I first met John Lennon through Tony King, who had moved to LA to become Apple Records’ general manager in the US. In fact, the first time I met John Lennon, he was dancing with Tony King. Nothing unusual in that, other than the fact that they weren’t in a nightclub, there was no music playing and Tony was in full drag as Queen Elizabeth II. They were at Capitol Records in Hollywood, where Tony’s new office was, shooting a TV advert for John’s forthcoming album Mind Games, and, for reasons best known to John, this was the big concept.
I took to him straight away. It wasn’t just that he was a Beatle and therefore one of my idols. He was a Beatle who thought it was a good idea to promote his new album by dancing around with a man dragged up as the Queen, for fuck’s sake. I thought: We’re going to get on like a house on fire. And I was right. As soon as we started talking, it felt like I’d known him my entire life.
We began spending a lot of time together, whenever I was in America. He’d separated from Yoko and was living in Los Angeles with May Pang. I know that period in his life is supposed to have been really troubled and unpleasant and dark, but I’ve got to be honest, I never saw that in him at all. I heard stories occasionally – about some sessions he’d done with Phil Spector that went completely out of control, about him going crazy one night and smashing up the record producer Lou Adler’s house. I could see a darkness in some of the people he was hanging out with: Harry Nilsson was a sweet guy, an incredibly talented singer and songwriter, but one drink too many and he’d turn into someone else, someone you really had to watch yourself around. And John and I certainly took a lot of drugs together and had some berserk nights out, as poor old Dr John would tell you. We went to see him at the Troubadour and he invited John onstage to jam. John was so pissed he ended up playing the organ with his elbows. It somehow fell to me to get him offstage.
In fact, you didn’t even need to go out to have a berserk night in John’s company. One evening in New York, we were holed up in my suite at the Sherry-Netherland hotel, determinedly making our way through a pile of coke, when someone knocked at the door. My first thought was that it was the police: if you’ve taken a lot of cocaine and someone unexpectedly knocks at the door, your immediate thought is always that it’s the police. John gestured at me to see who it was. I looked through the spyhole. My reaction was a peculiar combination of relief and incredulity. ‘John,’ I whispered. ‘It’s Andy Warhol.’
John shook his head frantically and drew his finger across his throat. ‘No fucking way. Don’t answer it,’ he hissed.
‘What?’ I whispered back. ‘What do you mean don’t answer it? It’s Andy Warhol.’
There was more knocking. John rolled his eyes. ‘Has he got that fucking camera with him?’ he asked.
I looked again through the spyhole and nodded. Andy took his Polaroid camera everywhere.
‘Right,’ said John. ‘And do you want him coming in here taking photos when you’ve got icicles of coke hanging out of your nose?’
I had to concede that I did not. ‘Then don’t fucking answer it,’ whispered John, and we crept back to doing whatever we were doing, trying to ignore the continued knocking of the world’s most famous pop artist.
But I genuinely never encountered that nasty, intimidating, destructive aspect of John that people talk about, the biting, acerbic wit. I’m not trying to paint some saintly posthumous portrait at all; I obviously knew that side of him existed, I just never saw it first-hand. All I ever saw from him was kindness and gentleness and fun, so much so that I took my mum and Derf to meet him. We went out to dinner, and when John went to the toilet, Derf thought it would be a great joke to take his false teeth out and put them in John’s drink: there was something infectious about John’s sense of humour that made people do things like that. Jesus, he was so funny. Whenever I was with him – or even better, him and Ringo – I just laughed and laughed and laughed.
We became so close that when his ex-wife Cynthia brought their son Julian to New York to see him, he asked me and Tony to chaperone them on their voyage over. We travelled to America on the SS France, this gorgeous old ship, on its last voyage from Southampton to New York. Most of my band and their partners came too. The other passengers were quite snooty towards us – these rich, enormous American women saying things like, ‘He’s supposed to be famous, but I’ve never heard of him,’ whenever I walked past them – but in fairness, I had dyed my hair bright green and brought suitcases filled with suits by the designer Tommy Nutter that were so loud they could permanently damage your hearing. I could hardly complain about attracting attention, adverse or otherwise. They liked me even less when I won the bingo one afternoon, not least because I got overexcited and screamed ‘BINGO!’ at the top of my voice. I subsequently discovered that the correct way to signify that you’d won on board the SS France was to graciously and demurely murmur the word ‘house’. Well, that’s not how they teach you to play bingo in Pinner, baby.
