A Jog Through Early Elton John: Part One
I think it's gonna be a long, long newsletter
As a disclaimer, this newsletter is entirely about Elton John. It’s largely self-serving, as I just want a safe place to dump a bunch of thoughts from my recent listens of his early catalog (Empty Sky thru Goodbye Yellow Brick Road) at the suggestion of my parents*. As an additional disclaimer, this newsletter covers his catalog through Madman Across the Water, which means that part two will be headed your way once I finish it. Thank you for enduring my Elton John era.
*My parents are big early Elton John fans and have been trying to get me to listen to him for pretty much my entire life.
Like any good 30-something, my most enduring memory of Elton John is him being part of Lady Gaga’s first Grammys performance at the 2010 awards.
I’ll spare you my normal five-minute speech about how They Sure Don’t Make ‘Em Like Lady Gaga Anymore, and instead just ask you to watch how damn good she was and is. Despite loving the performance, it took me 14 more years to listen to more Elton John than what I’d heard through eating in chain restaurants and watching the first ten seasons of American Idol (Your Song, Saturday Night’s Alright for Fighting, Levon, etc.).
At the end of my journey with early Elton, I love this performance even more, and Your Song couldn’t be a more perfect thing for them to sing together, as Lady Gaga was fresh off of cementing herself as a pop superstar thanks to Just Dance, Poker Face, and Bad Romance, but looking to be seen as more than just someone who can sing and dance. The same way Your Song helped make Elton John a respected artist, this performance helped make Lady Gaga a respected artist who could play the hell out of a piano and sing better live than on the recording. Gaga belting Sound of Music at the Oscars in front of Julie Andrews doesn’t happen without Elton and Gaga singing Your Song, and Nathan Chen skating to Rocket Man at the 2022 Olympics doesn’t happen without the b-side single Your Song taking off.
Anyway, this is going to be a scatterbrained walk through some early Elton John. Welcome!
Empty Sky
Bernie Taupin’s utter fascination with and love for America starts on Empty Sky, and it only intensifies from there. Western Ford Gateway has snapshots that are explored in greater depth on Tumbleweed Connection, but there’s something I find incredibly endearing about two young British guys waxing poetic about garbage blowing around newspaper stands in America on this album. It’s only fitting that the music is a blend of The Beatles and Highway 61 Revisited-era Dylan.
This album has some stinkers, and it’s interesting to get a glimpse of Elton John before he was self-titled Elton John, the guy who went on to release Your Song and Take Me to the Pilot a year later. Hymn 2000 is something I imagine both Elton and Bernie would take back if they could, and Lady, What’s Tomorrow is Goodbye Yellow Brick Road without the maturity and experience but with the farm. Weak debuts for wildly successful artists feel rare (are they? I don’t know? I should investigate.), but this is close to being one.
Elton John
It goes without saying that Your Song is a career-maker of a record, and opening an album with it feels like madness in the best way. It came after years of Elton failing to launch, and it’s hard to imagine a more spectacular way to enter public consciousness. There are so many love songs that are intolerable after hearing them at grocery stores, jukebox musicals, and weddings, but Your Song manages to convey truths that feel like things only a 17-year-old could profess so simply and earnestly. Unbelievably, the song was first performed by Three Dog Night, who Elton John was opening for at the time of recording, and who decided to let him have it. Can you imagine how much worse a Three Dog Night version would be?
You don’t have to.
Elton John’s performance feels infinitely more precious and vulnerable, and the lyrics have the space and emphasis that they need to have meaning. It can be uncomfortable to stand in front of someone who means the world to you and say any of the lines from this song, especially in the face of the dealbreakers adults have (we need a house where we both can live! you should know my eye color!). Love is enough when you’re 17. The lyrics also serve the clever purpose of making the song immune to harsh critique (I know it’s not much/but it’s the best I can do). While the Ewan McGregor version has a special place in my heart due to the sheer number of times I watched Moulin Rouge in high school, the Elton John version is the only true version of this song to me.
Some things are just sung best by the first person to sing them.
