From January 18 to 24, David Bowie records Britain’s second bestselling album of the year. Elton John releases the UK’s top seller on January 26.
“I find that I am a person who can take on the guises of different people that I meet. I can switch accents in seconds of meeting somebody,” David Bowie told London Weekend Television host Russell Harty on January 17. “I’ve always just seemed to collect personalities. Ideas.”
Aladdin Sane stands as homage to the personas who inspired him: Lou Reed, Iggy Pop, Mick Jagger, Andy Warhol, Elvis Presley, the New York Dolls; his wife, Angie; his dance teacher, Lindsay Kemp. It was powered by the amazing run of his last six months: recording Ziggy Stardust and the Spiders from Mars, producing Mott the Hoople, Reed, and Iggy and the Stooges, and touring America September through December. “In my mind, [the album] was Ziggy Goes to Washington: Ziggy under the influence of America.”1 The record’s sleeve listed the city in which each song was written.
“When I heard someone say something intelligent, I used it later as if it were my own. When I saw a quality in someone that I liked, I took it, I still do that. All the time. It’s just like a car, man, replacing parts.”2
Jagger observed, “If he took one of your moves, he’d say, ‘That’s one of yours—I just tried it.’”3
Stooges manager Danny Fields summarized, “David was a vampire, but a good vampire, he did something good with the blood. He shared the nutrients.”4
Aladdin Sane’s cover portrayed him with a slit on his neck, offering up unearthly plasma. When labels dumped the Stooges and Mott, Bowie convinced his manager, Tony Defries, to sign them. His work with Reed resulted in Reed’s only US Top 20 single, “Walk on the Wild Side.”
In return, they fired his imagination and gave him the courage to proclaim he was gay to the British music press, possibly the first rocker to do so. According to Angie, at the time London was so homophobic “even the slightest hint of that kind of scandal could mean the difference between someone getting a recording deal or someone spending their life playing working men’s clubs in the North of England … so when Lou would talk about the queens in New York and Candy Darling and all of these incredible characters who Andy Warhol was making stars out of … for David that was like America must be the most wide open, wonderful place.… If he hadn’t had all of those experiences, when they ask him in that Melody Maker article and he said, ‘Actually, I’m gay,’ and then he changed it and said ‘bisexual’ and said what he really meant, he would never have had the balls to do that unless he’d been around Iggy and Lou and realized that fuck it, if the English wanted to behave like that with that kind of hypocrisy, fuck it, but there was this place across the water in the States where things were changing. And you and I both know, of course, it wasn’t changing that much at all in the Midwest, but David didn’t know that, he just knew New York.”5
In the album’s opener, “Watch That Man,” Bowie finds himself in a lame party of old-fashioned married men, bad-looking ladies, and sad music, so he flees to the street, “looking for information,” and finds a man who “talks like a jerk” and “could eat you with a fork and spoon”—maybe Reed, renowned for his cruel streak. The song shares the staccato piano of Reed’s “I’m Waiting for the Man” and a similar title. One of the dancers at the party is Lorraine, also the heroine of Reed’s “Wild Child.” Bowie found Reed’s (and Pop’s) taboo-bursting anthems from the gutter to be the antidote he needed to balance the twee tendencies of his own songwriting. The wall of noise mix and backing vocalists emulate another of Bowie’s touchstones, the Rolling Stones in Exile on Main Street glory.
