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

by David DeCouto

  Elton next turned his hyper-attuned attentions to the Glasgow-based pop band Blue, who had recently been signed to Rocket Records.

  “They’re very raw,” he enthused. “It’s like working with the early Beatles, in a way.”

  Elton again enlisted Clive Franks to help co-produce an album’s worth of material. “Me and Elton had a great time producing them,” Clive said. “The recording was open, very basic, organic.”

  As none of the band members could play piano, Elton decided to lend a hand on several tracks.

  “Elton didn’t want to be credited as Elton John,” Clive said. “The band had a Budget Rent-a-van outside the studio, [so] he decided to be called Redget Buntavan—as opposed to Budget Rent-a-van.”

  After the band sessions were complete, Elton brought Martyn Ford in to arrange string charts for several tracks. “He’d had a falling out by then with Paul [Buckmaster], who was very untogether,” Ford said. “I’m not in Paul’s league, I make no bones about it, but I’m reliable. So Elton asked me, because he knew I’d turn up with an arrangement. And that was the first time I really got to spend time with him. Because he wasn’t surrounded by a great entourage like before. So we just hung out together and did the job. He was very professional. He was charming, he knew exactly what was going on, and he seemed like he was totally under control.”

  The album, entitled Another Night Time Flight, would produce one moderate hit for the group, “Capture Your Heart.”

  Despite the best efforts of Elton and Clive, Blue soon found themselves relegated to the musical sidelines. “They had one album and it was over,” Hogie McMurtrie said. “It must have been nepotism, or friends of the band, and it wasn’t marketed…Rocket Records really wasn’t in the business of promotion, they just put the stuff out and it would go through regular channels of promotion, to the radio stations, and typical marketing channels. But Rocket never had what you might call a real go-getting PR person, or even an A&R person. They didn’t have the machine set up and they didn’t have the mentality for marketing. I just think maybe it was there for Elton’s enjoyment.”

  Bored with the studio, Elton escaped into the Hawaiian sun for a week-long vacation in mid-July. Landing in Lahaina, the chic playground for movie stars and rock stars like Peter Fonda, Boz Scaggs, Jack Nicholson and Walter Becker, Elton spent most of his time at the Blue Max, a stylish seaside restaurant at 730 Front Street.

  “I should play here,” he told manager Bobby Lozoff—creator of the Tequila Sunrise—one late night, after the two had shared an in-depth discussion about the ‘Save the Whales’ campaign over countless Sea Breezes. “I haven’t done much in a while. Let’s do a gig for ‘Save the Whale’. It’d be fun.”

  Lozoff laughed in disbelief. “Sure.”

  “Get me a grand piano and you’re on.”

  The next afternoon, July 17, a Steinway grand was seen being transported across town and up the Blue Max’s double staircase.

  The island was abuzz with excitement as word spread that Elton was going to hold an impromptu performance. By the time he sat down to play at seven-thirty sharp, the restaurant was overflowing with excited patrons. “The stairway was full out onto the street,” Coco Souza, a Blue Max waitress, told Lahaina News journalist Louise Rockett. “They were starting to crawl in from the balcony of the store next door. When [Elton] started playing, the town just stopped. You couldn’t move on the sidewalk. It was packed. And, as far as I could see, when I looked up and down the street, there were people. The cars could not move anymore. They were either parked or stuck where they were.”

  Those fortunate enough to be inside the restaurant that night were treated to a uniquely one-off performance.

  “Everybody knew the words to all of his hits,” Souza said. “They were dancing, rock ‘n’ rolling, yelling, singing, hugging and carrying on. The people outside were having as much fun as the people inside. The music was fabulous. [Elton] had a fabulous time. I remember him standing up on top of the piano. He got close enough to the ceiling fan that I think it knocked his hat off.”

  As the performance grew in raw intensity, the Blue Max staff became unable to hold back the crowds amassed on the street. “People poured in, and then there was no movement,” Souza said. “You couldn’t move in there, because the place was packed. At that point, you realized you were participating in something fantastic.”

