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

  “The next album is going to be much more like we are live,” Elton promised anyone who’d bother to listen to him. “I swear I’m a rocker at heart.”

  The pianist would prove his point from the very first bar of what would become the album’s opening salvo, the bluesy, sepia-toned “Ballad of a Well-Known Gun.” With Caleb’s modified Fender Strat tuned down to D, the bracing track—about a fugitive on the run from both the Pinkertons and a starving family—rocked out hard in an earthy 2/4 time signature reminiscent of a few of the Faces more ambitious songs. “Roger [Pope] really made that track,” Gus said. “Just his fill near the end, that alone, it’s such an accomplished thing. A real moment of beauty.”

  “Reg had been classically trained at the Royal Academy, so he always had these tightly structured songs, very piano-oriented,” Caleb said. “But on songs like ‘Ballad of a Well-Known Gun’, Hookfoot came in and we just laid down a layer of pure funk over Elton’s classical chords. It was just a great combination.”

  The second song attempted at these new sessions was a plaintive piano ballad entitled “Into the Old Man’s Shoes.” The tale of a son fighting to escape the long shadow that his father cast, the finished recording would fail to make the final album lineup, despite being one of Elton’s personal favorites.

  Leslie Duncan’s “Love Song” then became the first non-John/Taupin track to appear on an Elton John album. The track was recorded live, with Elton and Duncan sitting side by side in the vocal booth. While the songstress strummed out ethereal chords on a battered six-string, Elton kept time with his boot. Liking the intimate effect, Gus miked up Elton’s foot.

  Further enhancing the atmospherics, the producer faded in prerecorded sounds of parents and children laughing at the beach throughout the final minute and a half of the track.

  Elton’s favorite song of the sessions, the lusty ballad “Amoreena,” was cut next. His highly Americanized phrasing and lower-register vocals showed the profound influence that Van Morrison’s Astral Weeks had on him, while his piano playing reflected the New Orleans-drenched R&B stylings of Allen Toussaint.

  For Bernie, “Amoreena” was a point of pride. “It’s a good song in the sense that it has a lot of natural feeling to it,” he said. “It’s a love song, but it’s a bawdy love song.”

  Despite its ribald nature, the song had a bit of a familial connection, as Elton and Bernie dedicated the song to Ray Williams and his family. “My wife was pregnant,” Ray said, “and Bernie said, ‘If you have a girl, we want you to call her Amoreena. I have this idea for a song, and I like the name Amoreena.’ And I said, ‘Okay, if we have a little girl, she will be called Amoreena, and you will be the godparents.’ So my little girl was born, and Amoreena was her name. That’s how that song came about. It’s not one of their classic songs, but it’s an understated song, and of course we’re all very proud.”

  Elton went solo on “Talking Old Soldiers,” a haunting dialogue between a young man and a weathered war veteran who expounds on the power of memory. The elegantly intimate narrative was recorded in a single take, with Elton playing saloon-like piano and singing at the same time, as the vocal line and instrumental melody were so inextricably tied together. Describing the track as “a very David Ackles-influenced song,” Elton would ultimately dedicate the song to the singer he’d soon share a stage with (“To David with love”) in Tumbleweed Connection’s lyric booklet.

  That same night, Elton and company lit into “Burn Down the Mission,” an infallibly structured gospel number about a desperate man who attacks a rich man’s home to help feed his family. The song’s unusual rhythmic progressions—it changes keys four times—was influenced by American songwriter Laura Nyro. “She was the first person, songwriting-wise, that there were no rules,” Elton said. “There were tempo changes, there wasn’t a verse/chorus/verse/chorus/middle-eight. She didn’t write in that kind of way. And that put in my mind that you didn’t have to write in that old template that everybody else did.”

  Lyrically, “Burn Down the Mission” was a more straightforward proposition, the initial idea having entered Bernie’s mind as he walked down the street one day. “I just thought of it for no reason at all,” he said. “I started with the first line and I followed it with something else. When it was finished, it was about something. That’s how a lot of my songs happen.”

