Captain Fantastic: The Definitive Biography of Elton John in the '70s Page 8

  One humid July morning in Essex’s cramped front waiting room, Elton ran into a fellow aspiring songwriter named David Bowie, who was there with his nineteen-year-old girlfriend—and soon to be wife—the statuesque Angela Barnett.

  “Reg was very charming,” Angela said. “When David was talking with Platz, I got to know him a bit. He was very quiet, but if you had patience and were able to draw him out, he became this incredibly witty person. He’d say the most cutting, hilarious things under his breath. Just a very clever young man, with real charisma. I liked him a lot. And when David came out of his meeting, he and Reg talked about what they’d been writing, what they’d been working on. They talked about money and laughed, and asked each other, ‘Are you playing anywhere this week?’ That sort of thing.”

  Though Elton was unable to interest Platz in any of his songs, he did have better luck when he was asked to attend a session at Abbey Road a fortnight later to lay down a keyboard track for the Hollies’ latest single, “He Ain’t Heavy, He’s My Brother.”

  The pianist found the band’s fastidious recording habits bemusing. “They thought they were making art,” he said. “I was just having a good time.”

  The highlight of that rudderless summer of ‘69 came on Sunday, August 31, when Elton, Bernie and Stuart Epps attended Bob Dylan’s Isle of Wight concert in Wooton, where they watched the American folk artist—backed by the Band—work his wayward charms from a distance.

  The songwriters, just two more faces in a sea 150,000-strong, were deeply affected by the concert.

  “We’ve seen God,” Bernie told friends the next day.

  After attending a recording session at South Harrow Market on October 27, and with the 1960s rapidly coming to a less-than-rhapsodic conclusion, Elton picked up a set of egg-stained lyrics that Bernie had written the week before over breakfast, and quickly read them through.

  The lyrics—detailing a poor man’s devotion to his one and only—was entitled “Your Song.”

  “I remember…looking at it and going, ‘Oh my God, this is such a great lyric, I can’t fuck this one up,’” Elton later recalled to Rolling Stone’s Cameron Crowe. “It came out in about twenty minutes.”

  Bernie appreciated his partner’s enthusiasm for his lyrics, though he himself was far less precious about them. “I’ve always said that number sounds like a song about a seventeen-year-old guy who is desperate to get laid,” he said. “Which, at the time, it was.”

  Elton’s unique fusion of classical training and unerring musical instinct provided a strong foundation for the delicate lullaby. “‘Your Song’ is quite a complicated song as far as chord changes go,” he said. “It was my first addiction to writing in the key of E-flat…I knew I’d written something that was really good. And that happens very rarely…You can’t pick those songs out. They just happen.”

  Excited by the artistic potential that “Your Song” represented, Dick James gave the okay for a follow-up album to Empty Sky. By this time, however, it had become apparent to all involved that Steve Brown lacked the top-tier technical skills to do the duo’s work justice. Further evidence of this was provided at a final Brown-helmed session at Olympic Studios, where Elton, Caleb Quaye and others laid stylized, riff-heavy versions of several new songs that were—if not quite lackluster—at least not as innovative as the pianist and his team wished.

  “They were like rock tracks, really,” Stuart Epps said, “with a three-minute ‘Take Me to the Pilot’ having a five-minute guitar solo in it. And it was really a step on from Empty Sky. But Elton had already done these demoes for the songs for the next album, and they were quite sort of classical pieces, really. So anyway, after those sessions, Steve decided he wasn’t good enough to be the producer. That’s how he was. He always wanted the best, even if it didn’t include him.”

  With Brown’s selfless blessing, Elton and Bernie approached famed Beatles producer George Martin. On the strength of a handful of demos, Martin agreed to helm the album—on the condition that he also be allowed to handle the string arrangements as well. This proved a sticking point, for Elton wanted the arranger and producer roles clearly divided. Reluctantly, he passed on Martin’s offer.

  Yet any worries he may have harbored were set forever aside days later, however, when he, Bernie and Steve Brown met curly-haired arranger Paul Buckmaster at a Miles Davis concert at Ronnie Scott’s Jazz Club in London. Brown presented Buckmaster with an open-reel, two-track quarter-inch tape containing demos of “Your Song,” “Take Me to the Pilot” and “Sixty Years On.” The Naples Conservatoire-educated arranger, who had recently scored a modest success arranging David Bowie’s single “Space Oddity,” liked what he heard.

