by Elton John
Mum wasn’t exactly thrilled by the idea that I was gay – she said something about condemning myself to a life of loneliness, which didn’t seem to make a huge amount of sense, given that I was in a relationship – but at least she hadn’t disowned me, or refused to accept it. And bizarrely, when he got home, I noticed that John looked like he’d had a much more stressful evening than I had. It turned out that midway through the show, Liberace had unexpectedly announced that he had a very special guest in the audience, a wonderful new singer who was going to be a big star: ‘… and I know he’s here tonight, and I’m going to make him stand up and wave to you all, because he’s so fabulous … Elton John!’ Assuming that my reluctance to make myself known was down to modesty, Liberace had become progressively more solicitous – ‘Come on now, Elton, don’t be shy, the audience want to meet you. Don’t you wanna meet Elton John, ladies and gentlemen? I tell you, this guy’s gonna be huge – let’s give him a big hand and see if we can’t get him to say hello’ – while a huge spotlight vainly circled the stalls. In John’s telling of the story, Liberace had carried on like this for about three weeks, during which time the audience had grown first restless, then audibly irritated at my churlish refusal to show myself. Meanwhile, the one person among them who actually knew Elton John’s whereabouts had grown concerned he was going to become the first person in history to literally die of embarrassment. Eventually, Liberace had given up. According to John, he was still smiling, but something about the way he launched into Liszt’s Hungarian Rhapsody suggested murderous fury.
Ruining a Liberace concert while coming out to my parents notwithstanding, life was heaven. I was finally able to be who I was, to have no fear about myself, to have no fear about sex. I mean it in the nicest possible way when I say John taught me how to be debauched. As Tony had noted, John really knew the gay scene, the clubs and the pubs. We’d go to the Vauxhall Tavern to see Lee Sutton, this great drag queen – ‘The name is Lee Sutton, DSM, OBE – Dirty Sex Maniac, On the Bed with Everybody’ – and to the Sombrero club on Kensington High Street. We would have dinner parties and other musicians would drop by. One night, after we went to see him play live, Neil Young came back home with us and, after a few drinks, elected to perform his forthcoming album in its entirety for us at 2 a.m. Already alerted to the fact that an impromptu party was going on by the nerve-jangling sound of my friend Kiki Dee drunkenly walking into a glass door while holding a tray containing every champagne glass we owned, the delight of the adjoining flats at Neil Young performing his forthcoming album was audible. So that’s how I heard the classic ‘Heart Of Gold’ for the first time, presented in a unique arrangement of solo piano, voice and neighbour intermittently banging on the ceiling with a broom handle and loudly imploring Neil Young to shut up.
My career suddenly had real momentum. We weren’t as big in Britain as we were in the US, but the band and I had come back from America with a new sense of purpose. We’d been validated, ratified by so many people over there that we knew we were on to something. Word of what had happened in Los Angeles had filtered back to Britain and the press were suddenly interested. A hippy magazine called Friends sent a journalist to interview me. I played him two tracks we’d already recorded for the next album, Tumbleweed Connection, and in the subsequent article he went as nuts as Robert Hilburn had done: ‘I think that along with his lyricist he will possibly become the finest, and almost certainly the most popular songwriter in England, and eventually the world.’ We played at the Royal Albert Hall, supporting Fotheringay, a band formed by Fairport Convention’s former lead singer Sandy Denny. Like the audience at the Troubadour, they thought they were getting a sensitive singer-songwriter – the perfect complement to what they did, which was wistful folk rock – and instead they got rock ‘n’ roll and Mr Freedom clothes and handstands on the piano keyboard. They couldn’t follow us: we had so much adrenalin and confidence. Of course, when the adrenalin wore off and I realized what we’d done, I felt terrible. Sandy Denny was one of my heroes, an amazing vocalist. It was meant to be their big showcase gig and I’d ruined it for them. I scuttled home, absolutely mortified, before they came onstage.