I didn’t care. I was having a blast: playing squash, going to the terrible cabaret shows, which for some reason always ended with a rousing singalong of ‘Hava Nagila’. Midway through the journey, I got a ship-to-shore call telling me that my latest album, Caribou, which had been released in June 1974, had gone platinum. And I was writing its follow-up. Bernie had come up with a set of songs about our early years together: they were all in sequence and they kind of told our story. They were beautiful lyrics. Songs about trying to write songs. Songs about no one wanting our songs. A song about my stupid failed suicide attempt in Furlong Road and a song about the weird relationship we had developed. The latter was called ‘We All Fall In Love Sometimes’. It made me well up because it was true. I wasn’t in love with Bernie physically, but I loved him like a brother; he was the best friend I’d ever had.
The lyrics were even easier than usual to write music for, which was just as well, because they’d only let me use the music room for a couple of hours a day during lunch. The rest of the time it was occupied by the ship’s classical pianist. When I turned up, she would leave with a great display of weary altruism, then head to a room directly above it and immediately strike up again. Sometimes she’d have an opera singer with her, who was the star turn at the aforementioned terrible cabaret. So I’d spend two hours trying to drown them out. That was how Captain Fantastic and the Brown Dirt Cowboy was written. I’d write a song – or sometimes two – every day during lunch break, to the accompaniment of an aggrieved pianist hammering away through the ceiling. And I’d have to remember them. I didn’t have a tape recorder with me.
In New York, we stayed at the Pierre hotel on Fifth Avenue. John Lennon was in the suite above mine, and called down. He wanted to play us the rough mixes of his new album. Moreover, he wanted me to play on two of the songs, ‘Surprise Surprise’ and ‘Whatever Gets You Thru The Night’. The second track sounded like a hit, even more so a couple of nights later when we went to the Record Plant East studio, just off Times Square. The overdub engineer was Jimmy Iovine, who ended up becoming one of the biggest music moguls in the world, but John produced it himself and he worked really quickly. Everyone thinks of John as someone who spent ages in the studio experimenting, because of Sergeant Pepper and ‘Strawberry Fields’, but he was fast, and he got bored easily, which was right up my street. By the time we were finished, I was convinced it was going to be Number One. John wasn’t: Paul had had number one solo singles, George had had number one solo singles, Ringo had had number one solo singles, but he never had. So I said we’d have a bet – if it got to Number One, he had to come onstage with me. I just wanted to see him play live, which he’d hardly done at all since The Beatles split up; a couple of appearances at benefit gigs and that was it.
To his credit, he didn’t try to shirk the bet when ‘Whatever Gets You Thru The Night’ did make Number One, not even after he travelled up to a show in Boston with Tony to see what he was getting himself into. I came onstage for the encore wearing something that basically resembled a little heart-shaped chocolate box with a tunic attached to it, and John turned to Tony, looking a bit aghast, and said, ‘Fucking hell, is this what rock and roll’s all about nowadays, then?’
But he still played with us at Madison Square Garden on Thanksgiving 1974, on the condition that we made sure Yoko didn’t come: they were still estranged. Of course, Yoko turned up anyway – which I have to say is very Yoko – but Tony made sure her tickets were out of the sightline of the stage. Before the show, she sent John a gardenia, which he wore in his buttonhole onstage. I’m not sure whether that was what made him so nervous beforehand, or if it was just because he didn’t know what to expect when he walked out. But either way, he was suddenly terrified. He threw up before the show. He even tried to get Bernie to come onstage with him, but to no avail: Bernie always hated the limelight, and not even a desperate Beatle could convince him to change his mind.
In my whole career, I’ve honestly never heard a crowd make a noise like the one they made when I introduced him. It just went on and on and on. But I knew how they felt. I was as giddy about it as they were, so were the rest of the band. It was probably the highlight of our careers to that point, to have someone like that share a stage with you. The three songs flew by, and he was off. He came back for the encore, this time with Bernie in tow, both of them playing tambourines on ‘The Bitch Is Back’. It was fabulous.
After the show, Yoko came backstage. We all ended up back at the Pierre hotel – me, John, Yoko, Tony and John Reid. We were sat in a booth having a drink and – as if the whole situation wasn’t peculiar enough – Uri Geller suddenly materialized out of nowhere, came over to our table and started bending all the spoons and forks on it. Then he began doing his mind-reading act. It had been a bizarre day. But ultimately it led to John reuniting with Yoko, having Sean – my godson – and retreating into a life of domestic contentment in the Dakota Building. I was happy for him, even if I could think of better places to retreat into domestic contentment in than the Dakota. There was something really sinister about that building, the architecture of it. Just looking at it gave me the creeps. You know, Roman Polanski chose to film Rosemary’s Baby there for a reason.