  The tone inside Trident’s brownstone walls shifted dramatically for “Come Down in Time,” an exquisite mediation on romantic illusions. The original take was recorded with a rhythm section. Sensing that the percussive vibe didn’t capitalize on the doleful poignancy inherent in Bernie’s lyrics, Gus brought in Paul Buckmaster to help recast the song as a symphonic piece, complete with flute, oboe and upright bass.

  “I love the melancholic, and I love the sadness,” Elton said. “If it were down to me, I’d write that sort of shit all the time.” Indeed, he favored “Come Down in Time” because it was exactly the type of song “that a jazz singer would record. Chord-wise, it was like nothing I’d ever written before.”

  The requisite Stones’-style rocker for the sessions, “Son of Your Father,” was a cautionary tale about family ties and the often sour milk of human compassion. Hookfoot’s Ian Duck added a bluesy harmonic part to the track, for which he earned £30. “I was sent an acetate of the song and I rehearsed the harmonica part at home first, then went to the studio,” Duck said. “Dudgeon would run the track and we would do it in a couple of takes…If Gus thought it was okay, then he said, ‘You can go home.’ It was that simple.”

  Like most of the others on these sessions, “Son of Your Father” owed more than a passing debt of gratitude to the Band’s watershed long-player, Music from the Big Pink. It was a purposeful direction initially set by Bernie. “I have to admit, the Band influenced me,” he told Sounds’ Penny Valentine, “because I have so much admiration for Robbie Robertson. If you like the Band, which I do, and listen to it a lot, you can’t help getting influenced. It just seeps into you.”

  “Where to Now, St. Peter?” was laid next. A reflective wah-wah-spiced rocker, the unusual track concerned a dead Civil War soldier who comes face-to-face with St. Peter. The soldier pleads to be show which road he is on. Is it to be an eternity of Heaven or Hell? The question is never resolved.

  Dave Glover would later recall that the session for “Where to Now, St. Peter?” was easy and relaxed. “We used to go into the studio and then go off to The Ship pub with Elton and have a few beers and then go back,” the bassist said. “He was a funny guy, friendly and a good laugh. We all got on very well, and it did not feel like we were recording or rehearsing in a studio. It was more like a rehearsal in a rehearsal room.”

  Elton briefly left the sessions to promote his upcoming Elton John album in the Netherlands, thus missing basic tracking work on “Country Comfort.” Session pianist Pete Robinson, a friend of Paul Buckmaster’s, filled in for him on the day. Robinson provided a restrained, nondescript performance over an otherwise pastoral arrangement which featured Johnny Van Derek on fiddle, Matthews’ Southern Comfort’s Gordon Huntley on pedal steel guitar, and Ian Duck again on harmonica.

  “We put everything you’d find on a dozen country records on it,” Bernie said. “Steel guitars and fiddles. You name it.”

  Unhappy with the end result, Elton ended up dubbing his own piano part over Robinson’s. But the feel of the song was already locked in, and there was little he could do to bring his matchless energy to the track.

  “I hate it,” he said later of the finished recording. “Too sugary.”

  Elton’s displeasure was short-lived, as his childhood crush, Dusty Springfield, stepped into Trident to lend her considerable vocal talents to the choir on “My Father’s Gun”—a riveting mix of bluesy rock and southern gospel—alongside Madeline Belle, Kay Garner, Lesley Duncan, Tony Burrows and Tony Hazzard. The tale of a Confederate man who swears vengeance against the Yankees who killed his father in a Civil War battle, Dusty
was impressed enough by the track to allow the album credits to list her under her real name, and not as “Gladys Thong,” the pseudonym she usually performed under for guest appearances.

  “Dusty Springfield came along,” Tony Hazzard said, “there was just a few of us singing on it, and I was standing next to her on the night. She was a lovely person. And she said, ‘I don’t know if I can do this.’ And I was thinking, ‘You’re Dusty Springfield, of course you can.’ And I told her, ‘You’ll be fine, don’t worry.’ So it was crazy, me reassuring Dusty Springfield, with her great voice, because she was worried about getting it wrong, which she didn’t.” Hazzard laughed. “The funny thing is about all this is that when you’re going through it, it’s just normal life, it’s what I did. I sang on sessions and made albums and that’s the milieu that I lived through. So you didn’t think anything of it. Elton makes a record and you think, ‘Good on, Elton. I hope it does well.’ And then you look back and you think, ‘Crikey!’ You’re part of musical history.”