But it felt like the time was right. The sixties were over, The Beatles had split up and there was a new wave of artists that were all starting to make it at the same time: me, Rod Stewart, Marc Bolan, David Bowie. Musically we were all very different, but in some ways we were birds of a feather. We were all working-class Londoners, we’d all spent the sixties with our noses pressed against the glass, toiling away on the same club circuit, never really getting where we wanted to go. And we all knew each other. Our paths had crossed backstage in r’n’b clubs and at gigs at the Roundhouse. I was never great friends with Bowie. I loved his music, and we socialized a couple of times, visiting the Sombrero with Tony King and having dinner together in Covent Garden while he was rehearsing for the Ziggy Stardust tour, but there was always something distant and aloof about him, at least when I was around. I honestly don’t know what the problem was, but there clearly was a problem. Years later, he’d always make snippy remarks about me in interviews: ‘the token queen of rock and roll’ was the most famous one, although in fairness, he was absolutely out of his mind on coke when he said it.
But I adored Marc and Rod. They couldn’t have been more different. Marc seemed to have come from another planet: there was something otherworldly about him, as if he was just passing through Earth on his way to somewhere else. You could hear it in his music. ‘Ride A White Swan’ was never off the radio when we moved into the Water Garden, and it didn’t sound like anything else, you couldn’t work out where he was coming from. That’s what he was like in person. He was larger than life – straight but very camp – and incredibly kind and gentle at the same time. He clearly had a big ego, but he also never seemed to take himself seriously at all. He somehow managed to be simultaneously completely charming and absolutely, brazenly full of shit. He’d say the most outrageous things with a straight face: ‘Darling, I sold a million records this morning.’ I’d think: Marc, no one in the history of music has ever sold a million records in a morning, let alone you. But something about him was so beguiling and endearing, you would never actually say that out loud. Instead, you’d find yourself agreeing with him: ‘A million, Marc? Congratulations! How fabulous!’
I’d known about Rod for years, because of the connection with Long John Baldry, but I only really got to know him after he covered ‘Country Comfort’, one of the new songs that I’d played the journalist from Friends. He changed the lyrics, something I complained about at length in the press: ‘He sounds like he made it up as he went along! He couldn’t have got further from the original if he’d sung “The Camptown Races”!’ That rather set the tone for our friendship. We’ve got a lot in common. We both love football and collecting art. We both grew up after the war in families that didn’t have a lot, so neither of us has ever been coy about enjoying the fruits of our success, shall we say. But the thing we really share is our sense of humour. For a man with a well-documented lifelong obsession with leggy blondes, Rod’s got a surprisingly camp sense of humour. He happily joined in when we started giving ourselves drag names back in the seventies. I was Sharon, John was Beryl, Tony was Joy and Rod was Phyllis. We’ve spent nearly fifty years constantly taking the piss out of, and trying to put one over, each other. When the press were speculating about my hair falling out, and whether or not I’d started wearing a hairpiece, Rod could be relied upon to send me a present: one of those old-fashioned, helmet-shaped hairdryers that old women used to sit under in salons. Keen to reciprocate his thoughtfulness, I sent him a Zimmer frame covered in fairy lights. Even today, if I notice he’s got an album out that’s selling better than mine, I know it’s only a matter of time before I’m going to get an email: ‘Hello, Sharon, just writing to say I’m so sorry that your record’s not even in the Top 100, dear. What a pity when mine’s doing so well, love, Phyllis.’
It reached a kind of p
eak in the early eighties, when Rod was playing Earls Court. They had advertised the gig by flying a blimp over the venue with his face on it. I was staying in London that weekend and I could see it from my hotel room window. It was too good an opportunity to miss. So I called my management and they hired someone to shoot it down: apparently it landed on top of a double-decker bus and was last seen heading towards Putney. About an hour later, the phone went. It was Rod, spluttering about the disappearance.
‘Where’s my fucking balloon gone? It was you, wasn’t it? You cow! You bitch!’
A year later, I was playing Olympia and the promoters had hung a huge banner across the street. It was mysteriously cut down immediately after it was put up. The phone call that informed me of this sabotage came from Rod, who seemed curiously well informed about exactly what had happened.
‘Such a shame about your banner, love. I heard it wasn’t even up five minutes. I bet you didn’t even get to see it.’
