by Elton John
But you didn’t need a stalker to alert you to LA’s dark side. One night, I went to see the Average White Band play at the Troubadour. They were so fantastic that I got onstage and jammed with them, dragging Cher and Martha Reeves up with me. After the gig, I took the band out to a place called Le Restaurant, which served great food and didn’t frown on outré behaviour: the management hadn’t even blanched at John Reid’s birthday party, which was extremely tolerant of them, given that a friend had brought the horse he bought John as a present into the restaurant and it had immediately shat on the floor. We stayed out until 6 a.m. There was something lovely about spending time with them, a young British band just on the verge of becoming huge, playing a residency at the Troubadour and boggling at the prospect of making it in America: they reminded me of me five years before. But two days later, I got a phone call from John Reid, telling me the Average White Band’s drummer, Robbie, was dead. They’d gone to another party the following night, up in the Hollywood Hills, and taken heroin some creep had given them, thinking it was cocaine. He died in his hotel room a few hours later.
I suppose it could have happened anywhere, but his death seemed to sum up LA. It could feel like a place where the tired old line about dreams coming true wasn’t a tired old line but a statement of fact. It was the city where, more or less, I’d become a star; where I’d been feted by my idols; where I’d somehow ended up taking tea with Mae West (to my delight, she swanned in with a lascivious smile and the words, ‘Ah, my favourite sight – a room full of men’, which, given that the men present were me, John Reid and Tony King, suggested she was in for an evening of disappointment). But if you didn’t keep your wits about you – if you took a wrong turn or kept the wrong company – LA could just as easily swallow you up.
* * *
The mayor of Los Angeles, Tom Watson, declared the 20–26 October 1975 Elton John Week. Among other things, I was to have a star unveiled on the Hollywood Walk of Fame, right outside Grauman’s Chinese Theatre. There were two gigs booked at Dodger Stadium, an audience of 55,000 at each. I’d played to larger crowds than that – there were 82,000 people at Wembley Stadium, or at least there had been before they decided they’d had enough and started storming the exits – but the Dodger gigs still seemed like a zenith. I was the first artist who’d been allowed to play there since The Beatles in 1966, when the promoter hadn’t booked enough security staff. There had been a kind of mini riot at the end of The Beatles’ set, and the stadium’s owners had subsequently banned rock gigs. And there was a peculiar sense of homecoming about them, given that my career had really taken off at the Troubadour five years previously.
So I chartered a Boeing 707 plane through Pan Am and flew my mum and Derf, my grandma and a load of my friends over from England, along with the staff of Rocket, journalists and media and a TV documentary crew fronted by the chat show host Russell Harty. I met them on the runway with Tony King and a fleet of Rolls-Royces and Cadillacs: the kind of welcome I’d been expecting the first time I got to America, instead of that fucking double-decker bus. I suppose it was quite an outrageous thing to do, but I wanted my family to see it; I wanted them to have the time of their lives; I wanted them to be proud of me.
Elton John Week passed in a blur. My family went on trips to Disneyland and Universal Studios. There was a party on John Reid’s yacht, Madman, to celebrate the release of Rock of the Westies. The grand unveiling of the star on the Hollywood Walk of Fame turned out to be a bit naff. I was wearing a lime-green Bob Mackie suit, covered in the names of other Walk of Fame stars, and matching bowler hat. I had to travel there on a gold-painted golf cart with an enormous pair of illuminated glasses and a bow tie stuck to the front of it. I’m aware that I was hardly the model of shy understatement onstage, but there were limits. There’s footage of it on YouTube, and if you look at the expression on my face, it’s pretty clear what a wonderful idea I thought that was. I don’t know if you’ve ever been driven very slowly through a crowd of screaming fans, in full view of the world’s media, on a gold-painted golf cart with a pair of enormous illuminated glasses and a bow tie on the front, but if you haven’t, I can tell you that it’s a pretty excruciating experience.
I felt incredibly awkward and tried to defuse the situation by pulling faces during the speeches and making jokes when my turn came to speak – ‘I now declare this supermarket open!’ – but I couldn’t wait for it to be over and done with. Afterwards, they told me that it was the first time in the history of the Walk of Fame that so many fans had turned up to an unveiling, they had to close Hollywood Boulevard completely.
