Captain Fantastic: The Definitive Biography of Elton John in the '70s

by David DeCouto

  “Christ, you’re played enough,” he said. “If you ever die, I shall throw my radio out the window.”

  The two superstars partied into the small hours of the night. At three a.m., a knock sounded at the door.

  Lennon arched a paranoid eyebrow. “The police?”

  “Fuck knows.”

  “Go to the door and look through the thing, Elt!”

  Nervously, they crept up to the door and took turns staring through the peephole. Out in the hallway stood Andy Warhol, impatiently adjusting the lens of his Nikon.

  “So we were trying to work out how Andy got to be a policeman,” Elton said. “He was standing there for what seemed like hours, banging on this door. And we just couldn’t work it out.”

  The night of the Madison Square Garden concert, November 28, found Lennon more apprehensive than ever.

  “He grimly got up and dressed in his black suit,” May said. Around his neck, he chose to wear a pendant from Van Cleef & Arpels which Elton had given him the month before. “Numbly, we went to the limousine. John was numb during the ride to the Sherry-Netherland, where we picked up Elton and went to Madison Square Garden. All of us were very quiet in the limousine. It was as if we were going to a wake.”

  The quiet inside the limo was in start counterpoint to the electric buzz that had built around the entire city, as rumors flew that the Beatles’ founder was going to make a special guest appearance at Elton’s concert. Yoko Ono decided to attend the show, arranging to be seated near enough to the stage as to have a good view, yet not so close that Lennon might pick her out of the crowd.

  An hour before the show, Ono sent two wrapped boxes backstage—matching white gardenia corsages for Elton and her ex.

  “Thank God Yoko’s not here tonight,” Lennon said. “Otherwise I know I’d never be able to go out there.”

  Except for a charity gig in 1972, the icon hadn’t performed live since the Beatles’ rooftop concert back in January, ‘69. He was thus a nervous wreck, shaky and sweaty and vomiting heroically into buckets.

  “I know I’ve done this before, but Christ,” Lennon said, wiping his face on a grease-stained towel. In a fog, he grabbed his guitar and wandered into a special backstage room reserved for musical acts to tune up their instruments. Davey Johnstone sat there alone, adjusting his guitars for the evening.

  “In those days we didn’t have guitar techs, I did it all myself,” Davey recalled years later. “John Lennon came into the room and said, ‘Will you tune my guitar for me?’ I went, ‘Yeah, sure, John.’ And he was totally white.”

  “You okay, John?’

  “I’m nervous.”

  “It’ll be great. It’ll be fine.”

  The ex-Beatle stared at the floor. “How long before we go on?”

  “About fifteen minutes.”

  Lennon nodded distractedly. “We used to get a bit of fanny around about now.”

  Davey looked up at his idol, confused. “Excuse me?”

  “We used to get a bit of fanny around about now,” Lennon repeated.

  Davey laughed at the memory years later. “The Beatles used to bring girls back there and have some fun before they went onstage…Long live rock and roll.”

  Elton opened the concert dressed as the Mad Hatter incarnate, in a purple jacket and oversized top hat. “He looked for all the gawking world…like the bastard offspring of some unthinkable tryst between Leon Russell and Liberace,” noted Rolling Stone’s Ed McCormack.

  As always, the pianist was in complete—almost psychic—control of his audience. They rose when he wanted them to rise, and sat quietly when he wanted them to sit. The ebbs and flows of his performance were perfectly calibrated, so that, two hours later, every person in the arena was as emotionally drained as he was.

  I went into a backstage bathroom to wash up,” author Eric Van Lustbader said, “and I hear somebody projectile-vomiting in one of the cubicles, and going on and on. And I had no idea who is was. And finally I said, ‘Are you alright?’ And someone said, ‘Yeah’ in this very weak voice. And then the door opens and it’s John Lennon, and he’s as green as grass. He just looked terrified. And I said, ‘John, I think it’s going to be okay. Elton has your back and it’s going to be great.’”

