by Elton John
My shopping habit wasn’t the only thing that was ramped up a notch. Everything seemed to be getting bigger, louder, more excessive. Bernie and I hadn’t intended ‘Rocket Man’ to be a huge hit single – we saw ourselves as album artists – but that’s what it turned into: it was Number Two in Britain, much higher than any of our singles had reached before, and went triple-platinum in the States. We’d stumbled onto a different kind of commerciality, and its success changed our audience. Screaming girls started appearing in the front rows and outside the stage door, tearfully clinging on to the car as we tried to get away. It felt really peculiar, as if they’d gone to see The Osmonds or David Cassidy but taken a wrong turn and somehow ended up at our gig instead.
I worked really hard, maybe too hard, but it felt like there was an unstoppable momentum behind me that carried me on no matter how exhausted I was, that drove me through any kind of setback. I contracted glandular fever just before we went into the studio to record Don’t Shoot Me, I’m Only the Piano Player in the summer of 1972. I should have cancelled the sessions in order to recuperate, but I just went to the Château d’Hérouville and ploughed through them, running on adrenalin. You would never have known I was ill from listening to the album: the guy singing ‘Daniel’ and ‘Crocodile Rock’ doesn’t sound unwell. A few weeks after we finished, I was back on tour again. I kept pushing the live show, trying to make it more over-the-top and outrageous. I started employing professional costume designers – first Annie Reavey, then Bill Whitten and Bob Mackie – and egging them on to do whatever they wanted, no matter how insane: more feathers, more sequins, brighter colours, bigger platforms. You’ve designed an outfit covered in multicoloured balls attached to pieces of elastic that glow in the dark? How many balls? Why don’t you add some more? I won’t be able to play the piano in it? Let me worry about that.
Then I got the idea of bringing ‘Legs’ Larry Smith, who’d been in The Bonzo Dog Doo-Dah Band, on tour with us. Legs was a drummer, but his other big talent was tap dancing. When we were making Honky Château, we had got him to come to the studio and tap-dance on a song called ‘I Think I’m Going To Kill Myself’, and now I got him to tap-dance onstage as well. His routine got more and more elaborate as the tour went on. Legs came onstage in a crash helmet and the vast train of a wedding dress. Then he started coming onstage accompanied by two dwarfs dressed as US Marines, while confetti rained from the ceiling. Then he came up with a routine where he and I would mime to ‘Singing In The Rain’, complete with dialogue. Larry would lean on my piano and sigh at me: ‘Gee, Elton, I wish I could play like you. I’ll bet you get all the boys.’ As usual, no one even raised an eyebrow.
I even invited Larry along when I was asked to do the Royal Variety Performance, which caused a huge row. Bernard Delfont, who organized the show, mystifyingly didn’t want a man in a wedding train and a crash helmet tap-dancing in front of the Queen Mother. I told him to fuck off, that I wouldn’t play unless Larry came on, and he eventually relented. I thought that it was the best thing about the whole evening, apart from the fact that I got to share a dressing room with Liberace. He’d clearly forgotten about, or forgiven me for, my failure to appear at his London Palladium performance a couple of years before and was just divine, like a living embodiment of showbiz. He turned up with trunk after trunk of clothes. I thought I looked pretty outrageous myself – I was dressed in multicoloured lurex pinstripes with matching platform shoes and top hat – but, by comparison with his side of the dressing room, mine looked like a particularly dowdy corner of Marks and Spencer. He had a suit covered in tiny bulbs that lit up when he sat at the piano. He signed an autograph for me – his signature was in the shape of a piano – then spent the afternoon reeling off one fantastic story after another in an impossibly camp accent. The month before, he said, the hydraulic platform that raised him up through the stage had broken midway through his grand entrance; nothing if not a trouper, he’d performed for forty minutes with only his head visible to the audience.
I had become increasingly obsessed with making a big entrance onstage myself, because it was the one time that I was really mobile, when I wasn’t stuck behind the piano. It reached a peak when we played the Hollywood Bowl in 1973. The stage was hung with a huge painting of me in top hat and tails, surrounded by dancing girls. First Tony King came onstage and introduced Linda Lovelace, who was the biggest porn star in the world at the time. Then a succession of lookalikes walked down an illuminated staircase flanked with palm trees at the back of the stage: the Queen, Batman and Robin, Frankenstein’s Monster, the Pope. Finally I appeared, to the sound of the Twentieth-Century Fox theme, dressed in what I called the Incredible Cheese Straw Outfit: it was completely covered in white marabou feathers – the trousers as well as the jacket – and came with a matching hat. As I descended, the lids of five grand pianos sprang open, spelling out ELTON.
