Elton John’s double album controls the No. 1 spot for the last two months of the year. “Saturday Night’s Alright for Fighting” reflects the tension of recording in Jamaica. “Candle in the Wind” becomes the second-bestselling single of all time. Black radio turns “Bennie and the Jets” into John’s second American pop chart-topper.
Elton John and his team arrived at the Pink Flamingo Hotel in Kingston, Jamaica, just a few weeks after the Stones vacated following their Goats Head Soup sessions. John was disturbed to learn he was staying in the same room Bill Wyman’s wife, Astrid, had been assaulted in three weeks before.1 The streets outside felt tumultuous as the city hosted the world heavyweight boxing championship between George Foreman and Joe Frazier. John stayed in his room and composed the music to twenty-one sets of lyrics by Bernie Taupin.2
John was equally unnerved by Dynamic Sound Studios, where the Stones, Marley, and Jimmy Cliff had recorded (and Cat Stevens would later in the year). Guards with machine guns and barbed wire protected the facility from record plant workers on strike, who pounded on the cars when John’s entourage drove in. The protesters even spit fiberglass at them through pipes.3 Attempting to channel the hostility, the band took a stab at Taupin’s tongue-in-cheek anthem for pub brawlers, “Saturday Night’s Alright for Fighting.”
“In those days, whenever a song came up, I’d immediately start working on what I should do,” guitarist Davey Johnstone recalled. “Elton would write so fast, and I had to be just as quick to keep up. As soon as I heard him writing [‘Saturday’] I knew it was a total guitar-rocking track. So I wrote the intro and all the guitar parts. It was so much fun.”4
But John felt the studio’s sound quality was poor and decided to cut out early, sparking real-life confrontations with the studio and hotel managers over bills. They returned to the Honky Château (Château d’Hérouville), where they’d recorded their previous two albums, and cut a snide pastiche called “Jamaica Jerk-Off,” probably musing that there was no place like home.
On a typical day they recorded up to four songs. John would polish off the music to one of Taupin’s compositions, then, while the band learned that one, he’d write the music for another. “Funnily enough, you do fall into a groove with success,” Johnstone said. “It must be like gambling, when you hit a lucky streak and you just can’t lose. Or that feeling of invincibility you get when you’ve had a few drinks. We were racking up the hits—‘Daniel,’ ‘Rocket Man,’ ‘Crocodile Rock’ and so on—and it was amazing. What happened was, our musical inhibitions went away. Success became our drug, and I don’t just mean the financial rewards, I mean how great we felt when we played, and how we were received. The more successful we got, the better we played, and the easier it became to know what to play. It almost felt effortless.”5
Returning to “Saturday Night’s,” the absurdity of John stomping ass at the local bar was erased by Johnstone’s blistering riff, a hook so fierce even the Who eventually covered it. Initially John thought the rhythm section wasn’t rocking enough, so he stood up from the piano and roared, “Come on you bastards!”6 As they captured the music and vocal in one take, he jumped around, then lay on the floor and whipped himself into a vocal-shredding frenzy. Producer Gus Dudgeon stacked the guitar track onto itself multiple times, and John overdubbed pounding piano.
Despite John’s goofy camp image (belligerently swigging wine in a Slade-like get-up on the single’s cover), some radio stations banned the song, as it was the year that A Clockwork Orange was blamed for copycat violence. (The film was recut in the US and withdrawn from release in the UK.) It was the only single John released between 1972 and 1975 that did not go Top 10 in the States (stalling at 12), too aggressive to cross over to easy listening. In concert the song gave John a chance to preen like Jagger, clapping his hands and exhorting the audience to chant “Saturday!” before making his way back to maniacally slam the piano keys.
Inspired by the movie-theater cover of their last record, Taupin initially envisioned a concept album called Silent Movies, Talking Pictures. “Roy Rogers” depicted a man escaping his mundane life by watching the old cowboy films that excited his imagination as a kid. “The Ballad of Danny Bailey” romanticized celluloid gangsters; “Candle in the Wind,” doomed starlets. The track that ultimately became the title song paid homage to the first movie Taupin saw as a child, The Wizard of Oz. “I’ve Seen That Movie Too” expanded the metaphor as the singer rues that he can see through his lover’s play-acting.
The new collection was also a reaction to the last. John considered Don’t Shoot Me “a disposable album. I think it’s a very happy album, very ultra-pop.”7 So Taupin provided a darker set of songs for the follow-up, maybe borrowing a page from the Beatles’ playbook: they’d followed the high spirits of A Hard Day’s Night with the downcast Beatles for Sale.
Perhaps feeling overworked, John imagined his own death and composed music that he wanted played at his memorial service. Producer Dudgeon combined this with a piece he commissioned from engineer David Hentschel, an overture that drew on melodies from “Candle in the Wind,” “Danny Bailey,” and other tracks, played on the ARP synthesizer.8 “Funeral for a Friend” segued directly into the second-best riff on the album, “Love Lies Bleeding,” its chewy twang a precursor to the Police’s “Synchronicity II.”
