elton john : the death and rebirth of a superstar

     I'm sitting in my bedroom right now, listening to a CD of Elton John's 1971 album Tumbleweed Connection. For those familiar only with the newly metamorphosed Elton - who has assumed his role as Gayest Man On Earth, and fills the duties thereof with aplomb, the album would come as quite a shock. It is, as the title may suggest, a dusty, dry album - with a sound that crackles with kinetic energy, fuelled by the energetic and muscular piano work of Mr. Dwight, and the buttery sound of a harem of gospel backup singers. To be honest with you, I pity the younger listener; the listener who doesn't remember an age in which the venerable Reginald Dwight (a.k.a Elton Hercules John) had not yet been transformed from a simple rock and roll star into something far more insidious. Something evil. The Elton John Machine has been running on autopilot for about twenty years now - the on switch having been flipped sometime around the release of 1979's 'Blue Moves' - an album which shows the seeds of Elton's demise being sown. Obvious, over-accessible, and proving that Elton was writing with none of the sensitivity or melancholia that marked his best work of the early 1970's, this was not the Elton of old - but was a beast who seemed to be aiming for the top of the charts with increasingly laser-like precision, even at the expense of the few shreds of tattered credibility that he had maintained during the seventies. Victim Of Love, and the made-to-order MOR hit ‘Little Jeanie’ were the final nails in the coffin – our ‘piano man who makes a stand’ was well and truly an accessory of the looming age of Corporate Rock – music by companies, tailor made for consumers; a situation who’s effects are still being forced to suffer to this day. By the time the eighties rolled around Elton, like his brothers-in-arms Rod Stewart, Joe Cocker, Paul McCartney et. al – was churning out middle of the road dreck like 'Nikita', and 'Sad Songs', in between bouts of golf and hobnobbing with a-list celebrities.

    But it wasn't always like that, was it? Of course not. If we can cast our minds back to sometime in early 1970, the singer-songwriter Elton John and his loquacious offsider Bernie Taupin were riding the crest of a wave that had begun with the loathsome 'Your Song'. A track which was about to pummel the airwaves for the next thirty years, it isn't even the best song of the Elton John album - that honor going to the nervy, enigmatic Take Me To The Pilot - a staple of what can be considered the start of Elton's 'classic period', and which turns up in a superior live cut on the 11-7-70 album. 11-7-70 is a live album featuring music from his first two albums; It's a spotty record - with a groan-inducing cover of Honky Tonk Woman that nobody in their right mind asked for, and an endless, tedious medley of Burn Down The Mission, My Baby Left Me, and Get Back. Boring stuff. It's not all bad news, though, as we are treated to a breathless, breakneck rendition of the aforementioned Take Me To The Pilot, in which the band seems to be having difficulty keeping up with Elton's manic piano playing - and the haunting, dramatic Sixty Years On, one of the young Elton's many forgotten classics.

    I digress, though. What I really want to talk about is the duet of classics that Elton released in 1971 - Tumbleweed Connection and Madman Across The Water. First of all, before all you cooler-than-thou Generation X/Y snobs start poo-poo'ing the idea that Uncle Elton could drop the eyeliner and Donald Duck outfits for three seconds and actually contribute something to rock and roll that is worth listening to - I must demand your silence, and your fucking respect - for we're about to go on an important journey. We're going to revisit the wigless young Elton, and the pompous young Bernie. A kindler, simpler time - the chilly winter of 1971.