The Stones, Reed, and Warhol all featured junkie male prostitutes in their art, so Bowie joined the club with “Cracked Actor.” Inspired by his stay at the Beverly Hills Hotel, Bowie sings of a fifty-year-old actor who buys a hooker at Sunset and Vine to abuse and/or be abused by. Bowie had actually ventured closer to the gigolo role than his peers in real life. At age twenty he moved out of his folks’ house into the flat of his gay manager, Kenneth Pitt, keeping him wrapped around his finger by walking around nude, per Pitt’s autobiography. Pitt even ironed his clothes. Wife Angie wrote in her memoir, “I saw the intensity of Pitt’s interest in him, and [Mercury Records A&R executive] Calvin Mark Lee’s, and I have no doubt that sex—given, promised, implied, even strategically withheld if that’s what got the job done—was a very significant factor in [Bowie’s] rise through the gay mafia of the London music business.”6
“The Jean Genie” celebrated gigolo/thief/Existentialist writer Jean Genet. When Bowie penned the tune, his former dance teacher Lindsay Kemp was in the process of turning Genet’s work into a dance production. The skills Bowie learned from Kemp were instrumental to the image he constructed, as evidenced by Aladdin Sane’s gatefold, featuring Bowie in proud ballerino stance. Kemp was another older man tormented by the younger Bowie; the singer once carried on simultaneous affairs with him and Kemp’s female costume designer.
Musically, the song sprang from a jam session on the tour bus. The “Starman” had resolved to tour America not by air but by Greyhound and Amtrak. His drummer Woody “Gilly” Woodmansey explained the decision came after “we went on holiday to Cyprus and the plane got hit by lightning. He went white and fainted.”7 Bowie invited his childhood friend George Underwood along, and in the excitement following the first American gig in Cleveland, Underwood started playing old favorites by John Lee Hooker and Bo Diddley. Bowie took the guitar and segued into the Yardbirds’ cover of “I’m a Man,” slowed it down, and changed the lyrics.
The next stop, Nashville, was home to a studio owned by Bowie’s label, RCA, where Elvis Presley recorded many of the early classics of rock and roll. “[Elvis] was a major hero of mine. And I was probably stupid enough to believe that having the same birthday as him actually meant something.”8 Bowie cut the “Genie” demo there, and the final version a week later at RCA New York, turning the song into a celebration of the Big Apple. For the video he recruited model Cyrinda Foxe, future paramour of New York Dolls singer David Johansen and Aerosmith’s Steve Tyler, and she joined the Bowies on tour.
Two days after recording “Genie” he met the muse for another track, “Lady Grinning Soul.” Claudia Lennear had already served as the inspiration for “Brown Sugar.” She got to know the Stones when she sang backup for their opening band, Ike and Tina Turner. Lennear saw Bowie’s show in Detroit. “He asked me for some input and we struck up a friendship after that.”9
Pianist Mike Garson plays in the style of nineteenth-century Hungarian composer Franz Liszt, accompanied by acoustic flamenco guitar.10 The atmosphere evokes the glittering hotel piano bars Garson and Bowie haunted after gigs, where they performed standards, or a James Bond film, as many online writers have noted. Bowie sings of a woman arriving in a Beetle and beating him at canasta; then clothes are strewn across the room. She “lays belief” on him, comes and goes at her whim. U2’s Bono named it one of his favorite Bowie songs.
The doo-wop pastiche “The Prettiest Star” was a tribute to his wife Angie. He’d written it for her a few years ago, when they first entered into one of the most famous open marriages of the ’70s. When Bowie’s manager refused to allow her to join them at the Ivor Novello Awards (the British equivalent of the Grammys), Angie left Bowie and returned to her home country, Cyprus. To make amends, Bowie wrote the song and played it for her, then proposed, partially so she could legally stay in the UK. A little over a year later their son, Duncan, was born.
He sang that with her help they would “rise up all the way.” And her hustling was instrumental to his success. She devised flamboyant costumes for him, added glitter, pushed him to wear a Michael Fish dress on the cover of The Man Who Sold the World, to let London stylist Suzy Fussey chop his hippie hair into the rooster mullet and dye it orange red, to go onstage in nothing but a red jockstrap. When Bowie was initially reserved with the Warhol contingent, Angie befriended them.