  Out onstage, Elton was grinning madly at his spent audience. “Seeing it’s Thanksgiving, and Thanksgiving’s a joyous occasion,” he said, exhausted yet exhilarated, “we thought we’d make tonight a little bit of a joyous occasion by inviting someone up with us onto stage.” The already charged air became electrified with raw anticipation. “And I’m sure he will be no stranger to anybody in the audience when I say, it’s our great privilege, and your great privilege, to see and hear…Mr. John Lennon!”

  Backstage, Lennon clung desperately onto Bernie.

  “You gotta come on with me, Bern, or I’m gonna be sick all over you.”

  Bernie walked his ghost-white comrade to the stairs which led to the stage.

  “You’re on your own now,” the lyricist said, giving his friend the gentlest of pushes.

  “Oh shit.” Sighing fatalistically, Lennon raised his black Fender Telecaster like a rifle. “Here we go then, over the hill.”

  The Garden detonated as he took to the stage.

  Chewing nervously on a stick of gum, the ex-Beatle stuck out his tongue at the crowd, mock-nonchalantly tossing one of Ray’s tambourine’s into the blackened frenzy. “When I walked on, they were all screaming and shouting,” he said later in bewilderment. “It was like Beatlemania. I was thinking, ‘What is this?’ ‘Cause I hadn’t heard it since the Beatles…The place was really rocking.”

  “[Lennon] hadn’t played live onstage for a long time,” Elton said, “and he was almost ordinary again, at least as a person. So when he came onstage with us at Madison Square Garden, I watched him go, ‘Oh Christ, what the hell is this?’ Because he’d forgotten what it was like…The amount of love from people just happy to see him on a stage was overwhelming.”

  After playing the main guitar riff to “I Feel Fine,” to help make Lennon feel at ease, Davey shook his head in disbelief as the entire venue began swaying back and forth. “We were actually getting dizzy,” he said. “It felt like an earthquake. It was unbelievable. It wasn’t just a feeling—you could actually see the balconies moving a little bit. It was unreal.”

  “When he hit the stage, the whole place was rocking,” Nigel said. “We thought it was going to fall down…[The crowd] went mental. It was unbelievable.”

  David Larkham, who was in the photographer’s pit in front of the stage, was astounded. “Normally, when taking pictures at any concert,” he said, “you have no recollection of the music, performance, or the atmosphere. You’re just totally concentrating on getting the right framing in your camera viewfinder, and pressing the button. That particular night was one exception, probably the only occasion I stopped for a few moments to take in the whole spirit and feel of the evening…Not only was the crowd noise overwhelming, but the whole building was shaking. The crowd appeared to be bouncing, and it felt like the Garden floor was moving up and down with it. I’d never encountered a performance atmosphere like it before. Or since.”

  Out in row 11, Ono was in tears. “I knew he was getting a wonderful reception,” she said. “But when he bowed, it was too quickly and too many times. And I suddenly thought, ‘He looks so lonely up there.’”

  Lennon walked up to a microphone center stage, but the reception kept rolling on and on. It was an ear-shattering ovation that seemed to gain energy from itself.

  It lasted three minutes.

  Six minutes.

  Eight minutes.

  Ten minutes.

  Gus, who was recording the show in a mobile studio in the bowels of the arena, literally thought a seismic shock was taking place. “I was about five or six floors down,” he said. “The truck was just floating on its suspensions. I’ve never heard human beings make a noise like that. It was just
incredible.”

  “I don’t think anyone in history has ever had an ovation like that,” Clive Franks agreed. “I was like everyone else. I was shaking.”

  Lennon leaned patiently against Elton’s piano as the ovation continued, moved by the genuine outpouring of love. “I was quite astonished that the crowd was so nice to me, because I was only judging by what papers said about me,” he said, “and I thought I may as well not be around.”

  At Lennon’s insistence, May Pang stood behind Elton’s piano during his appearance. “John needed to just be out there,” she said. “It was a culmination of everything—people seeing him, him being onstage, he hadn’t performed [‘Whatever Gets You Thru the Night’] before…I’ve never felt anything like that, being on that stage. It was just amazing. You could see John just turning and looking to see if I was okay, and it was very interesting because everyone’s screaming and clapping, and you could feel the stage going up and down. I felt like I could go through the floor. It’s an amazing feeling to be a performer, that much energy and feeling and ruckus. It has to be a rush.”

