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

by David DeCouto

  Despite their input to the contrary, Elton had made up his mind. “I felt that we had gone as far as we could,” he said. “After the [Captain] Fantastic album and the tour and everything, I felt we got to a point where we could go stale, and if I just added some other members to the band, I don’t think the older members would have liked it very much. Also, I don’t think Dee wanted to do much this year. He was getting a bit fed-up with the touring, so that was another factor.”

  Gus was at Elton’s house when he placed the fateful calls to Nigel and Dee. Like Lennon, the producer thought he was fucking crackers. “It’s funny how [Elton] can be the warmest bloke in the world,” Gus said, “but there are times when he just doesn’t seem to connect with people who genuinely care about him over and above music or anything else to do with music. Just as a bloke. And I think he’s brilliant. I absolutely love the guy. But he pisses me off sometimes, because he’s sometimes so removed.”

  No one knew that better than the musicians he’d just dismissed.

  “[Elton] hadn’t told us what was going on,” Nigel said. “In fact, he called me the week before and he was raving about the fact that we were going to do Dodger Stadium…The next week I got this call…I was floored. We were totally devastated. It was out of the fucking blue.” Dee felt the same. “It was a disappointment because there were things going on that I didn’t know about,” the bassist later confided to authors Susan Crimp and Patricia Burstein. “If people had the courage to just come out in the open with it, then it would have been more understandable…Too many people take the easy way out.”

  Nigel and Dee were quickly hired on by Billy Joel, who was recording his Turnstiles album at Caribou Ranch.

  “Billy in those days was like an Elton freak,” Nigel said. “He would sing all his songs on his record that we were going to cut exactly like Elton would sing them. And then Dee and I couldn’t help but play like we did with Elton.”

  “I heard those recordings,” drummer Liberty DeVitto later acknowledged. “Elton actually sent flowers to Nigel and Dee with a card that said, ‘I heard you’re working with another piano player.’ Their version of the song ‘James’ was great. Nigel and Dee were [also] involved in the backing vocals—they are both great singers, but the rest [of their playing] was a bit too Elton-esque.”

  Joel’s management concurred. Ultimately deeming the results too close to Elton’s signature sound, they scrapped the sessions. Soon after, Joel auditioned a new band. “When I was asked to audition for Billy,” DeVitto said, “I asked what can I listen to or what is he into that I should know about. I was told, ‘Get Elton John’s Captain Fantastic. So I learned all of Nigel Olsson’s licks. You know on ‘Don’t Let the Sun Go Down On Me’, where he kept time on the ride cymbal? I thought that was brilliant, so I did it on ‘New York State of Mind’, ‘Honesty’, ‘Leningrad’ and a few others. I still love how it sets up a verse.”

  Due to the enormous amounts of money Elton was earning—even without a functioning band in place—John Reid decided it would be in his best interest to establish the pianist as a “resident alien” within the United States. The move would allow Elton to avoid double taxation on his earnings—a key concern, especially in light of Britain’s eighty-three percent taxation rate.

  Agreeing that the plan had merit, Elton reluctantly purchased a Moorish-style six-bedroom palace high up in the Benedict Canyon hills. The mansion had enjoyed an infamously storied past, having been owned by a succession of notable movie people—from silent-screen heartthrob John Gilbert to Gone With the Wind producer David O. Selznick.

  Amongst its many dubious charms, the customized house featured a master suite bathtub with a trapdoor that once disposed eager starlets to a bedroom below, while the garden held a gazebo where movie legend Greta Garbo often slept when it rained.

  Situated near the scene of the Sharon Tate murders several years before, Elton’s new digs were full of gloomy corridors and darkened rooms which perfectly mirrored the city itself.

  “Good ol’ L.A.,” he said. “There are a bunch of weirdos around this town, like Charles Manson. I never got that feeling from any other town, even New York. There, the weirdness is different.”

  To help make the place feel a bit less eerie, Elton quickly stuffed his new home full of Gold records, vintage Rockola jukeboxes and blinking pinball machines. These efforts to ward off the creepier aspects of the city proved futile, however, for a mere week into his residency the superstar awoke to find a stranger in bed with him.

  “Who are you?” he asked, fumbling around for his glasses.