Recording Captain Fantastic had turned out to be as easy as writing it. The sessions were a breeze: we had gone back to Caribou in the summer of 1974 and taped the songs in the order they appear on the album, as though we were telling the story as we went along. We had knocked out a couple of singles, too, a cover of ‘Lucy In The Sky With Diamonds’ that John played guitar and sang backing vocals on, and ‘Philadelphia Freedom’, which is one of the few songs I ever commissioned Bernie to write. Normally, I just let him write lyrics about whatever he wanted – we’d learned we couldn’t really write to order back in the days when we kept trying to write singles for Tom Jones or Cilla Black and failing miserably – but Billie Jean King had asked me to write a theme song for her tennis team, the Philadelphia Freedoms. I couldn’t refuse; I adored Billie Jean. We’d met at a party in LA a year before, and she’d become one of my best friends. It seems a strange comparison, but she and John Lennon reminded me of each other. They were both really driven, they were both kind, they both loved to laugh, they both felt really strongly that they could use their fame to change things. John was politically engaged, Billie was a huge pioneer for feminism, for gay rights, for women’s rights in sport, not just tennis. All today’s huge female tennis stars should get on their knees and thank her, because she was the one who had the guts to turn round when she won the US Open and say, ‘You have to give women the same prize money as men, or I’m not playing next year’. I just love her to death.
Perhaps understandably, Bernie wasn’t hugely enamoured with the idea of writing about tennis – it’s not exactly the ideal topic for a pop song – so instead, he wrote about the city of Philadelphia. That worked perfectly, because the song’s sound was influenced by the music that was coming out of the city at the time: The O’Jays, MFSB, Harold Melvin And The Blue Notes. That was the music I heard when I went out to gay clubs in New York: Crisco Disco, Le Jardin and 12 West. I loved them, even though Crisco Disco once refused to let me in. I was with Divine, too, the legendary drag queen. I know, I know: Elton John and Divine getting turned away from a gay club. But he was wearing a kaftan, I had on a brightly coloured jacket and they said we were overdressed: ‘Whaddaya think this is? Fuckin’ Halloween?’
You didn’t go to those places to pick up guys, or at least I didn’t. I just went there to dance, and if there was someone there at the end of the night, then great. No drugs, except maybe poppers. You didn’t need them. The music was enough: ‘Honey Bee’ by Gloria Gaynor, ‘I’ll Always Love My Mama’ by The Intruders. Fabulous records, really inspiring, brave music. We got Gene Page, who arranged all Barry White’s records, to do the strings on ‘Philadelphia Freedom’ and we got the sound and style right. We must have done – a few months after it came out, MFSB covered it and named an album after it.
‘Philadelphia Freedom’ went platinum in America, then a few months later, Captain Fantastic became the first album in history to go straight into the US charts at Number One. I was everywhere in 1975. Not just on the radio: everywhere. I was in amusement arcades – Bally made a Captain Fantastic pinball machine. I was on black TV: one of the first white artists ever to be invited to appear on Soul Train. I was interviewed by the exceptionally laid-back Don Cornelius, who took a shine to yet another Tommy Nutter creation I was wearing, this time with huge lapels and brown and gold pinstripes: ‘Hey, brother, where did you get that suit?’
But I was still keen to keep moving. I decided to change the band and let Dee and Nigel go. I rang them myself. They took the news quite well – Dee was more upset than Nigel, but there wasn’t a huge row or a feeling of bad blood from either of them. I feel worse about it now than I did at the time. It must have been devastating for them – they’d been integral for years and we were at the peak of our careers. Back then, I was always looking forward, and I felt in my gut that I needed to revamp our sound: make it funkier and harder-driving. I brought in Caleb Quaye on guitar and Roger Pope on drums, who’d played on Empty Sky and Tumbleweed Connection, and two American session musicians, James Newton Howard and Kenny Passarelli, on keyboards and bass.