Angie always had a wild streak; she’d been expelled from high school for a lesbian affair. Actress/singer Dana Gillespie said, “Angie often opened the door to visitors naked. We were wild but it was natural, not forced. There was nothing sordid or nasty at all. It was what one did.”11 After all-night parties at the Bowies’ Haddon Hall, Stooges associate Scott Richardson said, “I used to wake under a pile of bodies.”12 Later in ’73 the couple moved into a four-story house in Chelsea with a sunken, fur-covered bed in the living room, “the Pit,” adorned by fifty cushions. Model Vicki Hodge reminisced, “Angie and David used to have the most amazing orgies at Oakley Street. Everybody fucked everybody in the Pit. Mick Jagger used to come there and be involved with sexual things.”13 Hodge relayed that her boyfriend, actor/gangster John Bindon, “told me that David watched while he had sex with Angie.”14 Sometimes the activities were videotaped.
Tour director Tony Zanetta maintained, “Sex wasn’t any big deal for [Bowie]—it was like shaking hands at the end of the evening. To him, it was about being adored.”15
On the West Coast leg of the American tour, Cyrinda Foxe recalled, Bowie “once called me into the room [from the bathroom] to talk to him while he fucked a girl, and he needed someone to talk to, and that was me. I’d be watching the TV and talking with David, and he’d be screwing the groupie. Very nonchalant.… Angela was fucking David’s black bodyguard, and David and I used to get down on all fours and peek in their keyhole and watch them fuck.”16
Richardson also became Angie’s lover on the tour. “They had this open relationship that the fans and all the world knew about. They utilized all that to seduce the world—and it was incredibly effective. But what they were trying to do with each other ultimately backfired.… David was pulling everybody left and right—and she was doing the same thing. And fantastic as that was for the publicity of the Ziggy Stardust era it was also incredibly destructive.”17
“Panic in Detroit” was inspired by stories Iggy Pop told Bowie about the Motown riot of 1967 and the revolutionaries affiliated with the Stooges’ “brother band” the MC5 (Motor City Five). The song opens with a character who “looks a lot like Che Guevara,” probably MC5 manager John Sinclair, leader of the militant art collective the White Panthers. Sinclair advocated “a total assault on the culture by any means necessary including rock ’n’ roll, dope and fucking in the streets” until he was jailed for three years for possession of marijuana. He was also charged with conspiracy after one of the White Panthers threw a bomb at the CIA recruiting office at the University of Michigan, blowing a hole in the sidewalk in front of the building. Those charges were eventually dropped because the feds had not obtained a warrant before they gathered evidence through electronic surveillance.
In the song, Bowie heads to school, where he finds his teacher crouching in his overalls. Radicals of the era romanticized Chairman Mao, who encouraged Chinese students to rise up in the Cultural Revolution and humiliate their teachers if they acted too bourgeois. From there, Bowie heads into the riots, looting and jumping across cars abandoned at traffic lights.
Bowie’s Detroit debut at the Fisher Theatre informed the song’s mood as well. Journalist Nick Kent remembered, “Those gigs were like Fellini’s Satyricon. If you went into the toilet people were openly having sex, everyone was taking Quaaludes or cocaine.… People would go to David Bowie concerts in London and they’d turn up as peacocks, it was very much a fashion show, as though you were in Paris. In America it was like, how fucked up can we get? That was Bowie’s audience, as somehow it was more radical to be sexually ambiguous in America.”18
After the gig, sketchy street people carrying drugs crashed Bowie’s party in his hotel room, making the singer afraid he’d get busted and lose his visa. Outside, the city loomed like the urban wasteland of Charlton Heston’s The Omega Man. In the aftermath of the riot and white flight, the city had earned an unwanted title, “murder capital of the world,” with five hundred homicides a year.
Bowie employed the Bo Diddley beat the Stooges used on their song “1969” and added percussionist Aynsley Dunbar for “Sympathy for the Devil” flavor. Guitarist Mick Ronson alternated between chugging sludge and searing squall, proving he could hold his own against Detroit skuzz-rockers like Funkadelic, Grand Funk, Ted Nugent, and Bob Seger. Rolling Stone called it Ronson’s “essential recording” and ranked him No. 64 in their list of the 100 Greatest Guitarists of All Time. Backing vocalists Linda Lewis and Juanita “Honey” Franklin completed the “Gimme Shelter” dread, conjuring an eerie bonfire climax.