  The buxom blonde grinned. “Oh, you don’t know me.”

  Elton was aghast. Somehow this intruder had managed to bypass an elaborate security system and sneak beneath his covers.

  “The CIA should have the sources these kids have,” he mused. “She could have been somebody with a gun.”

  It spoke volumes that Elton wasn’t even the wildest resident on the block—that honor fell to his next door neighbor, Alice Cooper. One day, Alice’s home caught fire, bringing a herd of stoned hippies onto Elton’s driveway to watch the flames as they licked at the sky.

  On another occasion, Elton held a garage sale at his house. “He was selling things like pairs of his platform shoes,” the shock-rocker told author Mark Bego. “There were normal platform shoes—and then there were Elton’s platform shoes, which had five-inch heels on them. They weren’t my size, but I was with my father, who’s a preacher, and they were his size. He bought a pair of Elton’s shoes and I said to him, ‘What are you going to do with those?’ He said, ‘I’m not quite sure, but I am going to work them into a sermon and announce the fact that I am wearing Elton John’s shoes.’”

  While Elton’s shoes became a bemusing point of doctrinal intrigue, it was his myriad spectacles—closing in on two-hundred pairs, and valued at more than $40,000—which seemed to best define his persona within the public’s consciousness. Recognizing this, the American Optical Society bestowed its “Eyes Right” award on the pianist, in recognition of his efforts to give glasses a more positive image.

  “Many people, particularly entertainers, had rather stumble around half-blind than wear glasses,” the Society’s president, Cecil H. Byrd, noted. “By making his specs his trademark, Elton John has proven that glasses can be glamorous as well as useful.”

  On May 17, Elton found himself the first white entertainer to headline Soul Train, black America’s answer to American Bandstand. Host Don Cornelius opened the show—taped at KTLA Studios in Hollywood—standing beside a transparent Plexiglas piano. “This is especially for a very, very gifted young man,” Cornelius announced gravely, “who has combined absolute genius as a musician/composer with a sort of psychedelic outlook on life, which causes everybody that comes near him to be thoroughly entertained.”

  Dressed like a Martian pimp, Elton provided relentlessly percolating renditions of “Bennie and the Jets” and “Philadelphia Freedom.” Having a ball, the pianist clearly relished his appearance. “[Soul Train is] the only thing that you can look forward to on a Saturday,” he said. “apart from the sports programs.”

  Between songs, Elton fielded questions from several of the dancers who had been gyrating around him moments before.

  “Where do you get your funky frames, Elton?”

  “Optique Boutique.”

  “What’s your favorite song?”

  “It’s always changing.”

  “When did you start to sing?”

  Elton glanced shyly down at his hands.

  “I’m just learning to sing,” he said.

  As Elton was doing his humble level best to bridge the racial divide, Gus was busy finishing his meticulous months-long post-production work on what would become the Captain Fantastic and the Brown Dirt Cowboy album. As to why it had taken so long to complete the tracks, Gus explained to Beat Instrumental’s Steve Turner, “We always prefer to leave the tracks for two to three months
before we mix them down. It’s always a good policy to leave the material for a short period before mixing, because after having been so intensely involved with the recording, it’s difficult to see things objectively.”

  Finally pleased with the mixes he’d achieved, the producer called up Bernie.

  “It’s done,” he said.

  “I’m there,” the lyricist replied.

  Gus played the entire album for Bernie, who sat listening with his eyes closed, a can of Coors in his lap.

  “He’d been enjoying it a whole lot,” Gus said, “and then I played him ‘Someone Saved My Life Tonight’ and he was just overcome, he had to leave the room. It’s just such an extraordinary ballad, played and sung so well—he just couldn’t take it. He rarely hears a song before it’s complete, a lot of songs are recorded just a few days after he writes the lyrics.”

  A listening party for Elton’s new LP was held the next afternoon at Media Sound Studios on West 57th Street. Sipping Dom Pérignon and cracking an endless string of jokes to the select rock journalists in attendance, Elton would bow in mock-embarrassment as his guests enthusiastically applauded each of his new tracks, with the heartiest ovation saved—intriguingly enough—for “Bitter Fingers.”

  One of the journalists invited to the party was Melody Maker’s Chris Charlesworth, who’d missed the album playback due to a magazine deadline commitment.

