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

by David DeCouto

  Yet another perk of being on the road were the willing groupies who would come out of the woodwork to party with the band. “Playing with Elton, who was the biggest artist in the world, women just flocked to us,” Caleb said. “After a show, the band would go to the hospitality suite and the roadies would just bring in a whole passel of willing women. Some women hoped to go to bed with Elton, but he’d only be there for a minute, then he’d go off to his own party somewhere else. After a little small talk, we’d pair off then head off to our rooms to get high and have sex. Night after night, city after city, it was the same thing. It became a way of life. Women and drugs. I was high all the time. We were young and we were having fun.”

  As if the adrenalized rush of a star-flanked, sex- and drug-filled tour wasn’t enough, Elton also found himself inducted into Playboy’s prestigious “Jazz and Pop Hall of Fame,” alongside such musical luminaries as Louis Armstrong, Dizzy Gillespie and Frank Sinatra. He was also voted by the magazine’s readers as the Number One Vocalist and Number One Keyboard Player, while he and Bernie received the nod as the World’s Number One Songwriters.

  The duo accepted these honors at Hugh Hefner’s Playboy Mansion in Chicago on July 29, where they played a heated foosball match with Hef and his current squeeze, Barbi Benton. Afterward, the magazine publisher presented Elton with a stars-and-stripes cape, while Benton gave him and Bernie T-shirts of herself.

  The next day, Elton attended a friend’s wedding at the Sheraton-Chicago. After the reception, he enjoyed a special private screening of the horror movie “The Omen,” before dining on lobster tails at Zorine’s.

  “I suppose I’m [one of] the beautiful people now, God help us,” he said with a grin.

  That night there was a record company party, hosted by WLS, the local FM station. “I think we were at Newbury Plaza,” DJ Bob Sirott said. “And they had a restaurant downstairs. Arnie’s Restaurant. And the rest of the building were condominiums. I was thinking, ‘How do we get Elton John aside to do an interview with him?’ We had our portable tape gear with us, and the party is noisy and crazy and it’s hard to corner Elton into a quiet area and spend some time with him. But then a salesman from WLS, Simon, he says, ‘I live in this building. If we get him upstairs, maybe then you can do an interview with him.” So Simon and I and a couple other guys say, ‘C’mon, let’s get him.’ So we literally kidnapped him. We said, ‘Elton, come with us,’ and we grabbed him and threw him in the elevator and went up to Simon’s apartment.” Sirott laughed at the memory. “So I turned on the tape recorder and started interviewing him. And this was before he came out, so he was much more guarded. During the whole interview, I’m sitting next to him on the couch, I don’t know that he looked at me one time. But he was obviously very smart and, you could tell by his answers, a very thoughtful guy who at the time was holding a lot in. He was very guarded and had good reason to be uncomfortable in that situation. About twenty minutes into the interview, he’s kind of nervously looking around and wondering when this is going to end, and how it’s going to end. And finally we closed up the interview and let him get back to the party.”

  Though every facet of Elton’s frenetic life seemed to be comprised of endlessly gilded moments, nowhere was the lunacy more apparent than onstage. “Even for all the craziness, most of those [Louder Than] Concorde shows were amazing,” Caleb said. “The excitement of the moment and the screaming fans—it always pushed you to give your best.”

  Having to keep up with his dexterous band mates pushed Elton to become an even more accomplished musician himself. “I’ve had to play my ass off on this tour,” he said, “and that’s something I’ve missed doing before. They’ve improved my playing, because [the last couple tours] I only used to play block chords. Now I stick my neck out and have a go.”

  “By the time we got to the U.S., we were smoking hot,” Kenny said. “The band was just killing it. Especially with Roger there. I thought he was the best drummer I’d ever worked with. I never even had to look at the guy while we were playing. He was unbelievable. There was just nobody like Roger Pope. He was the funkiest Brit I ever met.”

  While Elton was musically at ease in stadia packed to overflowing with eighty-thousand maniacal fans, he still found it difficult to walk into an ordinary room without a complete sense of panic sweeping over him.

  “My life was desperately trying to keep up with the performer side of me,” he admitted. “This will be the last tour in a long while. I feel like stopping for a time. For the last two or three years I’ve been like a nomad. It’s just got so big that it’s getting stupid…Sometimes I get a bit depressed playing big places. It’s like seeing animals in a cage when you look out towards the audience.”