Bowie offered an equally apocalyptic vision for the title track, inspired by Evelyn Waugh’s novel Vile Bodies, which he read onboard the cruise ship RHMS Ellinis sailing back home after the tour. The novel concerns the Bright Young Things, English socialites famous in the years between the world wars for their outrageous partying. The song’s full title, “Aladdin Sane (1913–1938–197?),” listed the year before each world war broke out, including a third one that Bowie predicted was just around the corner. In the lyrics, decadents consume sake and champagne at sunrise, then dash to the battlefield with a war cry, as millions weep and clutch dead roses.
He’d made a pun with “The Jean Genie,” so he mused over a pun for the genie’s master Aladdin … A Lad In—what? A Lad In Sane. Bowie reflected to Arena magazine in 1993, “It scared me that my own sanity was in question at times, but on the other hand I found it fascinating that my family had this streak of insanity—more than a streak. Several of my mother’s sisters committed suicide or were manic-depressives or schizophrenics, and my half-brother Terry was both—he was manic-depressive and schizophrenic. I often wondered at the time how near the line I was going and how far I should push myself. I thought that I would be serving my mental health better if I was always aware that insanity was a real possibility in my life. It was a dangerous game because I was putting myself in an area where insanity is seen as just some kind of personality trait—a characteristic of a person that was to be applauded, almost. The Iggy Pops of the world. And I was drawn to those people, I immediately felt an empathy and an attraction. I was perhaps using these people to create doppelgangers.”19
Bowie’s half-brother Terry Burns, six years older, was the first person Bowie patterned himself after as a teen. Terry introduced him to jazz clubs, Buddhism, authors like the Beats, Nietzsche, and Christopher Isherwood, hookers. But in ’66 as the two walked to a Cream concert, Burns suddenly screamed and fell to the pavement in a seizure, hallucinating that flames were rising out of the street. Thereafter, the family intermittently institutionalized Burns, lest he wander for days, homeless, visions of Jesus instructing him to carry out vague missions. In 1984 he laid his head on the train tracks and put himself out of his misery.
Bowie wanted the madness of “Aladdin Sane” to be conveyed by pianist Garson, hired at the beginning of the tour in New York. “I had just met him,” Garson recalled, “so I played a blues solo, but then he said: ‘No, that’s not what I want.’ And then I played a Latin solo. Again, Bowie said: ‘No no, that’s not what I want.’ He then continued: ‘You told me you play that avant-garde music. Play that stuff!’ And I said: ‘Are you sure? ’Cause you might not be working anymore!’ So I did the solo that everybody knows today, in one take. I always tell people that Bowie is the best producer I ever met, because he lets me do my thing.… I don’t think there’s been a week [since then] without someone, somewhere, asking me about it.”20 Garson performed live with Bowie until Bowie’s last tour in 2003.
Co-producer Ken Scott remarked, “The piano is very simple on [the] Ziggy [album]. But then you [get] to Aladdin Sane, Mike Garson is on board, and it completely changes the whole feel of it.”21
Bowie wrote “Time” in the cabaret style of Bertolt Brecht and Kurt Weill, who flourished in Germany until the Nazis drove them into exile. It is similar to a Jacques Brel chanson he covered on tour, “My Death,” in that it portrays Time as a malevolent figure. In Bowie’s song, Time/Death “demands Billy Dolls,” the drummer for the New York Dolls, Billy Murcia. Little more than a month after the Bowies met him (and Angie had a liaison with him), the twenty-one-year-old overdosed on alcohol and Mandrax (British Quaaludes) at a party in England. Teenagers at the party tried to revive him by lowering him into a bathtub and pouring coffee down his throat but succeeded only in asphyxiating him.
After finishing the songs, Bowie turned his thoughts to the cover. He asked photographer Brian Duffy to sketch ideas with a lightning bolt, perhaps influenced by the insignia Elvis Presley affixed to his rings, belts, sunglasses, and necklaces. The logo was the symbol of Presley’s favorite comic hero, Captain Marvel, as well as the logo of his old army battalion, not to mention the West Coast Mafia (the real Mafia, not Presley’s Memphis Mafia entourage).
