Elton John Rock’s Captain Fantastic

Captain Fantastic . . . from the end of the world to your town.

For him, the end of the world was a middle-class Middlesex town called Pinner, where he was born Reginald Kenneth Dwight. The lonely, lumpy, myopic only child of an R.A.F. squadron leader, he was too shy “to say boo to a goose.” He was so out of favor with his straight-backed dad that he was forbidden to kick a soccer ball in the garden lest he wreck the rose bushes. He was refused permission to purchase mohair sweaters and Hush Puppies shoes, status gear he devoutly hoped would help him gain acceptance in the local smart set in the late ’50s and early ’60s.

Now, in every home town that seems like the end of the world to its moping teen-age inhabitants, Reg Dwight, 28, and ever so much better known as Elton John, has become the repository of a million escapist dreams. He is the symbol of the often battered, never completely shattered juvenile faith that no one is too short, too fat, too awkward or parentally despised to be transformed into someone who is not only famous and rich, but—infinitely more important—loved by the multitudes.

So far, so routine. But no one stays at the top of the pop charts for any length of time without twanging chords that reverberate in the teen-age psyche. What sets Elton apart is the fact that his appeal knows no demographic limits. Said British Rock Promoter Mel Bush, watching a sellout crowd of 75,000 file out of London’s Wembley Stadium after John’s appearance there a fortnight ago: “Elton’s appeal is across the board. We had heads, hippies, film stars, lords and ladies here today.” Says the star of the huge audiences he regularly attracts: “I can see four or five rows when I’m onstage, and the cross section of people is staggering. In the front row may be a couple in their forties, and I think, ‘They must be friends of the promoters.’ Then you get 13-year-old girls and everybody. It’s great.”

Anyway, astonishing. In his five-years of singing and drubbing the piano

John has compiled a staggering set of statistics. With an annual income of $7 million, he is one of the most prosperous pop stars on the scene today. He signed a landmark deal in recording history when MCA Records last year guaranteed him $8 million in royalties against all the albums he produces in the next five years. The company could recoup its entire investment by the end of 1976. John has sold 42 million albums and 18 million singles worldwide; nine of his twelve albums are over the million mark in the U.S. alone, often with several hundred thousand to spare. His latest album, Captain Fantastic and the Brown Dirt Cowboy, had an advance sale to retailers of 1.4 million copies before anyone outside the recording studios had heard a single bar of this extraordinary autobiography in music by Elton and his faithful lyricist-companion, Bernie Taupin. This week it was in the No. 1 spot on all major U.S. record charts.

Success has brought Elton the rock star’s de rigueur lifestyle, which may be summed up as a frantic losing effort to spend his money faster than he makes it. But like his goofy glasses and flamboyant finery, his high-rolling existence may be one of the less important things about him. It has always contrasted with the strongest element in his music: a sweet, pensively expressed sense of sadness over human connections missed or lost.

If you ask how I am, then I’ll just say inspired.

That line from Captain Fantastic is self-deprecating and ironic. Elton seems to make a deliberate effort to demystify, demythologize what he is doing. “I’ve always thought rock ‘n’ roll was people’s music,” Elton has said. “It’s always been a thing everyone should enjoy.” He has concentrated on simplifying his sound, especially in the past couple of years. “People buy for sound, melody and sing-along quality,” he says.

The critics may dismiss it with the contemptuous catch phrase “Middle of the road.” Elton counters by calling his stuff “ultramelodic pop” and goes right on churning it out at a profligate pace. As for Taupin, a Lincolnshire loner whose father was a chicken farmer and whose hobby is collecting American handguns, his way with words exactly matches Elton’s prevailing musical mood. “We never want to write songs that tell an audience what to do,” says Taupin. “We don’t know enough about the world to preach to people. We take ourselves seriously, but the music has to be listenable.”

Is that all there is to it? Remember all that fiddle about how rock is the great new art form of the era, about how it should be a potent force for political and social comment, if not outright change? Does it now turn out that its most significant current figure is just doing what Tin Pan Alley has always done—wedding simple musical ideas to quite ordinary lyrical notions about love, loss and longing? And, in the great tradition of the music business, avoiding any things that might be regarded as “difficult” or “controversial”? The answer is no.

Will the things we wrote today Sound as good tomorrow?

