Me by Elton John
Macmillan, 376 pp., £25, October, 978 1 5098 5331 1
Elton John was born Reg Dwight in 1947 in the north-west London suburb of Pinner. His mother was a nightmare, his father a bully. He was a boy who did not start thinking about sex until he was 21. While he shared an interest in football with his father – they both supported Watford – his father didn’t approve of his taste in music. From early on, Reg loved shopping and acquiring things. Like many of his generation, he found his first glimmer of true happiness in record shops on Saturdays, flicking through all the new releases, finding a life in them that was, for him, unimaginable in its glamour and its excitement. Even when he grew famous, he never stopped remembering that his nose had spent time up against the window of this world. It filled him with wonder and surprise when he escaped and got to perform with and befriend singers whose music he was crazy about.
While his mother emerges in Me, his memoir, as one of the sourest people who ever walked the earth, she plays a heroic role at the beginning by introducing her only child to the music she loved. After work on Fridays, she often bought a new 78, enjoying the sound of big band and some American singers. One week she brought home a record by Elvis Presley. Her son already knew the name: the previous weekend in the local barber’s he had come across a photo of the ‘most bizarre-looking man I’d ever seen. Everything about him looked extraordinary: his clothes, his hair, even the way he was standing.’
Reg’s parents were a war couple. His dad was an amateur trumpet-player who spotted his mother in the audience one night. ‘They were both stubborn and short-tempered,’ he writes, ‘two delightful characteristics that it’s been my huge good fortune to inherit. I’m not sure if they ever really loved each other ... The rows were endless.’ Since his father remained in the army after the war, Reg was brought up mostly by his mother and his grandmother, living in fear of his mother’s moods, the ‘awful, glowering, miserable silences that descended on the house without warning ... she always seemed to be looking for a reason not to be happy.’ She had unusual views on potty- training, he tells us, ‘hitting me with a wire brush until I bled if I didn’t use the potty’. She also had strong views on constipation: ‘She laid me on the draining-board in the kitchen and stuck carbolic soap up my arse.’
The young Reg didn’t like himself: ‘I was too fat, I was too short, my face just looked weird, my hair would never do what I wanted it to.’ As his parents fought, he found solace in his bedroom, where everything was kept in perfect order. He began to study the singles charts, ‘then compiling the results, averaging them out into a personal chart of charts. I’ve always been a statistics freak ... I’m just an anorak.’
He began to take piano lessons, studied at the Royal Academy of Music, and eventually started playing in a bar, becoming fascinated by Little Richard and Jerry Lee Lewis. He got a Saturday job to fund his record-buying habit. As he became more involved with what was happening in music, he was aware that the older generation was not amused. ‘People fucking hated it. And no one hated it more than my father ... he thought the whole thing was morally wrong.’ Then his parents split up and his mother found a new partner whom Reg called Derf. In their two-bedroom flat, Reg acquired an electric piano and joined a band called Bluesology. They released two singles; neither was a success, but even so they were asked to be the support act for groups and singers whose names they recognised. ‘The whole thing was a dream come true for me. I was playing with artists whose records I collected.’ Even when the band went to Hamburg in 1966 and played at the Top Ten Club on the Reeperbahn, where the Beatles had played, Reg, aged 19, kept his innocence: ‘I barely drank and I still wasn’t interested in sex ... I had no idea about penetration, no idea what a blowjob was ... There I was, in one of Europe’s most notorious fleshpots ... All I cared about was playing and going to German record shops. I was totally absorbed by music. I was incredibly ambitious.’
He decided to become a solo artist and changed his name to Elton John. In 1967, he made the mistake of singing a Jim Reeves song (‘He’ll Have to Go’) at an audition for a new, progressive label. The offices, he noticed, were chaos. ‘There were piles of reel-to-reel tapes and hundreds of envelopes everywhere.’ The manager ‘seemed to pull an envelope out at random, just to give me something to take away, so the meeting didn’t feel like a dead loss ... That envelope had my future in it: everything that’s happened to me since happened because of what it contained.’ The envelope contained some lyrics by a songwriter called Bernie Taupin from Owmby-by-Spital in Lincolnshire. He was 17 years old and ‘long-haired, very handsome, very well read, a huge Bob Dylan fan’.
Taupin moved in with the singer previously known as Reg; they slept in bunk beds in the second bedroom of the flat owned by Reg’s mother and her new husband in Frome Court in Pinner. ‘We would spend the days writing,’ Elton remembers, ‘Bernie tapping out lyrics on a typewriter in the bedroom, bringing them to me at the upright piano in the living room ... If we weren’t writing, we spent all our time together, in record shops, at the cinema.’ (...)