The two icons never met, except from a distance in Presley’s Madison Square Garden concert. “I walked in on a Saturday evening in full Ziggy garb to see Elvis and he nearly crucified me. I felt such a fool and I was way down in the front. I sat down there and he looked at me and if looks could kill!”22
Makeup artist Pierre Laroche suggested they paint the bolt on Bowie’s face. Now it could symbolize the “cracked actor’s” conflicted feelings about his rising stardom, “this kind of schizophrenia that I was going through. Wanting to be up on the stage performing my songs, but on the other hand not really wanting to be on those buses with all those strange people. Being basically a quiet person, it was hard to come to terms. So Aladdin Sane was split down the middle.”23
Elton John had been conflicted about his orientation and channeled his energy into his career until finding love with John Reid, a young executive the singer met when he stopped by EMI to cadge free records. Reid found him a “dumpy little guy in a funny jumpsuit”24—then saw John in concert and realized he was a “one off.” They moved in together, Reid became his manager, and John came out to his folks. “If my mum can accept it and my family can accept it, then I don’t give a toss about anybody.”25 His mother said she’d always known anyway.
He wouldn’t comment verbally on his sexuality until 1976, when he told Rolling Stone he was bisexual, but visually he burst out of his singer-songwriter cocoon of overalls and denim jackets. It was seamstress Maxine Phyllis Feibelman (immortalized in “Tiny Dancer”) who got the ball rolling: “Oooh, I’ve found these mauve tights, I bet you wouldn’t wear them onstage.”26 John took the dare. Soon the platforms began rising. The glasses morphed into hearts or squares, goggles sprouting rhinestones, palm trees, sea horses, windshield wipers. One pair flashed the word “Elton” and required him to lug a battery pack across the stage like the Hunchback of Notre Dame.27 Feathers spilled out of his hats and out of his shoulders. The blouses grew sequins. The jumpsuits glittered pink and purple and tinfoil or Uncle Sam lamé. Cher on an acid trip, he boasted.
“It’s been done in a humorous way because I couldn’t compete with the Bowies or the Jaggers. I haven’t got the figure for it. I’d look like Donald Dumpling from Dover, so I try to make people grin a bit.”28 Donning absurd outfits was John’s preshow ritual to get into the mind-set to perform. “I’m a dumpy twenty-six-year-old guy going bald, and I sell millions of records, so I’m going to enjoy myself when I perform, no matter how ridiculous I look.”29
Despite John’s self-effacement, occasional collaborator Gary Osborne revealed, “Elton did feel a sense of rivalry towards Bowie. Most of these rock stars have somebody that they feel more rivalry towards than the others. It’s because they’re on similar territory. I think Elton slightly resented the fact that Bowie, who is substantially straight, made it partially by pretending to be gay, by courting a gay following, by propagating a gay mystique, whereas Elton, who is substantially gay, had for so long had to conceal his real orientation from the public. From Elton’s point of view, here was this guy who had made it as a pretend poof, and here was he, a real poof, having to be a pretend straight. I think that got up his nose a bit.”30
At the same time, John loved “Space Oddity” and recruited its arranger, Paul Buckmeister, and producer, Gus Dudgeon, to be part of his regular team. When “Rocket Man” performed better than “Oddity” in the States, Angie had to remind her angry husband that “Other people can sing about space travel, too.”
Afterward, John made an effort to connect. “I first met David when I took him out to dinner when he was Ziggy Stardust. We had a nice time, y’know?… The only other time we met was at Dino Martin’s party when I was with John Lennon and David was so stoned that I don’t think he remembers. He was out of it completely.”31
In Bowie’s memoir Moonage Daydream, the way he remembered it was John invited him over for tea. “I’d met him only once before and although he was cheerful and quite friendly we didn’t exactly become pals, not really having that much in common, especially musically. This meeting was even more awkward. His entire living room was barricaded with huge stacks of record albums. He sat, small and bewildered-looking, in the middle, as if in some kind of bunker.… We had tea and cakes and we asked each other how we found America and after a polite half-hour I made my apologies, declining a further cuppa, and went for a wander down Sunset.”32
Musically, of course, Bowie preferred the avant-garde, while John is still tied with the Carpenters for most No. 1 singles on the adult contemporary/easy listening chart.33 (Ken Scott said Elton walked out of an early Ziggy Stardust show at the Rainbow Theatre remarking, “He’s blown it now. He’ll never mean anything anymore!”) Which is not to say John couldn’t rock. He was the fierce successor to Little Richard and Jerry Lee Lewis, pounding the keys, then leaping back to kick away the stool and sprint alongside the audience, slapping hands, strutting and pouting in full-on Jagger impersonation.