For the benefit of anyone who felt this was too subtle and understated, 400 white doves were meant to fly out of the grand pianos. I don’t know whether they were asleep or too frightened to come out, but none appeared. As I jumped on top of my own piano, I found myself unexpectedly joined onstage by John Reid – who, judging by his furious expression, seemed to have taken the doves’ non-appearance as a personal insult, as if they’d done it deliberately to challenge his managerial authority – and a more sheepish-looking Bernie, running from one piano to the next, frantically grabbing doves and throwing them into the air.
Dance routines, marabou feathers, doves flying – or not, as the case may be – out of grand pianos with my name on their lids: the band didn’t like this kind of thing much, and nor did Bernie. He thought it was distracting attention from the music. I thought I was forging myself into a personality that was like nobody else in rock. And, besides, I was having fun. We would have these preposterous disagreements about it. The biggest song-writing partnership of the era, locked in a dispute backstage at the Santa Monica Civic, not about money or musical direction, but about whether it was a good idea for me to go onstage with an illuminated model of Father Christmas hanging in front of my willy. Sometimes Bernie had a point. The costumes literally did affect the music. I had a pair of glasses made in the shape of the word ELTON, with lights all over them. The combined weight of the glasses and the battery pack that powered the lights squashed my nostrils, so that it sounded like I was singing while holding my nose. In fairness, that probably did undercut the emotional impact of his lovingly crafted lyrics.
The Hollywood Bowl show was a huge event, a kind of launch for my next album, Goodbye Yellow Brick Road. By my standards at least, its making had been slightly torturous. We had decamped to Dynamic Sounds Studios in Kingston, Jamaica: it was considered very hip in those days to go and make your album somewhere more exotic than Europe. Dynamic Sounds had seemed like an obvious destination. Bob Marley had recorded there. So had Cat Stevens. It was where The Rolling Stones had made Goats Head Soup. But we arrived to find there was a record-pressing plant attached to the studio, and the pressing plant workers were on strike. When you arrived, they would pull open the windows of the minibus that brought us from our hotel, and spit crushed fibreglass at everyone inside with blowpipes, which brought you out in a rash. Once you got into the studio itself, nothing worked. You would ask for a different microphone and someone would nod slowly and say, ‘We can get one in maybe … three days?’ It was hopeless. I’ve no idea how The Rolling Stones made an album there. Maybe Keith was so stoned that three days’ wait for a working microphone felt like twenty minutes.
Eventually we gave up, went back to the hotel, and called to book recording sessions at the Château d’Hérouville. While we were waiting for a plane out of there, the band sat by the pool, occupying themselves with what appeared to be some kind of determined world record attempt involving the consumption of marijuana. By the time we got to the Château, we had so many songs that Goodbye Yellow Brick Road ended up a double album. When it came out, it took off in a way that none of us expec
ted. It’s quite a dark record in a lot of ways. Songs about sadness and disillusion, songs about alcoholics and prostitutes and murders, a song about a sixteen-year-old lesbian who ends up dead in a subway. But it just kept selling and selling and selling until I couldn’t work out who was still buying it. I don’t mean that flippantly: I really didn’t know who was buying it. The American record company kept pushing me to release ‘Bennie And The Jets’ as a single and I fought them tooth and nail: it’s a really odd song, it doesn’t sound like anything else I’ve done, it’s five minutes long; why don’t you just put out ‘Candle In The Wind’, like we’ve done in Britain? Then they told me it was being played all over black radio stations in Detroit. When they released it, it shot up the Billboard Soul Chart: an unreal thing, seeing my name in among the singles by Eddie Kendricks and Gladys Knight and Barry White. I may not have been the first white artist to do that, but I can say with some certainty I was the first artist from Pinner.