Elton and Bernie worked fast: ‘Bernie got the lyrics to “Your Song” over breakfast one morning in Frome Court, handed them to me and I wrote the music in 15 minutes flat.’ He didn’t go around with melodies in his head. ‘I don’t even think about songwriting when I’m not actually doing it. Bernie writes the words, gives them to me, I read them, play a chord and something else takes over, something comes through my fingers.’ They made the album Elton John in four days and it appeared in 1970. The reviews were good. Famous singers, such as Pete Townsend, Jeff Beck and Dusty Springfield, began to turn up at Elton’s gigs to check him and his band out. The album’s cover photo showed a moody, nerdy-looking guy with glasses; his face was lit, but the space around him was black. He could easily have been someone’s answer to Leonard Cohen, the songwriter as lonely, fucked-up guy. He looked like a recluse, introspective, overeducated; his voice sounded weird, the accent fake American. At the time, it took me ages to work out that the opening two words of ‘Border Song’ were ‘Holy Moses’. He had sort of chewed them before he sang them. It was hard to make them out.
No one was sure where to place him. In Paris, when he supported Sérgio Mendes, he was booed off. In London, he played at the Royal Albert Hall supporting Fotheringay, the band formed by Sandy Denny in 1970. ‘They thought they were getting a sensitive singer-songwriter,’ Elton writes, ‘and instead they got rock’n’roll and Mr Freedom clothes and handstands on the piano keyboard. They couldn’t follow us: we had so much adrenaline ... I felt terrible. Sandy Denny was one of my heroes ... I scuttled home, absolutely mortified, before they came on stage.’
Between the album’s release and the Albert Hall concert, Elton had been in America. Before he set out, he’d found a clothes shop in Chelsea called Mr Freedom: ‘The stuff in the window was so outrageous that I hung around on the pavement outside for ages, trying to pluck up the courage to go in.’ When he played the Troubadour in LA, ‘the audience was greeted by the sight of a man in bright yellow dungarees, a long-sleeved T-shirt covered in stars and a pair of heavy workman’s boots, also bright yellow, with a large set of blue wings sprouting from them. This was not the way sensitive singer-songwriters in America in 1970 looked.’ (...)
Elton began to enjoy parties. ‘Life was heaven. I was finally able to be who I was, to have no fear about myself, to have no fear about sex. I mean it in the nicest possible way when I say John taught me how to be debauched.’ He got to meet all sorts of people, including Neil Young – who performed his forthcoming album, Harvest, at a party in John’s house – and Brian Wilson of the Beach Boys, who, when Elton went to see him, sang the chorus of ‘Your Song’ (‘I hope you don’t mind/I hope you don’t mind’) over and over. ‘By now, the novelty of hearing the chorus of “Your Song” sung to me by one of pop history’s true geniuses was beginning to wear a little thin.’
In the last months of 1970, Elton went to a party at Mama Cass Elliot’s house in LA to find many of his favourite singers present. ‘They were all there. It was nuts, like the record sleeves in the bedroom at Frome Court had come to life: what the fuck is happening?’
by Colm Tóibín, LRB | Read more:
Macmillan, 376 pp., £25, October, 978 1 5098 5331 1
Elton John was born Reg Dwight in 1947 in the north-west London suburb of Pinner. His mother was a nightmare, his father a bully. He was a boy who did not start thinking about sex until he was 21. While he shared an interest in football with his father – they both supported Watford – his father didn’t approve of his taste in music. From early on, Reg loved shopping and acquiring things. Like many of his generation, he found his first glimmer of true happiness in record shops on Saturdays, flicking through all the new releases, finding a life in them that was, for him, unimaginable in its glamour and its excitement. Even when he grew famous, he never stopped remembering that his nose had spent time up against the window of this world. It filled him with wonder and surprise when he escaped and got to perform with and befriend singers whose music he was crazy about.
While his mother emerges in Me, his memoir, as one of the sourest people who ever walked the earth, she plays a heroic role at the beginning by introducing her only child to the music she loved. After work on Fridays, she often bought a new 78, enjoying the sound of big band and some American singers. One week she brought home a record by Elvis Presley. Her son already knew the name: the previous weekend in the local barber’s he had come across a photo of the ‘most bizarre-looking man I’d ever seen. Everything about him looked extraordinary: his clothes, his hair, even the way he was standing.’
Reg’s parents were a war couple. His dad was an amateur trumpet-player who spotted his mother in the audience one night. ‘They were both stubborn and short-tempered,’ he writes, ‘two delightful characteristics that it’s been my huge good fortune to inherit. I’m not sure if they ever really loved each other ... The rows were endless.’ Since his father remained in the army after the war, Reg was brought up mostly by his mother and his grandmother, living in fear of his mother’s moods, the ‘awful, glowering, miserable silences that descended on the house without warning ... she always seemed to be looking for a reason not to be happy.’ She had unusual views on potty- training, he tells us, ‘hitting me with a wire brush until I bled if I didn’t use the potty’. She also had strong views on constipation: ‘She laid me on the draining-board in the kitchen and stuck carbolic soap up my arse.’The young Reg didn’t like himself: ‘I was too fat, I was too short, my face just looked weird, my hair would never do what I wanted it to.’ As his parents fought, he found solace in his bedroom, where everything was kept in perfect order. He began to study the singles charts, ‘then compiling the results, averaging them out into a personal chart of charts. I’ve always been a statistics freak ... I’m just an anorak.’