    Elton and Bernie don't meet your gaze when you run your eyes across the sepia-tinged cover of Tumbleweed Connection. They don't have to. Leaning against the front of a store which could, conceivably, have come out of any western you'd care to mention - they seem to be trying to sink back into the woodwork, a pair of phantoms who aren't so much determined to replicate the sound of the Americana of yore - but to physically embody it. Elton takes this to the logical extreme inside the package, with a photo of himself in period costume, and pictures of the individual band members shot using the same grainy, sepia filter as the cover art. The intentions of the album are pretty obvious - we're about to be taken on a trip through Elton's America - a transient America, which we can assume was witnessed from the windows of tour buses - and an America who's soul is deeply rooted in the imagery of its past. Surprisingly, however - Elton doesn't present us with some kind of unholy marriage between country rock and whiter-than-white glam, which was his bread and butter at this point. No. Instead, we're treated to a lyrical exploration of Americana - with references to guns, latent violence, and the imagery of the south - in My Father's Gun, for example, in which we see a young man's father killed during the Civil War. As he 'laid his broken body down below the southern land' he tells us that 'it wouldn't do to bury him where any Yankee stands'. When he prepares to take his father's place in the battle, he swears that 'from this day on until I die, I'll wear my father's gun'. If we can suspend the dubious verisimilitude of a pair of foppish Brits attempting to empathise with a Confederate soldier, Elton and Bernie really do manage to generate a melancholic - almost apocalyptic atmosphere, with the howling chorus of gospel singers moving from sharp to flat as the chorus spirals upward, and slowly - gently - fading out. Genuinely moving stuff. Not the only thing on the album that is worthy of your undivided attention, though. The father/son theme is given further exploration with the gritty 'Son Of Your Father'. Call me crazy, but I get the feeling that ol' Bernie was attempting to set up some kind of bizarre binary metaphors in the chorus, as he has Elton spitting out the following lines:

    You're the son of your father,

    Try a little bit harder,

    Do for me as he would do for you.

    With blood and water, bricks and mortar,

    He built for you a home

    You're the son of your father,

    So treat me as your own.

    Is Bernie  trying to tell us that sons and fathers ARE the bricks and mortar that construct the family home - a family home that he proceeds to desecrate throughout the album - and, indeed, throughout the following few albums? Perhaps, perhaps not. Taupin is a member of the David Bowie School Of Lyrical Obscurity, in which it all may mean something terribly profound - but, then again, maybe it just sounds cool when sung by a glittery, makeup-festooned fruitcake to an audience of dope fiends in denim bellbottoms. Either way, Son Of Your Father marks one of the early examples of the Young Elton attempting to rawk out, in a way that clearly separates this phase of his career from the later Barry Manilow With A Backbeat that he became.

    For all of Phil Collins' bluster in the Two Rooms documentary about the artistic and philosophical ramifications of 'a cluster of nightjars', Come Down In Time is a soothing, broken-hearted track featuring more of Bernie's complicated, and ultimately frustrating lyrical imagery. As obtuse a love song as you're likely to hear, the gentle descending scales of Elton's piano line invoke the feeling of awaiting a rendezvous with a lover - and hearing her whisper crying out in the night. It is a moment of pause and reflection in an album that seems obsessed with motion - the inner jacket contains photos of trains, steamboats, and Elton and Bernie in transit, photographed gloomily through the window of their tour bus. Despite the western imagery, this is no tawdry cash-in on the totemic mythology of the American west, a'la The Eagles' 'Desperado'. This is, instead, a sincere attempt to capture the resonance of the imagery of Bernie and Elton’s youth – a sepia-toned America, lost in the swirling clouds of dust that emanate from the arid wastelands of the frontier. An America which is strictly attuned to the rural identity – painted in broad, loose brushstrokes of brown and yellow – ruled by the kinetic violence which is illustrated on the album sleeve, through photos of guns and slain Confederate soldiers. In short, the America of the television era – of which Bernie and Elton are most certainly children.

       There is, however, room for pause in the soft, plaintive ‘Love Song’ – sounding like an especially mysterious and dark Neil Young/CS&N track, it is a soaring acoustic piece which does not suffer from the absence of Elton’s piano-work – relying instead on the entwined multi-track vocal harmonies which weave in and out of the delicately plucked notes. It finds Elton in a rare contemplative mood – stripped of the bombast that Paul Buckmaster would later apply to his material – and written in a sad, brokenhearted minor key. It is no accident that the song is the work of Lesley Duncan – a relatively obscure 1970’s singer-songwriter, who works largely in the style of Joni Mitchell – yet whose voice lends itself to a number of prominent 70’s masterworks – such as Pink Floyd’s Dark Side Of The Moon. 