I was now so successful that I toured America using the Starship, an old Boeing 720 passenger plane that had been converted into an opulent flying tour bus for the exclusive use of the seventies’ rock and roll elite. There were lurid tales about the parties Led Zeppelin had thrown on it. I was less bothered about what they’d done inside it than by what they’d done to the outside of it. The thing was painted purple and gold. It looked like a giant box of Milk Tray with wings. No problem: we could have it repainted to our specification. It was redone in red and blue with white stars. Much more tasteful.
Inside, the Starship had a bar decorated in orange and gold foil, with a long mirror behind it, an organ, dining tables, sofas and a TV with a video recorder, on which my mother insisted on watching Deep Throat – ‘Everyone’s talking about it, aren’t they? What’s it about, then?’ – while she was eating her lunch. Whatever foul deeds Led Zeppelin had got up to on board, I’m pretty sure they never kept themselves amused for an hour watching a middle-aged lady shriek with horror while Linda Lovelace did her thing: ‘Oh gawd, no, what’s happening now? Oh! I can’t look! How’s she doing that?’
There was a bedroom at the back with shower, a fake fireplace and bedside tables made of plexiglass. You could hide yourself away in there and have sex. Or sulk, which is what I was doing one night when my American publicist, Sharon Lawrence, started knocking on the door and pleading with me to come out: ‘Come back to the bar, we’ve got a surprise for you.’ I told her to fuck off. She kept coming back. I kept telling her to fuck off. Eventually she burst into tears – ‘You have to come to the bar! You have to! You have to!’ – so I angrily opened the door and did as she asked, with a lot of huffing and eye-rolling and ‘for fuck’s sake, can’t you leave me alone’-ing en route. When I got to the bar, Stevie Wonder was sitting at the organ, ready to play for me. He launched into ‘Happy Birthday’. Had I not been cruising at 40,000 feet, I’d have prayed for the ground to open and swallow me.
From the outside, everything looked perfect: the tours were getting bigger and more spectacular, the records were selling so much that journalists had started to say I was the biggest pop artist in the world. John had taken over my management completely: the contract he had signed with DJM in 1971 had run out, and he had moved out of his offices and started his own management company. We had also started our own record company with Bernie and Gus Dudgeon called Rocket: not to release my records, but to find talent and give them a break. Sometimes we were better at spotting talent than developing it – we couldn’t make a success of a band called Longdancer, despite the fact that their guitarist, a teenager called Dave Stewart, clearly had something about him, as was proven years later when he formed Eurythmics. But we had successes, too. We signed Kiki Dee, who John and I had known for years: she had been the only white British artist signed to Motown when John worked for them. She had been putting out singles since the early sixties, but never had a hit until we released her version of ‘Amoureuse’, a song by a French singer called Véronique Sanson that had flopped in the UK, but that Tony King had noticed and suggested to Kiki.
But beneath the surface, things were starting to go wrong. We spent the first weeks of 1974 recording at the Caribou Ranch, a studio up in the Rocky Mountains that gave its name to our new album: Caribou. It could be hard to sing at such a high altitude, which is how I ended up throwing a tantrum while we were recording ‘Don’t Let The Sun Go Down On Me’. After announcing that I hated the song so much we were going to stop recording it immediately and send it to Engelbert Humperdinck – ‘and if he doesn’t want it, tell him to send it to Lulu! She can put it on a B-side!’ – I was coaxed back to the vocal booth and completed the take. Then I yelled at Gus Dudgeon that I hated it even more now it was finished and was going to kill him with my bare hands if he put it on the album. Apart from that, it was great up at Caribou. The studio was much plusher than the Château. You stayed in beautiful log cabins, filled with antiques – the bed I slept in was supposed to have belonged to Grover Cleveland, a nineteenth-century president of the United States. There was a screening room for movies, and musicians passing through Denver or Boulder would drop by to visit. Having obviously forgiven me for the incident on the Starship, Stevie Wonder turned up one day and took out a snowmobile, insisting on driving it himself. To pre-empt your question: no, I have absolutely no idea how Stevie Wonder successfully piloted a snowmobile through the Rocky Mountains of Colorado without killing himself, or indeed anyone else, in the process, but he did.
