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

  Captain Fantastic

  Elton John in the ‘70s

  The definitive biography by

  David John DeCouto

  Copyright © 2016 by David John DeCouto

  All rights reserved. Except as permitted under the U.S. Copyright Act of 1976, no part of this publication may be reproduced, distributed, or transmitted in any form or by any means, or stored in a database or retrieval system, without the prior written permission of the author.

  Triple Wood Press, LLC

  Chandler, AZ

  Printed in the United States of America.

  First Draft: November, 2016

  10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1

  The Library of Congress has cataloged this edition as follows:

  John, David. DeCouto

  Captain Fantastic: Elton John in the ‘70s / David John DeCouto.

  -1st ed.

  p. cm.

  ISBN— 12 131965-0-696969-38-24-36

  Title

  PS05242013 2016

  232’.178-dd48

  The Author hereby asserts his rights to be identified as the author of this work in accordance with sections 77 and 78 of the Copyright, Designs & Patents Act 1988.

  Every effort has been made to trace the copyright holders of the various photographs used in this book. Some, unfortunately, were unreachable. The publisher would be grateful if any photographers concerned would contact us so we can credit you properly in future editions.

  Cover design by David John DeCouto.

  Front and back cover photographs, and various internal images © 1974, 1975, 1979 by James Fortune/James FortunePhotography.com.

  Additional photographs care of Scott Segelbaum/RockArtShow.com, and Richard Barnes/RbarnesPhotography.com.

  For my mom, for buying me a true treasure—the “Daniel” single, by God—one nameless spring afternoon after baseball practice.

  And for my dad, for taking me to my first concert—Elton John, of course—back in that most prehistoric of years, 1976 A.D.

  The Forum, Los Angeles, California, October 4, 1974

  Table of Contents

  Foreword

  Prologue: Young Man’s Blues (1947-1969)

  Part One: Troubadour (1970 – 1971)

  Chapter 1: It’s a Little Bit Funny

  Chapter 2: Tumbleweed Connection

  Chapter 3: Bad Side of the Moon

  Chapter 4: Is New York As Hip As California?

  Chapter 5: Friends

  Chapter 6: Dylan Digs Elton!

  Chapter 7: All the Nasties

  Chapter 8: Madman Across the Water

  Chapter 9: ‘We Literally Played in Our Overcoats’

  Part Two: Silent Movies, Talking Pictures (1972 – 1973)

  Chapter 10: Honky Château

  Chapter 11: The Ghosts of a Hundred Songs

  Chapter 12: Don’t Shoot Me I’m Only the Piano Player

  Chapter 13: ‘I’m Inclined to Be Extremely Moody’

  Chapter 14: Jamaica Jerk-Off

  Chapter 15: Goodbye Yellow Brick Road

  Chapter 16: ‘And now, the Gentleman You’ve All Been Waiting For’

  Chapter 17: Fred Astaire and Ginger Beard

  Part Three: Ol’ Pink Eyes is Back (1974)

  Chapter 18: Caribou

  Chapter 19: Pinball Wizard

  Chapter 20: Whatever Gets You Thru the Night

  Chapter 21: The Eight Million Dollar Man

  Chapter 22: ‘Here We Go Then, Over the Hill’

  Part Four: Bottled & Brained (1975 – 1976)

  Chapter 23: Dogs in the Kitchen

  Chapter 24: Chameleon

  Chapter 25: Rock of the Westies

  Chapter 26: ‘Elton Could Shit Bricks and People Would Go Out and Buy Them’

  Chapter 27: Dodger Stadium

  Chapter 28: Blue Moves

  Chapter 29: Louder Than Concorde (But Not Quite As Pretty)

  Chapter 30: The Token Queen of Rock

  Part Five: A Single Man (1977 – 1979)

  Chapter 31: The Blue Max

  Chapter 32: Mama Can’t Buy You Love

  Chapter 33: Ego

  Chapter 34: Benedict Canyon Boogie

  Chapter 35: To Russia…With Elton

  Chapter 36: Back in the U.S.S.A.

  Epilogue: Central Park (September 13, 1980)

  Afterword

  Acknowledgments

  Concerts

  Bibliography

  FOREWORD

  Elton John, when he first emerged, seemed to have got a niche very much for developing primarily as a writer. “Your Song” was a touching, simple, relatively unaccompanied piece, which set the tone for a very thoughtful character. From what I remember at the time, he and Bernie Taupin had got a publishing deal, and maybe Elton was singing songs in order to try his hand at it, but I think they were actually primarily about writing for other people.