It seems Elton and Bernie, in their eagerness to sell themselves simple, are probably selling themselves short. Their ballads have often been far more original than their critics have cared to admit. Candle in the Wind, for example, is both a comment on the Marilyn Monroe cult and a tribute to the confused, touching woman who caused it. Rocket Man is a sweet conceit in which the writers conjure up for us what the real-life astronauts never seem to have: the feeling of anxious sadness that must attend exceedingly rapid passage from familiar earth into the dark, cold reaches of unknowable outer space. Then there is Daniel, a song about a wounded war veteran taking leave of his family in order to avoid their pity. These can scarcely be dismissed as moon-June moonings.

And all of their albums have some pure, hard rockers: Burn Down the Mission, Saturday Night’s Alright For Fighting, The Bitch Is Back, Bennie and the Jets. Add the country-and-western and gospel variants the pair have worked through the years, and a picture of astonishing versatility begins to emerge.

Elton’s beat constantly punctuates Taupin’s lyrical line in arresting ways. There is a curious blend of sophistication and primitivism in Elton’s assertive piano style that makes it an instantly recognizable musical signature—as unmistakable in its way as a Beach Boys harmony or Joe Cocker’s sandpaper rasp. Elton’s own voice is a supple instrument. He can growl like Mick Jagger or sing an insinuating lyric plaint. He writes for himself­not surprisingly ­with supreme correctness, confidence, even elegance. To an unusual degree, he is the only one who can effectively sing the songs he writes.

Still, exciting and absorbing as his records are, they do not give one a full feeling for his talents. That comes only in live performance. These extravagant concert appearances—or perhaps more properly, these extragagantappearances at concerts­ have given him his notoriety among those whopay more attention to rock scenes than to rock sounds.

He started out wearing gaudily studded and mirrored jumpsuits, soon graduated to feather boas, fur shoulderettes, a top hat surprounted by a magnificent ostrich plume by now these too have become routine costumes for him.

Elton’s concerts are fun. People augh as much as they shriek. (“If they scream,” he says in his self-mocking way, “it is probably in horror.”) Fans eagerly await his first appearance onstage to see what outrageous variations he will work on his image that night. No one can predict which of his 200 pairs of glasses (total value: $40,000) he may wear. He has three pairs that are mink-lined, another with 57 tiny light bulbs that spell out ELTON, yet another shaped like musical notes linked by a jeweled bridge bar. Most gorgeous of all is a set of cloud-shaped lenses suspended by gold hooks from a gold and platinum frame encrusted with 103 diamonds.

One of Elton’s trademarks is pounding the piano with his feet; another is throwing his piano stool in the general direction of the audience (but actually into the pit). He has been known to dye his hair orange or pink for some gigs, to bat tennis balls into the crowd, and once in Los Angeles he hired actors to dress as Queen Elizabeth, Frankenstein and Elvis Presley and wander around the stage. Whether this represents a display of unquenchable energy, the response of a sometime wallflower suddenly encouraged to be the life of the party, or just overripe showmanship, it makes for the best show, and the best biz, on the pop scene today.

John plays down the crazy flash of his in-person appearances. “Since I’m not your rangy rock idol in skinny leather pants, I wear flamboyant clothes. People shouldn’t take the clothes and the dyed hair so seriously. Honestly, it’s just a joke. I’m affectionately parodying the rock-‘n’-roll business by saying ‘Here it is, let’s all have a laugh and enjoy ourselves.’ ” There have been no acid-rock-style riots at his concerts. Somehow, right from the stage, he manages to get across to his audiences the message that he is just kidding. A small but serious point, however, underlies the fun. Elton says, “I didn’t start enjoying life until I was 21, so I’m living through my teenage period now.” One imagines that the suppressed child, the introverted adolescent of not so distant former years is letting a great deal hang out onstage. There are clues in the way he lives now that he is coming to peaceable terms with a fairly difficult past. His lack of anger —and rebellious posturing of the sort that the Rolling Stones, now touring the U.S., specialize in—partly accounts the ready acceptance he has found among older audiences.

Very clearly a case for cornflakes

and classics “Two teas both with sugar please.”

Reg Dwight’s father Stanley was frequently away on military duty. When he was home, his son discovered there were really only a couple of things he could do to please dad. One was to accompany him to Watford, six miles away, to watch the local football (soccer) team’s matches. The other was to play a little Chopin; he had started piano lessons at four. Chumship evaporated, however, when Reg tuned in pop music on the radio. His mother Sheila recalls a letter Stanley sent from overseas warning that Reg, then 16, must “get all this pop nonsense out of his head, otherwise he’s going to turn into a wild boy. He should get a sensible job with either BEA or Barclays Bank.”