      Tumbleweed Connection’s grand finale is one of the Taupin/John partnership’s first great masterpieces – the epic ‘Burn Down The Mission’. As Elton’s voice ascends into the upper register, backed by a gentle swirl of organ, which builds into a full band backing – the song becomes lyrically apocalyptic, as Taupin keeps with the album’s themes of loss and departure:

      Deep in the woods the squirrels are out today,

      My wife cried when the came to take me away.   

      But what more could I do just to keep her warm?

      Than burn, burn, burn, burn, burn down the mission walls.

      Burn down the mission.

      If we’re gonna stay alive.

      Watch the black smoke fly to heaven,

      See the red flame light the sky.   

      Taupin’s lyrical bleakness, coupled with the upwardly-rising key changes, results in a track which closes the album on an unsettling, grim note. It is one of the peaks of Elton’s career – a track which ends with the musical representation of the locomotive of the cover trailing off into the distance – the tempo galloping madly, as Elton implores us to ‘burn down the mission’. Tumbleweed Connection is, then, a surprising combination of country, blues, and glam pop – which despite the odds stacked against it, works – largely due to the strength of Elton and Bernie’s conviction with regards to the emotional veracity of the concept, and their obvious love and regard for their source material. It is, however, a stage setter for the dark, brooding follow up – Elton’s masterpiece, Madman Across The Water.

                It is an inauspicious enough cover. Very much of the time – the album title and artist name embroidered onto a piece of blue denim. The reverse, the track titled – again, embroidered into a pair of jeans. The cover is misleading – for Elton John’s Madman Across The Water is one of the most unjustly forgotten albums of the 1970’s – and is a seminal work, predating the obsession with madness that would become Pink Floyd’s bread and butter. It is a firm break away from the typical sound that we have come to associate with Elton John – a record that shifts between genres and styles from track to track – proving Elton’s mastery of power-pop, the rock ballad, the confessional, and the spiritual – and is, for me at least, the absolute zenith of his creative powers. 1971 found Elton in a dangerous time – the glam rock that he had come to personify with his flamboyant stage outfits, and blurring of sexuality was being threatened by the new guard; T-Rex, Mott The Hoople, Alice Cooper, Slade, Wizzard, and Sweet to name but a few – bands who appeared publicly with their faces hidden behind a calculatedly applied lather of makeup, sequins, and campy futurism. To avoid becoming rock’s own John Inman, Elton had to think fast – and his response to the sleazy excesses of T-Rex’s Electric Warrior, and Alice Cooper’s brutal, simmering Love It To Death was the Madman Across The Water album – an album designed to combat the outlandish blitzkrieg of controversy stirred up by his contemporaries – and to cement his relevance in a market becoming increasingly saturated by lyrical and sonic decadence. It is not, however, an aural or lyrical attack a’la The Stooges Funhouse – or, indeed, a stab at cultural subversion a’la Alice Cooper’s Billion Dollar Babies. Instead, Elton drew his influences from the blues rock of the preceding Tumbleweed Connection album, yet darkened the tone substantially – employing the grandiose pomp of Paul Buckmaster’s sweeping, cinematic strings. It is, then, an album of piano rock, produced by way of a far more precise and disciplined Phil Spector, with the lyrical acumen of a Neil Young, or Roger Waters. Confronting, without being confrontational – and confessional, without any clear point of reference between song and artist.

