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

by David DeCouto

  “There was never any feud,” Elton insisted. “It’s the typical thing you read in the papers—just because he lived in America and I had an album out and he had an album out with different people, the tongues started to wag.”

  “We just needed a little freedom from each other,” Bernie said. “It was never intended to be permanent. What had caused some tension was that [Elton] was in England, and I had moved to America. When Elton wanted to write, I wasn’t there to work…Everybody seems to think that we fell out and we weren’t going to ever work together again. It wasn’t that. We never fell out. I think we just needed to get away from it for a while.”

  The break not only rejuvenated the team’s creative juices, it also gave Berne the necessary space to find a new outlook on life—a necessity, given how tumultuous his post-Maxine existence had become. The introspective lyricist had bounced around aimlessly, indulging in several half-hearted affairs and ultimately breaking the heart of twenty-two-year-old model Loree Rodkin. Rodkin, in turn, soon shattered the romantic illusions of Eagles’ drummer and lead vocalist Don Henley. When she ended their brief tryst, Henley took it hard, funneling his rage into the biting lyrics of “Hotel California.”

  “Some of the more derogatory parts of ‘Hotel California’ are definitely about Loree Rodkin,” Henley said. “‘Her mind is Tiffany twisted, she got the Mercedes bends/She got a lot of pretty boys that she calls friends’—that’s about her, and I wouldn’t be crowing if I were Ms. Rodkin.”

  After writing “Wasted Time” about their failed romance, a venom-drained Henley called Rodkin and begged her to get back together.

  “It can’t happen,” Rodkin said. “I’m involved with someone else.”

  “Already? Who?”

  “Let’s just say he’s a very successful man.”

  “Goddammit,” Henley fumed. “Who the hell is it?”

  “I’m back with Bernie, Don.”

  Henley slammed the receiver down and turned his cresting angst into yet another song—“New Kid in Town”—this time aimed squarely at Bernie.

  Taking it all to heart, the conflict only serving to accelerate Bernie’s already redlining alcoholic tendencies. It was, indeed, a black-cloud period unlike any he had ever experienced before. “I did some heavy, heavy drinking,” he said. “So bad, I had to dry out…I became a recluse. I just wanted to forget rock ‘n’ roll because it made me a drunk, and it made me lose my wife. I felt like a part of my life was missing.”

  Sequestering himself at Horseshoe Bay, Acapulco for several months to detox both body and soul, the lyricist emerged with a renewed sense of self. “I kept a diary [while at Horseshoe Bay],” he said, “and as I wrote it, gradually I could feel my mind unfogging and clearing, and it was beautiful. There’s nothing heroic in being a fall-down drunk. It’s pathetic, and I was pathetic.”

  Now sober and refreshed, Bernie was ready to tackle creative challenges once again. The sessions at Superbear Studios, in fact, marked the first time Elton and Bernie had sustained a working relationship in over three years. Many industry insiders breathed a sigh of relief that the John/Taupin partnership was finally back on the rails. As Billy Joel later related, “Their work has had a profound impact on an entire generation of popular music and musicians. To me, they are the Gilbert & Sullivan of our generation.”

  Elton invited Bernie and his new wife, fashion model Toni Russo—sister of movie actress Rene Lynn Russo—to stay at his rented house on the Côte d’Azur during the album’s gestation. Bernie appreciated from the gesture; from day one of the project, Bernie was one-hundred-percent onboard. “I’ll write songs for Elton as long as he breathes and wants me,” he swore.

  The first song the Brits attempted was the highly autobiographical “Two Rooms at the End of the World.” Playing off the Captain Fantastic tagline “From the End of the World to Your Town,” the track’s steely cadences provided a telling look at the Captain and the Kid’s symbiotic ties five years down the line.

  “It’s a song saying, ‘You can judge us individually, but together this is what we do,’” Bernie said. “Accept it or get out of the way.”

  Other new compositions included the meticulously sculpted love lament “Tortured,” a broiling “Sympathy for the Devil” update entitled “Chasing the Crown,” and the vital cocaine kiss-off, “White Lady White Powder,” which featured Eagles Glenn Frey, Timothy B. Schmit, and a humbled Don Henley on backing vocals.

  “They were all exorcism songs,” Bernie said. “They were songs saying, ‘Yeah, we’ve been there, now let’s get it back together.’”

