There’s an incident from early on in Elton John’s career that reminds us how peculiar it has been. The year was 1970. John’s first album, Empty Sky, had been released in the U.K. but had gone nowhere. His label, supportive of him in fits and starts, eventually laid out for a decent producer and some lush orchestrations for his second album, which was self-titled and came out that spring. Today, we know Elton John as a lasting and flamboyant star; put that aside for right now and remember that back then, no one was thinking in those terms about the plainly talented but pudgy and somewhat morose 22-year-old they were working with at the time. The first single from Elton John, “Border Song,” was a flop. The label’s next move, for some reason, was to dig out a non-album track and release it as the second single, hoping to garner more attention that way. That release, “Rock and Roll Madonna,” went nowhere, either. The label went back to the album, poked around some more, and made a third try, with “Take Me to the Pilot.”
It wasn’t a hit.
By this time, other things were going on in John’s career. The shy boy behind the scenes found a raucous personality on stage; he and a small band had flown to America and had wowed the industry with a cacophonous six-night stand at the famous Troubadour nightclub in L.A. And by this time, John had finished a third album, Tumbleweed Connection, which was released that October.
That’s when something interesting happened. Late in the year, some radio DJs checked out the B-side of the “Pilot” single, which was a throwaway track from the Elton John album. They began to play it. This was not typical at the time. The B-side was a forlorn-sounding piano-based track.
The first words of the song went, “It’s a little bit funny / This feeling inside …”
A few months later, in early 1971, nearly a year after the release of the album, the B-side was a top-ten hit both in the U.S. and in the U.K. The track, “Your Song,” is a standard today, nearly 50 years on; it is one of the most played radio singles of all time, and has been covered by scores of artists, perhaps hundreds. But isn’t it weird that no one — label execs, marketers, or journos — thought it was a single back then, or even notable? For some reason, even experienced music industry people at the time couldn’t “hear” the song.
In some fundamental way, “Your Song” was unusual. The melody is sturdy, of course, and the chorus is plainly as lovely as can be, but there was something about its formal presentation — coursing strings, a prominent, tasteful bass, a subtle but insistent set of piano fills — that wasn’t registering. Maybe it just wasn’t cool enough. As for the lyrics, their premise — “I’m writing a song about writing a song for you” — has some remote Cole Porter overtones, I guess, but there’s nothing droll or arch about it; indeed, if anything, it suffers from over-sincerity. It was the end of the psychedelic era, remember, and the more somber singer-songwriters had their roots in folk and blues. “Your Song” is arguably a traditional pop ballad, but it’s conceived and performed with a somewhat shambling but definite rock-and-roll authenticity. The writing is elegant and prosaic at the same time; are the lyrics conversational and halting, or exquisitely crafted to sound that way? I think, in 1970, the people first confronted by the song couldn’t process what is, for us, today, its patent brilliance, because they hadn’t heard a song like it before. It’s familiar to us today, because we live in a world that Elton John has made his own.
Indeed, to many, John is a bit too obvious, now: the teddy-bear pop-rock star, the burbling sidekick of royalty, the aging, bewigged gay icon. But that cozy mien has always hidden something uncompromising and a bit strange underneath. He is a dubious figure set against the high intellectualism of Joni Mitchell, say, or the assuredly more dangerous work of Lou Reed, or that of Bowie, and on and on. But in his own way, originally, and then definitely as his acclaim grew, he found his own distinctive passage through the apocalypse of the post-Beatles pop landscape — and offered us ever more ambitious pop constructions, culminating in some sort of weird masterpiece, Goodbye Yellow Brick Road, and then an odd autobiographical song cycle, Captain Fantastic and the Brown Dirt Cowboy, in which he looked back to examine his life and the years of insecurity preceding his stardom.
Those were his artistic achievements. His commercials ones were even bigger. Bowie looms large in rock history now, but in the U.S., in the early ’70s, he was nothing close to a star. John famously took sartorial flamboyance to almost transvestite levels but was treated as a curiosity, and never registered as transgressive. He had seven No. 1 albums in a row in the U.S. These albums, in a three-and-a-half-year period, spent a total of 39 weeks at No. 1, a bit less than a quarter of that overall span. By Billboard’s rankings, he is by far the biggest album act of the 1970s (despite the fact that he didn’t have a top-ten album after 1976). He is also Billboard’s biggest singles act of the decade, and the magazine’s third-biggest singles artist of all time, with nine No. 1 singles and 27 top-ten hits, which is a lot. In all, he’s sold more than 150 million albums and 100 million singles.
Fifty years into his career, John has embarked on what is supposed to be his absolutely final Farewell-Good-bye-I’m-Retiring-I-Really-Mean-It Tour. The first time he announced his final show, for those keeping score, was in 1976. “Who wants to be a 45-year-old entertainer in Las Vegas like Elvis?” he said at the time. (He played his 449th and 450th Las Vegas shows, supposedly his final ones, this May, at the age of 71.) The new tour began in Allentown and Philadelphia and will come to Madison Square Garden on October 18 and 19, and then again on November 8 and 9 — after which the Farewell Yellow Brick Road tour has shows scheduled through 2019.
But for the record, it should be said that if there is one thing John is not, it’s obvious. He doesn’t write his own lyrics; he has spoken to us, if he has at all, through the words of other lyricists, most prominently Bernie Taupin, with whom he formed a songwriting partnership in 1967 that lasted through the entirety of his classic years. Over the decades, the themes and subjects of Taupin’s words have benignly reflected onto the singer’s persona, even though we have no reason to think they accurately represent it. And John’s songwriting process make their significance even more obscure. The pair didn’t (and still don’t) work together; instead, John walks off with Taupin’s scrawls and, with uncanny speed and focus, makes the songs he wants out of them. (Band members and producers over the years have testified that the composition of some of his most famous works was accomplished in 15 or 20 minutes.) In effect, he has always made Taupin’s words mean what he wants them to mean, giving himself the room to identify with or distance himself from them at will. In other words, if you think you know Elton John through his songs — you don’t.
