*Jokes about Elton John’s taste in tracksuits go in here*
Now that you’ve had a moment to bask in the vision of Elton’s orange-swathed thighs, let’s move on. We can focus on his dramatic flair, both in style and in music or the way he can belt a ballad all the way to the back row without sounding mawkish. He simply has a great understanding of theatrics, and that’s one of the reasons he remains a stadium filling superstar. Being associated with glam rock for his sequins notwithstanding, Elton John has never been genuinely glamorous. He hasn’t got the hair for it. But just because he hasn’t got the dangerous allure of a David Bowie, doesn’t mean he doesn’t rank with the greatest of the great as a consummate showman. It’s not just about wearing lots of feathers on stage, fun as that may be. It’s the skill to balance the intimate with the dramatic, to exaggerate without flying over the top, to appear both ordinary and outlandish. It’s easy enough to imagine some alternate universe where Elton Hercules John is the toast of Broadway, occupying a niche somewhere not far away from Nathan Lane. Lucky for us he chose the cool route and took up rock’n'roll.
Believe it or not, this was before Elton John came out. In 1983 he still had a sham marriage and years of alcoholism ahead of him. Coming out was never an easy thing and still isn’t, but it’s hard to understand why Elton John spent so long keeping up the half-hearted pretense of being ‘bisexual’. It might have worked for a while at the height of glam rock, when sexual ambiguity was chic, but pretty soon everyone in the world was aware that Elton John was completely, inexorably, flamboyantly flaming gay. He certainly broadcast it loud enough in this video. Everyone just had to sit back and watch and wish he’d stop hurting himself by pretending otherwise. Of course, the 80′s were a particularly rough time for coming out, with the AIDS epidemic fueling a rise in homophobia and discrimination. It was also a hard time for Elton on a personal level, as his drinking and partying became increasingly destructive. It’s a relief to see the Elton of today, clean living and happily settled down. What we see in the goofy, campy little video is a man in crisis. The story goes that during the video shoot in Nice, Elton bumped into members of Duran Duran, who plied him with many martinis, and ended up waking up in his utterly destroyed hotel suite with no memory of what happened. Given that the singer was on a swift downward spiral at the time, it’s ironic that this song is such an invigorating anthem of overcoming. But, as usual, it’s about Bernie anyway.
I have to admit that I kind of gave up on Elton John sometime in the nineties. I figured he’d eternally consigned himself to writing musicals about talking lions, publishing books about flowers and weeping at funerals. It seemed like Sir Elton was keeping himself so busy doing important things like raising millions of dollars for his AIDS Foundation that making good music dropped from the top of his priority list. Of course, it would be inhuman to find fault with Elton’s charity work and activism – he really has raised millions and millions of dollars for AIDS research, education and prevention, as well as fighting discrimination and standing up for marriage equality. Elton John has set an inspiring standard for using his wealth and status to make the world a better place. So if it looked as if he’d lost his musical calling along the way, it would be easy enough to forgive him. Except that he hadn’t. He just got distracted by all those Disney dollars for a quick minute. When I first heard this song – on the sound system at Walmart of all places – I couldn’t believe my ears. What was this long lost classic, and how had I never known of its existence? I looked at every Elton John album at my disposal, which was most of them, and couldn’t find it. It took a while, in those dark pre-internet days, to find out that it was actually a brand new single, from a brand new album. Songs From the West Coast turned out to be the best album Elton had made since probably the eighties, not least because he ditched trying to test drive all the latest production gimmicks. It was a good album all the way through, but this song is the obvious standout. I would confidently put it up there with his best work. It’s definitely one of his most soulful and touching vocal performances. Elton can be a campy little diva sometimes, but when he sits down at the piano with a great ballad, he positively flows with emotion. I also think that Elton had to be a little older and wiser for this song. It’s a song for a mature singer, someone who can look back on a lifetime of mistakes and then look to the future with wary optimism. The young Elton would still have made a good song out of this, but it would have been fluff. It’s the right song for an older Elton, an Elton who can really blow it out of the water. And that’s how he proved that he never lost his mojo, that he was still brilliant and he still had so much to share.