  “The phone rang at about 1:30,” Charlesworth later recalled, “and it was one of Elton’s assistants, who told me Elton had noticed I wasn’t at this party and he wanted to know why.” By the time he arrived, many people had already come and gone. “[Elton] came running over and gave me a great big hug and said he thought I wasn’t coming. I said I had to write about people other than him, you know, and he said, yes, he knew that. It sounds silly now, but that’s how he felt… I was actually astonished that my absence had worried him, that he was worried I was no longer an ally, as it were. He didn’t need me or any other journalists by then, so it was reassuring to realize that for all the success he’d achieved, he didn’t want to lose touch with those from his past who’d helped him a bit.”

  The New York preview went considerably better than a twin event held in Los Angeles, in a private cinema on the Universal Studios lot. An audio-visual presentation that mixed colorful slides of the album’s artwork with historical photographs of Elton and Bernie went awry when the sound emanating from the cinema’s speakers grew muddled.

  Five songs in, John Reid called a halt to the proceedings.

  “Can’t you get this fucking thing together?” he barked at the engineer in charge. “It’s a bloody shambles!”

  “It’s not us, it’s the tape,” the long-haired engineer replied helplessly. “We’re doing our best here. We really are.”

  “Well, your best ain’t fucking good enough!”

  “I’m sorry, Mr. Reid. It’s not—”

  Apoplectic, Reid punched the engineer with all his might.

  “Jesus,” the engineer groaned, blood pouring from his mouth.

  Reid leapt on the engineer as he turned away, his fists still flying. It would take four men to finally pull the irate Scotsman off him.

  With threats of police involvement in the air, Reid brought the situation under control with a quick flash of his checkbook.

  Days later, the short-tempered manager attempted to explain his explosive outbursts. “They’re isolated incidents,” he insisted. “I don’t make excuses, I’m not particularly proud of it, but any time anything like this has happened, it’s been in defense of Elton or Bernie, not for personal reasons.”

  Captain Fantastic and the Brown Dirt Cowboy was released in America on May 19, and four days later in the U.K. Anticipation for Elton’s latest LP ran higher than for so high that it amassed more than 1.4 million advanced orders before the master tapes had even been shipped to the pressing plants, thus guaranteeing the disc a Number 1 debut. It was a staggering feat that no other album had ever managed before.

  The iconic album cover, painted by Alan Aldridge—the graphic artist responsible for The Beatles Songbook—was a Bosch-esque maelstrom of demonic imagery which gleefully depicted the naked savagery of the music industry. A masked Elton bravely charges through the melee like a conquering hero upon a wildly rearing, stead-like piano, while Bernie resides in his own little Eden on the back cover, safely encapsulated in a protective glass bubble.

  The most intriguing image on the cover belongs to a satanic figure that bears an unmistakable likeness to Dick James, a sick-faced creature who mockingly holds the key to the kingdom. Whether for this slight or not, DJM refused to pay the bill Aldridge presented for his cover painting, which they deemed “too introverted and indulgent.” Rocket Records was thus forced to pick up the tab and then lease the artwork back to DJM. To add insult to injury, DJM priced the disc as a double in England, making it the costliest single disc in British history.

  “It’s their decision, not mine,” Elton told Melody Maker. “There’s only one album left to do in the DJM contract. After that, I’m free.”

  The album’s lavish packaging included a full-sized poster of the cover art, as well as a booklet of memorabilia—compiled by Bernie himself—and an illustrated lyric booklet which included the lyric to the unrecorded “Dogs in the Kitchen,” a scathing attack on corporate lechery and greed.

  Who, exactly, were the vultures and vampires? “The people who wanted us to be successful without being prepared to put any effort in to help us, or give us any support,” Elton explained. “You get executives going to give one of their artists a Gold record, but you know they’re wishing they were somewhere else. Listening to Mozart, probably. There are very few record executives who are into the music, and that makes me really mad.”

  The music contained within the grooves of the self-mythologizing disc proved to be united and mature; a purposefully noncommercial work intended to be consumed as an integrated whole. Having achieved exactly what they’d set out to create, the producer was rightfully proud of the work.

