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

  “Reg just got so incredibly hacked-off,” Caleb said. “We were dead in the middle of this song and all of a sudden you could hear this racket going on around the back of the stage. I turned around and Reg has completely lost his bottle. Tipping his organ over, screaming, ‘Fuck this! I’ve had enough!’ And meanwhile Baldry’s still trying to sing.” The guitarist laughed. “It was definitely time to go after that. And I decided to leave too.”

  Reg gave his notice on the British Airways bus from Heathrow into London. “That was the best day in my life,” he said. “When I quit the group.”

  Recognizing that “Reg Dwight” sounded more like an assistant librarian than a burgeoning pop artist, Reg promptly began scribbling down potential stage names on the back of an envelope. None of the names seemed appropriate. Suddenly, inspiration struck hard. He walked back to where Elton Dean was sitting, and smiled nervously at him.

  “Is it all right if I call myself Elton Dean?”

  “Fuck off, Reg,” the saxophonist snarled. As Dean would later reflect, “No one would be happy if someone just came up and said, ‘I want your name.’ But that was Li’l Bunter.”

  Reg shuffled back to his seat, crestfallen.

  Caleb pointed toward Long John Baldry. “Why don’t you take his name too, and mix ‘em up?”

  Reg thought it over. “Elton John?”

  Liking the sound of it, he clapped Caleb on the shoulder.

  “Of course,” he said. “Why the fuck not?”

  In that moment, Elton John was born.

  “Later,” he said, “I thought about changing [my name] again, but no one could come up with anything better.”

  The newly christened Elton John released his first single weeks later. The Caleb Quaye-produced “I’ve Been Loving You”—backed with the brass-driven blues of “Here’s to the Next Time,” which Elton had originally written for Marsha Hunt—hit the record shops on March 1. Though the simplistic words to both songs belonged to him and not his partner, Elton shared the writing credits with Bernie, allowing him to earn his first meager publishing royalties.

  Issued on the Philips label, “I’ve Been Love You” was birthed into a pre-Internet world of Flower Power, Lost in Space, miniskirts and anti-Vietnam protests. Stateside, Richard Nixon and Robert F. Kennedy had thrown their hats into the presidential ring, while the Beatles’ “Lady Madonna” and Louis Armstrong’s “What a Wonderful World” sat high atop the pop charts. Culture was in a major state of flux, and despite ads in the London trade papers declaring that “I’ve Been Loving You” was “the greatest performance on a ‘first’ disc,” and that “Elton John is 1968’s great new talent,” few bothered to take much notice of the song.

  The disc’s lack of success did little to boost any romantic illusions on the home front. “Elton did get very depressed over his music,” Woodrow said. “He was also very depressed about not having any money.” With the first blush decidedly off the rose, Elton and Linda Woodrow began to fight constantly—an eerie reminder to the pianist of his own parents’ interminable discord. Worse, his headstrong girlfriend had already grown wary of his failing musical ambitions, and began to insist that he follow a more conformist career path. “She didn’t think that music was a good career move,” Elton said. “She was trying to get me to give it all up. She didn’t like my songs. It really destroyed me inside. Everything I’d write, she’d put down.”

  For his part, Bernie was “shit scared” of Woodrow, whose fascistically idiosyncratic house rules precluded him from putting up posters of Simon & Garfunkel and Bob Dylan on his bedroom wall.

  With Woodrow’s days spent at a secretarial job at the Evening Newspaper Advertising Bureau in Holborn, Elton and Bernie were left largely to their own devices. The two spent endless hours talking about music, and poring over their prized record collections. “He turned me on to things that had grooves, like soul music, Stax, Chess, and so on,” Bernie said. “In turn, I turned him onto folk music, narrative stuff like Bob Dylan, Leonard Cohen.”

  The duo also spent a great deal of time at the Musicland record shop at 44 Berwick Street, in London’s SoHo district. Elton helped out behind the counter from time to time for extra money, while Bernie investigated whichever new releases had arrived on any given week. The two novice songwriters were in heaven being amongst endless stacks of vinyl. “We used to hang out there like people hang out in a bar,” Bernie said.