  After most shows, Elton would retire alone to his hotel suite, gorge on buckets of extra-crispy Kentucky Fried Chicken—his favorite American “garbage food”—and fall asleep in front of the television.

  As the nitro-fuelled Louder Than Concorde tour rocketed its way across America, a pirated 14-track pre-Empty Sky compilation entitled I Get A Little Bit Lonely was hitting the underground market. The LP was comprised of a dozen skeletal John/Taupin demos from their late nights at DJM back in the late ‘60s, along with a song co-written by Caleb Quaye (“Sitting Doing Nothing”), and the Reg Dwight-penned title track. Highlights included “A Dandelion Dies in the Wind,” “Tartan Coloured Lady” and a solo piano rendition of “The Tide Will Turn for Rebecca” which stripped the song of its overblown, Humperdinck-esque pomposity to reveal an evocative soliloquy of heartbreaking indecision.

  Knopf, meanwhile, released a lyrical bootleg of sorts with a hardcover tome called The One Who Writes the Words for Elton John. Edited by Alan Aldridge, the book featured 114 lyrics—every one of Bernie’s published works from 1968 through Goodbye Yellow Brick Road—alongside illustrations by such celebrity friends as Alice Cooper, Peter Blake, Charlie Watts and Ringo Starr. Joni Mitchell illustrated “Talking Old Soldiers,” while John Lennon tackled “Bennie and the Jets.”

  “I just called them up and said, ‘Would you like to do a drawing?’” Bernie said. “And they were all great, they really came through.”

  Elton himself provided a sardonic introduction to the book (“To be read in a showbiz Las Vegas accent with plenty of drama”)—as well as a ‘Sideways’. “Having been told that my doodles would not be needed—I felt shunned,” he wrote. “How could Taupin put a book together without any mentions of my name!” The pianist switched into third-person to envisage himself performing an onstage tribute to his writing partner—a performance that quickly devolved into anarchy. “The audience starts to rush the exits,” Elton imagined. “Sobbing frantically now, John screams at them, and as the last remaining chords of ‘Your Song’ echo round the now virtually empty room, the last words trickle from this pasty little troll of a man: ‘And do you know—the midget can’t even spell.’ He hurls a copy of Taupin’s book at the band and exits shouting, ‘Remember “Funeral For a Friend”—huh?’”

  The One Who Writes the Words for Elton John sold out its initial print run in a matter of weeks, peaking at Number 2 on the U.K. bestseller list.

  Bernie was pleased; Elton, a bit less so. “I was a little sad when he put out the book of the lyrics,” he said. “It’s all very well—and it’s incredibly bold—but I wish he’d just publish some of his children’s poems. They’re wonderful. But I think he’s a bit afraid to take that sort of step.”

  Perhaps no single concert was more highly anticipated during America’s historic Bicentennial year of 1976 than Elton’s July 4 show at Schaeffer Stadium in Foxboro, Massachusetts. The sold-out crowd of sixty-two-thousand—who was more than ready to go ballistic after having sat quietly through dual opening acts John Miles and Dave Mason—rose to their feet in ecstatic anticipation as an enormous firework effigy of Elton began sizzling above the stage.

  As “Grow Some Funk of Your Own” came ripping out of ten-story high speakers, Elton made his grand
entrance—dressed as the Statue of Liberty, standing stock-still atop his candy-striped piano, a flashlight-powered “torch” raised high.

  Grinning at the crowd, Elton whipped off his Liberty garb to reveal a Stars-and-Stripes shirt, tennis shorts and sneakers.

  “Alright!” he cried, leaping off the piano and pumping his fist as if he’d just scored the winning goal in a World Cup final.

  A deafening roar rose from the stands.

  “The Yanks loved it, got off their asses, and…stayed on their feet all night,” noted Melody Maker’s Harry Doherty. “The presentation was luxury at its finest, for who else plays on a blue-carpeted 50-grand stage? Gone are the days when such refinery was considered the debasement of rock ‘n’ roll.”

  After a pair of shows at the Spectrum in Philadelphia, Elton landed in Detroit for a massive concert at the Pontiac Silverdome on July 11. Running onto stage in bionic slow-motion á la The Six Million Dollar Man, the stadium exploded at the mere sight of him. Those riotous cheers only increased during “Hercules,” when the beloved Brit played the piano while lying atop his instrument—and reached a crescendo during “Bennie and the Jets,” when he played beneath it.