  “The second I heard the tapes I said, ‘This is a whole different story,” Buckmaster said. “This is the game I want to get into.’”

  As for a potential producer, Buckmaster recommended Gus Dudgeon, who had produced “Space Oddity” after Bowie’s usual producer, Tony Visconti, decided the song was merely a novelty and thus not worth his time. Even before the Bowie track, Gus had already enjoyed an eventful career on the British music scene, engineering sessions for the Rolling Stones (“Poison Ivy,” “Fortune Teller”), the Small Faces (“Sha La La La Lee”), the Zombies (“She’s Not There”), Marianne Faithful, and Them, as well as John Mayall’s seminal Blues Breakers with Eric Clapton LP.

  “I was told to get into producing when I was an engineer,” Gus said. “I was doing a session with Andrew Loog Oldham, who used to do all the sessions with the Stones. I guess I was getting kind of lippy on sessions, saying, ‘This isn’t any good.’ I was arguing with producers, which is not a good thing to do. Andrew was leaving the studio and said, ‘Gus, go into production.’ He was the second guy in two months to say it, and I thought, ‘Maybe they’ve got a point.’ And then [Andrew] stuck his head around the corner and said, ‘And get a royalty.’ I had to ask someone else what a royalty was.”

  “We’d heard ‘Space Oddity’, which for me was one of the best records of all time,” Elton said, “and…we knew that we had to get [Gus] to produce the second album.”

  Gus’ office was situated just around the corner from the DJM offices. Elton and Bernie headed over the next afternoon to play several demos for him. “I just couldn’t believe it,” Gus later told Mix Magazine’s Rick Clark. “All of [the songs] floored me. Basically, my prayers were answered. Although I’d had four hits prior to this, it was with four different artists. What I really wanted was an artist that I could work with on a consistent basis. So I was like, ‘Yeah, I’m going to do this.’”

  Despite Gus’ initial flush of excitement, the partnership began inauspiciously. Until the end of their first meeting, in fact, the meticulously dressed producer thought that Bernie was Elton and Elton was Bernie. “I got them completely arse-about-face. Bernie had long hair and he was slim and he looked more like a singer. It was only halfway through that Steve Brown said, ‘Well hang on, Elton…’ and I realized I was looking at completely the wrong guy.” Gus chuckled. “He was very quiet, and Bernie was even quieter. [Elton] always dressed like a traffic light, though.”

  Gus and Paul spent endless hours on the floor of the producer’s office, poring meticulously over every musical passage for the upcoming sessions. Each song was planned out as if it were a mini-film, with its own unique setting and cast of characters. “We had the demos and we had the lyric sheets, and we decided where the drums would come in, what the orchestration would be, what the instrumentation would be,” Buckmaster said. “We approached each song as its own individual entity. And there were no comments at all from Elton’s camp. They had total confidence in what we were doing.”

  Great arrangements didn’t come cheap, however. After triple-checking his estimates, Gus informed Steve Brown that the proposed album would cost an estimated £6,000 to produce—an unheard of amount at the time—and that he demanded full and unquestioned control of the project.

  Much to Steve
Brown’s amazement, Dick James acquiesced to all of Gus’ demands. And so, as the final frozen sunbeams of the 1960s melted into the frosted skyline, Elton and his team were officially in place and ready to attack the coming decade with everything they had.

  Part One:

  Troubadour

  Chapter 1:

  It’s A Little Bit Funny

  A rusted cab rumbled to a stop at 17 St. Anne’s Court, a dented black door creaking open against a hard January wind. Out stepped Elton in a long herringbone coat and black trilby hat. Bernie joined him on the sleet-filled sidewalk a moment later, arms wrapped tightly around his narrow frame.

  “Right on time,” Gus Dudgeon said.

  The two songwriters turned to see the producer smiling warmly from the entrance of Trident Studios.

  Elton nodded to Bernie.

  “Here we go,” he said. “There’s nothing left now but to do it.”