  “The most exciting thing was waiting for the imports to come in,” Elton later recalled. “We were obsessed by American records, not just because of what was inside them, but we loved the covers. We loved the card on American records because it was harder, they didn’t have that glossy sheen that English records had. It was great. It was all imports, and the biggest import album while I was working in Musicland was Soft Machine Volume 1 in the original sleeve.”

  With access to an endless assortment of discs, Elton’s record collection swelled to heroic proportions, encompassing three-thousand albums, fifteen-hundred 45s, fifty EPs, sixty-one 78s, three-hundred 8-track cartridges and two-hundred cassettes. “My influences go back to Little Richard, Jerry Lee Lewis, Bill Halley, all those rock ‘n’ roll things, and then Tamla Motown,” he said. “And now my taste is everything. The only thing I really haven’t got in my collection is middle of the road stuff. Englebert Humperdinck-type stuff and traditional jazz. But I’ve got everything, from Tibetan monks playing the gong backwards to Led Zeppelin and things like that.”

  While Elton’s vinyl assemblage flourished, his relationship with Linda Woodrow was rapidly deteriorating. When their nightly arguments grew particularly heated, she took to physically attacking him.

  “I was in love with her for the first three months,” Elton said, “but after that she made me completely miserable.”

  At his wits’ end, the pianist finally gave in to his girlfriend’s demands and proposed to her on March 25—his twenty-first birthday.

  “He didn’t exactly get down on his knees,” Woodrow said. “He just mumbled something about, ‘Well, we may as well get married.’” Still, she readily agreed, rushing out the next day to buy her own engagement ring.

  Elton wrote his father and stepmother days later, a thank you note for a leather briefcase that they’d given him for his birthday. In his letter, he touched on his engagement. “We do not intend to get married yet, or at any rate not until my career takes shape,” he wrote. “[Linda] is a very understanding girl, and realizes that at the moment my work comes first.” He continued on to say, “I have just had a record released, but I don’t think that it will be a hit because none of the disc jockeys like it very much. So I will just have to wait until I can find something they do like!”

  Despite Elton’s cautious nuptial approach, Linda was insistent, and before long wedding plans were finalized for the Uxbridge Registry Office at 9:45 a.m., June 22, with a reception to be held afterward at Sheila and Derf’s house.

  “You could see he didn’t want to go through with it,” Caleb said, “but he’d sort of trapped himself. But we were all teenagers. It was just one of those things.”

  Elton felt cornered. With his career foundering and the pressure of an upcoming marriage pressing down on him, he grew despondent and depressed. He came close to a breaking point in early June, when he walked into his tiny kitchenette and stuck his head in the oven.

  “The three of us were supposed to be taking a nap,” Woodrow said. “I came out of my room and Bernie came out of his, both thinking we’d heard a noise. We went into the kitchen, and there was Elton lying with his head in the gas oven.”

  “It was a very Woody Allen-type suicide,” the pianist later admitted. “I turned on the gas and left all the windows open.”

  “He’d only turned the gas on to low, and left the kitchen window open,” Bernie said. “And he’d thought to take a cushion to rest his head on.”

  The distraught lyricist quickly pulled Elton’s head out of the oven.
/>   “I said, ‘My God, he’s tried to commit suicide!’” Bernie said. “And [Linda] said, ‘Why, he’s wasted all that gas.’”

  With the marriage mere days away, Elton and Bernie went out drinking at the Bag O’Nails club in Soho with Long John Baldry.

  “I was supposed to be best man,” Baldry said. “So I said, ‘Hey Reg, have you booked the hall yet?’” The innocent inquiry brought Elton to tears. Baldry shook his head in disgust. “You’re more in love with Bernie more than you are with this girl, dear boy,” the bluesman scalded. “For fuck’s sake, come to your senses. Why are you getting married when everyone knows you’re a poove? If you marry this woman you’ll destroy two lives—hers and yours.”

  By the time the three closed the bar, Elton had resolved to end his relationship. He and Bernie walked drunkenly up Furlong Road arm-in-arm, to give themselves courage, bumping into parked cars and setting off their alarms.