Take Me to the Pilot is another obvious single from the album, and it has a tremendous groovy, funky feel that I think most people associate with Elton John. It feels like something playing over the opening credits of Oliver and Company if Billy Joel hadn’t made the theme instead (said in the most flattering and complimentary way possible). The lyrics don’t make much sense, and both John and Taupin have admitted as much. It makes it all the funnier that it has been so widely covered (by Ben E. King: Could sing the telephone book and I’d listen with a grin on my face, by Buzzy Linhart: The version you’d hear at a street festival and turn to your partner and say “hmm” about, by Ben Platt: Horrendously oversung, and by José Feliciano: Honestly? It’s fun, I’m into it).
No Shoe Strings on Louise is a direct sign of what is coming next, as it feels like an Americana-tinged The Band b-side (and Elton John has to be doing his best Mick Jagger impression, right?).
One of the biggest sleeper hits to me is The King Must Die. 👏Why👏Is👏Nobody👏Talking👏About👏The👏King👏Must👏Die👏?! “And sooner or later/Everybody's kingdom must end/And I'm so afraid your courtiers/Cannot be called best friends” Come on man! The vocals have a satisfying bite, the lyrics are a reworking of the same ideas that we later see on Goodbye Yellow Brick Road (no man can do this fame and success thing forever without giving up something in the process), and the music is so damn dramatic. How did a Kingsman movie include FOUR Elton John songs and none of them were this?
Treasure: Your Song, Take Me to the Pilot, The King Must Die, Take Me to the Pilot: BBC Session (available on the Deluxe Edition), Border Song (but the Aretha Franklin version recorded two years later)
Skip: No Shoe Strings on Louise, First Episode at Hienton, The Greatest Discovery
Tumbleweed Connection
This album is an absolute oddity in the best way. Elton John and Bernie Taupin, teenagers who had yet to visit America, writing a concept album filled with the West, Americana, and longing for a pre-Civil War South? It should not work on any level, and the album lacks an obvious single, unlike the previous releases. If you held a gun to my head before I listened to this album and asked me if Elton John ever sang “From this day on I own my father's gun/We dug his shallow grave beneath the sun/I laid his broken body down below the Southern land/It wouldn't do to bury him where any Yankee stands”, I would be dead and not writing this right now!
My Father’s Gun is the tale of a Confederate soldier whose father died during the Civil War picking up his father’s gun to continue fighting for the cause (a message probably more associated with Jason Aldean than Elton John). The verses are well-written despite the oddness of the lyrics (As soon as this is over we'll go home/To plant the seeds of justice in our bones/To watch the children growing and see the women sewing/There'll be laughter when the bells of freedom ring—because everyone knows Confederate victory would mean the seeds of justice are planted and freedom will ring…), but the chorus is the true marvel, where everything comes together for a fantastic hook. It was recorded live for the most part, which I think shows in the final recording. Dusty Springfield also helped with backing vocals on this (great cocktail party fact!).
Amoreena is such an irresistible catchy song, and it feels like hot and sticky summer days. It’s also incredibly horny, I mean—I can see you sitting, eating/Apples in the evening/The fruit juice, flowing slowly, slowly, slowly/Down the bronze of your body—Ok Elton!! From the little reading I’ve done, it seems like this is mostly known for being in the opening credits of Dog Day Afternoon, not for being a lusty ode to banging in the summer sun, which is a shame.
One of the things that I adore about this record (my favorite after Goodbye Yellow Brick Road) is how many different suits Elton John tries on over the course of the album. Love Song has Crosby, Stills, and Nash sprinkled on top. My Father’s Gun is a The Band song (but a damn good one). Ballad of a Well-Known Gun is basically a Bob Dylan song if he spent a little more time in honky-tonks and was also Elton John.
Unlike some artists, who feel like they are trying on these outfits because they don’t know who they are, Elton feels like he’s trying them on because he loves them and wants to wear them too.