The next day, I invited my family over to lunch at Tower Grove Drive. Like Captain Fantastic, Rock of the Westies went straight into the US album charts at Number One. No one had ever done that before – not Elvis, not The Beatles – and now I’d done it twice, in the space of six months. I was twenty-eight years old and I was, for the moment, the biggest pop star in the world. I was about to play the most prestigious gigs of my career. My family and friends were there, happily sharing in my success. And that was when I decided to try and commit suicide again.
Again, I can’t remember exactly what provoked me to do it, but as my family were eating I got up from the table by the swimming pool, went upstairs and swallowed a load of Valium. Then I came back down in my dressing gown and announced that I’d taken a bunch of tablets and that I was going to die. And then I threw myself in the pool.
I can’t remember exactly how many tablets I swallowed, but it was fewer than I’d taken that night at Caribou studios – a sign that, deep down, I had absolutely no intention of actually killing myself. This fact was brought very sharply into focus when I felt the dressing gown start to weigh me down. For someone who was supposed to be in the process of trying to end it all – who was apparently convinced that life had nothing more to offer him and was filled with a longing for death’s merciful release – I suddenly became surprisingly keen not to drown. I started frantically swimming to the side of the pool. Someone helped me get out. The thing I remember most clearly is hearing my grandmother’s voice pipe up. ‘Oh,’ she said. And then, in a noticeably aggrieved tone – unmistakably the voice of an elderly working-class lady from Pinner who’s realized her wonderful holiday in California is suddenly in danger of being cut short – she added: ‘We might as well bleedin’ go home, then.’
I couldn’t stop myself laughing. That might have been exactly the response I needed. I was looking for ‘oh, you poor thing’, but instead I got ‘why are you behaving like such a twat?’
It was a good question: why was I behaving like such a twat? I suppose I was doing something dramatic to try and get attention. I realize that, on one level, it sounds nuts, given that I was living in a city that had declared it was Elton John Week, I was about to play in front of 110,000 people, and there was an ITV camera crew in the process of making a documentary about me. How much more attention can a man need? But I was looking for a different kind of attention from that. I was trying to make my family understand that there was something wrong, however well my career was going: it might seem that it’s all great, it might seem that my life is perfect, but it’s not. I couldn’t say to them, ‘I think I’m taking too many drugs’, because they would never understand; they didn’t know what cocaine was. I hadn’t got the guts to tell them, ‘Look, I’m really not feeling very good, I need a bit of love’, because I didn’t want them to see any cracks in the facade at all. I was too strong-willed – and too afraid of her reaction – to just take my mum aside and say, ‘Listen, Mum, I really need to talk to you – I’m not doing very well here, I need a bit of help, what do you think?’ Instead of doing that, I bottled it up and bottled it up and then eventually I went off like Vesuvius and staged this ridiculous suicide bid. That’s who I am: it’s all or nothing. It wasn’t my family’s fault at all, it was mine. I was too proud to admit that my life wasn’t perfect. It was pathetic.
They called a doctor. I refused to go to hospital
and have my stomach pumped, so he gave me this hideous liquid that made me vomit. And as soon as I threw up, I felt all right: ‘OK, I’m better now. So, anyway, I’ve got these two gigs to do.’ It sounds ridiculous – it was ridiculous – but I bounced back very quickly from my deathbed: right, I’ve tried to commit suicide, done that, what’s next? If anyone around me thought that was strange, they kept it to themselves. And twenty-four hours later I was onstage at Dodger Stadium.
The shows were a complete triumph. That’s the thing about playing live, for me at least. Even now, whatever turmoil I might be going through just gets pushed aside. Back then, when I was onstage I just felt different from when I was offstage. It was the only time I really felt in control of what I did.