  For these sessions, Elton composed exclusively on a Yamaha CP-80 electric piano, with a four-track recorder running. Though he hadn’t written in earnest in nearly a year, he found that music still flowed as readily as ever from his calloused fingertips. On his first day of composing, he came up with six songs, including what would become 21 at 33’s leadoff single, “Little Jeannie.”

  “There are times I want to cry after I’ve finished composing,” Elton admitted soon after writing the song. “Because when I’ve created a song it becomes almost like my child…You want to hold onto the miracle for as long as possible.” Though he came up with the most memorable line of that sweetly intimate track, “I want you to be my acrobat, I want you to be my lover,” Gary Osborne wrote the lion’s share of the lyrics. The two also collaborated on “Dear God,” the countrified “Can’t Get Over Getting Over Losing You,” “Chloe,” “Take Me Back,” “Conquer the Sun,” and the aching lullaby, “Steal Away Child.”

  Pleased with his work on Victim of Love, Elton invited guitar ace Steve Lukather, just twenty-one-years-old, to participate in the sessions. “Toto was in the middle of our second album, Hydra,” Lukather said years later, “and I asked the guys in my band if they minded I go play hookey and go to do an album with Elton for two weeks. All the guys were very jealous as all of us were, and still are, massive Elton fans. We lived in a house in the mountains away from everything and everyone. We were the next band in after Pink Floyd had cut tracks for The Wall. There was magic in that room, but also it kept blowing up, so we laughed through all that as well.” As for meeting the iconic pianist in person? “He welcomed me with open arms, and after a few days of cutting tracks he really warmed up to me and we had a fucking blast waking up and going into the studio to hear Elton’s next new song and help arrange and interpret his new music. Watching Elton work and write was something else. The man is a genius. I watched him write a song from scratch with lyrics he had never seen. The music flowed from him.” The memories remained some of Lukather’s fondest, in a vast career lasting well over forty years. “We were cutting and overdubbing on at least two tracks a day—Elton let me play whatever I liked and heard on his new music—and then we would hang out at night and drink too much and Elton told us stories and played for us. It was magic.”

  Elton also expanded his roster of lyricists to include “2-4-6-8 Motorway” rocker Tom Robinson, whom he’d met the fall before at a photo shoot for the Guinness Book of Pop Singles, the day before his heart scare.

  The first song they created together was “Elton’s Song,” a sorrowful hymn of unrequited love. “This was the first heartbroken love song I had written really deep from the heart,” Robinson confessed to author Tom Stanton. “I sent off the lyric and went off on tour and came back and heard nothing from Elton. And apparently, he told me later, he had actually looked at it and put it aside because the lyrics didn’t conform to any of the suggestions he had made at the time of recording the tune. He came back to it a few months later at the piano and said, ‘Oh, let’s give it a go anyway’, and suddenly said, ‘Oh yeah, I rather like that.’”

  Reminding the pianist of the film if…. by Lindsay Anderson, the track clearly meant a lot to the composer. “‘Elton’s Song’ is so beautiful,” he said, “and Tom Robinson’s lyric is so beautiful. It was the first gay song that I actually recorded as a homosexual song. Rather than
‘All the Girls Love Alice’, it was the first boy-on-boy song I wrote—because Tom, of course, is a gay man, and we became great friends.”

  Intriguingly, the track’s oddly meta title derived from what was, or was not, a misunderstanding—Robinson had provisionally scrawled ‘Elton’s Song’ at the top of the lyrics simply to remind himself that that particular effort was intended for Elton, and not for his own upcoming album. “Rather than choose a title for the song,” Robinson said, “[Elton] figured he’d call it [“Elton’s Song”]. And he did. Maybe he identified with the sentiment of the lyric. Or maybe he thought I meant that to be the title.”

  The two sophisticates also collaborated on the evocative “Never Gonna Fall in Love Again,” as well as a cosmopolitan serenade to broken expectations called “Sartorial Eloquence.” “I spent a lot of time thinking about past relationships and put them into songs,” Robinson told journalist Tom Stanton. “I remember that the line [about being lonely but keeping it under control] was one that Elton particularly liked. It was a kind of similarity in our personalities, the way we felt about breakups and things.”