  “The whole thing is perfect, it’s absolutely perfect,” Gus said. “I can’t fault it. It’s the best that they’ve ever played, it’s the best that Elton’s ever played, and it’s the best collection of songs. There’s not one song on there that’s less than incredible…I’ve managed to get the best sound I’ve ever got, and it’s the loudest album I’ve ever cut, despite its being twenty-five-and-a-half minutes long on one side.”

  The critics were equally as beguiled. “Reg Dwight is the biggest phenomenon in modern-day rock,” Phonograph Record’s Greg Shaw noted in his review, going on to praise “the remarkable process by which Elton John transforms mere lyrics (however sophisticated) and mere musicians (however brilliant they may be—and certainly are) into a gestalt that defies analysis…[Elton’s] best songs don’t merely set words to music, they use both lyrics and basic melody as a starting point from which elaborately constructed moods are explored, often culminating in tonal crescendos that completely overshadow the songs’ origins. Elton John’s music has become refined now to the point where almost every song he does achieves that kind of impact, helped along by producer Gus Dudgeon and the rest of the team that, with Captain Fantastic and the Brown Dirt Cowboy, should finally receive proper recognition for their part in creating (we may as well face it) the only true pop phenomenon of our times.”

  To prove his point, Shaw conducted an experiment, randomly flipping the radio dial for six hours straight. He found an Elton John song playing, on average, every two minutes. Moreover, he noted, at least one FM station per each major market in America labeled itself “the official Elton John station.” “Reg Dwight is the biggest phenomenon in modern-day rock,” Shaw concluded. “His songs are on every radio station, every hour of every day; the old ones as well as the new. If the singles charts were based solely on airplay, the Beatles’ long-standing record of eight songs in the Hot 100 during one week would be quickly forgotten; it
’s been over a year since Elton had less than that many on the air.”

  The L.A. Times Robert Hilburn was equally as impressed, noting that “the arrangements, vocals and lyrics are as controlled and finely honed as anything they’ve yet done.” Wayne Robins, reviewing the disc for Creem, asserted that “in this thoroughly autobiographical album, The Captain (Elton) and the Cowboy (Bernie Taupin) achieve a unity as a songwriting team that they’ve been striving for….For the first time, Elton does not seem to be speaking someone else’s words.” Sounds’ Penny Valentine, meanwhile, opined, “For once, Elton is singing about himself and not simply giving voice to images and emotions which ostensibly are drawn from Bernie’s experience alone…He is more exposed than ever on this album.”

  The plaudits didn’t stop there. “This is one of Elton John’s best albums,” Jon Landau claimed in his Rolling Stone review. “It isn’t weighted down with the over-arranging and over-production that marred so much of Goodbye Yellow Brick Road. It sounds more relaxed than Caribou. His voice sounds rough, hoarse, almost weary. But that only helps make him sound more personal and intimate than in the past…There’s no illusion of saying something, they are saying something; there’s no illusion of superb performance but a superb performance itself; no imitation of quality but rock of a very high caliber.” ZigZag’s John Tobler had much the same reaction. “I’ve played it several times, particularly the first side, which I marginally prefer, and no way am I disappointed by what I hear,” he wrote. “‘Bitter Fingers’ is the best track for me, coming into the same class as ‘Tiny Dancer’, my absolute fave Elton track, and ‘Someone Saved My Life Tonight’ isn’t far behind…If you like Elton John, this is well up to standard. If you don’t like Elton John, then you bloody well should.”

  Despite the glowing reviews, a few dissenters still seemed determined to cling to an anti-authoritarian, success-hating bias. Chief amongst them was the Village Voice’s Robert Christgau, who wondered “what’s happening to our children when a concept album about the hard times of a songwriting team hits Number One on all charts the week it’s released? Does it matter that the five good songs on this one aren’t as catchy as the five good songs on the last one? Probably not.” More dire still was Charles Shaar Murray, who argued thusly in his NME review: “Captain Fantastic seemed like an album that Elton actually deeply wanted to make. It was somewhat excruciating to listen to.” The Village Voice’s Greil Marcus concurred, deriding Elton’s latest work as “flat, painfully slow, and filled with the kind of self-awareness that in rock ‘n’ roll so often comes off as mere self-pity.”