  Sessions for what would eventually become known as the Elton John album began eleven days into the new decade at Trident Studios. The most professionally advanced recording facility in all of London, Trident boasted both an 8-track machine and a state-of-the-art Ampex 3M 16-track system, as well as four massive playback monitors. The studio also featured a felt-lined, leather-covered Bechstein grand, which rang forth with a sharp, rich timbre—ideal for the baroquely classical songs Elton had recently composed. “A lot my songs were influenced by Tchaikovsky,” he said. “The guy was a genius. I like Stravinsky as well. I like lyrical composers, and I think Sibelius and Stravinsky are really good.”

  The plan of attack that Gus Dudgeon and Paul Buckmaster had devised was simple yet formally groundbreaking: to fuse an orchestra onto a rock rhythm section in a wholly convincing way. “What united this diversity,” Buckmaster said, “was the common continuity of all our collaborative efforts from the very beginning. So you have a natural flow, but you treat each song separately. Each one requires its own interpretation and approach.”

  To implement their plan, a twenty-two member orchestra was booked for the sessions. Understanding that they were insufficient to properly realize the team’s grand vision, Gus booked a handful of additional musicians, swelling the orchestral ranks to thirty-six. The move caused the album’s initial budget to balloon to well over £9,000. Dick James reluctantly absorbed the cost overrun, hopeful that he had another potential Beatles on his hands.

  Elton was relieved by the show of faith, yet intimidated all the same by the expanded group of professionally trained virtuosos which resulted from James’ largesse. “They had all these brilliant session musicians standing there and I had to play live,” the pianist said. “I was shitting. There I was, with all these string players who could really read music, and if I made a mistake that means they went, ‘Oh God, it’s back to looking at the newspapers.’ It was a real nightmare.”

  To further fill out the sonic landscape, the orchestra was augmented by Blue Mink’s drummer, Barry Morgan, bassist Herbie Flowers, and guitarist Alan Parker. Caleb Quaye was also on hand to lend his sterling fret work to a few of the more rock-edged tracks, which he had helped flesh out with Elton. “He would sit down and run through a song in the studio and I would just sit there and play along with acoustic guitar,” Caleb later told journalist James Turano. “I’m also a piano player myself, so there would be a lot of contextualizing. I’d eyeball what [chord] inversions he was using and sort of match that on the guitar, just to create this complementary sound. We didn’t want the piano and the guitar to sound like two mutually exclusive things.”

  Each song was recorded live, in multiple 3-hour sessions which ran from ten a.m. till two p.m., four p.m. till six p.m., and seven p.m. until ten p.m. “We had to record three songs per session, because they [the orchestra] cost so much,” Elton said. “Absolutely fucking terrifying.”

  “Take Me to the Pilot” was the first song attempted. Bernie’s lyrics for the piano-based rocker were a reflective hodgepodge inspired by Michael Moorcock’s science fiction novel, Behold the Man. “That song means fuck-all, it doesn’t mean anything,” he admitted. “That song proves what you can get away with.’”

  Gus implored Buckmaster to write more cello parts for the track, to underscore the half-time beat on the chorus, thus providing the song with a uniquely distinctive flavor.

  “But that many cellos will get lost,” Buckmaster argued.

  “No, they won’t,” Gus countered. “Because if we pitch them in the right register, they’re going to be perfectly audible. I can promise you that.”

  Buckmaster complied, dutifully writing out a powerfully linear, Dvorak-influenced arrangement which featured banks of cellos playing in unison. “[‘Take Me to the Pilot’ has] a lot of stuff happening at the bottom of the spectrum,” the arranger said. “There are only cellos in the orchestral part of that track, although at the climaxes they play towards the high-end of their range…I asked for the cellos to be phased on that. We [then] tape-flanged them.” Given the extra focus the track required, it soon became one of the arranger’s personal favorites. “It has this tremendous humorous quality to it. There’s a wide range of emotional expression in it. It’s just wonderful.”

  Though Elton had supreme confidence in his arranger, he wasn’t quite as convinced about studio bassist Alan Weighall, who played on the track. “I took one look at the bass player and he was bald,” Elton said, “and so I had this phobia about him not being able to play funky bass. But things turned out okay.”