  It wasn’t until a little later, when Elton was so established in the USA, that his performance, his modus operandi, became very theatricalized in a bouncy, energetic sort of way. As Elton’s performances got more rocky and more, I suppose, filled with the extremes of onstage behavior and production values that crept in really in the first half of the ‘70s, when shows became more production-oriented—you spent a lot more money on lights and sound and touring around with trucks and busses—everything became of a much larger scale. Which it hadn’t been in 1969. It was around 1972 when that really kicked off, and that was at the time that Jethro Tull started doing arenas with Thick as a Brick, and that was the era when Elton John was beginning to enjoy major popularity and that kind of production of large-scale, gaudy, bright, in-your-face performance which characterized him. It also characterized us, except we were a little weirder, a little more esoteric—perhaps—than the slightly almost musical presentation of Elton John. And it was that era, during ‘73, ‘74, ‘75, we were playing in places like Madison Square Gardens and the Forum in L.A., and we were popular enough to do multiple shows, and Elton John was doing multiple shows, and we were I suppose competing very much on the same level in terms of performance venues at that point. We played multiple shows, as did Elton. Trying to obviously demonstrate, as artists did, that you could play three shows or five shows at the Forum in L.A., and three nights in Madison Square Gardens, and all that sort of stuff. It was all about showing-up a bit.

  The weird thing was, I never got to see Elton John play live. It wasn’t until one ex-tour manager of ours joined the Elton John entourage as Elton’s personal assistant that I nearly got to see Elton John. We had a night off in New York at a time when Elton John was playing, I believe, at Madison Square Gardens. Our ex-tour manager said, ‘Do you want to come along to the show?’ We said, ‘Yeah, yeah, let’s do that.’ We were all ready to pop along and watch for the first time Elton John play live, only to be told, a few minutes before we set off from the hotel, ‘Elton’s not going to play tonight.’ Whatever was wrong was wrong. I suppose he wasn’t feeling too good. So it was cancelled, so I never ever got to see Elton John. I did see him once on the other side of a restaurant somewhere, but I was too nervous to go over and say hello. Mainly because I didn’t know what you call him. It’s a bit like Cat Stevens. Do you call him Cat, or Mr. Stevens, or Steve, which was his real name? What do you do with Elton? Do you call him Reg? Or Mr. John? It’s always a bit embarrassing as to what you do. So I didn’t say hello.

  I only ever once, very briefly, bumped into Elton John in person. It sounds like name dropping,
but I’d been invited by a mutual friend to a Christmas party at Mr. Sting’s—Gordon’s—who was having a big Christmas party, and he’d invited the good and the great, and Elton John was there with David Furnish, who seemed a very nice chap. And when they were leaving, perhaps a little earlier than other people, I plucked up the courage to say, ‘I just wanted to say thank you, Elton. We never met, but back in ‘72 you did an interview with some British music press where you praised our album Thick as a Brick at the time, and you said some very kind things about me, which I always remembered. And I just wanted to say thanks for the very positive words that you used.’ And he looked at me kind of blankly, he obviously didn’t remember it, but he was gracious and polite and went on his way. So no sign of tantrums and tiaras on the brief occasion that I had eye contact with the man.

  As for my favorite Elton John song, I’m going to steer away from “Crocodile Rock” and the other up-tempo fancy songs that you have to be at a high level of energy and intensity to pull off if you’re doing a big rock concert. For me, Elton is the consummate singer/songwriter. Someone who, above all, is very thoughtful. And it’s difficult to do, if you’re singing lyrics that somebody else wrote. It’s a matter of somehow casting yourself almost like an actor. You have to take on a persona. And maybe Elton finds that easier than writing lyrics himself. Or maybe writing lyrics is a little too personal. But whatever it is, he always sounds very thoughtful, that he’s really singing in a way where he is considering the words, considering how to project them, how to make every nuance work. So it’s the singer/songwriter Elton that I’m always going to like best. The guy who just sits downs at the piano and can mesmerize you with a calm, heartfelt rendition. So the song I come up with is “Candle in the Wind.” the original Marilyn Monroe version, not the Princess Diana version. Though he was extremely brave to do that at Diana’s funeral service. It was very apt, and I think it brought tears to a lot of people, hearing him sing that. I don’t know how he got through it. It must have been an enormous emotional thing for him to do that and somehow detached himself a little bit from the occasion in order to sing those words. It was such a poignant and heartfelt moment. But that’s what you do when you’re a performing artist and you have that skill to embed yourself in what you’re doing, but kind of just stand a little bit to one side, in the way that perhaps an actor does.

  That’s about it, really. I have to say, whilst Elton John has been around, he’s someone who, to this day, is perhaps known not only for his music but also for his philanthropy and his position on things that matter. He’s a guy who truly deserves his status in the long term. He’s not just a pretty face with somebody else’s hair. No, I didn’t say that. Long live Elton.

  - Ian Anderson, June, 2016.

  ∞

  Elton John sits alone in the darkened bedroom of his Laurel Canyon manse, pale shadows converging around bare feet. The unseeing button-eyes of a dozen mute teddy bears and stuffed lizards watch in idle fascination as their superstar caretaker unscrews a bottle of ten-milligram-strength Valium and empties a handful of pills into an unshaking hand.

  “Here we go,” Elton sighs, gazing blankly into a triple-mirrored vanity. Multiple faces stare back at him, vacant and haunted.

  The world’s most famous pianist tosses a dozen light blue pills into his mouth, washing them back with a quick swig of Perrier. He shakes out another handful of pills, and then another. Soon enough, the bottle is empty. Eighty pills melt into his gut, quietly dispelling their insidious magic.