  When they reached their flat, Elton nodded resolutely. “I’m going to tell her now,” he said.

  “I’m going to throw up,” the lyricist replied, stumbling toward the bathroom.

  Elton headed into the kitchenette, where Linda sat fuming. Before he could get a word out, she began berating him for coming home so late, and so obviously drunk.

  “Stop,” he said, holding up his hand. “Listen, Linda. I don’t want to get married. It’s over. I’m moving out.”

  Woodrow broke into tears. “I was in total shock,” she said.

  Her crying jag soon turned into screaming accusations. With all hell breaking loose, Bernie lurched into his room and locked the door as quickly as his inebriated fingers would allow.

  After a while, the flat fell eerily silent.

  Moments later, a timid knock sounded at the lyricist’s door.

  “I’m coming in there with you,” Elton said. He spent the rest of the night curled up on the floor beside Bernie’s bed. “I was so relieved [the marriage] was off,” he said. “It was as if someone had saved my life that night.”

  The next morning, Linda claimed she was pregnant. When that gambit failed, she locked herself in the bathroom and threatened to kill herself by injecting her brachial artery full of air bubbles.

  “I remember the two of us outside [the bathroom door],” Bernie said. “[We were] saying, ‘She can’t, can she? She hasn’t got a syringe.’”

  Having reached his limit, Elton phoned his mother. An hour later, Derf was pulling up outside their flat in his Ford Cortina. While Woodrow sat crying hysterically in the living room, Derf quickly loaded up Elton and Bernie’s personal effects.

  “How he managed to cram all that stuff in there, I’ll never know,” Elton said. “It was a narrow escape.”

  Elton and Bernie moved—temporarily, they hoped—into the cramped confines of Frome Court, sharing metal bunk beds in the tiny bedroom where Elton had grown up.

  “We had all our records in there, all our clothes,” the pianist said. “God knows how we did it.”

  Elton participated in a one-off project with a group of session musicians assembled by Apple Records assistant Tony King, a former DJM staffer, in early August. Put together as a low-rent “supergroup,” the ensemble—dubbed the Bread & Beer Band—also included Caleb Quaye, drummer Roger Pope, Hollies bassist Bernie Calvert, and a pair of Jamaican percussionists. “It was done during a period when we were all basically starving, trying to make something happen,” Caleb said. “Tony got this project together and it was great. We all earned some session fees.”

  With Beatles producer George Martin off on vacation, the band would sneak into the studio at Abbey Road and record loose jam-band renditions of popular tunes. “We used to go down to the pub in the afternoon, have a few beers, and go back to the studio in the evening,” King said. “Then we’d turn down all the lights at Abbey Road and get all moody. The Beatles had been using lots of colored lights while they were recording, and we thought it was terribly avant-garde. So we used to steal them and use them during our sessions.”

  The group’s recording of “The Dick Barton Theme (The Devil’s Gallop)” would be released the following February on Decca, with a standard 12-bar blues entitled “Breakdown Blues” as the B-side. As always, the disc failed to chart.

  Though unsuccessful in its own right, the Bread & Beer Band would prove the start of a secondary musical life for Elton. Lasting well into 1970, in fact, he would pick up an enormous amount of session work on budget “sound-alike” recordings for labels such as Avenue, Music For Pleasure and Pickwick’s Top of the Pops series—budget-priced albums sold in Woolworth’s and supermarkets, with cheeky cheesecake shots of smiling lasses in various stages of undress adorning their lurid covers.

  The songs were recorded across a variety of studios, including Pye Records at Cumberland Place and Decca Studios. Elton would eventually appear on over two dozen such recordings, providing vocally dead-on facsimiles of Cat Stevens’ “Lady D’Arbanville,” White Plains’ “My Baby Loves Lovin’,” Credence Clearwater Revival’s “Travelin’ Band,” and Norman Greenbaum’s “Spirit in the Sky,” among others.

  “They were a blast,” Elton later said of the sessions, which earned him £25 per. “I can remember singing the ‘oohs’ and ‘ahhs’ on a song like ‘(I’ll Be Your) Jack in the Box.’ Just a line like that would set us all off, and we’d have to stop the tapes because we’d all be laughing so hard…Of all the cheapo-cheapo cover albums that were around at that time, the ones we made were by far the best.”