  “My Father’s Gun” gained further sonic grandeur from the crystalline production Gus Dudgeon lent the track. “He clearly knew what he was doing,” Hazzard said. “And Elton and Gus had the same sort of humor, which helped ease things in the studio. They had this quirky humor and they would talk in funny voices. It was a bit like the Goon Show. They would talk in a very sort of upper-class English accent, where people slightly mispronounce words: ‘Either sit day-own, or gait ow-it!’ And we all used to fall about laughing. So they were relaxed sessions, and clearly Gus had a very clean aural vision, if I can mix metaphors, of what he wanted. And Elton did, as well.”

  The period-piece dramatics of Buckmaster’s horn and string arrangements, which proved to be some of the arranger’s finest work, provided added verisimilitude to the track. “Paul Buckmaster is arranging for us again and he is just totaling amazing,” Elton said. “He’s doing the most incredible things with straight session musicians. Half the time I just don’t believe it. He has them all hitting their violins for three bars and they all love it. He is really freaky and very good. I’m so pleased that he’s doing our album.”

  Two of the more lyrically intriguing songs of the sessions would never progress pass the demo recording stage. “The Sisters of the Cross,” a volatile ballad about the lonely sexual lives of nuns, and “Rolling Western Union,” a full-throttled, Force-one gale which told the a typically dour Taupin-esque tale of a man who spends his days laying railway tracks across America, while thinking of his wife who died a hundred miles back.

  The sessions then ended with “Madman Across the Water,” which featured hallucinatory guitar work from Mick Ronson, a respected session musician who was soon to join forces with David Bowie in his Spiders From Mars band.

  “It came out sounding like Led Zeppelin playing Elton John,” Gus noted of the final recording. “A bit schizophrenic and boring.”

  Though the eight-minute track was temporarily shelved, it was anything but forgotten.

  Dick James was impressed with Elton’s most recent work; so much so, that he offered the singer an expanded recording contract which bound him to DJM’s This Record Co. for five years, recording two full albums (six album sides worth of music) per year. Elton’s royalty would be four percent of the record’s retail price, increasing to six percent two years down the road.

  To celebrate the signing, the publisher arranged a launch party on March 26, the day after Elton’s twenty-third birthday, at London’s Revolution Club. Elton sipped champagne during the event and played a selection of songs to a group of invited press. David Rosner, a publisher working for Dick James in America, was in attendance that day. “The performance was good,” he said. “But you couldn’t really say it was spectacular. It was workman-like. He simply played some songs and that was that. His rear never left the piano seat.”

  Indeed, the party’s highlight had nothing to do with Elton’s stagecraft but rather with Dick James’ grandiose presentation of a birthday present to his piano-playing charge—a state-of-the-art, lime-green 8-track stereo system.

  “No expense was spared,” Elton said with a smirk. “Can it really get any better?”

  While tracks from Elton’s latest sessions were being mixed and mastered, the Elton John album was being released in the U.K. and throughout Europe. It was, in every way, a quantum leap forward in quality from Empty Sky. Unlike its predecessor, even the cover art—a stark Rembrandt-esque portrait by fashion photographer David Bailey which showed Elton swamped in black shadows, as if lit by a single lantern—was designed to impress.

  “It was, ‘Try and hide as much of his face as possible’,” the pianist noted wryly.

  Reviews for the disc were promising. Calling the LP “a truly great record,” Melody Maker wondered, “Is this the year of Elton John?” The Daily Mirror’s Don Short took it a step further, trumpeting that it was “time to hail a new genius in the commercial folk world.” NME, meanwhile, labeled Elton “a big talent…who sounds as if he has lived in Nashville all his life.”

  Industry insiders were equally as vociferous in their praise, especially in their admiration of the resonant open drum sounds Gus was able to coax from the studio. “Gus Dudgeon had phone calls in the night from producers,” Elton said. “His production on that record became very influential.”

