Elton John: The Four-Eyed Bitch Is Back
The costumes, Elton said, will continue to be a staple of his stage personality. “I just do it for amusement. It really started as a tongue-in-cheek thing, because the songs that I was performing weren’t the sort of songs that you’d expect anyone to come in wearing a costume to, ’cause they were very moody songs. And then I started to enjoy it. And there’s not – I never feel like coming out in a suit or a pair of jeans. Even at sound checks I’m a little glamorous.”
“I’ve got a suit which at the moment is being repaired which is incredible. It’s all lights, dangling lights, the shoes light up, a 60-foot parachute comes out, it’s dayglo and just shoots across the stage. And Bill Whiten had this other suit made for me, it’s got wooden legs, and as I step out, a button releases 60 colored snakes that fly into the audience.
“I mean I’ll do anything. If anyone’s prepared to make it and make it work, I’ll get into anything.” Elton never comes up with his own ideas, he said, and he’s never vetoed anything from his designers.
“But I don’t say, ‘Well, I must have this costume made ’cause the public will like it.’ I have it made ’cause it’s a big appeal for me. It’s the same as my records or the songs I write. I don’t want to sort of pander to them in any way, except when I’m performing. When I’m performing, yeah, I’ll pander to them, I’ll do anything for ’em.”
Elton and Bernie’s song-writing has also remained unchanged, he said. They still write only for a specific album; Bernie writes the words first, then submits them to Elton. That must be a moment, I ventured, when the song is returned to Taupin, with music. John smiled.
“Now,” he said, “it gets to the point sometimes where Bernie would send me a lyric and actually not hear the song till the album was finished. So he’d come to the album playback session and it really does him in. He can’t listen to more than three or four songs. It really does him in.”
He doesn’t even know what beat they’ll be in?
“No. He sometimes tries a suggestion, like on the new album, Captain Fantastic and the Brown Dirt Cowboy, there’s a song called ‘Better Off Dead,’ which he said, on the bottom of the page, ‘a la John Prine?’ And it’s nothing like John Prine, it’s sort of a – it sounds like a Gilbert & Sullivan song. Semioperatic.”
Taupin: “I wrote it folky, and he turned it into like a galloping major, a regimental thing.”
Captain Fantastic, John says, is a departure. “It’s a story of all the things that happened to Bernie and me, how we met, all we went through up to the point of the Empty Sky album, and all the disappointments, our experiences with music publishers, asking for ten quid a week to live on. It’s the entire album, and I think it’s very uncommercial. I don’t know if there’ll be any singles on it, even now that we’ve recorded it.” The album won’t be out until next spring, but a new single will be released in November, along with the Greatest Hits album. The single is another departure. It’s a Beatles tune, “Lucy in the Sky with Diamonds,” and it’s performed on the current tour. Ringo Starr heard it at the Forum and declared it “great” at an MCA carnival/party the next day.
The idea came to Taupin from seeing Yellow Submarine on television, said John, and he tried it out at two charity concerts in England last spring. “It went down incredibly well, staggeringly well.” On the session, he said, “John Lennon played on it and put his own personality on it.”
Taupin and John – in yet another departure – have begun writing songs tailored for other artists.
On the solo album by Rod Stewart (who, like Elton, worked with John Baldry in the early days), he duets with Stewart on a John/Taupin number, “Let Me Be Your Car.” Actually, it’s Elton, with Stewart on harmony. “He’s a lazy kid,” said Elton.
“We’ve also written a song for Ringo, ‘Snookeroo.’ He said, ‘Listen, make it nice and commercial,’ so we did. Bernie wrote really simple lyrics, very Ringo-type lyrics, and I tried to write a simple sort of melody to it. And I play piano on it.” (Bernie: “It’s a simple, biographical thing: ‘I was born in a Northern town’ . . . like that. Just that bit got me humming ‘Yellow Submarine.’ “)
Ringo is almost a neighbor of Elton’s in Surrey; they live two miles apart. As for Lennon: “I met him last year in Los Angeles when he was doing the Phil Spector sessions. Tony King introduced me. He’s probably the first big star who I instantly fell in love with. It usually takes me about six or seven meetings with someone ’cause I’m very withdrawn. But he’s so easy to get on with. The first time we met, we got a Mercedes limousine, and we were driving down past the Roxy, and the Dramatics were there, and everyone’s really dressed up to the hilt to go in, all the black people, and they look fabulous. So John and I went past and started going ‘Right on! Right on!’ through the roof. It was great. We were tempted to get in, but we couldn’t ’cause it was full.”