  “The piano was just thumping,” said another waitress, Anne Haley, who watched the impromptu exhibition from atop the hostess station. “And we were just wild-eyed kids jumping up and down. Oh my Lord, it was just magical.”

  Chapter 32:

  Mama Can’t Buy You Love

  The pianist flew off to America to duet with Kiki Dee in Central Park on August 2; soon after, he was back in England, pacing his Gold-record-lined halls and reading J.R.R. Tolkien’s “The Lord of the Rings,” which Bernie had given him as a birthday gift several years before.

  His idyll was shattered on August 16, when news broke that Elvis Presley had died.

  “Elvis changed everyone’s life,” a saddened but not stunned Elton said. “There would be no Beatles, there would be no Hendrix, there would be no Dylan [without Elvis]. He just was the man who changed music without question. He was ‘The King’, and he was the one that started it all.”

  Reverberations were felt far across the globe. “I certainly hope I don’t pop off in the next few weeks, as I’ll only get page-three coverage,” Marc Bolan joked.

  Elton shuttered his windows, grabbed a bottle of Glenlivet 25, put “Heartbreak Hotel” on the stereo, and retreated into the darkness.

  Elton’s only album release of the year—Elton John’s Greatest Hits Volume II—hit the streets on September 13. The LP was an important release for the pianist, as it finally fulfilled his commitment to DJM. Not wishing to put out a substandard collection, Elton leased two Rocket-owned hits—“Don’t Go Breaking My Heart” and “Sorry Seems to Be the Hardest Word”—for inclusion on the set. Even with their addition, the U.S. and U.K. pressings differed slightly, with the English version including “Bennie and the Jets,” which had not been part of the original British pressing of the first Greatest Hits package, while “Levon” appeared on the American release.

  Reviews for the album, which featured Elton on the cover posing in white linen—a determined batsman smiling confidently before the wickets—were generally positive. “The two previously-unavailable-on-LP originals here are peaks,” critic Robert Christgau noted. “Plus [the listener receives] the lead cut from Caribou and two hits from Rock of the Westies and leftovers from 1971 and 1976 and the climax of Captain Fantastic. Is this product necessary? Depends on who’s doing the needing. B+.”

  The album, supplemented by a 12-page, fully illustrated lyric booklet, shipped Gold on both sides of the Atlantic. It ultimately made Number 21 in the U.S. and Number 6 in the U.K. Six weeks later, it quietly went Platinum.

  Elton awoke days later to learn that Marc Bolan had died tragically the night before. On September 16, two weeks shy of his thirtieth birthday, Bolan became the latest rock casualty, when his girlfriend, Gloria Jones, lost control of their purple Mini Clubman GT on the way home from Morton’s Club and wrapped it around a sycamore tree.

  Elton attended Bolan’s funeral at Golders Green Crematorium alongside Rod Stewart, David Bowie and Linda Lewis.

  “I was distraught after Marc died,” Lewis later recalled. “Gloria had been driving and had broken her arm and jaw. She had her mouth wired shut in hospital and wrote me a handwritten note: ‘Did you ever sleep with Marc?’ I told her, ‘No.’ She was very near death herself, so I told her what she wanted to hear. You have to remember, in those days, everyone slept with everyone. But I’d always feel guilty later and go to confession.” She laughed grimly. “The priest was always really keen to hear all the details of my life.”

  For Elton, the loss was one he would feel for years to come.

  “Marc was a large
r-than-life figure,” the pianist said solemnly about his comrade-in-arms. “He lived in this fantasy land but he was sweet, and loveable, and very, very clever…It was like he was from another planet, but with not a bad bone in his body. And it’s very rare that you find that amongst people.”

  After a brief ceremony, a shattered Elton fell into the backseat of his Rolls and wept. First Elvis, now Marc. Death was seemingly everywhere, all at once.

  The transience of his friend’s life spurred Elton into making good on a long-held promise to himself: to finally solving the maddening riddle of his prematurely thinning thatch. Life was far too short to be displeased with yourself, he decided. He was already more than self-conscious enough as it was. The time was nigh.