He adored performing and had an encyclopedic knowledge of music, owning one of the largest record collections in the world. But when it came time to record his new album for ’73, he was burned out, suffering from mono, in dire need of a vacation.34 Ultimately he decided to get it over with so he could relax and returned to the Honky Chateau, a.k.a. the studio at Château d’Hérouville near Paris. By now his team was such a well-oiled machine that the muscle memory of their formula carried him through the exhaustion, like the Beatles circa Beatles for Sale. The unit included guitarist Davey Johnstone, bassist Dee Murray, drummer Nigel Olsson, producer Gus Dudgeon, manager/boyfriend Reid, and lyricist Bernie Taupin (married, incidentally, to seamstress Feibelman).
John’s bond with Taupin formed back in the Summer of Love in 1967. Twenty-year-old John had been playing clubs for almost half a decade, backing American R&B groups like the Isley Brothers when they came to town, when Liberty Records suggested he try writing songs with another kid they were working with. Taupin (born 1950) was from a farm town of three hundred people, which was why many of their songs expressed a yearning to return to rustic roots. Taupin left school at fifteen for manual labor, but his mother and grandfather had instilled a love of poetry. He started mailing lyrics to John, who in turn fashioned melodies to accompany them. By the time they actually met in person, they had twenty co-writes under their belt.
John made a pass at Taupin, but Taupin said, “When I started laughing, it sort of broke the ice. He got over it very quickly.”35 Taupin moved in with John and his mother, sleeping in the bunk bed in John’s room. John said, “I just adored him, like a brother. I was in love with him, but not in a physical way. He was the soul mate I’d been looking for all my life.”36 When the still-closeted John tried to force himself to marry a woman who wanted him to give up music, Taupin and their friend Long John Baldry convinced John to stick with his career, a conversation immortalized in “Someone Saved My Life Tonight.”
Taupin wrote stacks of lyrics alone, then handed them off to John. Guitarist Johnstone said, “Elton has a very short attention span. He always did, always will. When he sits down to write, if something doesn’t come to him in fifteen minutes, he’s on to something else. He writes very spontaneously, and there’s no fat on anything he does. In those early days, demos didn’t exist. Elton would come into the studio in the morning with Bernie Taupin’s lyrics, sit down at the piano, and he’d write a song with the rest of us right there with him.… I think that’s why those songs worked so well: You weren’t hearing things that were sitting around for years and were labored over and had no energy. What you heard was all energy.37 … I’ve seen him write songs in the time that it’s taken me to make a chicken sandwich. If he wrote a song in roughly 20 minutes, we’d go over there, and by the time we plugged in and got our shit together and played it a couple of times [that would be] another 15 minutes. Then the red light would go on, and usually the second or third take would be the one that we’d end up with. Sometimes it would go to four or five, but that didn’t often happen. A lot of times we’d use the first take.”38
John still plays live with Johnstone and Olsson, though Murray passed in ’92. When they weren’t recording, they’d play practical jokes, throw someone who was sleeping into the pool. Elton would make the others laugh by crank-calling people at two in the morning and yelling in a German accent, “I want to lick your body!”39
The band’s secret weapon was background vocals, discovered when producer Dudgeon asked them to sing on “Rocket Man.” Johnstone explained, “[Nigel], Dee and I never really discussed what we would do, but we got together and did it. It chilled us when we heard how good it sounded. Dee and I usually changed up on the bottom and the mid part, and Nigel would take the higher harmony. Occasionally, Dee would do a high part, but he’d have to put his head between his legs to do so,” Johnstone laughed. “It was a unique technique, but he always managed to pull it off.”40
One reason John could push through his weariness to create high-quality product was that he knew the power of delegating. Arranger Buckmeister said, “As a matter of policy Elton decided to not be involved in the creative decisions that [producer] Gus and I made. Elton literally said, ‘I don’t want to be involved in this. I trust you guys.’”41
The system bore fruit again when “Crocodile Rock” became his first American No. 1 single in February, ultimately the year’s fourth-bestselling single worldwide.42 Hearing Daddy Cool’s “Eagle Rock” in Australia inspired John and Taupin to write their own animal song,43 harking back to Bill Haley’s “See You Later Alligator.” They strove to replicate the organ sound of Johnny and the Hurricanes, the guitar from Bobby Darin’s “Dream Lover,” and the vocals of Del Shannon and the Diamonds.44 Alas, they emulated the “la-la-la’s” of Pat Boone’s “Speedy Gonzales” a little too closely, necessitating an out-of-court settlement.