I auditioned another American guitarist as well, but it wasn’t a success. For one thing, it didn’t gel musically, and for another he freaked out everyone else in the band by telling us that he liked fucking chickens up the arse, then cutting their heads off. Apparently when you do that their sphincters contract and it makes you come. I couldn’t work out whether he had an absolutely horrendous sense of humour or an absolutely horrendous sex life. There aren’t many rules in rock and roll, but there are some: follow your gut musical instincts, make sure you read the small print before you sign and, if at all possible, try not to form a band with someone who fucks chickens up the arse and decapitates them. Or even talks about it. Whichever it is, it’s going to wear on your nerves after a while if you have to share a hotel room with them.
There was one other complication. Bernie’s marriage to Maxine had broken up, and she’d started having an affair with Kenny Passarelli. So my new bass player was sleeping with my songwriting partner’s wife. It was obviously really hurtful for Bernie, but I had enough going on in my own life without getting embroiled in other people’s relationships.
I took the new band to Amsterdam to rehearse. The rehearsals were fantastic – we were an absolutely shit-hot band – but the days off were bedlam: it turned out we were absolutely shit-hot at taking drugs, too. Tony King turned up with Ringo Starr and we all went on a boat trip along the canals, which swiftly degenerated into a mammoth drug fest. It was completely debauched. I’m afraid the aesthetic loveliness of the Grachtengordel went entirely unnoticed that day. Everybody was too busy doing coke and blowing spliff smoke into each other’s mouths. Ringo got so stoned that, at one point, he asked if he could join the band. At least, that’s what people told me afterwards – I didn’t hear him. If he did, he probably forgot he said it about ninety seconds after the words came out of his mouth.
One of the reasons I was taking so many drugs was because I was heartbroken. I’d fallen in love with someone who was straight and didn’t love me. I spent so much time in my hotel room weeping and listening to 10CC’s ‘I’m Not In Love’ that Tony eventually had a gold disc made up and presented me with it: to Elton John for a million plays of ‘I’m Not In Love’.
In fact, since I had broken up with John, my personal life had been, more or less, a disaster. I’d fall in love with straight men all the time, chase after the thing I couldn’t have. Sometimes it went on for months and months, this madness of thinking that today was the day you’d get a phone call from them saying ‘oh, by the way, I love you’, despite the fact that they’d told you it was never going to happen.
Or I’d see someone I liked the look of in a gay bar and before I’d actually spoken to them, I’d be hopelessly in love, convinced this was the man I was fated to share the rest of my life with and mentally sketching out a wonderful future. It was always the same type of guy. Blond, blue eyes, good-looking and younger than me, so I could smother them with a kind of fatherly love – the sort of love I suppose I thought I’d missed out on myself as a kid. I didn’t pick them up so much as take them hostage. ‘Right, you have to give up what you’re doing, come on the road, fly round the world with me.’ I’d buy them the watch and the shirt and the cars, but eventually these boys had no reason to be, except to be with me, and I was busy, so they’d be left on the sidelines. I didn’t realize it at the time, but I was taking their existence away from them. And after three or four months they’d end up resenting it, I’d end up getting bored with them, and it would end in tears. And then I’d get someone else to get rid of them for me and start again. It was absolutely dreadful behaviour: I’d have one leaving at the airport at the same time as the new one was flying in.
It was a decadent era, and plenty of other pop stars were behaving in a similar way – Rod Stewart occasionally let girls know he’d finished with them by just leaving a plane ticket on their bed, so he wasn’t going to win any awards for chivalry either. But somewhere in the back of my mind, I knew this can’t be right.
I had to have some arm-candy, though, someone to talk to. I couldn’t stand being on my own. There was no solitude, no reflection. I had to be with people. I was incredibly immature. I was still the little boy from Pinner Hill Road underneath it all. The events, the shows, the records, the success were all great, but when I was away from that, I wasn’t an adult, I was a teenager. I had been completely wrong when I thought that changing my name meant I’d changed as a person. I wasn’t Elton, I was Reg. And Reg was still the same as he’d been fifteen years ago, hiding in his bedroom while his parents fought: insecure and body-conscious and self-loathing. I didn’t want to go home to him at night. If I did, the misery could be all-consuming.
One night, while I was recording with the new band up at Caribou studios, I took an overdose of Valium before I went to bed. Twelve tablets. I can’t remember what exactly prompted me to do that, although it was probably some catastrophic love affair gone wrong. When I woke up the next day, I panicked, rushed downstairs and called Connie Pappas, who worked with John Reid, and told her what I’d done. While I was talking to her, I blacked out. James Newton Howard heard me collapse and carried me back upstairs to my room. They called a doctor, who prescribed me pills for my nerves. With the benefit of hindsight, that seems quite an odd thing to do to someone who’s just tried to finish himself off with a load of pills for his nerves, but they must have helped, at least in the short term – the sessions got finished.