“I’ll tell you something incredible: The whole song, including ‘Funeral for a Friend,’ was one take,” Johnstone said. “We rehearsed it a couple of times, but that was it. Again, Elton’s attention span—he’s very impatient. So as soon as we knew what the song was going to be, we went in and nailed it, played it straight through. I knew I would do some layering and overdubs, but still, the idea was to do as much as possible all at once.”9
Two years earlier, John had given Taupin one of Marilyn Monroe’s dresses for his birthday, and she became the heroine of the album’s third track. “What I was enamored with was the idea of fame or youth and somebody being cut short in the prime of their life,” said Taupin of “Candle in the Wind.” “How we glamorise death, how we immortalise people.”10
He’d heard Clive Davis refer to Janis Joplin as a “candle in the wind,” a term that had already served as the title of two plays and a novel in T. H. White’s series about Camelot, The Once and Future King. Taupin said the song “could have been about James Dean, it could have been about Montgomery Clift, it could have been about Jim Morrison.”11
But the song became permanently associated with another icon in 1997. John had grown close to Princess Diana, and she comforted him after the loss of his friend Gianni Versace in July—a month before she herself was killed in a car crash while being chased by paparazzi, a dark echo to the song’s lyrics mourning a heroine hounded by the press. John requested Taupin revise the lyrics and played this version only once, at her funeral. It became the fastest- and bestselling song in UK history, eventually the second-biggest-selling single of all time after Bing Crosby’s “White Christmas.”
Death also haunts “All the Girls Love Alice,” about a sixteen-year-old rejected by her mother who becomes the go-to girl for middle-aged women to call when their husbands are out of town, until she’s found dead on the subway, her demise unexplained. It covered some of the same ground of that year’s debut novel by Rita Mae Brown, Rubyfruit Jungle, in which young lesbian Molly Bolt gets kicked out of the house by her mother and tries to survive on the streets of New York. Her lover encourages her to become a kept woman to older lesbians, though Molly rejects that option, unlike Alice. After being published by a small feminist press, Rubyfruit Jungle became one of the first successful novels featuring a lesbian heroine.
The other gender-nonconforming female on the album does not share the same grim fate. Taupin said, “I saw Bennie and the Jets as a sort of proto-sci-fi punk band, fronted by an androgynous woman, who looks like something out of a Helmut Newton photograph.”12
In mohair suit and electric boots, Bennie sounds like a precursor to Annie Lennox, a female Ziggy Stardust with a “spaced out” band leading children to fight parents in the street. John and the band figured the song was so weird it would probably not make it onto the album. Perhaps that freed John to give one of his most idiosyncratically assured performances, using the Benzedrine double entendre of the name to stutter like the Who’s amphetamine anthem “My Generation,” masterfully employing vocal fry, unhurriedly drawing out syllables, then endlessly repeating the title in beautifully absurd falsetto.
Even though John wrote the track off, Dudgeon decided to mess around with it. À la Sgt. Pepper he faded in crowd sounds from a show John gave at Royal Festival Hall. At the end he used applause from Jimi Hendrix’s Isle of Wight performance. Then, to be perverse, he added the sound of an audience clapping on “the wrong beat, because English audiences always clap on the ‘on’ instead of the ‘off’ beat, which drives me crazy.”13 He threw in some whistles, then coated it with glossy reverb.
Afterward, Johnstone said, “we just sat back and said, ‘This is really odd.’”14 There was no intention to make it a single.
But a black station in Detroit, WJLB, started playing it. It became one of their most requested songs, and the album started selling in black record stores. The music director of Detroit’s Top 40 station CKLW, Rosalie Trombley (the one immortalized in Bob Seger’s “Rosalie”), added it to their playlist. Listeners bombarded the station with requests to hear it again. She let John’s label know. The singer called her a few days later.
“If you want to reach a black audience, you really should consider making this your next single,” she told him.15
John resisted. “I had an argument with MCA and the only reason I caved was because the song was the No. 1 black record in Detroit. And I went, ‘Oh my God.’ I mean, I’m a white boy from England. And I said, ‘Okay, you’ve got it.’ I’m such a black record fanatic that to think I’m actually in the R&B chart means that even if it doesn’t get higher than 34 I’m gonna stick it up and frame it.”16 Though he fretted, “What am I going to do on my next American tour? Play the Apollo for a week, open with ‘Bennie and the Jets’ then say, ‘Thanks, you can all go home now.’”17 It actually made it to No. 15 on the R&B charts, and No. 1 US pop.
He was even more shocked when Soul Train invited him to perform it on the show, making him one of only a handful of white artists so honored. Thus a song the producer used to spoof how white people couldn’t clap on the beat became one of the few white performances in the program’s history.