      It opens on a fairly restrained note – with what I consider to be one of the absolute highlights of 1970’s pop-balladry, the panoramic, heartbreakingly emotional ‘Tiny Dancer’. You know ‘Tiny Dancer’. It was recently used in Cameron Crowe’s repugnant ode to his own ego ‘Almost Famous’, in which the band of the film – who may or may not be the Allman Bros. – have a little singsong on the tour bus, grinning like stoned chipmunks as they clasp hands and feel the love. Such loathsome revisiting and repositioning of the track aside – it is one of Elton’s most sincere and heartfelt declarations of love in his entire catalogue – Bernie’s lyrics paying homage to his ‘Blue jean baby’, listening to the band and singing the words of the songs to herself. As the song’s central refrain is repeated throughout the songs outro, Bernie pleads with her to ‘hold me closer tiny dancer, count the headlights on the highway, lay me down in sheets of linen, you had a busy day today’ – thus setting up one of the key recurring concepts of the album; that of movement. Like Tumbleweed Connection, Madman Across The Water was recorded between Elton’s relentless tour schedules of the early 70’s, and the strain shows – as he obsesses over leaving, transition, and the endless road of the tour – stretched out in front of him, trailing off into the distance. Endless and oppressive – the road looms over the lyrics of this period – and in ‘Tiny Dancer’ – Bernie has found his saviour. Something to take away the pain of transition and uprooting – solace during the long, punishing nights of the tour. Indeed, in the liner notes for the album the identity of the ‘tiny dancer’ is revealed – a photo of a pretty blonde girl sits beneath the lyrics for the song, captioned ‘With love to Maxine’.

      The album’s pessimism finds its initial voice in ‘Levon’ – a difficult, confusing slice of surrealism, in which Bernie tells the story of a man who was ‘born a pauper to a pawn on a Christmas Day, when the New York Times said God is dead and the war’s begun’. He has a son named ‘Jesus’, who sits by Levon’s balloon stand, dreaming of a time when he may leave – and ‘take a balloon and go sailing while Levon slowly dies’. ‘Levon’ presents a curious case in Elton’s chronology – that of the identity of an ‘Alvin Tostig’, who is referenced in the lyrics of the song, proclaiming that ‘Alvin Tostig has a son today’. Taupin has commented that ‘Alvin Tostig’ was a fictitious name invented by himself for the song, although has admitted that the character is, in fact, Levon’s father. Levon’s son’s grandfather. The grandfather of Jesus – or, God. Theological issues aside, the couplet is made all the more puzzling by the fact that the name ‘Tostig’ references the Earl of Wessex in the 1040’s – Wessex being the birthplace of Mr. Bernie Taupin. If ‘God is dead’, both Levon’s father, and his Father are dead – and, in time, Levon himself will be dead (‘as Levon slowly dies’) – thus returning us to Taupin’s themes of fatherhood and death that were initially explored on Tumbleweed Connection. The death in ‘Levon’ is, however, not the glorious death of battle that a song like ‘My Father’s Gun’ gave us – but is instead the natural passing of generations – and the song has a sad, resolute acceptance. Despite the fact that ‘he shall be Levon, and he shall be a good man’ – even good men die. Just as his father did before him.

      Returning us to far more straightforward lyrical territory is the blues-rock snarl of ‘Razor Face’. Predating Elton and Bernie’s later interests in the ethereal quality of the Hollywood star system, thoroughly addressed in the recently cannibalized ‘Candle In The Wind’, ‘Razor Face’ paints a character study of man who – just like the restless travelers of ‘Tiny Dancer’ – is ‘looking for a place to lay down’. Razor Face, however, is imprisoned in the transience of Tumbleweed Connection – as the song’s narrator asks him ‘how does it feel to know you can’t go home?’. He is described – in one of Bernie’s flashes of lyrical brilliance – as ‘a song on the lips of an ageing star’ – a burned out victim of success. Indeed, the image of the ruined star is central to the themes of both Goodbye Yellow Brick Road – an allusion to the demise of Judy Garland – and Elton’s own Captain Fantastic And The Brown Dirt Cowboy – his last gasp of sheer brilliance, in which he himself plays the role of the ageing icon. ‘Razor Face’ is musically dark – with a gritty, bluesy shuffle played both by Elton and a guesting Rick Wakeman – still a member of The Strawbs, and preparing to ascend the mountain as a member of that defining symbol of 70’s excess and prog-rock experimentalism run amok, Yes. In the end, though – despite Bernie’s obvious despair for the character, he tells us that ‘amazing grace protects you like a glove – and I’ll never learn the reason why I love you Razor Face’. This kind of observational writing seems to suit Taupin well, as he is given the breathing space to create characters and narratives – while retaining a certain confessional angle. A kind of hybrid of Neil Young and Harry Chapin. ‘Razor Face’ works because it manages to generate empathy for what is, essentially, a cracked, damaged character – without being condescending towards that character. It is a quality that carries Taupin’s lyrics throughout the Madman Across The Water album.

