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

  Reg seemed negatively affected by inconveniences that his band mates routinely shrugged off. Indeed, his temperament was markedly different—so much so, in fact, that he soon found himself an outcast in the group he’d help found. His reluctance to indulge in the same vices that the others enjoyed didn’t help endear him to them. There was little alcohol for Reg. No cigarettes, no drugs, and no girls. “If nothing was happening, he’d just go to sleep,” Pat Higgs said. “He had a special little pillow that he used to carry round with him.”

  Like many bands before them, Bluesology would further attempt to emulate the Beatles’ road to success by playing a month-long residency at the Top Ten Club in Hamburg. The nights were grueling—performing from seven p.m. till two in the morning, exchanging hour-long sets with another British group called the Sinners. Not having enough material to fill the required timeslot, Bluesology often jammed on extended twenty-five-minute blues improvisations, while Reg made up rude lyrics which sailed harmlessly over the heads of the German audiences.

  Between sets, Reg became friends with the Sinners’ lead guitarist, Pete Bellotte. In their down time, they’d often grab a bite to eat, or dance drunkenly amongst the traffic that ripped past them on the Reeperbahn.

  “You’ve got a touch,” Bellotte told him one night. “You’re a great player. We should do something together sometime.”

  “Maybe so,” Reg answered offhandedly, thinking nothing more of it.

  Back on home soil that April, Bluesology kept gigging, playing clubs like the Ricky Tick in Windsor and the Mojo Club in Sheffield. At Manchester’s Twisted Wheel, they performed alongside John Mayall, sharing the stage with a baby-faced Eric Clapton. Between sets, Clapton showed Stewart Brown how to use a light-gauge banjo string on his guitar, enabling him to bend notes much farther across the frets; it was a trick Brown would turn to often in the future.

  During a performance at the Whisky A Go-Go, bassist Rex Bishop quit Bluesology. Two days later, he was replaced by the imminently more dexterous Freddy Gandy, late of Twink and the Pink Fairies. This wasn’t the only lineup change the band would see—cofounding member Mick Inkpen would get ousted soon after at the behest of Patti LaBelle, who was lining up a second tour of the U.K. “You would have thought that the other members of the band, including Reg, would have stuck by me and refused to tour,” a crestfallen Inkpen said. “But apparently the tour was more important.”

  With new drummer Paul Gale installed, the band’s sophomore outing with LaBelle and the Bluebelles went swimmingly. After its conclusion, Bluesology headed to the South of France for several gigs at the Papagayos Club. Their dates were threatened, however, when Reg electrocuted himself on the bare wiring from a chandelier in a crumbling villa outside St. Tropez.

  “I remember there was a sudden yelp and Reg was spark out,” Freddy Gandy later told author Keith Hayward. A doctor was called, and a hypodermic in the ass brought Reg around. “He recovered from the ordeal so remarkably well, even we were surprised,” Gandy said. “The gigs we were booked to do continued with him in good form, like nothing had happened.”

  After a long hot summer gigging endlessly, Bluesology released a third single—the Kenny Lynch-produced “Since I Found You Baby,” which marked Stewart Brown’s vinyl debut as a lead singer. When the disc flopped, talks of disbanding arose. But fate took a hand in the form of twenty-five-year-old soul singer Long John Baldry, who caught their act at the Cromwellian Club—a smoky, patchouli-scented sweatbox—and decided that they were exactly what he’d been looking for.

  The six-foot-seven, immaculately dressed Baldry was something of a local legend, having featured in Alexis Korner’s Blues Incorporated. Baldry had made his bones performing alongside the likes of Mick Jagger, a pre-Zeppelin Jimmy Page, and—from his short-lived band, Steampacket—a teenage Rod Stewart, whom Baldry had discovered busking on a Twickenham railway station platform.

  “[Baldry] really was a fantastic blues guitarist, just him on his own, singing Leadbelly stuff,” Elton said. “He was definitely a pioneer, and at the forefront of British blues music.” As for his sexuality, the openly gay Baldry seemed like an exotic creature to Bluesology’s organist. “I cannot believe I never realized that he was gay. I mean, I didn’t realize I was gay at the time, but—looking back on it now—John couldn’t have been any more gay if he tried. It wasn’t on my radar at that time.”