It wasn’t a hit.
By this time, other things were going on in John’s career. The shy boy behind the scenes found a raucous personality on stage; he and a small band had flown to America and had wowed the industry with a cacophonous six-night stand at the famous Troubadour nightclub in L.A. And by this time, John had finished a third album, Tumbleweed Connection, which was released that October.
That’s when something interesting happened. Late in the year, some radio DJs checked out the B-side of the “Pilot” single, which was a throwaway track from the Elton John album. They began to play it. This was not typical at the time. The B-side was a forlorn-sounding piano-based track.The first words of the song went, “It’s a little bit funny / This feeling inside …”
A few months later, in early 1971, nearly a year after the release of the album, the B-side was a top-ten hit both in the U.S. and in the U.K. The track, “Your Song,” is a standard today, nearly 50 years on; it is one of the most played radio singles of all time, and has been covered by scores of artists, perhaps hundreds. But isn’t it weird that no one — label execs, marketers, or journos — thought it was a single back then, or even notable? For some reason, even experienced music industry people at the time couldn’t “hear” the song.
In some fundamental way, “Your Song” was unusual. The melody is sturdy, of course, and the chorus is plainly as lovely as can be, but there was something about its formal presentation — coursing strings, a prominent, tasteful bass, a subtle but insistent set of piano fills — that wasn’t registering. Maybe it just wasn’t cool enough. As for the lyrics, their premise — “I’m writing a song about writing a song for you” — has some remote Cole Porter overtones, I guess, but there’s nothing droll or arch about it; indeed, if anything, it suffers from over-sincerity. It was the end of the psychedelic era, remember, and the more somber singer-songwriters had their roots in folk and blues. “Your Song” is arguably a traditional pop ballad, but it’s conceived and performed with a somewhat shambling but definite rock-and-roll authenticity. The writing is elegant and prosaic at the same time; are the lyrics conversational and halting, or exquisitely crafted to sound that way? I think, in 1970, the people first confronted by the song couldn’t process what is, for us, today, its patent brilliance, because they hadn’t heard a song like it before. It’s familiar to us today, because we live in a world that Elton John has made his own.
Indeed, to many, John is a bit too obvious, now: the teddy-bear pop-rock star, the burbling sidekick of royalty, the aging, bewigged gay icon. But that cozy mien has always hidden something uncompromising and a bit strange underneath. He is a dubious figure set against the high intellectualism of Joni Mitchell, say, or the assuredly more dangerous work of Lou Reed, or that of Bowie, and on and on. But in his own way, originally, and then definitely as his acclaim grew, he found his own distinctive passage through the apocalypse of the post-Beatles pop landscape — and offered us ever more ambitious pop constructions, culminating in some sort of weird masterpiece, Goodbye Yellow Brick Road, and then an odd autobiographical song cycle, Captain Fantastic and the Brown Dirt Cowboy, in which he looked back to examine his life and the years of insecurity preceding his stardom.
Those were his artistic achievements. His commercials ones were even bigger. Bowie looms large in rock history now, but in the U.S., in the early ’70s, he was nothing close to a star. John famously took sartorial flamboyance to almost transvestite levels but was treated as a curiosity, and never registered as transgressive. He had seven No. 1 albums in a row in the U.S. These albums, in a three-and-a-half-year period, spent a total of 39 weeks at No. 1, a bit less than a quarter of that overall span. By Billboard’s rankings, he is by far the biggest album act of the 1970s (despite the fact that he didn’t have a top-ten album after 1976). He is also Billboard’s biggest singles act of the decade, and the magazine’s third-biggest singles artist of all time, with nine No. 1 singles and 27 top-ten hits, which is a lot. In all, he’s sold more than 150 million albums and 100 million singles.
Fifty years into his career, John has embarked on what is supposed to be his absolutely final Farewell-Good-bye-I’m-Retiring-I-Really-Mean-It Tour. The first time he announced his final show, for those keeping score, was in 1976. “Who wants to be a 45-year-old entertainer in Las Vegas like Elvis?” he said at the time. (He played his 449th and 450th Las Vegas shows, supposedly his final ones, this May, at the age of 71.) The new tour began in Allentown and Philadelphia and will come to Madison Square Garden on October 18 and 19, and then again on November 8 and 9 — after which the Farewell Yellow Brick Road tour has shows scheduled through 2019.
But for the record, it should be said that if there is one thing John is not, it’s obvious. He doesn’t write his own lyrics; he has spoken to us, if he has at all, through the words of other lyricists, most prominently Bernie Taupin, with whom he formed a songwriting partnership in 1967 that lasted through the entirety of his classic years. Over the decades, the themes and subjects of Taupin’s words have benignly reflected onto the singer’s persona, even though we have no reason to think they accurately represent it. And John’s songwriting process make their significance even more obscure. The pair didn’t (and still don’t) work together; instead, John walks off with Taupin’s scrawls and, with uncanny speed and focus, makes the songs he wants out of them. (Band members and producers over the years have testified that the composition of some of his most famous works was accomplished in 15 or 20 minutes.) In effect, he has always made Taupin’s words mean what he wants them to mean, giving himself the room to identify with or distance himself from them at will. In other words, if you think you know Elton John through his songs — you don’t.
by Bill Wyman, Vulture | Read more:
Image: Jack Robinson/Condé Nast via Getty Images