He began to take piano lessons, studied at the Royal Academy of Music, and eventually started playing in a bar, becoming fascinated by Little Richard and Jerry Lee Lewis. He got a Saturday job to fund his record-buying habit. As he became more involved with what was happening in music, he was aware that the older generation was not amused. ‘People fucking hated it. And no one hated it more than my father ... he thought the whole thing was morally wrong.’ Then his parents split up and his mother found a new partner whom Reg called Derf. In their two-bedroom flat, Reg acquired an electric piano and joined a band called Bluesology. They released two singles; neither was a success, but even so they were asked to be the support act for groups and singers whose names they recognised. ‘The whole thing was a dream come true for me. I was playing with artists whose records I collected.’ Even when the band went to Hamburg in 1966 and played at the Top Ten Club on the Reeperbahn, where the Beatles had played, Reg, aged 19, kept his innocence: ‘I barely drank and I still wasn’t interested in sex ... I had no idea about penetration, no idea what a blowjob was ... There I was, in one of Europe’s most notorious fleshpots ... All I cared about was playing and going to German record shops. I was totally absorbed by music. I was incredibly ambitious.’
He decided to become a solo artist and changed his name to Elton John. In 1967, he made the mistake of singing a Jim Reeves song (‘He’ll Have to Go’) at an audition for a new, progressive label. The offices, he noticed, were chaos. ‘There were piles of reel-to-reel tapes and hundreds of envelopes everywhere.’ The manager ‘seemed to pull an envelope out at random, just to give me something to take away, so the meeting didn’t feel like a dead loss ... That envelope had my future in it: everything that’s happened to me since happened because of what it contained.’ The envelope contained some lyrics by a songwriter called Bernie Taupin from Owmby-by-Spital in Lincolnshire. He was 17 years old and ‘long-haired, very handsome, very well read, a huge Bob Dylan fan’.
Taupin moved in with the singer previously known as Reg; they slept in bunk beds in the second bedroom of the flat owned by Reg’s mother and her new husband in Frome Court in Pinner. ‘We would spend the days writing,’ Elton remembers, ‘Bernie tapping out lyrics on a typewriter in the bedroom, bringing them to me at the upright piano in the living room ... If we weren’t writing, we spent all our time together, in record shops, at the cinema.’ (...)
Elton and Bernie worked fast: ‘Bernie got the lyrics to “Your Song” over breakfast one morning in Frome Court, handed them to me and I wrote the music in 15 minutes flat.’ He didn’t go around with melodies in his head. ‘I don’t even think about songwriting when I’m not actually doing it. Bernie writes the words, gives them to me, I read them, play a chord and something else takes over, something comes through my fingers.’ They made the album Elton John in four days and it appeared in 1970. The reviews were good. Famous singers, such as Pete Townsend, Jeff Beck and Dusty Springfield, began to turn up at Elton’s gigs to check him and his band out. The album’s cover photo showed a moody, nerdy-looking guy with glasses; his face was lit, but the space around him was black. He could easily have been someone’s answer to Leonard Cohen, the songwriter as lonely, fucked-up guy. He looked like a recluse, introspective, overeducated; his voice sounded weird, the accent fake American. At the time, it took me ages to work out that the opening two words of ‘Border Song’ were ‘Holy Moses’. He had sort of chewed them before he sang them. It was hard to make them out.
No one was sure where to place him. In Paris, when he supported Sérgio Mendes, he was booed off. In London, he played at the Royal Albert Hall supporting Fotheringay, the band formed by Sandy Denny in 1970. ‘They thought they were getting a sensitive singer-songwriter,’ Elton writes, ‘and instead they got rock’n’roll and Mr Freedom clothes and handstands on the piano keyboard. They couldn’t follow us: we had so much adrenaline ... I felt terrible. Sandy Denny was one of my heroes ... I scuttled home, absolutely mortified, before they came on stage.’
Between the album’s release and the Albert Hall concert, Elton had been in America. Before he set out, he’d found a clothes shop in Chelsea called Mr Freedom: ‘The stuff in the window was so outrageous that I hung around on the pavement outside for ages, trying to pluck up the courage to go in.’ When he played the Troubadour in LA, ‘the audience was greeted by the sight of a man in bright yellow dungarees, a long-sleeved T-shirt covered in stars and a pair of heavy workman’s boots, also bright yellow, with a large set of blue wings sprouting from them. This was not the way sensitive singer-songwriters in America in 1970 looked.’ (...)
Elton began to enjoy parties. ‘Life was heaven. I was finally able to be who I was, to have no fear about myself, to have no fear about sex. I mean it in the nicest possible way when I say John taught me how to be debauched.’ He got to meet all sorts of people, including Neil Young – who performed his forthcoming album, Harvest, at a party in John’s house – and Brian Wilson of the Beach Boys, who, when Elton went to see him, sang the chorus of ‘Your Song’ (‘I hope you don’t mind/I hope you don’t mind’) over and over. ‘By now, the novelty of hearing the chorus of “Your Song” sung to me by one of pop history’s true geniuses was beginning to wear a little thin.’
In the last months of 1970, Elton went to a party at Mama Cass Elliot’s house in LA to find many of his favourite singers present. ‘They were all there. It was nuts, like the record sleeves in the bedroom at Frome Court had come to life: what the fuck is happening?’
Image: Wikipedia