  Having made up his mind, the pianist flew up to Paris weeks later for the first of six square-grafting procedures. Performed by Dr. Pierre Pouteaux, the world’s leading hair transplant surgeon, the painful procedure involved harvesting hair follicles from the back of Elton’s head and surgically implanting them into the top of his scalp. The initial five-hour-long surgery went well. As the pianist was ducking into a car after the operation, however, he smashed his tender, gauze-wrapped head against the doorframe, causing agonizing pain as well as knocking out a good portion of the newly embedded hair plugs.

  Nearly as unpleasant, Elton would be forced to wait a full six months to learn if the transplant was successfully taking hold. In the meantime, he began hiding his much-speculated-upon scalp beneath a rotating succession of berets, floppy caps and boaters, despite Dr. Pouteaux’s insistence that he leave his head exposed for as often as possible.

  On October 1, a be-capped Elton was inducted into Madison Square Garden’s Walk of Fame, alongside such sporting greats as Muhammad Ali and Sugar Ray Robinson.

  “I’ve got a great ego as far as sports goes,” he admitted. “I’m a great fan. I’ll go anywhere to meet anybody who’s got anything to do with sports, ‘cause I love it. And when MSG came up with this honor—which it is for me, to be indoctrinated into the Hall of Fame—and be the first non-sportsman or someone not connected with sports to be indoctrinated in it, I was so pleased, I said ‘Of course I’ll do it.’” Elton smiled. “I was just knocked out to be on the walls with all those great boxers and athletes. Wonderful. I’ll go anywhere to get a Gold record, and I mean that most sincerely, and I’ll go anywhere to meet sports people.”

  While in New York, Elton sat for a rare television interview with talk show host Mike Douglas. The appearance was ostensibly to promote a new book, It’s a Little Bit Funny, a visual essay of Elton’s 1976 tour that featured photographs by David Nutter (whose brother, Tommy, had designed Elton’s jackets for the tour) and text by Bernie Taupin. The tome also included a new lyric from the latter called “On the Road,” which detailed the topsy-turvy world of a working band in America.

  After briefly discussing the photo book, Elton’s discussion with Douglas turned to his dissatisfaction with his last U.S. tour.

  “I got fed-up during my concert at Pontiac Stadium in Detroit,” he said with a wince. “I saw all these faces squashed up against the barriers and I thought, ‘This isn’t what I started out wanting to do.’ It’s a great ego trip seeing sixty- [or] seventy-thousand people there to see you, and it’s great fun, I don’t deny it. But somewhere along the way I think rock ‘n’ roll has lost its path in the fact that it’s become so big, it’s become such a big machine, the record companies have taken over, and I helped contribute to that, so now I have to really go back and do what I feel artistically is best for me…I don’t want to play too big a place again. I’d rather reach and touch the audience rather than see them squashed against a fence.”

  As for what was best for him on a personal level—living with someone on a permanent basis, perhaps—Elton quickly dismissed the possibility. “I’m so selfish and self-centered…for the moment, I’ve accepted that I’m a loner. I don’t mind, I’m beginning to enjoy it. There was a period for two or three years where it made me really miserable, but I think I’ve come to grips with it. But if that’s the way it is, that’s the way it is.”

  The pianist took that attitude of acceptance to the Sam Goody’s record store at Rockefeller Center that same afternoon, where he and Bernie briefly reunited to sign copies of It’s a Little Bit Funny while a hysterical throng twelve-deep wept and screamed around them.

  Later that evening, John Reid placed an international call to Elton to tell him that he and the group Queen had begun the process of severing ties with each other. “Freddie [Mercury] and Elton got on very well, but you couldn’t manage Freddie and Elton,” publicist Caroline Bouncher succinctly told author Mark Blake. It was a position Queen’s drummer readily agreed with. “[Reid] was put under a tremendous amount of pressure from his other artist, Elton John, who naturally felt—we were being very successful—and I think Elton felt a bit threatened,” Roger Taylor said. “Elton was absolutely massive at the time. So I think we came to the conclusion mutually it would be a good idea to split.”

  “John promised [Queen] the world, but when they signed he was difficult to get hold of,” EMI song-plugger Eric Hall said. “He was so busy with Elton John that he didn’t really have the time to spend with anyone else.”