  “That was a huge gig,” Caleb said. “There was some problem going on down the front with security keeping kids away from the stage. They started getting a bit out of hand, throwing bodies around and this, that and the other. And the next thing I know, I looked over and I happened to see John Reid dive off of one of the trusses into the security and start trying to beat up the security. He was a wild guy. He was turbo-driven at that point. It was crazy.”

  As always, Elton tempered dazzling brilliance with large doses of tenderness and soul. Undoubtedly one of the key ingredients to his massive adulation, this addictive admixture caused an orgiastic fervor that lasted throughout the entire show, which went off without a hitch—at least until the first verse of “Saturday Night’s Alright (For Fighting),” when a pair of binoculars came winging out of the darkness and clocked Kenny Passarelli on the shoulder.

  “Saturday night’s alright for fighting, but it’s definitely not alright for throwing bloody binoculars,” Elton warned, tossing a cup of water into the crowd. “Behave now, I say.”

  The Silverdome show climaxed with a particularly bruising “Pinball Wizard,” which saw a stadium full of fans standing on their seats, arms held high as if testifying before rock ‘n’ roll’s holiest altar. It was another musical frenzy. Another spectacle nonpareil.

  An equally indelible performance happened days later at the Charlotte Coliseum in North Carolina. Halfway through the sweat-soaked show, Elton mockingly read a negative critique from critic Max Bell before setting it on fire to massive cheers.

  “That was a highpoint [in my career],” Bell said.

  Improbably, the tour only picked up momentum as it wound its way from Tuscaloosa, Alabama to Louisville, Kentucky.

  “It was just unbelievable,” Caleb told journalist James Turano. “This was the biggest tour in the world. It became more than just a concert. We would walk onstage and the crowd noise was deafening. Many times we couldn’t even hear each other play…But for all the craziness, most of those shows were very good. We had a great lineup of musicians and everyone played their hearts out.”

  “I was spoiled after I worked with [Elton],” Kenny Passarelli later admitted to author Tom Stanton. “He really knew how to put together a show. I should have just stopped touring then.”

  At most shows, the crowds were as energized as the musicians. At the Saint Paul Civic Center on August 24, a crazed blonde leapt onto stage, lassoing Elton around the neck with her bra and yanking him hard to the floor. A pair of burly bodyguards immediately dispatched her backstage, never to be seen again.

  The strain of all the madness was slowly wearing on the superstar.

  “As Elton got so enormous,” said Linda Lewis, who had stayed in contact with the pianist over the years, “he got a bit more—what’s a good word to say? Out of reach. Not so available. In fact, he seemed quite sad a lot of the time. Sadder than when he was starting out. It seemed like he was always under a cloud of gloom, I think. He went onstage and did his performance, but then he’d come off and he’d be very sad. Still, he was quite a lot of fun at parties, when he’d let his hair down—well, what hair he had at the time. I shouldn’t say that.” She laughed. “He was fun when he’d had a few drinks and everything else. He’d go from very maudlin—‘Oh, I wish I were straight, I wish I could have children’—and then all of a sudden he’d be up and, ‘Try my outfits on!’ And I remember trying one on once, and it weighed a ton. I don’t know how he managed to even lift his hands up to play the piano. I was in the wardrobe with him when that happened. Basically he was in the closet, in the closet.” She sighed. “But Elton wanted children, and I said, ‘I’ll have your baby. Just put it in a bottle, we can do it by artificial insemination.’ But he never took me up on my offer.”

  And so the caravan rolled on.

  A four-night stand at Chicago Stadium was followed by a pair of highly anticipated gigs at Richfield Coliseum in Ohio. Among the backstage visitors before the first show was Eric Carmen, who’d recently hit it big with the lachrymose ballad “All By Myself.”

  “He introduced himself to Elton,” said journalist Chris Charlesworth, “who responded, quick as a flash, with: ‘On your own, are you?’”

  Elton and his band were riding the thermals by this point, as were his fans—both those lucky enough to have obtained tickets, and the thousands left wanting outside each gig. That frustration came to a head at the Riverfront Coliseum in Cincinnati on August 3. Minutes before Elton was due to take the stage, several dozen rabid souls—frustrated at being locked out of the event—hurled a pair of concrete benches through a glass wall and stormed into the building.