  “[Baldry] was very elegant and incredibly flamboyant, combined with this highly acute sense of humor,” Eric Clapton said. “There was a darkness to him, too, that I didn’t really want to know very well. I could just sense that the guy was troubled, you know?”

  Baldry offered to pay Bluesology a weekly retainer to be his regular backing band. The musicians held a vote, and—feeling that it was a step in the right direction—unanimously accepted his offer.

  Baldry got on well with his new band mates—especially with Reg, whom he found endearing. “He was taking pills to get thin,” Baldry said, “and though they worked, they also tended to make him aggressive and short-tempered. He shouted a lot, which I found amusing.” Yet even with his quirks of personality, the towering blues singer had to admire the all-or-nothing manner in which Reg threw himself into performing. “A great show would make him joyous. But if anyone flubbed up or played out-of-tune, he would blow up. Music was the most precious thing to him.”

  One of Baldry’s first decrees as the de facto leader of Bluesology was that they expand to a nine-piece ensemble. Only Reg, Stewart Brown and Freddy Gandy would agree to this, however. Thus the rest of the band left, to be replaced by guitarist Neil Hubbard and Chevelles’ drummer Pete Gavin.

  “Bluesology was entirely Reg’s baby at the outset,” Gavin said. “He was the band leader. But then Long John Baldry took the front line and it was a little bit odd. Reggie didn’t like the way it was going by then.”

  Baldry then brought in soul singers Alan Walker and Marsha Hunt, to help emulate Steampacket’s triple lead vocalist format.

  “She gave an audition down the old Studio 51 Club and she did an unaccompanied version of ‘Love is a Many-Splendored Thing’,” Elton recalled years later. “And she was really awful. Baldry said, ‘Marvelous dear, we’ll have you.’ As far as Baldry was concerned, just as long as she was black and could sing relatively well, that was what he wanted. And it worked out great. She looked good and got the blokes in the audience going.”

  Baldry finalized his new lineup with the addition of ex-Sidewinder cornetist Marc Charig, as well as a tenor saxophonist who went by the unlikely name of Elton Dean. Dean noticed at once that Reg was a frustrated singer. “His problem was that we already had three regular singers. I never even knew he sang until I heard him do a number one day at a soundcheck. Then I thought he sounded great. Just like Jose Feliciano.”

  That December, the new-look Bluesology was booked by Brian Epstein to play third on the bill to Little Richard at London’s Saville Theatre. Reg found himself spellbound by the flamboyant star’s unrestrained theatrics. “When I saw Little Richard standing on top of the piano, all lights, sequins and energy, I decided there and then that I was going to be a rock ‘n’ roll piano player. Little Richard was the king for me.”

  Reg also got to see Jerry Lee Lewis perform—albeit from the cheap seats—several weeks later. Lewis would prove to be another colossal influence on the teenager. “This was the first time I heard someone beat the shit out of a piano,” Elton said, impressed by rock ‘n’ roll’s first great wild man. “He got me excited.”

  Reg spent the first several months of 1967 on constant tour with Baldry and Bluesology. “We just did mediocre things,” he said. “We never starved, but it was such a mundane experience.” The setup at least provided the frustrated keyboardist with a modicum of spiritual comfort, as Baldry became a mentor figure for him. Wherever Baldry went, Reg was sure to follow.

  “It was really a matter of ‘monkey see, monkey do’,” Baldry said. “It was actually quite flatter
ing.”

  On nights when there were no shows scheduled, Reg would follow Baldry to Mike McGrath’s apartment in Earls Court. McGrath, a photographer for Rave magazine, was a lightning rod for London’s artistic underground community. “Reg had this enormous inferiority complex and he weighed two stones heavier than he was when he came to fame,” McGrath said. “Reg would sit next to Baldry, lost inside his duffel coat, and not speak a single word all night long. I can’t honestly remember one line that Elton ever came up with in this room, because he was just so inhibited.”

  In an attempt to shake off his natural reserve, Reg did what he could to better fit in with the psychedelic, Carnaby-esque fashions of the day. But no amount of flared collars or tie-dyed shirts could hide his stout figure.

  “Reg was quite porky,” Baldry mused. “In a caftan, he looks like a myopic nun.”

