Elton John: The Four-Eyed Bitch Is Back

Peter Greenberg and his two-man film crew had just flown into San Diego from L.A. with the Elton John tour. They had quickly hopped onto the stage of the tense and sweaty Sports Arena to map out their camera position, behind the speaker columns, out of view of both the 15,000-seat audience and the main man onstage. This will be for the Newsweek Broadcasting Service, a division of the magazine, where Greenberg is a reporter; this two-minute number they’re working on will go to 55 customer-TV stations around the country.

Standing right next to Greenberg in this tight, frazzled knot of people backstage is Johnny Hyde, the longtime small-town California DJ, now program director of KCRA radio in Sacramento. Like Greenberg, Hyde free-lances TV features, and he’s here to gather material for a possible piece on the Today show.

Greenberg is hopping and yelling and Hyde is barely keeping his doubleknit cool, because here, no more than three minutes before Elton John is due onstage, they are being told that Elton has changed his mind and doesn’t want cameras onstage. They can shoot from the audience, and they can shoot only one number: “Burn Down the Mission.” And they can have exactly 20 seconds, at the end of the song.

Greenberg puts on a little show – he is stunned, it seems, dazed and at a loss. He jumps on Connie Pappas, a partner of Elton’s manager John Reid, and publicist Peter Simone, reminding them of their earlier promise – a general one – to let him shoot the show. He shakes a flustered head when Pappas begins to explain just where cameras could be placed. But nothing can change John’s apparent orders. Greenberg walks away. The lost and confounded guise has not worked. He is left only one alternative.

“I, I’ll steal it,” he says, stalking the catacombs backstage “That’s what I’ll do.”

The two crews are able to roll their cameras when Elton John appears out of the dressing room, where, from out of a half-dozen huge, white steamer trunks, he has selected tonight’s uniform: a violet top hat brimmed with rhinestones, a stone-studded white scarf, a long-waisted topcoat and satin pants with wide chartreuse and violet stripes. Long violet and black feathers jut out of the hat, and Elton’s glasses are framed in wispy fur. He stands still, looking a little nervous, surrounded by security guards. His own bodyguard, Jim Morris (the current Mr. America), is clutching the curtain, ready to pull. John Reid, his manager, hustles around with orders for everyone. And Bernie Taupin, lyricist of the Taupin/John team, stands aside – tranquil and tanned from a recent vacation. He and wife Maxine are on board for the first couple of swings of the tour, mostly to watch, listen and enjoy the limousine rides.

The audience, responding to the darkened houselights, is already screeching. When they spot this outlandish little mass of flash climbing the stage stairs, they get even crazier, and the noise level is actually accelerated and sustained for a full two minutes while the show begins, sound and fog machines creating the whooshy, spatial opening of “Funeral for a Friend,” which gives John a chance to sit studiously at the piano, creating immediately that ironic juxtaposition of nonsense costuming and serious music which helped make him a stage star four years ago, when he first came to the States, to Los Angeles, to play the 350-seat Troubadour for a week.

With the show begun, the camera crews are forced idle for an hour, to the halfway point of the concert. That’s when “Burn Down the Mission” turns up. The crew members sit or pad around backstage, ignoring the unfurling, unrelenting music: “Love Lies Bleeding,” “Candle in the Wind,” “Grimsby,” “Rocket Man,” “Take Me to the Pilot,” “Bennie and the Jets,” “Daniel,” “Grey Seal” and “Goodbye Yellow Brick Road.”

They are missing some show. And not just the music, which is performed well, and is staged, lit and amplified swell. There’s this parade of young girls hurtling up onto the stage, or being tossed up, and they land right in front of Elton and his equally glitter-dressed Steinway. From there, they are led, pulled or carried into the backstage area by blue-shirted security cops. If they jump onstage, they are hustled out the back door, banished from the concert.

The others are casualties and are placed in the first-aid room, where two nurses attend to them. By the end of 15 songs, one of the nurses says that they’ve seen maybe 24 girls, mostly the victims of “festival seating,” of pushing and shoving by people behind them. Also, several faintings from excitement and a couple of drug overloads – “But not nearly as much as we get for the teenybop concerts here – Black Sabbath, Deep Purple, or, you know, the Moody Blues.

“What kind of drugs at those concerts? Oh, mostly LSD.”