The song was Exhibit A in the nostalgia movement that peaked with American Graffiti later in the summer. That yearning for simpler times was satirized by “Texan Love Song,” casting John as a redneck who calmly informs a long-haired musician that he’s going to kill him for corrupting the values of his small town and fooling around with his woman. The wistful shanty bemoans how kids used to respect the president until rockers came through with their “communistic politics,” “negro blues” and “drug-crazy songs.” “Goddamnit, you’re all gonna die,” John sang like one of the good ol’ boys who murder Jack Nicholson in Easy Rider.
“Daniel” offered a more empathetic portrait of a Texan, written after Taupin read an article about an American soldier returning from Vietnam to the Lone Star State in a wheelchair. The veteran received an outpouring of attention but just wanted to be left alone on his small farm. Taupin combined the tale with an ode to his older brother, whom Taupin missed after he’d moved to Spain in 1968.
The lines mentioning the war were excised in the studio. Johnstone remembered, “[Elton] called me over and said, ‘Look at this last verse, I think Taupin’s on drugs. He must be taking acid or something.’ And we looked at this verse, and I can vaguely remember something about a ship’s dog named Paul. And I’m like ‘What the fuck is he talking about?’ Suddenly out of nowhere he starts talking about this dog. So Elton just kind of took the page and ripped that bottom part off very slowly and very definitely and said, ‘Well, that’s the end of that.’”45
Label head Dick James opposed releasing the track as a single. The standard wisdom in the UK at the time was that releasing two singles from an album hurt the album’s sales. When John insisted, James made him agree to reimburse the costs of the promo campaign if the song flopped. It hit No. 4 in England and No. 2 in the US.
“Elderberry Wine” carried a Taupin theme that recurred with increased frequency, the man at rock bottom after his woman leaves over his drinking. John’s piano and the horns are so infectious that the song became a concert staple regardless. “High Flying Bird” was another lament for the one who got away, a soaring ballad inspired by Van Morrison, and a precursor to “Don’t Let the Sun Go Down on Me.” With its gorgeous production sheen, one barely notices the lines about the singer’s obsession bleeding on the cold stone floor, under walls stained scarlet.
The album’s title sprang from John’s friendship with Groucho Marx, who frequently ribbed him for offenses like having his name in the wrong order (should’ve been John Elton). Once, after a barrage of jibes, John threw up his hands and cracked, “Don’t shoot me, I’m only the piano player.” Shoot the Piano Player had been a 1960 film by Francois Truffaut. Hence the cover featured a theater marquee and a poster for the Marx Brothers’ Go West. The Crocodile Rocker and his girlfriend in sock-hop dress buy tickets to the show, in the happy days before she leaves him “for some foreign guy.” It became the second of Elton’s seven consecutive No. 1 LPs in the States, fulfilling the unlikely prophecy of track five, “I’m Going to Be a Teenage Idol.”