  His sartorial ineloquence perhaps fueled his darker moods. “Reggie was prone to fits of pique,” Pete Gavin said. “If something pushed his buttons, he’d just fly off the handle. I have this one image of him just literally laying on his back on the floor, screaming and kicking his heels and bashing his elbows on the ground. He’d just come totally unglued, absolutely and completely unglued. Which was part of him, that was part of his nature. Otherwise, he was very quiet. And very kind. I remember one time he showed up, we were going away for a few days and he showed up with this really nice suitcase. And I admired it and said, ‘That’s really nice, Reg.’ And he said, ‘Yeah, it was a fiver in a shop up the road.’ And nothing much more was said. But a few days later we picked him up for another gig, and he’d gone somewhere and had bought me a similar suitcase and just gave it to me on the spot. I thought that was a very kind gesture. Reggie really did have a heart of gold, but at the same time a pretty short fuse.”

  Reg was on tour with Bluesology in Newcastle when an advertisement in the June 17 issue of New Musical Express (NME) caught the restless journeyman’s eye. Wedged between an article on the Small Faces and a review of James Bond discs sat an unassuming ad featuring the Statue of Liberty. Below that, the ad copy read: “Liberty Wants Talent—Artistes/Composers/Singer-Musicians To Form New Group.”

  “I thought, ‘Hello—they’ve put an advert in,” Elton said, “and I shall answer it immediately.’”

  He wrote Liberty a letter. Days later, it landed on the desk of Ray Williams, the label’s twenty-year-old talent scout who had originally drafted and placed the NME advertisement.

  “When Reg wrote me, he said that he’d been in Bluesology,” Ray later said, “which I’d seen at the Marquee a few times. He said he said he was the keyboard player, so I had an image of him. So in short I said, ‘Come in and say hello.’”

  Reg arrived at Ray’s office on Albemarle Street days later looking dumpy and forlorn, all of his possessions gathered together in a carrier bag.

  “Immediately you noticed he didn’t have your normal rock ‘n’ roll star potential,” Ray said. “He was fairly shy, polite, so different to how he became. He said, ‘I feel lost, I don’t know what to do.’ Basically, he was frustrated that Long John Baldry wouldn’t allow him to do very much as far as singing, and that was part of the big frustration at the time. But he was an absolute enthusiast about music, and very knowledgeable about all music.”

  Reg informed Williams that, while he could compose melodies with ease, he was hopeless when it came to writing lyrics, and that he knew he could be a vocalist if given the chance. Intrigued, Williams asked Reg to perform a few songs at the console piano that sat in his office. “He got up and sang a few songs, and I just thought, ‘That’s great.’ But it wasn’t obviously the sort of thing we were looking for as a label. But his voice stood out, there was something special in it—it was really warm, the kind of voice that would translate well onto record—and he obviously had ability as a keyboard player.”

  Williams was sufficiently impressed to book Reg into Regent Sound Studios on Denmark Street to record five songs as a vocal test. “As I never sang in the band,” Elton said, “the only songs I could remember were the ones I used to sing in the public bar of the Northwood Hills Hotel. So I did some Jim Reeves material: ‘I Love You Because’, ‘I Won’t Forget You’, ‘He’ll Have to Go’. I even sang ‘Mammy’.”

  The acetate from the session was then played for Liberty’s A&R Director, Bob Reisdorf. “Bob had owned his own label, Dolton Records, plus he produced the enormously successful Ventures and the Fleetwoods,” Ray said, “so he had a strong view on stuff, but he didn't really see that Reg had the talent. He didn’t see it at all.”

  Reg was hardly surprised that Reisdorf passed on him. “I hadn’t sung in years and I was awful,” he admitted. “They turned me down and I don’t blame them.”

  On the way out the door, Williams handed the dejected musician an envelope full of lyrics that had been sent in by a seventeen-year-old chicken farmer from Lincolnshire. “Basically I had a letter from this little chap called Bernie Taupin,” Ray said. “And he said, ‘I’m really a poet, but I think my lyrics could be set to music.’ And I knew Reg said he could do music but he can’t write lyrics, so a bell went off in my head: ‘Let’s introduce Bernie to Elton. Let’s see if he could set his words to music.’ If nothing else, he could at least say he’d tried.”