* * *
Not long after we moved into the Water Gardens, I was back in America for another tour. It’s a huge country and most of it couldn’t care less if the LA Times has called you the future of rock and roll. You have to get out there and show people what you can do. Besides, we had a new album to promote – Tumbleweed Connection was already finished: recorded in March 1970 and released in the UK in the October. That’s just how it was then. You didn’t take three years to make an album. You recorded quick, you got it out fast, you kept the momentum going, kept things fresh. It suited the way I worked. I hate wasting time in the studio. I suppose it’s a legacy from my days as a session musician, or recording demos in the middle of the night at DJM: you were always working against the clock.
So we criss-crossed the States, usually playing as a support act, for Leon Russell, The Byrds, Poco, The Kinks and Eric Clapton’s new band Derek And The Dominos. That was the idea of my booking agent, Howard Rose, and a really clever move: don’t play top of the bill, play second, make people want to come back and see you again in your own right. Every artist we supported was incredibly kind and generous to us, but it was hard work. Each night, we’d go onstage with the intention of stealing the show. We’d go down great, and come off thinking we’d blown the headliners offstage, and every night, the headliners would come out and play better than us. People talk about Derek And The Dominos being a real disaster area, strung out on heroin and booze, but you would never have known that if you’d seen them live that autumn. They were phenomenal. From the side of the stage, I took mental notes about their performance. Eric Clapton was the star, but it was their keyboard player, Bobby Whitlock, that I watched like a hawk. He was from Memphis, learned his craft hanging around Stax Studios and played with that soulful, Deep Southern gospel feel. Touring with them or Leon was like being on the road with Patti LaBelle or Major Lance when I was in Bluesology: you watched and you learned, from people who had more experience than you.
If we still had a long way to go, it was clear on that tour that the word was spreading. In LA, we had dinner with Danny Hutton from Three Dog Night and he casually mentioned that Brian Wilson wanted to meet us. Really? I had idolized The Beach Boys in the sixties, but their career had tailed off, and Brian Wilson had turned into this mysterious, mythic figure – according to some lurid gossip he was supposed to have become a recluse, or gone insane, or both. Oh no, Danny assured us, he’s a huge fan, he’d love you to visit.
So we drove up to his house in Bel Air, a Spanish-style mansion with an intercom at the gate. Danny buzzed it and announced he was here with Elton John. There was a deathly silence at the other end. Then there was a voice, unmistakably that of The Beach Boys’ mastermind, singing the chorus of ‘Your Song’: ‘I hope you don’t mind, I hope you don’t mind’. As we approached the front door, it opened to reveal Brian Wilson himself. He looked fine – a little chubbier than on the cover of Pet Sounds, perhaps, but nothing like the reclusive weirdo people gossiped about. We said hello. He stared at us and nodded. Then he sang the chorus of ‘Your Song’ again. He said we should come upstairs and meet his kids. It turned out that his kids were asleep in bed. He woke them up. ‘This is Elton John!’ he enthused. His daughters looked understandably baffled. He sang the chorus of ‘Your Song’ to them: ‘I hope you don’t mind, I hope you don’t mind’. Then he sang the chorus of ‘Your Song’ to us again. By now, the novelty of hearing the chorus of ‘Your Song’ sung to me by one of pop history’s true geniuses was beginning to wear a little thin. I was struck by the sinking feeling that we were in for quite a long and trying evening. I turned to Bernie and a certain look passed between us, that somehow managed to combine fear, confusion and the fact that we were both desperately trying not to laugh at the absolute preposterousness of the situation we found ourselves in, a look that said: what the fuck is happening?
It was a look that we grew increasingly accustomed to using during the last months of 1970. I was invited to a party at Mama Cass Elliot’s house on Woodrow Wilson Drive in LA, famed as the leading hang-out for Laurel Canyon’s musicians, the place where Crosby, Stills and Nash had formed, and David Crosby had shown off his new discovery, a singer-songwriter called Joni Mitchell, to his friends. When I arrived, they were all there. It was nuts, like the record sleeves in the bedroom at Frome Court had come to life: what the fuck is happening?