  “A-one, two…a-one, two, three, four!” Elton shouted as he and Lennon ripped effortlessly through “Whatever Gets You Thru the Night.”

  Bashing away behind his kit, Nigel had to reimagine his drum fills as the song rolled along. “Because the cymbals were actually moving away from the drums…rocking to the drums and back from the drums,” he said. “I had to plan where I was going to hit the cymbal. It had to be on the inward swing.”

  “When they actually launched into the first song, for me it was just like the Beatles,” said Stuart Epps, who was serving as Kiki Dee’s band manager for the tour. “There was only one of them there, but it might as well have been the four of them. Although Madison Square Garden is a massive, massive room, that night it was like a club. You felt the floor pounding away, and the PAs were sort of bouncing up and down with people banging on the floor, and I’m looking at the ceiling, at the PAs bouncing up and down, and I’m thinking, ‘Is it going to hold?’ It was exciting as well as frightening, but that’s the way it was. Like a small club with 20,000 people, everyone going absolutely bananas.”

  “The difference between the private and public John was startling,” May Pang said. “John was nervous when he first began to sing and play, but he quickly picked up steam. Occasionally he turned and looked at me. I sang and danced and gave him reassuring smiles, and with each note he grew stronger and stronger.”

  After “Lucy in the Sky with Diamonds,” Lennon stepped nervously up to the microphone.

  “I’d like to thank Elton and the boys for having me on tonight,” he said. “We tried to think of a number to finish off with so I can get out of here and be sick, and we thought we’d do a number of an old estranged fiancé of mine called Paul. This is one I never sang, it’s an old Beatles number, and we just about know it.”

  “Here we go!” Elton cheered as the band tore into a heated version of “I Saw Her Standing There.”

  “Boogie, baby!” Lennon screamed as the song swung into a frenzied solo. The audience responded in kind, finding hidden reserves of energy as the historic performance climaxed before them.

  “The audience went wild,” May said. “I thought the building would collapse during ‘I Saw Her Standing There’.”

  Lennon was overcome by the evening. “The emotional thing was Elton and I together,” he said. “It meant a lot to me and it meant a hell of a lot to Elton, and he was in tears. It was a great high night, a really high night.”

  Davey felt similarly. “The whole thing was actually so dream-like,” he said, “that I don’t actually remember anything specific about it. I do remember I broke a string and played the solo [on ‘I Saw Her Standing There’] on five strings. It didn’t sound that bad when I heard it back. I really didn’t care.”

  “John did really well that evening,” Dee agreed. “The lad’s got a future.”

  The magic continued to flow even after Lennon left the stage.

  “Everyone was just standing there in amazement,” Elton said. “I was halfway through ‘Don’t Let the Sun Go Down On Me’, which I always do with my eyes closed, and suddenly there were all these lighted matches in the audience…A little tear did run down me eyes. It’s impossible not to be touched by that sort of thing.”

  “A galaxy of match-stick torches erupted in schlock-symbolic tribute,” Rolling Stone’s McCormack noted sarcastically, “glowing from the very apron of the stage to the remotest Siberias of the Puerto Rican wrestling-night bleachers to Godspeed Elton over the quavery inspirational soars.”

  “It was the first time I’d seen everybody strike lighters and matches in the darkness,” Tony King’s personal secretary, Margo Stevens, said. “By that time, you as a spectator were completely wrung out and drained, so God knows what it must have felt like for Elton.”

  “That was probably one of the best shows we’ve ever, ever done,” Bernie said. “The emotion generated in that building that night, you’ll never see that again.”

  Elton provided his New York fans with four encores. For the final one, “The Bitch is Back,” Lennon again joined in on guitar and backing vocals.

  After the show ended, the ex-Beatle ran into Yoko backstage. The two sat quietly for a few moments, holding hands.

  “John was like he wanted to eat me up or something,” Yoko said.

  “Well, there’s two people in love,” a roadie joked as he passed by the blushing pair.

  “That’s probably when we felt something,” Lennon said. “It was very weird.”

