Captain Fantastic: Elton John’s Stellar Trip Through the ’70s

271 Pages·2017·23.69 MB·English

by  Tom Doyle

Contents
Cover
Title Page
Copyright
Prologue
Chapter 1: A Long, Long Time
Chapter 2: Elton John Has Arrived
Chapter 3: Reborn on the West Coast
Chapter 4: A Well-Known Gun
Chapter 5: Hope You Don’t Mind
Chapter 6: Hercules
Chapter 7: No Superman Gonna Ruin My Plans
Chapter 8: All Aboard the Starship
Chapter 9: High in the Snowy Mountains
Chapter 10: From the End of the World to Your Town
Chapter 11: Drift of the Fantastic Voyage
Chapter 12: Burning Out His Fuse
Chapter 13: An Audience with the King
Chapter 14: Floating into Space
Chapter 15: Super Czar
Chapter 16: Quack!
Epilogue
Dedication
Acknowledgments
Discography
Bibliography
Photo Credits
By Tom Doyle
About the Author
PROLOGUE
IF YOU WERE TO TAKE a peek at random entries in his diary, 1969 seemed to have
been a fairly humdrum year for Reg Dwight. A moon-faced twenty-one-year-
old, going on twenty-two, from the northwest London suburb of Pinner, he cut a
vaguely Beatleish figure in his bowl haircut and Lennon-inspired “penny round”
glasses. His pleasures were simple: getting up early on Sunday mornings to play
soccer; reading his collections of magazines on World War II and the Old
Master painters; going to the cinema and returning home to jot down his
thoughts on the films he’d seen.
January 17, Sunday: Saw:—“Lady In Cement”—good, “Secret Life
of An American Wife”—lousy.
Music, however, was his obsession. Reg’s poky bedroom in the small flat at
30A Frome Court, Pinner Road, where he lived with his mother, Sheila, and
stepfather, Fred, was a virtual record library—approximately fourteen hundred
singles, three hundred LPs, and one hundred EPs, which he lovingly played and
cleaned and cataloged. There was an expression for people like him, who were
utterly entranced by the sounds magically emanating from revolving black
plastic discs: “It’s called vinyl in the blood,” he’d proudly state. His mum
laughed and called him an old hoarder. Reg wouldn’t ever let anyone borrow any
of his records, for fear of them being scratched. He would get annoyed if anyone
else even touched them.
To feed his obsession, he helped out, unpaid, at Musicland, a large record
shop on the corner of Berwick and Noel streets in Soho, the seedy and thrillingly
boho heart of London. Reg would drop in, have a cup of tea, then get behind the
counter. Often he’d wait there until late in the evening for the deliveries to come
in, especially the American imports. In October ’68, he’d hung around for hours
to get his hands on a copy of Jimi Hendrix’s head-spinning double LP Electric
Ladyland. In April of that year, he stayed on until nine o’clock at night in eager
anticipation of the arrival of Leonard Cohen’s stark second album, Songs from a
Room.
There was a fetishistic element to Reg’s record collecting. He much preferred
the thicker American cardboard covers to the flimsier British ones. He’d been
delighted to discover that Laura Nyro’s wildly eclectic, piano-driven Eli and the
Thirteenth Confession came with a lyric sheet perfumed with scented ink. He’d
admit to anyone that when he was a solitary child, records had been his friends,
and so they remained.
Sometimes, the outside world wasn’t so friendly. In a violent disruption of his
unremarkable everyday existence, one night, returning to Pinner from Soho,
diffident, bespectacled Reg had been beaten up.
April 12, Saturday: Went into Musicland. Got “duffed up” on the
way home. Went straight to bed.
Ten days later, perhaps not coincidentally, he became the proud owner of a
boxy vehicle, which would ferry him around in comparative safety.
April 22, Tuesday: Got home tonight to find that Auntie Win and
Mum had bought me a car—Hillman Husky Estate—Superb!!
In reality, Reg’s life wasn’t as ordinary as it seemed. The year before, he’d
begun living a strange, parallel existence as Elton John: his stage name—and
increasingly exaggerated persona. Stepping out of the shadows of Bluesology,
the band in which for three years he’d been an enthusiastic, if often teeth-
grindingly frustrated, member, hammering away in the corner on his Vox
Continental organ, he harbored a strong desire—highly unlikely you’d think if
you were to take just one look at him—to become a pop star. Sometimes this shy
and funny individual would suddenly erupt with excitement at the very thought.
“I’m going to be a star, do you hear me?” he’d loudly declare, with comic
drama, as if assuming the role of a brattish character in a hackneyed rags-to-
riches Hollywood biopic. “A star!”
But stardom was proving agonizingly tough to achieve. He had started off
1969 on a promising high with the release in January of his second single, “Lady
Samantha,” a ghostly heavy rock ballad centered on a sad, spectral female
protagonist wafting supernaturally across the hillsides and spooking the locals,
as dreamed up by his lyric-writing partner, eighteen-year-old Bernie Taupin. It
had been what was termed a “turntable hit,” pulling in an encouraging number of
radio plays, before entirely failing to rouse the interest of the record-buying
public.
There was an almost schizophrenic nature to the songs that Bernie and Elton
had been writing for the past thirteen months as payroll employees of Dick
James Music—the former on £10 a week, the latter £15, since he was required to
sing and play on their demonstration recordings. Half of these songs were in tune
with the post-psychedelic, head-in-the-clouds mood of the times, bearing typical
“Wow, man” titles such as “A Dandelion Dies in the Wind” and “Tartan-
Colored Lady.” The other half were far straighter and more commercial-minded,
written with a view to being sold off to chart singers looking for material. These,
which the pair invariably viewed as “stinkers,” were usually intensely lovelorn:
“You’ll Be Sorry to See Me Go,” “There’s Still Time for Me,” “When the First