  A new arrival at DJM in the fall of ‘68 was to have a lasting effect on Elton and Bernie’s careers. Steve Brown, a bohemian song-plugger who had been formerly employed at EMI as a promotions man for the Beatles, was brought on as an A&R man. Brown quickly noticed that Elton and Bernie’s idiosyncratic writing voice left them ill-suited for the kind of accessible balladry Dick James expected of them. “We played Steve the commercial stuff we’d written and some of our own stuff,” Elton would tell Playboy in 1975. “[Our songwriting] wasn’t as good as we could do, and [Steve] asked us the reason why. So we told him that half of us wanted to write things that we really wanted to write, while the other half had to do what Dick wanted us to do, and that was write hit songs.”

  Calling the duo’s attempts at commercial hit-making “fucking rubbish,” Brown urged them to forget James’ edict and instead write what they truly wanted to. The point was further driven home when songwriters Roger Cook and Roger Greenaway gave Elton and Bernie similar advice. “You’ve got to quit writing what James wants and start writing the kind of songs you feel,” they told their younger counterparts. “We write formula, but it works for us. Obviously, you guys need to write your own kind of material.’”

  “Roger Cook and Roger Greenaway were very instrumental in helping us get on,” Elton said. “We owe a lot to them.”

  With the words of Cook, Greenaway and Steve Brown echoing in their heads, Elton and Bernie came up with what would prove to be their breakthrough tracks—“Lady Samantha” and “Skyline Pigeon”—that very weekend.

  “From that point on,” Elton said, “we’ve never written a song that we haven’t liked.”

  Freed of any commercial constraints, the songwriters began creating new work at a prolific pace. The pair worked quickly—it only took Bernie an hour to come up with a complete set of lyrics, while Elton composed music to them in half that time.

  “I think that was when the great factory syndrome of our early stuff started,” Bernie said. “We had a bedroom at one end of the apartment and…I used to sit on the edge of the bunk bed writing lyrics. Then I’d walk down the corridor to the living room and put them on [Elton’s] piano and go back and write some more.”

  The duo often tested out their new songs on Elton’s mother.

  “If it was one I cried at,” Sheila said, “they’d say, ‘Well, that’s a winner, we’ll have that one.’”

  Within weeks, Elton and Bernie had amassed an entire LP’s worth of
demos. Recorded at DJM with Clive Franks engineering, the collection—entitled Regimented Sergeant Zippo—was never released. “There’s an entire album no one’s ever heard sitting somewhere,” Clive said. “Maybe it’s better that way.”

  Despondent at the fate of their first would-be album, Elton and Bernie’s spirits were lifted when they ran into Beatles’ icon Paul McCartney at Abbey Road. “We were talking to the Barron Knights,” Bernie said. “Suddenly Paul came in, sat down at the piano, and asked us if we’d like to hear this new thing he’d written. It was ‘Hey Jude’. God, we thought that was just so cool.”

  “It blew my fucking head apart,” Elton said. “That was my first encounter with a Beatle.”

  Inspired by the confidence that radiated off of Paul McCartney, Elton and Bernie decided that “Lady Samantha”—a cinematically expansive ode to a tortured apparition—would become their new single. They turned to Caleb Quaye to help arrange the session. “He asked me if I would record this song with him,” Caleb said. “And could I get a bassist and a drummer? So my job was to put a band together for the single and arrange the music.”

  The musicians—Roger Pope, Tony Murray, and Caleb himself—met up at the DJM studio on October 18. Caleb introduced Roger and Tony to Steve Brown, who had been enlisted to produce the session. “I hadn’t any experience as a producer at all,” he admitted, “but I had been a musician. I played baritone sax for a time with Emile Ford and the Checkmates.”

  Though the team was initially excited at the prospect of working on such wholly original material, a technical problem quickly dampened Elton’s enthusiasm. “The song was in B-flat, and the B-flat of the electric piano that we hired was out-of-tune, so I had to play a song in B-flat without playing the B-flats, which is rather difficult.”