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

by David DeCouto

“Alright,” Elton sighed. “Well done.”

  After the show proper ended with a stridently convulsive “Crazy Water”—Elton and Ray rocking back-to-back on the piano stool—the stage lights kicked on and the official guests in the front of the hall got up and left. For them, creatures of structured protocol, the show was over. At the same time, the younger crowd in back—the true fans—surged toward the stage. “I was watching the official guests’ faces,” Robert Hilburn said. “And there was that registering of, ‘Why is this all going on?’ And you see this dawning, and this expression and so forth, and it’s a dangerous thing, it’s a real powerful force. You saw what happened in the West in the ‘50s and ‘60s with this music.”

  Elton and Ray were called back for multiple encores as renegade fans leaped maniacally atop the seats, crooning and shimmying and flashing peace signs in security guards’ faces, in an extraordinary display of defiance. The four-dozen-strong police force within the hall watched on with stony gazes, making no move to break up the riotous party. In the lockdown world of Brezhnev’s Soviet Union, it was a truly historic moment—a notable fissure in the cement grip of Communism’s iron grasp.

  “Fantastic,” Ray called gruffly from the stage. “Really amazing.”

  Elton finished the show alone, in spectacular fashion, on his Fender Rhodes. After toasting the crowd with a healthy swig of Stoli, he launched into an adrenaline-pumping “Back in the U.S.S.R.,” the breakneck rendition of the Beatles’ classic dissolving any last pockets of restraint within the already frantic audience. “I didn’t mean to do that song…It just came to me, and I was singing it before I realized I didn’t know any of the words,” Elton said after the show. “So I just sang ‘Back in the U.S.S.R.’ over and over again.” He smiled. “They went apeshit. It was like playing ‘Philadelphia Freedom’ in Philadelphia.”

  “I’ve never seen anything like this,” Mr. Kokonin said of the show’s thunderous reception. “Not in all my years.”

  After the concert, thousands of desperate fans—many of whom had traveled up to a thousand miles without any hope of obtaining a ticket—stormed police barriers outside the hall to beg of concertgoers, “What was he like? Tell us what he was like!”

  “El-tone! El-tone!” they chanted below the singer’s third-floor dressing room window, blocking tram lines and refusing to disperse.

  “As I watched [Elton] wave to the fans below,” Robert Hilburn said, “I remembered Janis Joplin and what she had said about how hard it is to be loved by thousands on stage and then face the world alone. I stood next to him as he listened to the continuing chants of ‘Elton, Elton.’ Even on this night of triumph, there was something about Elton that made it obvious he felt terribly alone.”

  “Audiences are specially attracted to the lyrical ballads and folk songs performed by R. Dwight,” a Soviet journal reported the next day in a comically staid review. Across the globe, however, headlines screamed out a more accurate picture of the event. Elton John Stuns Soviet Rock Fans, proclaimed the Daily Telegraph. Elton John, Super-Czar, Rocks Them Back In The U.S.S.R., shouted the London Daily Mail (“[Elton] won the acclamation of an audience that almost deafened itself in its own applause…”), while the L.A. Times simply declared: Rock Star Rises Over Russia.

  “The first concert in the Soviet Union by the British rock star Elton John erupted into a frenzy last night,” The New York Times noted, “with nearly 4,000 Russian fans dancing on their seats and in the aisles. Uniformed policemen and other Soviet officials were helpless to control the screaming, clapping mob in the Bolshoi Oktyabrsky Concert Hall here.” Critic John Rockwell, possibly still stinging over his battle-of-words with Elton back in ‘76, did his best to downplay the pianist’s specific role in the historic concert. “[Elton] is the best-known rock star ever to be allowed to perform in the Soviet Union,” he wrote. “Thus the fanatic enthusiasm of the Russians may be as much an attestation of his symbolic status and a sign of their longing for Western popular music as it is a response to his considerable performing talents.”

  “Ol’ Rockwell,” Elton laughed. “Never lets our side down. Blimey.”

  Elton and Ray’s victory was short-lived, as they began receiving warnings to tone down their show the very next day.