  Elton also wrote with Judie Tzuke, a British pop singer signed to his Rocket label who’d recently scored a Top 20 U.K. hit with “Stay with Me till Dawn.” “She’s got the biggest tits in the world,” the pianist said with a jovial laugh. “She’s just lovely.” For her part, Tzuke was glad for the guidance Elton provided. “It used to be a real challenge in the ‘70s to not get saddled with the whole ‘pretty girl at the piano’ mold that women songwriters were often stuck with, especially if they’d had any real commercial success,” she said. “[But] Elton had total faith. He was a godsend, that way.”

  Their combined effort was a lacquered jazz-pop piece entitled “Give Me the Love.” “He asked me if I’d like to write together,” Tzuke later recalled, “and I said, ‘I really would.’ So he sent me a track with some words on [it], and he wanted some of them used, but he gave me freedom to write the rest. I wrote tons of them, some of which I was sort of quite proud of, and some of which I wasn’t really sure of. And I just said to him, ‘Use whichever ones you like.’ And he did. But he threw away some of the ones I liked. I would have loved to have actually sat down with him and written a song [from scratch], but I don’t think he does that very often. But I was very flattered and honored to have written a song with him.”

  Once more finding melodies coming to him unbidden, Elton also composed several instrumentals during these sessions, including the atmospheric instrumental “Basque,” which—as later recorded by flutist James Galway—would earn the composer a Grammy for Best Instrumental.

  Other music-only tracks included the pyrotechnic jam “Earn While You Learn,” and the classically stained “Carla/Etude,” which Elton wrote in honor of Clive Franks’ wife, who had served as makeup artist on his most recent tour. “He played it to us, and it was lovely,” Clive later told journalist George Matlock. “I asked him what it was called, and Elton said he was trying to title it in an anagram of our names…Elton is very clever with words, even though he doesn’t write lyrics. [But] after ten minutes, he came back into the control room where me and my wife, Carla, were sitting and said, ‘I can’t get an anagram of your names, so sod you, I’m just calling it [‘Carla/Etude’].”

  Elton and Bernie reconvened their final week in France to work on a final batch of songs together, including the brass-tinged “Hey Papa Legba,” “White Man Danger,” “Fools in Fashion,” and a tenderly bittersweet tale of Civil War soldiers called “The Retreat.”

  Both men had to laugh—despite their many trials and tribulations, the rapidity of their songwriting magic was still very much intact.

  “Don’t ever let anybody tell you that if it takes you a long time to write a song it’s going to be any better than if you write it in ten minutes,” Bernie told journalist Steven P. Wheeler. “Certain people, like Don Henley or Robbie Robertson, are great writers, but they slave over the songs and it takes them three years to make an album because they’re meticulous in the sense that they go over and over and over things. I’m the sort of writer to where if it’s not working for me in like ten minutes, I know it’s going nowhere. My best stuff comes straight out and pours out, and the same with Elton.”

  Another new John/Taupin composition, “Love So Cold,” dealt intriguingly with the sexual politics of aging. Elton spent three hours attempting to record a steel drum solo on the track, to no avail. Frustrated with their inability to properly mic the island instrument, he whipped off a harmonized piano solo in ten minutes instead. “One of the best piano solos I’ve ever done,” he said. “It’s not a jazz solo, it’s just a solo melody line which was done off the top of my head out of the frustration of trying to get some steel drums onto the record.” Despite the superior piano line, the song would be relegated to B-side status—except in France, where it was released as a single.

  Elton and Bernie completed their efforts for the new sessions—and for the decade as a whole—with “Bobby Goes Electric,” a taut rocker about an expat drug smuggler who recounts the day Bob Dylan traded in his acoustic guitar for an electric one at the Newport Folk Festival in ’65.

  The song would remain forever unreleased.

  The sessions over, Elton oversaw the release of his latest single. “Victim of Love.” Backed with the Single Man holdover, “Strangers,” the disc was issued in Britain on September 14. A heady mix of hard beats and unabashedly inventive dance-pop melodicism, “Victim of Love” failed to chart. In America, the single would fare better. Though American radio stations were initially loathe to play such a blatantly discofied track, the song entered heavy rotation once word leaked that the Doobie Brothers were singing backup.

  “Typical,” Elton laughed.

  “Victim of Love” ultimately climbed deep into the Billboard charts, giving Elton his twenty-fourth, and final, Top 40 single of the decade—nine years to the day from the historic WABC radio concert that resulted in 11/17/70.