  Reg took Bernie’s writings home and looked them over. They featured such mystically esoteric titles as “Smokestack Children” and “Mr. Lightning Strikerman.” “I was quite impressed,” he said. “I’d have been impressed by anything.” In the span of only a few short hours, he set all fourteen lyrics to music. “They were very naïve lyrics and they were very naïve melodies,” Elton later conceded. “But there was a chemistry there, and I enjoyed doing it.”

  Bernie’s later assessment of his own early work was hardly any less forgiving. “Pseudo-intellectual pre-Flower-Power trash,” he said. “Before I started with Reg I’d always thought of myself as a poet, and I found it hard to write lyrics. The first stuff I ever wrote was dreadful. I mean, really disgusting, pre-Sgt. Pepper things about ‘freaked-out teddy bears.’ I’d never experienced anything, I was just a hick who thought if I wanted to make the big time I had to have freak-out lyrics. I mean, I was coming up with all of these acid-trip things, which I really had no right in writing because at the time I didn’t have a clue what acid even looked like. What can I say? I was young and stupid.”

  An astute assessment, perhaps, yet Reg didn’t care. “I just found my niche. I was very good at putting music around written words.”

  Ray Williams further assisted Reg when he brought him into the orbit of songwriters Nicky James and Kirk Duncan. “I wanted to find him some help, because I actually loved his voice,” the talent scout said. “So I introduced him to Nicky and Kirk, two songwriters I was trying to help around the same time. We knew Graham Nash of the Hollies very well, so we formed a little association with Graham Nash with Nicky and Kirk called Niraki, which was basically Nicky, Ray and Kirk, the first two letters of each of our names, much like Graham’s Gralto publishing setup. And everything started to evolve from there.”

  Under Gralto’s auspices, Niraki existed as an independent publishing subsidiary of Dick James Music (DJM). Owned by the Beatles’ publisher, Dick James—who had cofounded Northern Songs along with Brian Epstein—DJM was hallowed ground for any struggling songwriter. Reg quickly learned that one of the more immediate perks of being affiliated with Niraki was the ability to utilize DJM’s in-house studio to create demos of the new songs he was writing.

  As fate would have it, the lead engineer and studio manager of the DJM studio was someone Reg was already well-acquainted with—his old friend from his Mills Music days, Caleb Quaye. “One day, this guy, Ray Williams…brings in this new singer-songwriter guy, Reg Dwight,” Caleb recalled years later in the documentary film A Voice Louder Than Rock. “By this time, Reg has grown his hair longer…and he’s looking a bit more hip, so I didn’t actually recognize him, first of all. And
he stood there in the studio kind of hunched over the piano, and I come in and I’m setting up the mics and everything to record these demos…and I can see him kind of [hiding his face in his hands], going, ‘Oh no, it’s him. Oh no’. And I suddenly went, ‘Wait a minute—don’t I know you?’” Caleb came away from the session more than impressed with Reg’s talent. “It was so obvious [he had] got something special. Every day, a little bit more of it would come out.”

  “I began working with Reg on a pretty regular basis,” Caleb said. “It was an exciting time. We were all like stable mates, there was a big community factor going. We were all friends, and we were all dipping in and out of each other’s work. We were all trying to help each other.” He chuckled. “All of us spent so much time at that tiny DJM studio that we’d refer to it as ‘The Gaff’.”

  Indeed, throughout the late summer and fall of 1967, Reg would make prodigious use DJM’s basement studio, where a battered Studer four-track recorder and an ancient MCI mixing board lay in a tiny white-tiled room. Securing the talents of drummer Dave Hinds and future Troggs bassist Tony Murray, Reg recorded several songs that he’d written with Nicky and James—prosaic fare such as “Where It’s At” and “Who’s Gonna Love You”—as well as solo compositions like “Witch’s House” and “I Get a Little Bit Lonely.”

  Reg picked up extra money over the summer by filling in for keyboardist Eric Hines, as Simon Dupree and the Big Sound toured Scotland. Consisting of Derek Shulman and his two brothers Ray and Phil, the popular psychedelic pop band was a precursor to Gentle Giant. “We didn’t know Reg before this, he was sent to us through an agency,” bassist Peter O’Flaherty later recalled. “We had one afternoon practice, he made a few notes, and that was it, he knew our program. He was very talented and easy to get along with…He was paid £25 a week for this tour.”