They were huge events. Cary Grant was backstage, looking incredibly beautiful. I had gospel singers, James Cleveland’s Southern California Community Choir, performing with me. I had Billie Jean King come out and sing backing vocals on ‘Philadelphia Freedom’. I had the security guards dressed in ridiculous lilac one-piece jumpsuits with frills. I had California’s most famous used-car dealer, a man called Cal Worthington, come on with a lion – Christ knows why, but I suppose it all added to the general gaiety. Even Bernie put in an appearance in front of the audience, which was almost unheard of.
I wore a sequinned Dodgers uniform and cap, designed by Bob Mackie. I climbed on top of the piano and swung a baseball bat around. I hammered at the piano keys until my fingers split and bled. We played for three hours and I loved it. I know how to pull off a show because of all those years I spent in clubs, backing Major Lance or playing with Bluesology to twenty people; I’ve got the experience, so my gigs are never really below a certain standard. But sometimes, something else happens onstage: from the minute you start playing you just know you can do no wrong. It’s as if your hands are moving independently of your brain; you don’t even have to concentrate, you just feel as free as a bird, you can do anything you want. Those are the gigs you live for, and Dodger Stadium was like that, on both days. The sound was perfect, so was the weather. I can remember standing onstage, feeling the adrenalin coursing through me.
It was a pinnacle, and I was smart enough to know that it couldn’t last, at least not at that pitch. Success on that level never does; it doesn’t matter who you are, or how great you are, your records aren’t going to enter the charts at Number One forever. I knew someone or something else was going to come along. I was waiting for that moment to happen, and the thought of it didn’t scare me at all. It was almost a relief when the second single from Rock of the Westies, ‘Grow Some Funk Of Your Own’, wasn’t a huge hit. For one thing, I was exhausted: exhausted from touring, exhausted from giving interviews, exhausted by the ongoing catastrophe that was my personal life. And for another, I’d never really set out to have hit singles. I was an album artist, who made records like Tumbleweed Connection and Madman Across the Water, and I’d inadvertently become this huge singles machine, having smash after smash after smash, none of which had been intentionally written to be hit singles.
In fact, one of the few times I ever sat down and tried to write a hit single was at the end of 1975. I was on holiday in Barbados with a big group of friends: Bernie was there, Tony King, Kiki Dee, lots of people. I thought we should write a duet for Kiki and me to sing. Bernie and I came up with two. One was called ‘I’m Always On The Bonk’: ‘I don’t know who I’m fucking, I don’t know who I’m sucking, but I’m always on the bonk’. The other was ‘Don’t Go Breaking My Heart’. I wrote the melody on the piano, came up with the title and then Bernie finished it off. He hated the end result, and I can’t really blame him – Bernie was not, and is not, a fan of anything he thinks is shallow pop music. But even he had to admit it had substantially more commercial potential than ‘I’m Always On The Bonk’.
seven
I only agreed to do an interview with Rolling Stone because I was bored out of my mind. The 1976 Elton John world tour was supposed to be a journalist-free zone. I didn’t need to do any press to promote it, because every date had sold out instantly. But I’d been stuck in a suite at the Sherry-Netherland in New York for two weeks – we were playing a run of shows at Madison Square Garden – and I’d completely run out of things to do when I wasn’t onstage.
It was hard to get out of the hotel. It was August, and Manhattan was unbearably hot, but there was a crowd of fans permanently stationed outside the entrance. If I managed to get past them, wherever I went, there was chaos. I’d literally seen little old ladies get knocked over and trampled by people who were trying to get a look at me, not a sight designed to make you feel good about your celebrity. Still, I’d tried to keep myself occupied. I’d been to see, or been visited by, everyone I knew that was in town. I’d been out clubbing to 12 West and visited a radio station called WNEW. They’d given me champagne, an act of generosity they swiftly came to regret when I went on air immediately afterwards and offered listeners my full and frank appraisal of a rock critic called John Rockwell, who’d given me a bad live review: ‘I bet he’s got smelly feet. I bet he’s got bogeys up his nose.’ I went shopping, although I realized I might have exhausted the possibilities of retail therapy when I found myself buying a cuckoo clock that, instead of a cuckoo, had a large wooden penis that popped in and out of it every hour. I gave it to John Lennon when I went to visit him. I thought it was a good present for a man who had everything. John and Yoko were as bad as me when it came to shopping. The various apartments they owned in the Dakota were so full of priceless artworks, antiques and clothes that I once sent them a card, rewriting the lyrics to ‘Imagine’: ‘Imagine six apartments, it isn’t hard to do, one is full of fur coats, another’s full of shoes’. They owned herds of cows, for God’s sake – prize Holstein cattle. Years later, I asked what had happened to them. Yoko shrugged and said: ‘Oh, I got rid of them. All that mooing.’