  Security personnel stood helplessly by as a mob hundreds-strong flooded past them. “Those idiots were out of their minds,” one guard said. “Lucky no one got hurt.”

  The tumultuous feeling only amplified as the concert blasted forth. Fights broke out throughout the arena, causing multiple arrests; when Elton swung like Tarzan from a set of lighting cables during “Love Lies Bleeding,” dozens of cherry-bombs exploded from the nosebleed seats.

  “They wanted their money’s worth,” Roger said with a laugh. “And they got it.”

  After a chilling reading of “Someone Saved My Life Tonight,” Elton disappeared offstage for several moments, returning with a Dodgers’ baseball cap atop his head.

  The Cincinnati Reds fans in attendance booed vociferously.

  Elton whipped off the cap. Beneath it was a St. Louis Cardinals’ cap. The boos rained down even harder.

  Ripping that cap off, the superstar revealed a Cincinnati Reds’ cap.

  The Coliseum erupted.

  “Alright then,” the pianist chuckled, blasting into a slightly altered version of one of his most beloved hits.

  “‘Cause I live and breathe…this Cincinnati Freedom…”

  Out in the fourteenth row, Pete Rose and Johnny Bench—star members of the Cincinnati Reds’ “Big Red Machine”—cheered wildly.

  Rain began falling even before John Miles and Boz Scaggs—Elton’s opening acts for his August 7 show at Buffalo’s Rich Stadium—took to the stage. By the time the superstar himself appeared, the heavens had truly opened up, unleashing iron-gray torrents. Still, the deluge wasn’t enough to dampen the enthusiasm of the 84,276 in attendance—or of the man they’d all come to see.

  After a luminous “Goodbye Yellow Brick Road,” Elton walked to the lip of the rain-slick stage and dumped a cup of water over his own head, in solidarity with the thoroughly soaked fans.

  “I’ll play for you as long as you’re willing to stay and watch,” he promised, to massive cheers.

  Everyone was impressed with the efforts he and his crack band put forth—especially Boz Scaggs, who had stuck around after his opening set to enjoy the main perfo
rmance. Soon after, he would admit to a touch of professional jealousy. “The perfect band doesn’t stay with me,” he lamented to NME’s Max Ball. “Each musician has new roads to follow. It’s difficult and expensive to keep a good group [together]—and only someone like Elton John can afford to retain them.”

  As successful as the Louder Than Concorde outing was proving to be, the entire undertaking was merely a warm-up for the ultimate capstone: a seven-night stand at New York’s Madison Square Garden. Elton was more than primed to rock the Big Apple, selling 137,900 tickets in a matter of hours—easily shattering the house record set just the year before by the Rolling Stones.

  The Garden shows were a homecoming of sorts, with Elton’s protégée, Kiki Dee—who’d joined the tour in Chicago—taking to the stage halfway through each night’s performance to sing “I’ve Got the Music In Me” before joining Elton on a lively duet of “Don’t Go Breaking My Heart.” Additionally, Ray Cooper, who had missed the entire tour up to this point due to an undisclosed illness (during his absence, a life-sized dummy stood watch behind unused timpani, as Elton explained to his audiences that his percussionist was “Ray Cooper-ating from surgery”), also appeared for this final run.

  Each show climaxed with a triple encore assault that was kicked off by a scorching “Saturday Night’s Alright (For Fighting),” which Elton would deliver in full-on manic style while surrounded by a revolving cast of guests that included Alice Cooper, drag-queen Divine, Billie Jean King, and the New York Community Choir. By the time of the second encore, “Your Song,” a good portion of the capacity crowds would have tears in their eyes. The shows then ended with a combustible “Pinball Wizard,” which never failed to wring out whatever remaining stores of emotion were left in the spent crowd.

  “We were first band to play Dodger Stadium since the Beatles,” Caleb said. “One of the first bands to ever play Wembley. We made a lot of firsts. The first band to sell out Madison Square Garden seven nights running. With four-hour shows, mind you, which was unusual. Elvis was only doing sixty-minute shows. The Stones, maybe eighty-five minutes, if you were lucky. Our fans certainly got their money’s worth. We always gave them everything we had.”