“It just shows you that you can’t see the wood through the trees,” John said. “To this day, I cannot see that song as a single.”18
Other highlights in the collection included “Grey Seal,” a remake of an older Elton John B side. Taupin denied knowing what the lyrics meant, but John’s glistening piano triplets suggested the animal swimming free in Arctic Ocean purity. “Harmony,” another exemplary mix of Taupin sardonicism obscured by warm John melodicism, would eventually be considered for the album’s fifth single. But by that point the prolific team already had a new album, Caribou, on the conveyor belt.19
Amid the riches, the finest moment was the title track itself. If “Honky Cat” was split down the middle between the appeal of country life and city life, Taupin was now ready to return to the small village of his childhood. In his youth he’d romanticized the London music industry, but after years spent drinking backstage with the “dogs of society” and partying in their penthouses, he saw through the glamour. And as he confessed on an ABC TV special, since his gig only necessitated working two weeks a year, he had too much time on his hand and was, as recounted in “Social Disease,” “getting bombed for breakfast.”
“The lyrics to the title track do say that I want to leave Oz and get back to the farm. I think that’s still my M.O. these days. I don’t mind getting out there and doing what everybody else was doing, but I always had to have an escape hatch.”20
John said that during the making of the album he was very happy. His own substance abuse issues didn’t start until the following year, when he discovered cocaine. But there was something ineffable about the way John’s falsetto high-jumped through the Leslie speakers with Dudgeon’s echoey orchestra. It carried both the sadness and freedom of letting go of dreams, catharsis for a year that saw the death of many illusions: that the country would always win its wars, that its presidents were always noble, that its families would always stay together, that its economy would always grow.
John liked a Creem magazine cover that Ian Beck illustrated of Bowie in front of a poster on a brick wall. So he hired Beck to render John stepping through a poster on a city wall into Oz. His platform boots updated Judy Garland’s ruby slippers. The cover’s burned-out yellow color scheme became synonymous with the early ’70s.
A month before the double album’s release, for his triumphant Hollywood Bowl performance on September 7, John asked Deep Throat’s Linda Lovelace to open the show. She introduced a panoply of characters who would have been at home on the Hollywood-themed record: the Queen of England, Elvis, Frankenstein’s monster, the Pope, the Beatles, Batman and Robin, Groucho, and Mae West. As she called their names, performers dressed as the figures took the stage and lifted the lids of five rainbow-colored pianos. The open lids spelled ELTON, and doves hidden in the pianos flew out above the crowd as the singer arrived. “Here he is: the biggest, the largest, the most gigantic and fantastic man, the costar of my next movie, Elton John!” Lovelace raved as Elton pounded out “Elderberry Wine” (and Taupin threw out birds who tried to remain in the pianos).
For the press conference promoting the album, John’s image was transmitted by satellite from, apparently, a midwestern Holiday Inn and he took questions from journalists until the signal abruptly cut out. The journalists waited for it to return, but finally gave up and approached the buffet arranged for them. John nonchalantly walked in and stepped into line beside them. He’d been broadcasting from a nearby room the whole time.22
Goodbye Yellow Brick Road held the No. 1 spot for two weeks in the UK and for two months in the US starting November 10, making him the only artist to have two chart-topping records in the States that year (unless you count McCartney with Red Rose Speedway and Beatles 1967–1970). It ended up becoming the bestselling album of 1974, eventually selling thirty million worldwide and going eight times platinum, the highest-selling album of John’s career. Rolling Stone placed it as No. 91 in its list of the 500 Greatest Albums. Had it been boiled down to a single disc, it would have given The Dark Side of the Moon a run for best record of the year.
John flew to arenas, coliseums, and stadiums in the Starship, the plane Zeppelin and the Allman Brothers used, with its multiple rooms and waterbeds. Fans mobbed his limos and stormed the security guards to get onstage, held lighters aloft for “Your Song.” To capitalize on Elton mania he rushed into the studio to cut “Step into Christmas” backed with “Ho, Ho, Ho (Who’d Be a Turkey at Christmas).” For a moment, his pop domination recalled the heyday of Presley and the Beatles.
“The preeminent rock star of the ’70s seems out of time, untouched by the decade’s confusion,” wrote Robert Christgau. “The best way to explain him is to steal an idea from Greil Marcus: Elton is the superfan, the ultimate music consumer. This is literally true—his collection of popular records is almost certainly one of the largest in the world, and he seems to listen to all of them.… And finally, the superfan’s reward is the fans’ reward. Elton is our tabula rasa—the very sureness of his instinct for sales makes him a kind of one-man Zeitgeist.”23
“I think in those days, because we were a unit, because of my relationship with Bernie and the band and the management team and everything that went with it, it was just like a little family and it was great,” John said. “It was magic. That time in my life, that creative period will never, ever come back again. You search for it and you try to say, ‘Oh, it would be great to do,’ but it’ll never happen like that again. It was a special time.”24