Burn Down the Mission is the perfect closer for this album. It’s the type of comically large and ambitious song that feels brave. There’s more than one reason why more bands don’t try to be Queen, and it’s partially because standing in front of a room and singing “I see a little silhouetto of a man/Scaramouche, Scaramouche, will you do the Fandango?” with a straight face without everyone laughing you out of the room is not an option for most people. While this song doesn’t have the drama that future songs do, it’s still a Big Song about convincing your neighbors to help burn a rich guy’s house down, and it sticks the landing as a final track.
Treasure: My Father’s Gun, Amoreena, Burn Down the Mission, Madman Across the Water with Elton John and Mick Ronson on guitar (on the Deluxe Edition, later another version is released on Madman Across the Water)
Skip: Son of Your Father, Talking to Old Soldiers
17-11-70
The restraint (self-imposed? increase-radio-play-suggested? label-mandated?) that pops up occasionally on earlier releases gets tossed out the window and violently stomped on throughout 17-11-70, which culminates in an immensely satisfying 18-minute rendition of Burn Down the Mission that rapidly descends into a jam session. One misconception of Elton that I believed for years before listening through his early catalog was that he was a performer first and a musician second. It’s impossible to leave this LP with that impression.
The fact it wasn’t even supposed to come out makes it even wilder! The record company solely released 17-11-70 because there was a bootleg recording of their set at A&R Recording Studios that was broadcast by a New York radio station that was so popular they couldn’t miss out on a piece of the pie.
I waxed poetic about Amoreena under the Tumbleweed Connection section, but the live performance on this record is something to behold. The piano, the vocals, the entire thing feels like a flashing sign reading “THIS GUY HAS SEX” behind Elton for 4 minutes and 54 seconds. One nice side effect of the live recording is that Dee Murray’s bass really pops and emphasizes how funky and nasty this song really is. The piano also has so much space to breathe and lead on every song because there is no guitar on any song (something I shamefully didn’t even notice until my second listen-through—just piano, drums, and bass).
Honky Tonk Woman sneaks onto the album as a cover, and it feels like one of the most Elton John songs to ever not be an Elton John song (the chuckles from the audience during the dead silence after each opening line just add to the intimate feel of the album, like you’re tucked away at the studio with a hundred other people witnessing something unbelievable that you know will never be seen in such a small venue again, which is probably exactly how it felt).
Finally, the final track (Burn Down the Mission bundled with My Baby Left Me and Get Back) leaves you on an impossibly high note. It’s also amazing to see how much this song can fill a track without all of the instrumentation and a whole orchestera, like there is on Tumbleweed Connection.
‘Tis better to have loved and lost than to have never loved at all. In other words, I’ll take 6,000 milquetoast rehashes of Your Song with Dua Lipa or whatever he’s doing now if it means one 17-11-70.
Treasure: All. Seriously, if there’s one thing you listen to in this entire newsletter, make this it.
Madman Across the Water
Just like Elton John improbably opens with one of the biggest songs of his career, Madman Across the Water opens with Tiny Dancer, another one of them. The slide guitar from Tumbleweed Connection is still here, which is nice too. It’s funny that it didn’t crack the Top 40 in the US until it slid onto the Almost Famous soundtrack in 2000.
Levon is a song about an old man who came from humble beginnings and made his fortune after the war selling balloons. Jesus, his son, does not want to enter the balloon business and instead wants to watch them fly away. These are insane sentences to type, but that’s the real plot of the song.
Madman Across the Water is a tremendously odd song (Gus Dudgeon, Elton’s producer at the time, called it Led Zeppelin Doing Elton John when he struck it from Tumbleweed Connection), and that’s a good thing. The melody does unexpected things, which forces you to go along with the song and actually listen instead of anticipating what is going to come next like you might with a more predictable tune. The vocals on this song are particularly pointed and vicious, and the bass and guitar are despicably heavy when they come in. “You better get your coat, dear, it looks like rain” is spat into the mic at the end of the second verse, and it just gets more vicious from there.
Brandi Carlile is the queen of covers, and she manages to make this big, swirling song look easy.
Treasure: Tiny Dancer, Levon, Madman Across the Water
Skip: Indian Sunset, All the Nasties
Part II is mostly written, but I figured I’d split it nonetheless to avoid overwhelming your inbox. Cheers and see you next time!