  “Everyone’s very aware and frightened of a normal show, bringing people to their feet too much,” Ray noted from his hotel room. “It’s sad, because the warnings are coming from people that I don’t really consider to understand what crowd-control is about. It’s up to Elton and myself, who are, after all, supposedly the artists.” He stared forlornly out the window. “When the lights go down, it’s our show.”

  Soviet officials asked that Elton not kick his piano stool away during future performances, as he was damaging official Soviet property. Nor were he to pound his piano in quite so vigorous a manner. Most especially, they banned him from ever singing “Back in the U.S.S.R.” again.

  Elton summarily ignored all their requests. Yet even with the uncompromised, full-tilt performance the second night, proceedings were noticeably more subdued. During “Bennie and the Jets,” not a single person got up to dance.

  “Come on!” Ray exhorted, clapping his beefy hands forcefully above his head. “Come on!”

  Nothing.

  Elton and Ray were confused.

  “It was funny,” the pianist said, “‘cause we really couldn’t tell onstage what was different from the first night. I mean, they all seemed to be enjoying it, and you could see it. But I kept looking over at Ray, and he was working his nuts off, and people weren’t getting up at all. And we found out later that if the kids did get up, then there were men in navy blue suits who’d push them down again.”

  Despite the uphill battle, Elton finally got the crowd to display a measure of enthusiasm by working a chorus of “Midnight in Moscow” into the coda of “Bennie and the Jets.”

  “Communism,” a bearded roadie in a faded red Midnight Special T-shirt chuckled from the wings. “No fuckin’ thanks.”

  Back at his hotel that night, Elton was asked to perform in the dining hall. He was less than enthusiastic about the idea. “When I was first trying to make it as a musician, as Elton John, I always said that I would try and avoid playing to people who were eating, ‘cause I’d had enough of that in cabaret when I was playing piano for Long John Baldry. So when I got to the hotel and people were saying, ‘Go on, get up onstage,’ I was very reluctant. But the first bottle of vodka sort of took my mind off it, really.”

  To the delight of the hundreds in the room, Elton performed a driving “I Heard It Through the Grapevine,” with Ray Cooper on drums and Clive Franks on bass. Thereafter, it was back to the Stoli.

  After two more Leningrad performances, Elton and his retinue boarded the Red Arrow bound for Moscow, as dozens of poverty-stricken Soviets tossed flowers and boxes of candy and stuffed teddy bears at them. Elton was touched—they were sharing items purchased at hugely inflated prices on the black market, items that they most likely couldn’t even afford for themselves. Their selfless largesse brought the cultural iconoclast to tears.

  “They’re such a generous people,” he said quietly.

  The pianist was equally impressed with how polite and reserved the Soviets proved to be whenever he’d encounter them on the streets. “They gather around in crowds but they don’t gawk, and they’re not rude like other people out of other places,” he noted in the documentary To Russia…With Elton. “Although I’ve noticed that when they ask you for your autograph, you just get halfway through signing it and they think that’s it. And I’m saying, ‘No no no, there’s more to come yet,’ as I start on the ‘John’. And they just run away halfway through.”

  An afternoon spent taking in such sightseeing attractions as the changing of the guard outside Lenin’s tomb culminated with Elton holding a press conference before his first show at Moscow’s 4,000-seat Rossiya Concert Hall.

  “Are you against apartheid in sport?” one Sov
iet journalist asked.

  “I object to apartheid, whether it’s because of color, class or sexual preference,” Elton firmly replied. His answer was translated into Russian sans his mention of sexual preferences—at the time, homosexuality in the U.S.S.R. was punishable by a five-year prison sentence.

  Elton’s first Moscow concert was another triumph, which had diplomats from Britain’s Moscow embassy hailing the tour as the single most important step forward in East-West relationships since Khrushchev visited Hollywood back in ‘59.

  Fully understanding the political implications of his visit, a celebratory Elton struck a playful, Cossack-like pose for the press outside the Kremlin. Wearing a magenta jacket, bright yellow trousers and a four-foot rope of pearls, he told his Russian guides that Paul McCartney should be allowed to play in Red Square; his suggestion was met with pointed silence.

  Elton and Ray’s final show, on May 28, created another bit of history when it was beamed live throughout Europe on the BBC, thus becoming the first satellite broadcast ever between the Soviet Union and the Western world.