Tear Shows.”
One song from this latter crop, “I Can’t Go on Living Without You,” a frothy
and upbeat pop soul track in the style of Dusty Springfield, was selected in
February as a potential UK entry for the Eurovision Song Contest, that annual
pancontinental clash of oompah tunes and overwrought ballads. “I Can’t Go on
Living Without You,” in competition with five other songs from British writers,
was performed by the diminutive Scottish singing sensation Lulu on BBC1 that
month and witnessed by a televisual audience of close to twenty million.
It came in sixth out of six in the ensuing postcard ballot. Even more
depressing, the winning entry, the gibberish lovey-dovey anthem “Boom Bang-
a-Bang,” went on to scoop the Eurovision prize for Britain. For Elton and
Bernie, it was a sign that they were paddling in too-shallow waters. They
resolved never again to write such pop pap.
Instead, they threw themselves into the making of what was to become the
first Elton John album, Empty Sky. Recorded in nocturnal downtime sessions at
the DJM studio in New Oxford Street, it was a happy time for all involved—
plotting and scheming their bright shiny futures in breaks at the Wimpy
restaurant along the road, eating dinner after hours at the Golden Egg café,
walking through the near-deserted streets at four in the morning to doss down at
the flat that producer Steve Brown’s father was given as a perk of his job
working for the Salvation Army. Reg always slept on the sofa, drifting off with a
head filled with amazed wonder at how the tracks were shaping up.
Hearing the playback of the propulsive, faintly trippy title song of Empty Sky,
eight and a half minutes long, took him aback. To his young ears, it was the
greatest thing he’d ever done or possibly even ever heard. But, in truth, from the
outside perspective, Reg still seemed to be fumbling to work out exactly who he
wanted Elton to be. The songs bore obvious reverberations of the sounds of his
vinyl collection back at Frome Court—the loose swing of the Rolling Stones, the
wandering flute reveries of Traffic, the rootsy modernist Americana of the Band.
One song, however, the hymnlike “Skyline Pigeon,” gently floating along on
ornate harpsichord phrasings and churchy organ, stood out from the rest. Its lyric
was inspired by the views from a twelfth-century clock tower in Lincolnshire
that as a child Bernie would climb to watch the sun slipping below the horizon.
It was written from the imagined perspective of a captive bird longing to be
turned loose and to soar high and far away. As a pining ballad from a couple of
jobbing songwriters who spent half their time chained down penning on-spec
middle-of-the-road compositions, it was hard not to read it as a yearning for
creative freedom.
Falling into neither of the fashionable musical categories of the time—woozy
psychedelia and weighty rock—“Skyline Pigeon” was something else entirely.
Perhaps it was a pre-echo of a time to come, a pared-down singer-songwriter
approach that just might belong to the decade to follow.
Reg becoming Elton. The first photo session: Hampstead Heath, London, January 22,
1968.
Even if creatively reborn as Elton, in physical reality, Reg was still awkwardly
coming to grips with his pop star guise. Shortish at five feet eight inches and
prone to dumpiness, he struggled with his weight. His glasses constantly slipped
down his snub nose. His stubby fingers looked nothing like those that might
belong to a piano player.
The January before, he’d been photographed for the first time as Elton,
looking like a bank clerk who’d experienced a drunken epiphany of sixties
liberation before sweeping down Carnaby Street to randomly buy clothes for a
“far out” makeover. A leopard print fedora. A flamboyant fur coat with a
ludicrously hairy collar that looked as though it might have things living in it.
He’d also taken to wearing shirts cut from nursery curtain material featuring
popular children’s book characters.
Yet remarkably, as 1969 progressed, his celebrity, in sometimes bizarre ways,
appeared to be on the rise, as he incredulously noted in his diary:
April 30, Wednesday: Offer to open a carwash in Cricklewood—
what!! Stayed in tonight. My glasses broke.
To promote “Lady Samantha,” he’d been interviewed by the UK teen
magazine Jackie. “I always wanted to be famous,” he confessed, even though he
wasn’t really.
“He says he can be unbearably moody and self-pitying,” revealed the
uncredited Jackie writer, “but usually manages to laugh himself out of it.”
Those around him knew this to be true. His black moods would suddenly
descend, but they would blow away just as quickly. It wasn’t hard for him to
cheer himself up. Simple pleasures once again.
At the yearly Pinner Fair in the last week of May 1969, Reg amused himself at
the various “roll-up roll-up” stalls. At one, where the challenge was to throw
Ping-Pong balls into jam jars, ever competitive, he quickly succeeded twice, his
prize being two unlucky piscine creatures cruelly forced to swim around in small
transparent plastic bags of water.
May 28, Wednesday: Went to the fair with Mick and Pat: I won a
coconut and two goldfish!!—John and Yoko!!
The next day, John and Yoko died. “Very upset!!” scribbled Reg.
A week later, Empty Sky was released. It struggled to sell four thousand copies
before, for now, disappearing completely.
—
EXACTLY FIVE AND a half years after that day at Pinner Fair—November 28, 1974
—a limousine was gliding through the streets of Manhattan. Inside, heading for
Madison Square Garden, were the now legally named Elton Hercules John and
John Lennon. The latter was almost paralyzed by fear at the prospect of his first
appearance onstage in more than two years. The mood in the car was heavy and
silent, as if its passengers were traveling to a funeral rather than a sold-out gig.
John and Elton had first met the previous year, in October 1973, during what