The new band’s first show was at London’s Wembley Stadium on 21 June 1975. It was more like a one-day festival than a gig, called Midsummer Music. I’d picked the bill myself: a band signed to our label, Rocket, called Stackridge, Rufus with Chaka Khan, Joe Walsh, The Eagles and The Beach Boys. They were all great. The audience loved them. For my headlining set, I played Captain Fantastic and the Brown Dirt Cowboy in its entirety, all ten songs, from start to finish. It was the biggest show I’d ever played. Everything was perfect – the sound, the support acts, even the weather. And it was an unmitigated disaster.
Here’s something I learned. If you’ve elected to come onstage immediately after The Beach Boys – whose set has consisted of virtually every hit from one of the most incredible and best-loved catalogues of hits in the history of pop music – it’s a really, really bad idea to play ten new songs in a row that no one in the audience is particularly familiar with, because the album they come from was only released a couple of weeks ago. Unfortunately, I learned this vital lesson about three or four songs into the Wembley performance, when I sensed a restlessness in the crowd, the way schoolkids get restless during a particularly long assembly. We ploughed on. We sounded wonderful – like I said, we were a shit-hot band. People started to leave. I was terrified. It was years since I’d lost an audience. The feeling I used to get onstage in the clubs when Long John Baldry insisted on playing ‘The Threshing Machine’ or doing his Della Reese impersonation came flooding back.
The obvious thing to do would be to turn it around and start playing the hits. But I couldn’t. For one thing, it was a matter of artistic integrity. And for another, I’d made a big speech when we came onstage about performing the album in full. I couldn’t just suddenly strike up with ‘Crocodile Rock’ halfway through. Fuck. I’d have to stick with it. I could already imagine what the reviews were going to be like, and I was only half an hour into the show. We kept going. The songs still sounded wonderful. More people left. I started thinking about the big celebratory post-gig party that was planned. It was going to be filled with stars who were supposed to have been dazzled by my performance: Billie Jean, Paul McCartney, Ringo Starr. Great. This is just fucking wonderful. I’m screwing up in front of 82,000 people and half The Beatles.
We eventually got round to the hits, but it was too little, too late, as the reviews quite rightly pointed out. We went back to America, having been taught both a lesson in the perils of artistic integrity and that you’re never too successful to fall flat on your arse.
I was spending more and more time over in the States, so much that it made sense to rent a house in LA. I found one at the top of Tower Grove Drive, which I eventually bought. It was a Spanish Colonial-style house that had been built for the silent movie star John Gilbert. He’d lived there while he was having an affair with Greta Garbo. There was a hut in the garden by a waterfall, and that was allegedly where Garbo slept when she wanted to be alone.
It was a nice neighbourhood, although a house nearby did burn down shortly after I moved there. The fire allegedly started because the owner was freebasing cocaine, something I very much frowned on. Cooking up drugs meant that you were a druggie, which – with the help of some remarkably convoluted internal logic – I had worked out that I definitely wasn’t, despite some pretty compelling evidence to the contrary. I would stay up all night on coke, then not touch it for six months. So I wasn’t an addict. I was fine.
It was a beautiful house, and I employed a housekeeper called Alice to look after the place and nurse me through my hangovers. I filled it with all the stuff I was collecting – art nouveau, art deco, Bugatti furniture, Gallé lamps, Lalique, incredible posters – but I only really lived in three rooms: my bedroom, the TV room and the snooker room. Actually, I mostly used the snooker room to seduce guys. Strip snooker! It usually seemed to do the trick, especially after a couple of lines of coke.
That was another reason I took a lot of coke: I found it was an aphrodisiac, which is strange, because for most people it kills the erection side of things completely. Never a problem for me, I’m afraid. Quite the opposite. If I took enough coke I could stay hard for days. And I liked the fantasy of it: I did things on coke that I would never have had the courage to do or try if I hadn’t been. It takes all the inhibitions out of people. Even straight guys sometimes. You gave them a couple of lines and they’d do stuff they wouldn’t ordinarily do in a million years. Then regret it in the morning, I suppose – or occasionally come back for more.