      The title track is a mysterious, glittering thing – another highlight – only, this time, Elton’s mood is a frightening one. The track broods and snarls with electricity, as Elton softly growls the opening lines – ‘I can see very well.. there’s a boat on the reef with a broken back and I can see it very well… there’s a joke, and I know it very well.. it’s one of those that I told you long ago – take my word, I’m a madman, don’t you know?’. Buckmaster’s haunting string arrangement is positively cinematic, as Elton recites Taupin’s tale of madness in a creepy, schizophrenic voice that veers crazily between a low, hushed growl, and an acrobatic, upper-register whine. Indeed, the song’s lyrical obsession with mental collapse is a theme that will serve Elton well in the future, as he details his own breakdown in Someone Saved My Life Tonight. Here, though, the song is firmly a character study, rather than a piece of autobiography – much like ‘Razor Face’ before it – yet it has a quality absent from Pink Floyd’s similar themed writing – ‘Madman Across The Water’ is a visual experience, drawing on the central image of a man in a rowboat paddling away across a river, as opposed to the elliptical, prog-inspired surrealism of The Dark Side Of The Moon.

      ‘Indian Sunset’, probably the only low point on the record, is a meandering tale of an Indian brave, desperate to retain the land that has been seized by white settlers. Again, Taupin returns to his themes of dislocation and transience – telling us that ‘there seems no reason why I should carry on. In this land that once was my land, I can’t find a home. It’s lonely and it’s quiet and the horse soldiers are coming, and I think it’s time I strung my bow and ceased my senseless running.” ‘Indian Sunset’ is the flip side of the fallen Confederate soldier of ‘My Father’s Gun’ – the natives are in exactly the same predicament as the white soldiers, and – indeed – as Bernie and Elton themselves – a desperate grab for land that can be transformed into a home; and a need to end the restlessness of a life spent in transit. Musically, ‘Indian Sunset’ is relatively uninteresting – with a fairly unexciting series of melody lines that never quite gel together, despite the desperate, urgent string stabs of Paul Buckmaster.

      ‘Holiday Inn’ puts things back on track, however – with Bernie’s ode to the only home Elton and himself know at the time, that of the endless string of hotels and motels that they encounter on the road. It is a song about the alienation and dislocation of the tour – a lifestyle in which ‘boredom’s a pastime that one soon acquired’, as one sits in the hotel room waiting ‘till the time comes around to pick up your bags and head out of town’. The track is the closest cousin of Tumbleweed Connection on the album, with a slow, steady acoustic backing that erupts into a gospel-inspired chorus, informing us that ‘you ain’t seen nothing till you’ve been in a motel, baby, like the Holiday Inn’, with grim, sardonic humour. The following track, ‘Rotten Peaches’ is – again – the story of a man removed from his home, this time due to imprisonment. He laments his situation with anger – ‘there is no one to hold when you’re sick for your wife’ – and broken resignation – ‘my home is ten thousand, ten thousand miles away, and I guess I won’t see it no more’ – we cannot help but imagine that Bernie is suggesting that he and Elton are ‘imprisoned’ in their own lifestyle, something which is confirmed both on the tragic paen to isolation ‘Rocket Man’, and the Captain Fantastic album. ‘Rotten Peaches’ offers us another gospel workout, and a particularly successful one, with Elton’s bitter, resentful voice being augmented by a choir of black gospel singers – giving the track a muscular punch that much of Madman Across The Water has avoided, in lieu of the delicacy of Buckmaster’s arrangements.