  Elton geared up for his final America tour of the ‘70s, another two-man outing with Ray Cooper. Dubbed Back in the U.S.S.A.—the campaign was a mammoth undertaking—forty-two concerts across seventeen cities—anchored by a ten-night run at L.A.’s Universal Amphitheater, and an eight-night stand at New York’s Palladium. The pianist was characteristically enthusiastic about stepping back onto the American stage. “Returning to America has been the most important thing,” he said. “I have my enthusiasm for concerts back, and am already thinking about putting a band together next year.”

  For this tour, Elton had his ever-faithful Steinway painted fire-engine-red, with canary yellow legs. His instrument would prove the sole bit of flash, however. Gone were the wild costumes of the mid-70s. Gone, too, the recent Cossack look. In their stead were shiny silk suits of pink and gold and silver. With his hair transplant finally sprouting wispy dividends, Elton stepped onstage bareheaded for the first time since ’76, as vulnerable as he’d ever been.

  The bicoastal outing was nearly identical to its European and Russian counterparts, the main alteration being the addition of a rhythmic “Mama Can’t Buy You Love,” and a classic rock encore medley consisting of “Whole Lotta Shakin’ Going On,” “I Saw Her Standing There” and “Twist and Shout.”

  As ever, Ray Cooper seemed as much of a main attraction as Elton. But the reality was a hard truth the percussionist understood all too well. “My tragedy,” Ray said, “is that I know I’m totally dispensable. Hopefully I give audiences something to laugh at and look at, but I’m only allowed to do what I do because there’s such a strong structure around me.”

  The three-hour shows he and Elton gave were ubiquitously hailed as the apex of the Briton’s stage life. Indeed, the atmosphere from coast-to-coast was intimate and electric each night as Elton rocked with abandon. A jackknife marionette pounding the keys as relentlessly as he had back in his Bluesology days.

  Kicking off with a two-night run at Gammage Auditorium in Tempe
, Arizona, the tour soon moved on to Berkley for a three-night run at the city’s Community Theatre.

  In the audience for the second show, on September 23, sat none other than Davey Johnstone. The guitarist was duly impressed by his once and future boss.

  “I loved watching from the audience,” he said. “It was a first for me.”

  Elton and Ray next set up camp at the Universal Amphitheatre for a ten-night stand beginning on September 26.

  “It’s only taken me fifteen grams of coke and twelve Quaaludes tonight,” he told the sea of faces before him, his tongue planted firmly in his cheek. “There’s self-confidence for you.”

  An early highlight of the performance came during an extended “Rocket Man”—Elton crying out a desperate, “I’m burning out, I’m burning out,” while the crowd yelled back in chorale counterpoint: “No!” Perhaps the most dramatic moment of the evening, however, came halfway through “I Think I’m Gonna Kill Myself,” when Elton, suffering from a stomach bug—and coked out of his mind—took a couple woozy steps backward and collapsed unconscious into the arms of a roadie. Ten minutes after being dragged offstage and being made to be sick, Elton reemerged from the wings to perform the final hour-and-a-half of the show as if nothing had happened.

  “Even if I had only one finger left, I’d play for you,” he told the crowd, who roared its approval with full-throated devotion.

  Several weeks into the tour, the Pete Bellotte-produced album Victim of Love—its title having been changed at the eleventh hour from Thunder in the Night—was issued. Featuring a stark black-and-white portrait of an aloof-looking Elton in oversized glasses—taken by photographer David Bailey in his tiny studio in Primrose Hill—the album hit the racks on October 13. The timing was inauspicious, as it was only three short months after a riot-like disco-record-burning demonstration at Chicago’s Comisky Park which came to be known as “The Day Disco Died.” Victim of Love’s core tracks—“Warm Love in a Cold World,” “Born Bad,” “Street Boogie,” “Thunder in the Night” and “Spotlight”—were a taut maelstrom of melodic momentum and urgent white gospel vocals which belied an emotional gravity unusual in the disco landscape. Remixes of the title cut and “Johnny B. Goode,” meanwhile, proved popular in U.S. dance clubs, with a special promo-only boxed set of extended 12-inch singles were released exclusively to club DJs, who appreciated the exclusionary grooves.