But I was never actually into fucking that much. I was an observer, a voyeur. I’d kind of set up my perversion, have two or three guys doing things for me to watch. That was where my sexual pleasure came from, getting a bunch of people who wouldn’t normally have sex with each other, to have sex with each other. But I didn’t really participate. I just watched, took Polaroids, organized things. The only problem was that I was incredibly houseproud, so they’d end up having sex on the snooker table with me shouting, ‘Make sure you don’t come on the baize!’ which tended to puncture the atmosphere a bit. Not being that interested in having sex myself is the reason I never got HIV. If I had been, I’d almost certainly be dead.
Tower Grove Drive turned into a big party house, the place everyone came back to after a night out. LA was the centre of the music industry in the mid-seventies. Plus, LA had amazing gay clubs: the After Dark and Studio One. The first was a disco, quite underground; the second had cabaret. It was where I saw Eartha Kitt, who I’d loved when I was a kid, although strictly speaking I didn’t actually see Eartha Kitt perform. I went backstage to meet her before the show and her opening words to me were: ‘Elton John. I never liked anything you did.’ Oh, really? Well, thanks for your frank and honest appraisal. I think I’ll go home.
If Dusty Springfield was around, we’d go to the roller derby to see the LA Thunderbirds. It was so camp and fabulous, all scripted, like wrestling, but lesbians loved it – it was basically a load of dykes whizzing round on skates and fighting each other. And we’d have fantastic lunch and dinner parties. Franco Zeffirelli came for lunch and revealed that his close friends called him Irene. Simon and Garfunkel had dinner one night, then played charades. At least, they tried to play charades. They were terrible at it. The best thing I can say about them is that they were better than Bob Dylan. He couldn’t get the hang of the ‘how many syllables?’ thing at all. He couldn’t do ‘sounds like’ either, come to think of it. One of the best lyricists in the world, the greatest man of letters in the history of rock music, and he can’t seem to tell you whether a word’s got one syllable or two syllables or what it rhymes with! He was so hopeless, I started throwing oranges at him. Or so I was informed the next morning, by a cackling Tony King. That’s not really a phone call you want to receive when you’re struggling with a hangover. ‘Morning, darling – do you remember throwing oranges at Bob Dylan last night?’ Oh God.
There was a strange, dark undercurrent to LA, too. The Manson murders still hung over the place six years on. They’d left this weird sense that you were never really safe there, even in a big house in Beverly Hills. These days, everyone has security guards and CCTV, but no one did then, not even the former Beatles, which is why I woke up one morning to find a girl sitting on the end of my bed, staring at me. I couldn’t get up, because I never wore anything when I slept. All I could do was sit there screaming at her to get the fuck out. She didn’t say anything back, she just kept staring, which was somehow worse than if she’d spoken. Eventually the housekeeper came down and got her out of there. It scared the shit out of me – we couldn’t work out how the hell she’d got in.
But you didn’t need a stalker to alert you to LA’s dark side. One night, I went to see the Average White Band play at the Troubadour. They were so fantastic that I got onstage and jammed with them, dragging Cher and Martha Reeves up with me. After the gig, I took the band out to a place called Le Restaurant, which served great food and didn’t frown on outré behaviour: the management hadn’t even blanched at John Reid’s birthday party, which was extremely tolerant of them, given that a friend had brought the horse he bought John as a present into the restaurant and it had immediately shat on the floor. We stayed out until 6 a.m. There was something lovely about spending time with them, a young British band just on the verge of becoming huge, playing a residency at the Troubadour and boggling at the prospect of making it in America: they reminded me of me five years before. But two days later, I got a phone call from John Reid, telling me the Average White Band’s drummer, Robbie, was dead. They’d gone to another party the following night, up in the Hollywood Hills, and taken heroin some creep had given them, thinking it was cocaine. He died in his hotel room a few hours later.
I suppose it could have happened anywhere, but his death seemed to sum up LA. It could feel like a place where the tired old line about dreams coming true wasn’t a tired old line but a statement of fact. It was the city where, more or less, I’d become a star; where I’d been feted by my idols; where I’d somehow ended up taking tea with Mae West (to my delight, she swanned in with a lascivious smile and the words, ‘Ah, my favourite sight – a room full of men’, which, given that the men present were me, John Reid and Tony King, suggested she was in for an evening of disappointment). But if you didn’t keep your wits about you – if you took a wrong turn or kept the wrong company – LA could just as easily swallow you up.