But, having delivered a penis-themed cuckoo clock to John Lennon, I had nothing else to do, or at least nothing that I wanted to do enough to see a little old lady get hospitalized in the process. I just mooched around the hotel. The band certainly weren’t in the mood to hang out with me, because I’d fired them all the night before last, just before we went onstage.
It had been a weird tour. Commercially, it had been a huge success, and, on one level, it had been fun. Kiki Dee had come along with us to sing ‘Don’t Go Breaking My Heart’, which, despite Bernie’s profound misgivings, went to Number One on both sides of the Atlantic that summer. In Britain, we’d travelled around by car, visiting the tourist sites between shows, stopping off for ice creams and ducking into pubs for lunch. In America, the shows had been massive events – Hollywood stars backstage; a big performance in Massachusetts for the American Bicentennial on 4 July, where I dressed up as the Statue of Liberty; a guest appearance from Divine, who shimmied away around the band despite the fact that one of his high heels broke off the minute he got onstage.
And I met Elvis Presley, backstage at the Capital Centre in Landover, Maryland, a couple of nights before I played there myself. I took Bernie with me, and my mum. It seemed to make sense: Mum had introduced me to Elvis’s music; now I was going to introduce her to Elvis himself. We were ushered into a dressing room full of people: I was used to rock stars who went everywhere mob-handed, but I’d never seen anything like Elvis’s entourage. He was surrounded by cousins, old buddies from back home in Memphis, people who seemed to be employed specifically to hand him drinks and towels. When I squeezed past them to shake his hand, my heart broke. There was something desperately, visibly wrong with him. He was overweight, grey and sweating. There were expressionless black holes where his eyes should have been. He moved like a man coming round from a general anaesthetic, weird and sluggish. There was a trickle of black hair dye running down his forehead. He was completely gone, barely coherent.
Our meeting was short and painfully stilted. I was simultaneously starstruck and horrified, which is hardly a recipe for sparkling conversatio
n. And Elvis … well, I couldn’t work out whether Elvis just had no idea who I was – there seemed every chance he had no idea who anyone was – or whether he knew perfectly well and wasn’t very pleased to see me. Everyone knew that Elvis wasn’t keen on competition – there was a crazy rumour going around that when he visited Richard Nixon in the White House, he had literally complained to the US president about The Beatles – and, a couple of years before, I’d been contacted by his ex-wife Priscilla, saying that their daughter Lisa Marie was a huge fan, and asking if I would meet her as a birthday treat. We had tea together at my house in LA. Maybe he was angry about that.
I asked him if he was going to play ‘Heartbreak Hotel’ and he grunted in a way that strongly implied he wasn’t. I asked for his autograph and saw his hands shaking as he picked up the pen. The signature was just about legible. Then we went to watch the show. Occasionally, you would see something spark, a flash of the incredible artist he had been. It would last for a couple of lines of a song and vanish again. My main memory is of him handing out scarves to women in the audience. In the past he’d been famous for giving away silk scarves onstage, a grand gesture befitting the King of Rock and Roll. But times had clearly changed, and these scarves were cheap, nylon things: they didn’t look like they would last long. Nor did Elvis, as Mum pointed out.
‘He’ll be dead next year,’ she said, as we left. She was right.
But for weeks afterwards, I couldn’t stop turning over our meeting in my mind. It wasn’t just that he was in such a bad way, although that was incredible in itself – the last thing I’d expected to feel when I finally met Elvis was pity. It was that I could understand a little too easily how he ended up like that, closeted away from the outside world. Maybe he’d just spent too much time trapped in expensive hotels with nothing to do. Maybe he’d just seen one little old lady too many stretchered away and decided the outside world wasn’t worth the bother.