Proud of her son for winning a Royal Academy of Music fellowship when he was eleven, Sheila Dwight arranged a trade-off with him. If he would continue studying classics at the academy, she would permit him to spend as much free time as he wanted practicing the pops. After she and Stanley Dwight were divorced she permitted Reg to take a job playing piano at a nearby hotel pub. At 17 he quit school just two weeks before final exams and joined a decent band called Bluesology, a rhythm-and-blues outfit. From 1964 to 1967 he was on perpetual tour. Typical gigs were at the South Harrow British Legion and the Nottingham Rowing Club.

Nobody expected Reg to become anything big,” recalls Bluesology’s leader, “Long John” Baldry.

“He was a shy person, almost introverted onstage.” Also he was “quite porky. In a caftan he looked like a myopic nun.” Still young Reg, unable “to chat it up with the girls,” did what he could to change his unprepossessing image. He unsuccessfully tried amphetamines to cure his weight problem. He borrowed the Christian names of Saxophonist Elton Dean and Leader John Baldry to create a new stage name for himself. Then he went off to London, where he found work as an errand boy at a music company.

During those months, Elton spotted an ad in a trade paper, placed by a record-company executive who asked artists and composers to send samples of their work by mail. The executive matched some music written by Elton with lyrics Taupin had sent in. He introduced them, but then decided not to hire the team he had created.

No matter. Elton and Bernie recognized at once that each could do what the other could not. They bought a bunk bed and rented digs together in Islington, a grimy section of North London, where they perfected remarkably friction-free methods of collaborating. “It’s so simple,” says Taupin. “Bernie writes lyrics. Bernie gives lyrics to Elton. Elton writes a song. And plays it back to Bernie. It sounds cold, but it’s not.” It takes Bernie only an hour to write the words and Elton about half that time to set them to music. Though they may throw away, they never revise.

While others climb, reaching dizzy

heights, The world’s in front of me in black

and white, I’m on the bottom line, I’m on the

bottom line.

So it must have seemed to Elton and Bernie. Their system just was not working. Recalls DJM Record Executive Dick James, who became their patron: “They had no sense of what was commercial and were terrible at writing for other people.” It was James who made the key observation in their young lives, namely that “no one could sing Elton’s songs like he could.” So he gave them £20 a week, plus a little more to replace his presumptive star’s ripped jeans, and sent him forth to conquer first Scotland, then the world.

As the lyrics of Captain Fantastic make clear, the “long and lonely climb” seemed to stretch before Elton forever. Actually, only 36 months lay between his first meeting with Bernie and an August 1970 date at the Troubadour club in Los Angeles, where he won a tough record-industry audience with his showmanship. Says MCA Records President John Maitland: “It was one of the most spectacular openings for an unknown artist I’ve ever seen.”

Saved in time, thank God my music’s still alive.

The rescue referred to in that lyric occurred a couple of years before superstardom descended on Elton John, and the disaster he was saved from was marriage to a 6-ft. 2-in. girl named Linda. He had been smitten by her when she came to a Christmas Eve bash he was playing with the Baldry band. Terribly insecure then (and now) around women, he may have been encouraged to unwonted boldness by the fact that her escort on that occasion was a midget. In any event, by the following summer she was sharing a pad with Elton and Bernie. Elton was miserably going ahead with plans to marry her, despite the fact that “she hated my music. Everything I’d write she’d put down. Her favorite record was actually Buddy Greco singing The Lady Is a Tramp.”

It was not exactly a match made in heaven. Still, when the pair broke up shortly before the wedding day, Elton was benefit. “I tried to commit suicide. It was a very Woody Allen type suicide. I turned on the gas and left all the windows open.” He has remained “wary of up-front women getting to know me.” There have been very few women in the Elton entourage since.

His only other recent troubles have also been matters of mistaken identity. In the early ’70s the youthful population, still politicized and ever on the alert for potential messiahs, passed the word that Elton was the new “heavy”—sort of a Bob Dylan with sequins. Encouraged by pop’s desperately sober critical establishment, they began combing his works for “messages.” Worse, they were pretty sure they found some. The King Must Die was obviously about the Memphis assassination, while Honky Chateau was clearly a code word for the White House, Madman Across the Water a musical portrait of Richard Nixon. Elton has denied such suggestions, almost to the point of blowing his cool: “I can’t stand some half-stoned junkie coming onstage to yell out his political ideas.”