The mayor of Los Angeles, Tom Watson, declared the 20–26 October 1975 Elton John Week. Among other things, I was to have a star unveiled on the Hollywood Walk of Fame, right outside Grauman’s Chinese Theatre. There were two gigs booked at Dodger Stadium, an audience of 55,000 at each. I’d played to larger crowds than that – there were 82,000 people at Wembley Stadium, or at least there had been before they decided they’d had enough and started storming the exits – but the Dodger gigs still seemed like a zenith. I was the first artist who’d been allowed to play there since The Beatles in 1966, when the promoter hadn’t booked enough security staff. There had been a kind of mini riot at the end of The Beatles’ set, and the stadium’s owners had subsequently banned rock gigs. And there was a peculiar sense of homecoming about them, given that my career had really taken off at the Troubadour five years previously.
So I chartered a Boeing 707 plane through Pan Am and flew my mum and Derf, my grandma and a load of my friends over from England, along with the staff of Rocket, journalists and media and a TV documentary crew fronted by the chat show host Russell Harty. I met them on the runway with Tony King and a fleet of Rolls-Royces and Cadillacs: the kind of welcome I’d been expecting the first time I got to America, instead of that fucking double-decker bus. I suppose it was quite an outrageous thing to do, but I wanted my family to see it; I wanted them to have the time of their lives; I wanted them to be proud of me.
Elton John Week passed in a blur. My family went on trips to Disneyland and Universal Studios. There was a party on John Reid’s yacht, Madman, to celebrate the release of Rock of the Westies. The grand unveiling of the star on the Hollywood Walk of Fame turned out to be a bit naff. I was wearing a lime-green Bob Mackie suit, covered in the names of other Walk of Fame stars, and matching bowler hat. I had to travel there on a gold-painted golf cart with an enormous pair of illuminated glasses and a bow tie stuck to the front of it. I’m aware that I was hardly the model of shy understatement onstage, but there were limits. There’s footage of it on YouTube, and if you look at the expression on my face, it’s pretty clear what a wonderful idea I thought that was. I don’t know if you’ve ever been driven very slowly through a crowd of screaming fans, in full view of the world’s media, on a gold-painted golf cart with a pair of enormous illuminated glasses and a bow tie on the front, but if you haven’t, I can tell you that it’s a pretty excruciating experience.
I felt incredibly awkward and tried to defuse the situation by pulling faces during the speeches and making jokes when my turn came to speak – ‘I now declare this supermarket open!’ – but I couldn’t wait for it to be over and done with. Afterwards, they told me that it was the first time in the history of the Walk of Fame that so many fans had turned up to an unveiling, they had to close Hollywood Boulevard completely.
The next day, I invited my family over to lunch at Tower Grove Drive. Like Captain Fantastic, Rock of the Westies went straight into the US album charts at Number One. No one had ever done that before – not Elvis, not The Beatles – and now I’d done it twice, in the space of six months. I was twenty-eight years old and I was, for the moment, the biggest pop star in the world. I was about to play the most prestigious gigs of my career. My family and friends were there, happily sharing in my success. And that was when I decided to try and commit suicide again.
Again, I can’t remember exactly what provoked me to do it, but as my family were eating I got up from the table by the swimming pool, went upstairs and swallowed a load of Valium. Then I came back down in my dressing gown and announced that I’d taken a bunch of tablets and that I was going to die. And then I threw myself in the pool.
I can’t remember exactly how many tablets I swallowed, but it was fewer than I’d taken that night at Caribou studios – a sign that, deep down, I had absolutely no intention of actually killing myself. This fact was brought very sharply into focus when I felt the dressing gown start to weigh me down. For someone who was supposed to be in the process of trying to end it all – who was apparently convinced that life had nothing more to offer him and was filled with a longing for death’s merciful release – I suddenly became surprisingly keen not to drown. I started frantically swimming to the side of the pool. Someone helped me get out. The thing I remember most clearly is hearing my grandmother’s voice pipe up. ‘Oh,’ she said. And then, in a noticeably aggrieved tone – unmistakably the voice of an elderly working-class lady from Pinner who’s realized her wonderful holiday in California is suddenly in danger of being cut short – she added: ‘We might as well bleedin’ go home, then.’
I couldn’t stop myself laughing. That might have been exactly the response I needed. I was looking for ‘oh, you poor thing’, but instead I got ‘why are you behaving like such a twat?’