      The bleakness is suspended momentarily in the album’s penultimate track, the anthemic ‘All The Nasties’ – Bernie and Elton’s declaration of independence from their middle-class British backgrounds, asserting that ‘a full-blooded city boy is now a full-blooded city man’. ‘All The Nasties’ is a fairly standard piano ballad – and that doesn’t necessarily make it bad – it is, simply, what it is; until the end of the track, in which a soaring chorus of voices intone softly ‘oh, my soul… oh, my soul…’ – leading into the album’s closer, the depressing ‘Goodbye’. Giving us a hint of the breakdown that Elton will later suffer at the hands of rock excess, ‘Goodbye’ can be read as a suicide note to a lover – as Elton sings gently over a lilting minor-key piano backing ‘I’m sorry I took your time, I am the poem that just doesn’t rhyme, just turn back a page, I’ll waste away, I’ll waste away, I’ll waste away..’

      And then, it is over. The needle returns to the stylus – or, if you’re listening to the compact disc, the digital counters reset, and you are sitting in silence. Madman is a breathtaking record – a work of such resonance and beauty that it can literally knock the wind out of you, your chest tightening and your heartbeat quickening as Elton’s voice coils as tightly as a rattlesnake, before striking without warning into the ascendant choruses that were his trademark at the time. Lyrically, Taupin hits his targets with precision and sensitivity – never falling back on the trend for Zeppelin-esque nonsensical mysticism, or self-indulgent singer-songwriter clichés. He prefers to take an external approach to his characters, filling in the blanks of their back-stories just enough for us to understand who they are, and why we are listening to songs about them. It truly is a very special, transcendent album – and is the absolute antithesis of the public image that Elton John has created for himself in the decades since its release.

      But, alas, all things must pass as a famous Beatle once said, and Elton shortly began crafting a new career for himself – that of a rock Liberace; decadent, needlessly flamboyant and theatrical, and – musically – a panderer to the lowest common denominator, churning out watery, unimaginative MOR hits custom made for listening while shoveling pop tarts into a shopping trolley. Honky Chataeu, while having moments such as ‘Rocket Man’, and the truly wonderful ballad ‘Mona Lisas And Mad Hatters’ is noteworthy for sowing the seeds of Elton’s transformation into piano playing cheesemeister. Don’t Shoot Me, I’m Only The Piano Player continued the trend with the sappy hit ‘Daniel’, and the retro boogie of ‘Crocodile Rock’. Things began to turn ugly somewhere around 1974, with Goodbye Yellow Brick Road – a double album (Why? The Beatles couldn’t even do a double album without filler, why did everybody else think they could do better?) consisting of cheese, showtunes, a few shining moments of genius (‘Benny And The Jets’, ‘Candle In The Wind’), and a rise in vicious misogyny that out woman-hates The Rolling Stones, with tracks like ‘All The Girls Love Annie’ and ‘Sweet Painted Lady’. Caribou is an album soaked in the gin that Elton was very likely spending a lot of time soaking himself in with John Lennon – giving the world his made-for-UNICEF-commercials anthem ‘Don’t Let The Sun Go Down On Me’. As the Elton and Bernie show rolled along to the inevitable dissolution of the partnership, they had one more album of brilliance in them – the almost hit-free Captain Fantastic And The Brown Dirt Cowboy – an autobiographical concept album about their friendship, and their treatment at the hands of the celebrity culture.

      And then it was over. Elton found contentment in being one of rock’s elder statesmen, and spent the rest of his career avoiding any kind of non-commercial experiments, and courting fame as a darling of the media, and a paragon of homosexual acceptance. It’s a tragedy, really – because if nothing else, Tumbleweed Connection and Madman Across The Water reveal a raw, untouched talent, feeling his way through the styles that influenced him, and building on them – creating albums that were profound, honest, and musically powerful. That Elton John is dead now – and has been for the better part of twenty five years, and the zombie that has replaced him seems to have little regard for the achievements of his predecessor. When ‘Sacrifice’ or ‘Circle Of Life’ pollute the airwaves, one cannot help but think back to 1971, when Reg Dwight and Bernie Taupin began recording the best work of their career. The career of Elton John is one of the most disturbing examples of lost opportunity and unfulfilled potential in all of rock history.

      But for a while there, in 1971… oh boy.

Early 2003, published in Foffle #15