I love it when two seemingly unrelated song form a narrative. Honky Cat is obviously telling the same story as Goodbye Yellow Brick road. Whether or not it’s coincidental, I don’t know. The former tells of a ‘honky’ country boy itching to get out of the woods and into the big city. In the latter, the country boy is thoroughly sick of city life and longs to get back to the woods. The two songs were separated by only a year; Honky Chateau came out in 1973, Goodbye Yellow Brick Road came out the following year. It was a busy and fruitful time for Elton John. He released most of his best material in the first half of the seventies. Although it is tempting to see this particular duo as documenting Elton and/or Bernie’s evolving feelings towards success and fame, we have to be careful about perceiving his songs as too personal. Bernie Taupin wrote songs drawing upon his own life, Elton’s life, Marilyn Monroe’s life and just plain fictional songs. In fact, very few Elton/Bernie songs are directly autobiographical or even particularly personal. Because for one thing, Elton John is more of a showman by nature than a confessional emo type. Perhaps too, he wanted to avoid getting especially personal in his work because he was still closeted at the time and an outing would certainly have been detrimental to his career. (Because in the 70′s it was possible to dress like Elton John and still be in the closet.) So I would not strive to see a picture of Elton John in an Elton John song, at least not any of the early ones.
This might get lost among all the other brilliance of Goodbye Yellow Brick Road, but for me it’s always been one of the highlights. Not quite a love song, but not quite not a love song either. It’s a love song about loving someone you can’t be with because they aggravate the hell out of you. But you still love them and come back to them. A pretty complex emotion, delivered as only Elton John can. Such a simple song, but Elton’s voice brings the drama. I’d call it a power ballad, but it’s better than that label. I guess maybe Elton John wasn’t at his highest peak in 1980 when this video was recorded, but even slightly diminished he’s a powerhouse. Don’t let the funny hats distract you from how much soul is in his voice. Feathers, rhinestones, platform boots, it doesn’t matter. It’s just stage dressing. Elton John could be alone on an empty stage with his piano, no frippery, no sparkles, and still put on a bravura performance. But that wouldn’t be fun for him. He likes his showbiz.
Here’s more of Elton John showing his music-hall touch at the keys. As a kid, not having taken the slightest interest in the lyrics, I assumed that Grimsby was an ode to an English butler. Because it sounds like the kind of name a butler would have – “I say, Grimsby, be a good lad and fetch us a clean set of spats, atta boy!” As it happens, Grimsby is an ode the thoroughly unglamorous English seaport town of Great Grimsby, which is distinguished by exactly nothing. It’s unknown whether Elton or Bernie had actually been to Grimsby and liked it, or had been there and hated it and were being satirical, or if they just thought the name sounded cool. I’ve also heard that Grimsby is Bernie Taupin’s reply to something Randy Newman had composed about Cleveland, but I don’t know enough about Randy Newman to make a judgement on that.
Another brilliant album track from Elton John’s Goodbye Yellow Brick Road. Making a double album on which every track is a winner is quite a feat, and Elton pulled it off. Most double albums, even classic ones, suffer from at least a little bloat. Even if it’s solid all the way through, there’s still the matter of fun exhaustion, when the listener’s attention spans simply runs out and they wander off. Not here, though. Every song on Goodbye Yellow Brick Road could have been a single. Even better, every song is different, so it’s impossible to get bored. It does make you think, though, about the ways the record industry has changed for the worse. In the days of vinyl, a double was an extravagance, and the sheer physical limitations of an LP meant that most albums had to confine themselves to a lean eight to ten songs. The physical capacity of a CD is much larger, and online the physical boundaries disappear altogether. Which means that the idea of an album being single or double no longer has any meaning. Today artists routinely release albums of 20 or more songs, even if they only have enough good material for what would have been an extended-play in the old days. Putting out such a volume of material just because you can is a curse, not a blessing. Not everyone is Elton John, who can whip up 17 chart-quality tracks. Most artists should limit themselves to three or four good songs and another three mediocre ones, but don’t. Too many times what could have been a sprightly short little album of good music ends up a bloated heap of filler that the listener has to wade through to find the handful of worthy material. And don’t get me started on ‘deluxe editions,’ those unabashed ass-fuckings the studios like to unleash on consumers still dumb enough to buy physical product. Take me back to those times when a gatefold sleeve was cause for celebration.