  Despite all the good will Elton John generated, the album entered the BBC charts at number 45 and promptly fell off again, unable to fend for itself amongst such major league competition as the Beatles’ Let It Be, Simon & Garfunkel’s Bridge Over Troubled Water and Led Zeppelin II.

  Wise to the realities of the music business, Dick James told Elton in no uncertain terms that his future lay on the road.

  “We were told we would have to get a band together, which was the last thing I wanted to do,” the pianist said. “We came to the conclusion that I would have to go out on the road with a band and promote the record, which I’d fought against tooth and nail for a long time. And I suddenly just decided that was the only answer.”

  Elton rang up fellow label mates Nigel Olsson and Dee Murray, both veterans of the Spencer Davis Group, and asked if they’d be interested in doing a short promotional tour for his new album.

  “He said, ‘I’m doing this prestige gig,” Nigel said. “Would you be interested in doing the Roundhouse?’”

  The long-haired drummer was initially hesitant, having been hired mere weeks before by the hard rock outfit Uriah Heep. Still, he and Dee showed up the next night at DJM Studios to meet with Elton. The date was April 10, the day Paul McCartney officially announced to the world that the Beatles were no more.

  Elton took Nigel and Dee out for an Indian meal before their test rehearsal. The news of the Beatles’ split came over the radio while they sat in a tiny corner booth, silently eating their heavily spiced curry.

  “The baton’s been passed,” the pianist teased.

  “Right on,” Dee said with a laugh; Nigel merely nodded.

  The three musicians headed back to the studio around 6:30 p.m. Nigel settled behind a massive low-tuned drum kit, donning black racing gloves to protect his hands from cuts and callouses, while Dee plugged his bass into a Marshall skyscraper amp.

  “‘Bad Side of the Moon’ then,” Elton said. “One...two…”

  “Eight bars into the first song we played, I just thought, ‘This is it, this is exactly the stuff I wanna be doing,’” Nigel said. “Something where I could play to the low end of Elton’s piano…It was all so inspiring, the three of us were on the exact same wavelength.” He grinned. “It was just right. The music hit me in the heart and in the head. I gave up on anything else after that. This is where I wanted to be.”

  Nigel would tender his resignation with Uriah Heep the next day.

  For his part, Dee was equally enthusiastic. “We all had magic together, and felt that we had something that could get really big. Everything felt right.”

  “I remember very clearly wa
lking into Dick James Studios and there was this huge drum kit with Nigel behind it—who I knew—and there was Dee, and there’s Elton at the piano,” Stuart Epps said. “And I thought, ‘Well, where’s Caleb?’ And I’m looking behind the door and everything, and there’s no Caleb. And Elton said, ‘No, no, no, Caleb’s not in this band. We don’t have a guitarist.’ And I just thought, ‘He’s mad. How can they play without a guitarist?’ But they were phenomenal. They’d done these arrangements of songs like ‘Sixty Years On’ and ‘Take Me to the Pilot’, and Nigel wasn’t an ordinary drummer, he was using this huge kit, this thunderous sort of orchestral kit, and Dee wasn’t an ordinary bass player, he was playing chords in the songs, he was a great bass player, and because they didn’t have a guitar, it left a lot more room for the piano, and we all know Elton’s the most amazing pianist. It was a great sound.”

  No one was more pleased by the brilliant noise they created than Elton himself. “I couldn’t have wished for a better band,” he said. “I can’t say I did expect to find such good sidemen as Nigel and Dee. We all knew different styles of playing, and everything gelled very quickly. I had a pretty clear idea of the kind of group it should be, the basic, raw thing…lots of power. But knowing that, I also thought it would be nearly impossible to get just the right people for the job. When Dee came along I knew he was it, it had to be. I knew what he could do, how he would contribute, and had to have him. But Nigel was a different case. I was a little bit unsure about him at the start, but I didn’t say anything because I wanted to give him a chance to prove himself. I thought I saw something there. And I did.”

  Elton took another step forward in his career by appearing on the television show Top of the Pops. Britain’s answer to American Bandstand—and the sole music-oriented series available in Britain—the weekly audience for Top of the Pops was massive, with more than a quarter of all television sets in Britain tuning in to the show every Thursday evening.