  For Reid’s part, he harbored no ill feelings toward Queen.

  “Jim Beach came to me and said, ‘Look, you know, the band is not unhappy with what you’ve done,’” Reid later recalled in the documentary Days of Our Lives. “‘The contract is coming up [and] going forward they think they would like to manage themselves.’ And I thought that was a very nice way to tell me, and it was the correct way to tell me, and I’ve never had any difficulty with them at all. It was one of the gentlest parting of the ways of anybody I’d ever worked with.”

  With his stable of superstars back down to one, the Scotsman strongly suggested to Elton that he might think about a new recording project; a noncommittal Elton mulled the idea over while at a party held in his honor at Studio 54 that night. The recently opened hot-spot for New York’s glamorati at 254 West 54th Street was packed with some of the pianist’s biggest supporters, including ex-New York Doll David Johanssen, Saturday Night Live’s Gilda Radner and Laraine Newman, actress Ellen Burstyn, journalist Geraldo Rivera, Ashford & Simpson, several members of Monty Python, and Michael Jackson. After a brief appearance that saw him engulfed by photographers, a velvet-suited Elton disappeared into a back room and sat alone in the semi-dark.

  While in America, Elton found himself listening incessantly to a demo he’d made of “Shine on Through” weeks before. The urge to record was slowly coming back to him—organically, as he knew it should, and not through his manager’s business-minded pleas. By the same token, Elton knew that if he ever did make his way back into a studio, it would have to be with a brand-new team. He needed a fresh start, a unique challenge.

  After considering various big-name producers, the pianist decided that Thom Bell would be the perfect collaborator.

  “I’m a big soul fan, and that led me to Thom Bell,” Elton said. “I just loved the way his records sounded. Very dry-sounding records.”

  Elton met the architect of the popular “Philly Soul” sound days later in Los Angeles. After a competitive game of Ping-Pong, Elton set down his paddle and grinned across the table.

  “I want to do is something I haven’t done before, Thom.”

  “And what’s that?”

  “I don’t want to do anything.”

  Bell smiled patiently. “Okay. What is it that you don’t want to do?”

  “Anything.” Elton grinned. “Not a single thing.”

  “Well, how do I fit into this picture then?” the producer asked, confused.

  “I want you to be the boss of the whole thing,” the pianist said. “For the first time, I just want someone to tell me what to do.”

  Bell couldn’t believe it. “I kept saying, ‘Man, are you sure that you want to do this? Are you positive? Bec
ause we don’t want to get into midstream and all of a sudden [we have] these great ideas and I hear it one way and you hear it the other way, then we’re going to have problems.’ And I kept asking him to make sure.”

  The two shook hands on it. A couple weeks later, they reconvened at Kaye-Smith Studios in Seattle. Even after the contracts had been signed, Bell kept waiting for the temperamentally quicksilver superstar to renege on his promise to give up the reins of power. But it never happened. “[Elton] did not change, he stuck to the plan,” Bell said. “It’s unbelievable that he will work for you as hard, or harder, than he works for himself.”

  The producer’s first challenge was to come up with the correct material for the world’s biggest star to record. “The artist and their voice is what tells me what to do,” Bell said. “And I heard melodies in my mind, the way [Elton] phrases. And also, being English, he says words differently…His voice—it gives you the secret.” In the end, the soul maven decided to move in a direction suggested by Elton’s own “Philadelphia Freedom.” “I think he was emulating the Thom Bell sound at that point, which he did a nice job with, I thought,” the producer said. “‘Philadelphia Freedom’ was one of my favorite ones that he did, actually.”

  Bernie Taupin flew up from California to join Elton at the sessions. “Elton John and Bernie Taupin were frozen,” session drummer Charles Collins later told author Randy Alexander. “As if they were mentally recording every reaction. I just felt they were totally in awe of Thom Bell.”

  Before laying down a single vocal track, Bell taught Elton how to breathe properly. “You sing too high and you don’t use your lower register properly,” he told his new charge. “I’ve listened to a lot of your stuff, and you hardly ever use the lower range of your voice anymore.”