Other than these flurries, he has become increasingly relaxed about his success. He took it in stride when critics said he had sold out, edging in toward the musical center line they so deplore —as if there were something deplorable about pop music’s actually being popular. They also observed that Elton was derivative—at one moment of the Rolling Stones, at another of Joni Mitchell, Leonard Cohen, whomever. In fact, everyone in pop is influenced by others at one time or another. How can it be otherwise in a tight little world where the assimilation of newer, farther-out musical ideas is an honorable endeavor —one that was once performed by the Beatles? Elton may absorb more because he listens more. He spends hours in record stores and eventually buys quad, stereo, cassette and 8-track cartridge versions of the same album. Then he compares them for quality. His record collection alone numbers 30,000.

This kind of talk might have bothered him more if he were more hooked on the notion that he was a powerful creative force (“All these people spend all this time creating masterpieces. I could never believe they took themselves so seriously”) or more conscious of creating the mystique of an artist around him (“I hate that. It’s all bull shit”). Instead, he has watched his newer songs reach heights of popularity on the charts and is content, at last, to enjoy the fruits of his not-too-arduous labors.

I’d have a cardiac if I had such luck.

That is what he thought—not entirely seriously—as he looked up from the bottom line in the late ’60s and saw the life-styles that success was buying for his rock contemporaries. Now, of course, he has it all. “Really, I don’t think I’ll ever be able to spend all my money,” he sighs, but he gives it a good shot. Like many pop stars, he is wildly generous with those who have demonstrated their loyalty to him (see box page 40). Not that he stints on himself; he bops constantly from his home in suburban London to his home in Los Angeles, with regular stopovers at the Caribou Ranch in Colorado, where he likes to record, and another sort of ranch in Scottsdale, Ariz. There he concentrates on his tennis, a game chubby little boys can feel ridiculous playing but that the superstar plays with confidence, sometimes with Billie Jean King or Jimmy Connors. In England he lives in the affluent suburb of Virginia Water. His house is a lively jumble. The huge boots he wore as the Pinball Wizard in the movie Tommy stand near a Picasso. Two stuffed leopards are a leap away from three Rembrandt etchings. Says Elton: “All I really crave now is an original Toulouse-Lautrec or a Hieronymus Bosch.”

Pretty standard stuff for the man who stands near the head of the richest class of entertainers the world has ever known. But there are some things that are different about Elton John. For one thing, he will not join the exodus of rock stars who are leaving Britain to escape stiff new tax laws. “I can’t imagine going to live in Geneva,” he says. “There is nothing there but people who’ve gone to Geneva.” He would rather spend time worrying about his new record label, Rocket, which gives its artists much larger than standard royalties. It is a way of paying a debt to his profession, and though it is not a new idea, it is one to which Elton is uncommonly devoted.

Even closer to him is, of all things, the Watford Football Club, which he and his father used to watch in the old days. Elton is now a director of the club, called the Hornets. They are mediocre at best, but Elton lives and dies with their fortunes. He practices with the club, he bawls out its members in the newspaper when they do especially poorly, gives them the royal box at his concerts to encourage them. He has staged benefit concerts for Watford in order to buy the team the new players it needs. A year ago, he gained something like 40 Ibs. and what he claims was an incipient case of alcoholism helping team members drown their sorrows after an endless string of defeats.

Certainly he has loved football since he was a fumble-footed kid. But there is more to it than that. The man whose latest album is a brilliantly successful attempt to write music out of his own past experience is also a man seeking to forge new links with a deeper, possibly more despised past. The Watford Hornets are the symbol of that effort. He firmly believes he might have lost himself in his superstar image had he not rediscovered the club.

“Watford has brought me back down to earth,” he says. “I love it as much as music itself, and that’s a lot to say. It’s like erasing five or six years of my life, and here I am as if nothing had happened.” There is something as innocent and touching in that statement as there is in a good pop lyric. Even if, in the frenetic pop world, Elton John is never able fully to establish his ties between present and past, his effort creates another point of contact between artist and audience. Or, as he and Bernie Taupin put it at the end of Captain Fantastic:

There’s treasure children always seek

to find

And just like us You must have had A Once Upon a Time.