Aw, look at young Elton John and his big shiny glasses! Such a sweetiepie. No less adorable for singing about the highs and lows of being a gigolo. Which is just my personal interpretation. It could be about being a groupie, as well. Some people think it’s a parable about the perils of rock stardom, but that doesn’t make sense. It’s clearly about a mutually exploitative relationship between a country mouse and city mouse, so to speak. Funny what kinds of unbecoming things end up being hit records. If something’s powerful enough, it doesn’t necessarily matter what it’s literally about. What the words say and what we get out of them are two different things.
I’ll admit I actually find this song a bit grating. But it represents very well late-career Sparks. In which they’ve come to rely on a specific formula. Maybe I’m wrong about their creative process, but it seems like they first come up with the randomest song title they can think of and work from there. Sometimes it’s just Russ chanting the song title/joke over an endlessly repetitive synth melody. Here there’s a full set of lyrics in narrative formation, and they’re pretty damn funny. Love the formula or hate it, those guys have never lost their sense of humor. Sometimes they can be annoying but there’s always a good joke in there somewhere. I do miss early Sparks, when they were a full band with guitars and drums. They must have figured out keeping a stable of supporting players was too much trouble when all they ever needed was Ron’s keyboard and a mic for Russell. Now they’re the world’s only electronic music parody duo. But they’re not parodists in the Weird Al sense. They’re not interested in deflating whatever the next big thing is. They just write whatever they think is amusing. The youngest among you might not understand what makes this song funny. It’s funny because Liberace is such an absurd personality. If you don’t remember, for a few decades starting in the 1940′s he ruled Vegas as a kind of smarmier version of Elton John. That is: flamboyant, sparkly, tacky, and piano-based. Also gay, but unlike Sir Elton, never out with it. I read that he’d force his toy-boys to have plastic surgery so they’d look more like him, something Elton John would never dream of doing, because Elton John is married to someone his own age, for one thing, and also because Elton John isn’t a total freaking lunatic like that. Though that whole story may not even be true, who knows. Anyhow, Liberace was a talented showman and pianist, but his horrible taste in everything you can imagine and slimy Vegas persona has made him into a figure of high hilarity, even without anyone coming along to write a song about him.
So much Marc Bolan goodness, and Elton John is there too! Bolan is shiny! This song was renamed for single release from the straightforward Get It On to Bang A Gong (Get It On), which is nominally less suggestive and blunts the core message not at all. Like they knew getting it on was bad, but they didn’t know what banging was. The title matters not a whit, for it remains one of the most propulsively sexy tunes ever written. Bolan added a note at the end – “Meanwhile, I’m still thinking” – in tribute to Chuck Berry. Whatever his inspiration that chugging boogie is all his own. Those opening notes took Marc Bolan away from any hippie, bedsitter, folkie past and straight into superstardom. The fey early songs about unicorns and elves were great, Slider was great, the later soul-inflected stuff was great, but nothing approached the 39 minutes of Electric Warrior in greatness. That album and this song are just the ultimate in T-rextasy. What’s he singing? Though he’s expressing himself in his usual corkscrewey way, for once there’s no shimmer of a doubt. We know what he’s on about, and we are with him. ”You’re built like a car” is my favorite line of all time. I like to apply it as the highest possible compliment.
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