  Their time reconnecting would prove short-lived, however, as Lennon had to prepare to meet Elton at an elaborate after-party being held in the ballroom of the Pierre Hotel. Guests at the fête included Patti LaBelle, Neil Sedaka, Andy Warhol, Angela Lansbury and Elliott Gould. A mystified correspondent from the New Yorker reported that “Elton John was sitting at a table and the crowd was watching him eat. He was dressed in white, and he had short blond hair. John Lennon was trying to elbow his way through the crowd to get to Elton John’s table, and that did not accord with our idea of reality. Our idea of reality would be Elton John trying to elbow his way to get to John Lennon’s table.”

  Psychic Uri Geller, famous for his ability to bend spoons and restart broken watches with just the power of his mind, was also in attendance. As the party burned on into the wee hours, Geller asked Lennon to draw a picture, claiming that he would draw the same picture without looking. A minute later, Lennon held up his drawing and showed the table: a rowboat.

  “And sure enough,” Stuart Epps said, “Uri is also drawing a boat. I mean, not the exact same one, but they were both drawing a boat. It was wild.”

  “A night to remember,” Lennon laughed.

  He would never appear live onstage again.

  Davey Johnstone had trouble getting back into his hotel room after the party, as Uri Geller had used his mind powers to bend his room key completely out of shape. Finally, with the help of a front desk clerk, the guitarist managed to make his way inside. The moment he did, Elton phoned him.

  “John would like to come and hang out with you and Kiki,” the pianist said. “Is that cool?”

  “Cool? Are you kidding? Send him over!”

  Davey watched in disbelief as John Lennon and May Pang walked down the hotel corridor, the ex-Beatle dressed all in black—black jacket, black cape, black hat.

  “I thought I had died and gone to Heaven,” Davey said. “We proceeded to drink lots of wine, and I turned him on to some of my favorite music of the day: Ry Cooder, Al Green, the Band, the Meters, Little Feat…”

  As wine and other substances flowed, Lennon tried persuading Kiki to change her stage appearance. “Start wearing black leather,” he said. “Like Suzi Quatro.”

  Kiki demurred, embarrassed. Still, she was enthralled by Lennon’s presence. “[Davey and I] spent the whole night in our hotel room with them,” she said. “It was a r
eal thrill for us both.”

  “At the beginning of the tour,” May said. “[Kiki] was there as the opening act, and somewhere in the middle of the tour, next thing you know, they [Davey and Kiki] were together. I don’t drink and I don’t take drugs, but after a while those nights were beginning to be the same. But I liked Davey a lot, and Kiki. It was good.”

  The main topic of the evening was, not surprisingly, music. Davey was delighted that Lennon spoke openly about the epic catalog he’d helped create with his former band mates. “He was totally cool about discussing some of the Beatles recording techniques and our mutual love of studio ‘accidents’,” he said. “Like the feedback at the beginning of ‘I Feel Fine’.”

  As the night edged its way toward morning, Lennon began removing paintings off the walls, carefully turning them over and drawing doodles on the back sides before carefully hanging them up again.

  “I was in such a rush to get to the airport [the next morning],” Davey said, “I totally forgot these hidden masterpieces. I like to think some maid discovered them and is now living in St. Tropez.”

  The next afternoon, Elton stopped by WNEW-FM on Fifth Avenue and Forty-Sixth Street and spent over an hour on air with DJ Dennis Elsas, during a four o’clock show entitled Things From England.

  “Elton had been at the station earlier in the week as well,” Elsas said. “And we had arranged for him to return on Friday. He very much enjoyed coming to WNES—he felt comfortable there, and we put him on very often. I was a huge Elton fan.”

  After the show, Elton hopped a limo down to the Bottom Line on Fourth Street, where he had drinks with Led Zeppelin’s Robert Plant.

  “Let’s face it,” Plant said. “Elton’s fearsome. He’s the whole spectrum, really.” It was a sentiment Black Sabbath’s front-man, Ozzy Osbourne, later echoed. “[Elton’s] got a great talent, he does great songs, he does great shows,” the Ozzman said. “There’s nobody else that sounds like Elton John. You know Elton John as soon as you hear his voice.”