It was a good question: why was I behaving like such a twat? I suppose I was doing something dramatic to try and get attention. I realize that, on one level, it sounds nuts, given that I was living in a city that had declared it was Elton John Week, I was about to play in front of 110,000 people, and there was an ITV camera crew in the process of making a documentary about me. How much more attention can a man need? But I was looking for a different kind of attention from that. I was trying to make my family understand that there was something wrong, however well my career was going: it might seem that it’s all great, it might seem that my life is perfect, but it’s not. I couldn’t say to them, ‘I think I’m taking too many drugs’, because they would never understand; they didn’t know what cocaine was. I hadn’t got the guts to tell them, ‘Look, I’m really not feeling very good, I need a bit of love’, because I didn’t want them to see any cracks in the facade at all. I was too strong-willed – and too afraid of her reaction – to just take my mum aside and say, ‘Listen, Mum, I really need to talk to you – I’m not doing very well here, I need a bit of help, what do you think?’ Instead of doing that, I bottled it up and bottled it up and then eventually I went off like Vesuvius and staged this ridiculous suicide bid. That’s who I am: it’s all or nothing. It wasn’t my family’s fault at all, it was mine. I was too proud to admit that my life wasn’t perfect. It was pathetic.
They called a doctor. I refused to go to hospital and have my stomach pumped, so he gave me this hideous liquid that made me vomit. And as soon as I threw up, I felt all right: ‘OK, I’m better now. So, anyway, I’ve got these two gigs to do.’ It sounds ridiculous – it was ridiculous – but I bounced back very quickly from my deathbed: right, I’ve tried to commit suicide, done that, what’s next? If anyone around me thought that was strange, they kept it to themselves. And twenty-four hours later I was onstage at Dodger Stadium.
The shows were a complete triumph. That’s the thing about playing live, for me at least. Even now, whatever turmoil I might be going through just gets pushed aside. Back then, when I was onstage I just felt different from when I was offstage. It was the only time I really felt in control of what I did.
They were huge events. Cary Grant was backstage, looking incredibly beautiful. I had gospel singers, James Cleveland’s Southern California Community Choir, performing with me. I had Billie Jean King come out and sing backing vocals on ‘Philadelphia Freedom’. I had the security guards dressed in ridiculous lilac one-piece jumpsuits with frills. I had California’s most famous used-car dealer, a man called Cal Worthington, come on with a lion – Christ knows why, but I suppose it all added to the general gaiety. Even Bernie put in an appearance in front of the audience, which was almost unheard of.
I wore a sequinned Dodgers uniform and cap, designed by Bob Mackie. I climbed on top of the piano and swung a baseball bat around. I hammered at the piano keys until my fingers split and bled. We played for three hours and I loved it. I know how to pull off a show because of all those years I spent in clubs, backing Major Lance or playing with Bluesology to twenty people; I’ve got the experience, so my gigs are never really below a certain standard. But sometimes, something else happens onstage: from the minute you start playing you just know you can do no wrong. It’s as if your hands are moving independently of your brain; you don’t even have to concentrate, you just feel as free as a bird, you can do anything you want. Those are the gigs you live for, and Dodger Stadium was like that, on both days. The sound was perfect, so was the weather. I can remember standing onstage, feeling the adrenalin coursing through me.
It was a pinnacle, and I was smart enough to know that it couldn’t last, at least not at that pitch. Success on that level never does; it doesn’t matter who you are, or how great you are, your records aren’t going to enter the charts at Number One forever. I knew someone or something else was going to come along. I was waiting for that moment to happen, and the thought of it didn’t scare me at all. It was almost a relief when the second single from Rock of the Westies, ‘Grow Some Funk Of Your Own’, wasn’t a huge hit. For one thing, I was exhausted: exhausted from touring, exhausted from giving interviews, exhausted by the ongoing catastrophe that was my personal life. And for another, I’d never really set out to have hit singles. I was an album artist, who made records like Tumbleweed Connection and Madman Across the Water, and I’d inadvertently become this huge singles machine, having smash after smash after smash, none of which had been intentionally written to be hit singles.
In fact, one of the few times I ever sat down and tried to write a hit single was at the end of 1975. I was on holiday in Barbados with a big group of friends: Bernie was there, Tony King, Kiki Dee, lots of people. I thought we should write a duet for Kiki and me to sing. Bernie and I came up with two. One was called ‘I’m Always On The Bonk’: ‘I don’t know who I’m fucking, I don’t know who I’m sucking, but I’m always on the bonk’. The other was ‘Don’t Go Breaking My Heart’. I wrote the melody on the piano, came up with the title and then Bernie finished it off. He hated the end result, and I can’t really blame him – Bernie was not, and is not, a fan of anything he thinks is shallow pop music. But even he had to admit it had substantially more commercial potential than ‘I’m Always On The Bonk’.