  “It was a great team,” Caleb said. “Not just the musicians, but Gus Dudgeon was the perfect producer for that period of time, along with the first engineer, Robin Geoffrey Cable, who was a brilliant engineer. Gus and Robin were just a great production and sound-engineering team.”

  With “Take Me to the Pilot” in the can, the team turned their attention to “Border Song,” a fractured mood piece which Elton and Bernie were particularly keen on. “It’s written in two parts,” the lyricist said, “which is why it’s always seemed split up to me. The first part is a gotta-get-back-to-where-I-come-from song. The second part is a peace song. We just stuck it in for no reason. We do things like that.”

  The lyrical schizophrenia derived, in part, from the fact that Elton had taken over lyrical chores for the brotherhood-theme final verse, which he’d written specifically with Caleb Quaye—a Brit of West African ancestry—in mind.

  Though Elton deemed his lyrical efforts “very mundane,” Bernie was less critical, noting that “the great thing about Elton’s last verse was that he tried to put it all into perspective.”

  Barbara Moore ended up arranging the choir vocals on the track. “My phone goes, and it’s Reg,” she recalled years later. “He wanted a choir, a very large choir. He said, ‘I want you to do the arrangement, and it’s the song you like, ‘Border Song.’ And that was it. He came over to my home and we ran through it, and I did the chart exactly to his specifications, and it was part of the recording sessions, and it was a success. And that was just the beginning of a long friendship. And he actually ended up offering me the job as his musical director on his first tour, but I had a little girl of six years of age at the time, so I had to turn it down. I just couldn’t leave my little one behind and go off travling. So I stayed on in England. But all these years we’ve kept in touch, and every Christmas I get a beautiful card from him.”

  After recording “Border Song” in two takes, the mood lightened significantly with an exuberant jam on the raucous Jerry Lee Lewis homage, “Rock ‘n’ Roll Madonna.” Feeling the finished track was “missing an element or two,” Gus turned the recording into a quasi-live track by adding audience cheers and clapping from Jimi Hendrix’s Royal Albert Hall concert from the year before. “There was just something about [the song],” the producer said. “It had basically a loose feel to it, very much like a live recording would…It was really done sort of tongue-in-cheek. I never meant for anyone to think it was a real audience. It was meant as sort of a cartoon
audience.”

  The team next set their sights on the sweeping grandeur of “Sixty Years On,” a Spanish guitar-laced lament of a young man who rejects the warring ways of a blinded mercenary thrice his age.

  The song would prove one of Paul Buckmaster’s crowning glories.

  “I transcribed the piano part for harp on ‘Sixty Years On’,” the arranger said. “We had piano on every frigging track, and we wanted to do something different here. So I transcribed almost note-for-note, but changed a few notes, just to suit my tastes. And we decided there’d be no rhythm section on that. It would just be strings, vocals, harp, acoustic guitar. And at the end we introduced a Hammond organ playing a little countermelody.”

  Every bar of the sweeping opus was prearranged—except for the iconic rising string tone cluster which opened the track. “We were recording the strings when the 8-track machine broke down,” Buckmaster said. “And then came the call from the control room from engineer Geoffrey Robin Cable, saying, ‘Hey guys, can you relax for five minutes? We had a machine breakdown.’ And I turned to the orchestra and asked, ‘Do you want a break?’ And they said, ‘No, no, we’ll wait, it’ll only take a few minutes.’ So I said, ‘Okay, let’s have a bit of fun.’ And I told each musician, ‘You play this note, you play this note, you play that note. I’ll feed you in, I’ll indicate when I want you to start vibrating wildly, in exaggerated vibrato.’ And so I did. Because I’d just been listening to this great Polish conductor called Krzysztof Penderetsky—especially Polymorphia—and I wanted to try it out myself, so I took this opportunity. Unbeknownst to me, the machine had been fixed and was now operating, and Gus and Robin had recorded what we were doing. Afterward, I attended the mix for ‘Sixty Years On’, which was supposed to start with the harp, and—unbeknownst to me—Gus had tagged that rising cluster onto the front. And when I heard it, I was very pissed-off. Because that was not how I’d conceived the arrangement at all. But he did that, and you know what? He was right. I quickly got accustomed to it, and I thought it was a great idea in the end.”