  BBC Radio 1 producer Jeff Griffin was in charge of making sure that the broadcast went off without a hitch. With exactly two-and-a-half hours of signal time allotted to bounce the show from Moscow to the Ukraine to London, the margin for error was slim. “Elton had promised me if I gave him signals all the way through, especially the last half hour, he would come out on time,” Griffin said. “On the last but one encore, we were running very tight on time. So instead of staying off the stage for about a couple of minutes like an artist usually does while the applause builds and builds, I had [a roadie inform Elton], ‘You’ve got to go straight back on!’” The pianist complied, making a mad dash behind the curtains before appearing on the other side of the stage seconds later. He finished his final songs with only moments to spare before the satellite feed went dark.

  As always, the performance was met with a fanatical response. Elton was beside himself with joy. “The last show was probably the best I’ve ever given in my life,” he said. “This has to be my biggest achievement as an artist. I’m at a loss for words.”

  Landing back at Heathrow on May 31 to a hero’s welcome, promoter Harvey Goldsmith stood beside Elton with a satchel full of pound notes, the pianist’s payment for the eight shows. Even with the remittance—the bills were so old and worn, they had to be exchanged for newer ones at the Bank of England—Elton ended up losing over £25,000 on the tour. But he hardly cared. For him, the artistic benefits far outweighed any financial considerations.

  “I had the most fantastic time [musically]—culturally as well—seeing the most beautiful things,” he said. “I came back and the first questions that were asked were negative. At London Airport: ‘What do you think of Communism?’ First typical English quote.” He shrugged. “You hear a lot about the U.S.S.R. at home, but you’ve got to see things for yourself. I thought Leningrad was easily one of the most beautiful cities I’ve ever been to…The country is not dark, gray, grim or drab. It’s beautiful, and the people are very warm.”

  Did Elton feel any qualms playing for such an aggressively oppressive regime? “I’m against bigotry and prejudice and persecution,” he said. “But if that stopped me from playing my music, I wouldn’t play [in Britain], because of the National Front or the campaign against homosexuality. You don’t go in with guns blazing, saying, ‘I want this and that.’ You’ve got to approach things gently. I’d be very presumptuous to consider myself an ambassador of any sort, but I’m glad to do my bit.”

  In actuality, Elton was able to help build a vinyl bridge between East and West—soon after the conclusion of his brief tour, A Single Man became the first Western rock album to enjoy official distribution within the U.S.S.R. Released on Melodiya, the Soviet record label, the album was only given the green light after a pair of caveats were met: that the LP’s title be changed to Poyot Elton John (“Elton John Sings”), and that two of the lyrically more questionable tracks—“Part-Time Love” and “Big Dipper”—be excised, having been deemed too morally suspect for pristine Russian ears.

  Back in England, a full-length film documenting Elton’s Russian trip was issued under the title From Russia…With Elton. “It was one of the most memorable and happy tours I’ve been on,” Elton reflected at the premiere, despite his receiving only $1,000 per performance—his lowest wage since his days back at the Troubadour. “The hospitality was tremendous. The only negative experience [were] two or three vodka hangovers. Plus Russians are lousy lays.”

  Elton was impressed enough with the U.S.S.R. that he promised to write a song for the upcoming 1980 Olympics, which were being hosted in Moscow. Entitled “Tactics,” the fragile instrumental would never reach Soviet ears, as the U.K.—along with sixty-five other countries—soon joined together in an international boycott against the Soviet Union after their unwarranted invasion of Afghanistan.

  “I was very disappointed in fact when they invaded Afghanistan,” Elton said. “I was growing some of my best pot there.”

  The pianist would not return to the country for sixteen years.

  Chapter 36:

  Back in the U.S.S.A.

  “Loneliness—that’s what I worry about for him more than anything else,” Elton’s mother confided to David Wigg of the Daily Express soon after her son’s Soviet foray. “I think he’s desperate. He’s got all the possessions you could wish for, but that doesn’t make him happy. He hasn’t anyone to share it with, and that’s what he needs. He said he’d like to have a family. Unfortunately, his lifestyle doesn’t allow him to meet anybody. And he won’t allow himself. It’s as if he holds back all the time. I feel that he’s got everything—but nothing.”