We passed Bob Dylan on the stairs at the Fillmore East, and he stopped, introduced himself, then told Bernie he loved the lyrics of a song from Tumbleweed called ‘My Father’s Gun’: what the fuck is happening?
We were sitting backstage after a gig in Philadelphia when the dressing room door opened and five men walked in unannounced. You couldn’t mistake The Band for anyone else: they looked like they’d just stepped off the cover of the album we’d played to death back in England. Robbie Robertson and Richard Manuel started telling us they’d flown in from Massachusetts by private plane just to see the show, while I tried to behave as if The Band flying in from Massachusetts to see me perform was a perfectly normal state of affairs, and occasionally stole a glance at Bernie, who was similarly engaged in a desperate attempt to play it cool. A year ago, we were dreaming of trying to write songs like them and now they’re stood in front of us, asking us to play them our new album: what the fuck is happening?
It wasn’t just The Band who wanted to meet us. It was their managers, Albert Grossman and Bennett Glotzer. They were legendary American music business figures, particularly Grossman, a renowned tough guy who’d managed Bob Dylan since the early sixties. He had reacted to another client, Janis Joplin, becoming addicted to heroin not by intervening but by taking a life insurance policy out on her. Word must have reached them that I was currently without a manager. Ray Williams was a lovely man, I owed him a great deal and he was incredibly loyal – he’d even named his daughter Amoreena, after another of the Tumbleweed Connection songs – but after the first American trip, I’d talked it over with the rest of the band, and no one thought he was the right person to look after us. But nor were Grossman and Glotzer, as I realized the moment I met them. They were like characters from a film, a film that had been panned for its hopelessly cartoonish depiction of two aggressive, motor-mouthed American showbiz managers. Nevertheless they were real people, and their collective efforts to win me over succeeded in scaring me witless. As long as there was a vacancy, they were not going to leave me alone.
‘I’m going to follow you around until you sign for me,’ Glotzer told me.
He wasn’t joking. There seemed to be no way of getting rid of him short of applying for a restraining order. Once again, the allure of locking myself in the toilet became hard to resist.
It might have been while I was in hiding from Bennett Glotzer that I started thinking about getting John to manage me. The more I considered it, the more it made sense. John was young and ambitious and full of adrenalin. He’d grown up in working-class Paisley in the fifties and sixties, an experience which had left him tough enough to deal with anything the music busines
s threw at him. We were already a couple, which meant he’d have my best interests at heart. He was a born hustler with the gift of the gab and he was brilliant at his job. He didn’t just know music, he was smart about music. Earlier in the year, he’d personally convinced Motown to release a three-year-old album track by Smokey Robinson And The Miracles as a single, then watched as ‘Tears Of A Clown’ went to Number One on both sides of the Atlantic. It sold so many copies that Smokey Robinson had to put his plans to retire from music on hold.
Everyone agreed it was a good idea, including John. He quit EMI and Motown at the end of the year, got a desk in Dick James’s office – initially, at least, he was effectively an employee of DJM, given a salary to act as a kind of liaison between me and the company – and that was that. To celebrate, we traded in my Ford Escort for an Aston Martin. It was the first really extravagant thing I ever bought, the first sign I was actually making good money from music. We got it off Maurice Gibb from The Bee Gees and it was a real pop star’s car: a purple DB6, flashy and beautiful. And completely impractical, as we discovered when John had to meet Martha And The Vandellas off their flight at Heathrow Airport. It was one of his last jobs for Motown, and we proudly took the Aston Martin along. Martha And The Vandellas looked impressed until they realized they had to get into the back of it. The designers had clearly spent considerably more time on its sleek lines and poetic contours than they had worrying about whether the rear seats could house a legendary soul trio. Somehow they got in. Perhaps Motown’s famous Charm School had given classes on contortionism. As I drove back down the A40, I looked in the rear-view mirror. It was like a Tokyo tube train during rush hour back there. Hang on, Martha And The Vandellas were crammed into the back of my car, which was an Aston Martin. That would have seemed very strange twelve months ago, when I was driving a Ford Escort, its back seat noticeably devoid of Motown superstars. But after the year I’d had, strange was becoming a relative concept.