One night we were finishing up, when I wandered into a room at the back of the studio and spotted John fiddling with something on a table. He had a straw and some white powder. I asked what it was, and he told me it was cocaine. I asked what it did and he said, ‘Oh, it just makes you feel good.’ So I asked if I could have some, and he said yes. The first line I snorted made me retch. I hated the feeling in the back of my throat, that weird combination of numbness brought on by the drug itself and a sort of powdery dryness from whatever crap the coke had been cut with. I couldn’t get rid of it, no matter how often I swallowed. I went out to the toilet and threw up. And then I immediately went back into the room where John was and asked for another line.
What the hell was I doing? I tried it, I hated it, it made me puke – hello? Talk about God’s way of telling you to leave it at that. It’s hard to see how I could have been given a clearer warning that this was a bad idea unless it had started raining brimstone and I’d been visited by a plague of boils. So why didn’t I leave it at that? Partly because throwing up didn’t stop the coke affecting me, and I liked how it made me feel. That jolt of confidence and euphoria, the sense that I could suddenly open up, that I didn’t feel shy or intimidated, that I could talk to anybody. That was all bullshit, of course. I was full of energy, I was inquisitive, I had a sense of humour and a thirst for knowledge: I didn’t need a drug to make me talk to people. If anything, cocaine gave me too much confidence for my own good. If I hadn’t been coked out of my head when The Rolling Stones turned up in Colorado and asked me to come onstage with them, I might have just performed ‘Honky Tonk Women’, waved to the crowd and made my exit. Instead, I decided it was going so well, I’d stay on and jam along to the rest of their set, without first taking the precaution of asking the Stones if they wanted an auxiliary keyboard player. For a while, I thought Keith Richards kept staring at me because he was awestruck by the brilliance of my improvised contributions to their oeuvre. After a few songs, it finally penetrated my brain that the expression on his face wasn’t really suggestive of profound musical appreciation. Actually, he looked remarkably like someone who was about to inflict appalling violence on a musician who’d outstayed his welcome. I quickly scuttled off, noting as I went that Keith was still staring at me in a manner that suggested we’d be discussing this later, and decided it might be best if I didn’t hang around for the after-show party.
But there was something more to cocaine than the way it made me feel. Cocaine had a certain cachet about it. It was fashionable and
exclusive. Doing it was like becoming a member of an elite little clique, that secretly indulged in something edgy, dangerous and illicit. Pathetically enough, that really appealed to me. I’d become successful and popular, but I never felt cool. Even back in Bluesology, I was the nerdy one, the one who didn’t look like a pop star, who never quite carried off the hip clothes, who spent all his time in record shops while the rest of the band were out getting laid and taking drugs. And cocaine felt cool: the subtly coded conversations to work out who had some, or who wanted some – who was part of the clique and who wasn’t – the secretive visits to the bathrooms of clubs and bars. Of course, that was all bullshit, too. I already was part of a club. Ever since my solo career had begun, I’d been shown nothing but kindness and love by other artists. From the minute I turned up in LA, musicians I adored and worshipped – people who’d once just been mythic names on album sleeves and record labels – had fallen over themselves to offer friendship and support. But when it finally arrived, my success had happened so fast that, despite the warm welcome, I couldn’t help but still feel slightly out of place, as if I didn’t quite belong.
As it turned out, doing a line of coke then immediately going back for another one was very me. I was never the kind of drug addict who couldn’t get out of bed without a line, or who needed to take it every day. But once I started, I couldn’t stop, until I was absolutely certain there was no cocaine anywhere in the vicinity. I realized quite quickly that I had to get someone else – a PA or a roadie – to look after my coke for me: not because I was too grand or too scared to be the stash holder, but because if you left me in charge of that evening’s supply of cocaine there would be none of it left by teatime. My appetite for the stuff was unbelievable – enough to attract comment in the circles I was moving in. Given that I was a rock star spending a lot of time in seventies LA, this was a not inconsiderable feat. Once again, you might think this would have given me pause for thought, but I’m afraid the next sixteen years were full of incidents that would have given any rational human being pause concerning their drug consumption, as we shall discover. That was the problem. Because I was doing coke, I wasn’t a rational human being anymore. You might tell yourself you’re fine, using as evidence the fact that your drug use isn’t affecting your career. But you can’t take that amount of coke and think in a sane and proper way. You become unreasonable and irresponsible, self-obsessed, a law unto yourself. It’s your way or the highway. It’s a horrible fucking drug.