  While her maternal concerns held more merit than Elton perhaps cared to admit, he had more immediate matters to attend to, such as the American release of The Thom Bell Sessions ’77 that June. The release proved a bit problematic, as Billboard insisted on erroneously treating the disc as a full-fledged LP, despite the fact that its three tracks combined for a running length of just over eighteen minutes. Had it been properly reported as a maxi-single, it would have easily cracked the Top 20. As a long-playing “album,” however, the disc faltered at an anemic Number 51.

  “It was the first time a twelve-inch EP ever got on the album charts,” Elton said. “I couldn’t believe it. It looked as if I were making a desperate attempt to get back on the charts.”

  The 45 release of “Mama Can’t Buy You Love” fared considerably better. Backed with the contemplative soul-jam “Three Way Love Affair,” the single reached Number 9 in the U.S. charts that August. Elton’s first Top 10 single in three years, the song also hit Number 1 on Billboard’s Adult Contemporary chart. “Mama Can’t Buy You Love” also gave the artist his third smash black record of his career, earning him a Grammy nomination for Best R&B Vocal Performance, Male. “With ‘Philadelphia Freedom,’ ‘Bennie and the Jets’ and then ‘Mama Can’t Buy You Love’, I had three Number One R&B records,” Elton said, “which meant a huge deal to a white guy from Pinner.”

  Elton headed to Grasse in the south of France that same month to begin composing material for a proposed double album. Though the double disc would never materialize, the songs written and recorded in the south of France would make up the whole of Elton’s first release of the 1980s, 21 at 33, and half of his 1981 offering, The Fox—as well as providing enough B-sides to see him through 1984.

  Five days into the proceedings, he jetted over to Musicland Studio in Munich for a session with producer Pete Bellotte, the disco kingpin who had collaborated so successfully with Giorgio Moroder on such Donna Summers hits as “Hot Stuff” and “Last Dance.” Elton, who had known Bellotte since his days with Bluesology, had recently reconnected with the producer backstage at his two-man show at the Theatre Royal Drury Lane in London.

  “Would you fancy doing an album?” Bellotte had asked. “It’s gonna be called Thunder in the Night.”

&nb
sp; Elton immediately agreed to the project. “Because I do like disco music if it’s good,” he said. “I like any sort of music, if it’s good.”

  Elton’s proviso—much as it had been with Thom Bell two years before—was that Bellotte oversee the entirety of the writing and production duties. “I said, ‘I don’t have to play on it,’ which is more fun for me,” Elton said. “The keyboard parts are played by two other musicians. I know I’m going to get knocked for the album. But so what?”

  Bellotte presented Elton with seven dance tracks—an amalgam of guitar-based rock and thumping Eurodisco. Keith Forsey, who would gain acclaim for his production work with Billy Idol in the coming decade, played drums, while future Miles Davis virtuoso Marcus Miller added a molten bass line to each song. Acclaimed Brazilian musician Paulinho Da Costa was then brought in at the eleventh hour to add dynamic percussive flourishes to help add nuanced coherence to the entire project.

  Elton recorded his lead vocals in one eight-hour session at Musicland. The basic tracks were later flown to Los Angeles for overdubs at Rusk Sound Studios, where Tower of Power saxophonist Lenny Pickett—author of the hard-charging solo on “The Bitch is Back”—was recruited for a fiery turn on the session’s key track, a trance-inducing cover of Chucky Berry’s immortal “Johnny B. Goode.” The Doobie Brothers Patrick Simmons and Michael McDonald contributed backing vocals to the luminous title track, while

  Toto’s guitar ace Steve Lukather added similarly stinging solos to such Möbius-strip exercises as “Warm Love in a Cold World” and “Born Bad,” and would go on to lend his fret work to Elton’s next two studio efforts, 21 at 33 and The Fox, as well.

  Back in Grasse, Elton began composing and recording tracks for his new album in earnest. As with A Single Man, Elton utilized Gary Osborne as a lyricist. More intriguingly, he also turned to his old partner, Bernie Taupin. Their professional reunion was heralded as a major event within the music press, yet the men themselves remained stoic about the whole affair.