  Clutching at the folds of his terrycloth robe, Elton rises unsteadily and shuffles into his backyard. Two dozen heads turn his way, easy smiles fading as he climbs tentatively onto a sunbaked diving board.

  “I shall die within the hour,” he announces to everyone, to no one.

  Moments later, he crashes headlong into the deep end.

  Into the endless depths.

  Into the dark and unchartered waters where, finally, no sunlight ever dared to reach.

  Forty-four hours on, Elton leaps effortlessly onto a gleaming silver grand piano, his sequined Dodgers uniform glittering ruefully beneath a bank of candy-colored stage lights.

  “Louder,” he commands, triumphantly raising a baseball bat into the panoramic sky. Standing atop his instrument, he resembles nothing so much as some fallen god reborn, a magnetic alien from a planet ten-thousand light-years away.

  Elton nods at the fifty-five-thousand bodies crushed in supplication before him. He is the undisputed king, dominating airwaves, concert stages and the media with equal ease. His music, which accounts for a staggering two percent of all records sold globally, is as innovative as it is unavoidable. His tours are instant sellouts, breaking house records from London to Tokyo to Melbourne, while his albums routinely enter the charts at Number 1. It’s a feat no one in the history of recorded music has ever managed before. Not Elvis, not the Stones, not Sinatra, not the Beatles.

  As Elton bounds off his piano, his high-octane band rips into the crucial chords of “Saturday Night’s Alright (For Fighting).” Twin guitars lock behind a seismic backbeat, stoking a feral bonfire that rages throughout the stadium. Overcome by the insurgent maelstrom, Elton kicks his piano stool away and collapses to his knees with feverish intensity, his fingers unleashing an explosive thousand-note fusillade that surges from speakers ten-stories high.

  As the final thunderous notes of the song float heavenward, a landscape of frenzied humanity writhes helplessly in the frozen twilight. Delirious and tearful and begging for more more more.

  Elton leans against his piano and soaks in the fractured apocalypse. For the moment, at least, he’s safe within a cradle of mass adoration. An exalted supernova, celebrated beyond all normal human reckoning.

  “Alright,” he says, lowering the brim of his baseball cap and allowing himself the tiniest of smiles.

  He’s as alone as he’s ever been.

  Prologue:

  Young Man’s Blues

  (1947-1969)

  In 1944, as World War II cracked and boomed, nineteen-year-old Royal Air Force officer Stanley Dwight met eighteen-year-old RAF clerk Sheila Eileen Harris at the Headstone Hotel in North Harrow. Sheila had come with a girlfriend to see Bob Miller & the Millermen rip through jazz standards like “Body & Soul” and “My Funny Valentine,” as they played alongside influential guitarist Bert Weedon. Stanley, who played lead trumpet with the band whenever his military schedule allowed, immediately noticed Sheila. By the end of the evening, romance had sparked. The officer and the svelte brunette kissed heatedly in a darkened dining hall at midnight, swearing oaths to write each other throughout the endless blitzkrieg.

  Dozens of passionate letters followed. When he could manage it, Stanley would meet up with Sheila for clandestine trysts throughout the battered British countryside.

  The two married the following January, exchanging vows on a leaden, snow-filled morning at Pinner Parish Church.

  Having little money, the couple moved in with Sheila’s parents, Ivy and Fred Harris. The four lived in cramped nuptial stasis in a semi-detached row house—a council dwelling, government housing—at 55 Pinner Hill Road, in the sleepy northwest London suburb of Pinner, Middlesex.

  The future Elton Hercules John was born fourteen months later, in the early hours of a rain-swept Tuesday morning, March 25, 1947. Sheila Dwight christened her only son Reginald Kenneth. Though Stanley disliked the name, Sheila gave her husband’s protests no mind.

  Months later, Stanley—who had been commuting to the RAF base in Ruislip—found himself redeployed to Basra, Iraq. Not caring to be separated from her parents, Sheila refused to accompany her husband on his overseas posting.

  “But you must,” he insisted. “We’re a family.”

  “No,” Sheila said.

  With his father thirty-five-hundred miles away, young Reg found himself being raised in a predominantly female household, surrounded by his mother, aunt and grandmother, Nan. He was also env
eloped by an endless stream of popular melodies; from morning till night, the music of Guy Mitchell, Frankie Laine, Kay Starr and Billy May poured ceaselessly from the family’s Murphy-A46 wireless.

  “We always had music in the house,” Elton would later recall. “The radio was always on.”

  Reg grew up a mannered, overprotected child, forced to mark time alone in the small garden behind his house while the neighborhood children played Cowboys and Indians in a nearby field.

  One of his earliest memories was the day he climbed onto the piano bench of his grandmother’s King Brothers upright and began picking out the piquant melody of Waldteufel’s “The Skater’s Waltz” by ear.

  “Mum!” the three-year-old chirped, a beatific smile lighting up his normally dour countenance.

  Sheila set down her vacuum and rushed over. She was as grateful as she was amazed. Might music provide an antidote to her son’s downcast disposition? She would quickly learn to place Reg in front of the piano whenever he was overtaken by a darker mood, so that he could harmlessly bang out his unspoken frustrations.