Blue Moves 9781501355424, 9781501355455, 9781501355448

Table of contents :
Title Page
Copyright Page
Contents
Track Listing
Side One
Side Two
Side Three
Side Four
Chapter 1: A Dumb but Gorgeous One-Night Stand
Chapter 2: Just as Good
Chapter 3: Best of, Volume 300
Chapter 4: Our Mount Everest
Chapter 5: A Few Surprises
Chapter 6: A Sad, Sad Situation
Chapter 7: It Could Be Me
Chapter 8: One of My Favorite Albums
Chapter 9: The Queen Mum of Pop
Acknowledgments
Notes
Chapter 1
Chapter 3
Chapter 4
Chapter 5
Chapter 6
Chapter 7
Chapter 8
Chapter 9

Citation preview

BLUE MOVES Praise for the series: It was only a matter of time before a clever publisher realized that there is an audience for whom Exile on Main Street or Electric Ladyland are as significant and worthy of study as The Catcher in the Rye or Middlemarch. . . . The series . . . is freewheeling and eclectic, ranging from minute rockgeek analysis to idiosyncratic personal celebration — The New York Times Book Review Ideal for the rock geek who thinks liner notes just aren’t enough — Rolling Stone One of the coolest publishing imprints on the planet — Bookslut These are for the insane collectors out there who appreciate fantastic design, well-executed thinking, and things that make your house look cool. Each volume in this series takes a seminal album and breaks it down in startling minutiae. We love these. We are huge nerds — Vice A brilliant series . . . each one a work of real love — NME (UK) Passionate, obsessive, and smart — Nylon Religious tracts for the rock ’n’ roll faithful — Boldtype [A] consistently excellent series — Uncut (UK) We . . . aren’t naive enough to think that we’re your only source for reading about music (but if we had our way . . . watch out). For those of you who really like to know everything there is to know about an album, you’d do well to check out Bloomsbury’s “33 1/3” series of books — Pitchfork For reviews of individual titles in the series, please visit our blog at 333sound.com and our website at http:​//www​.bloo​msbur​y.com​/musi​c ands​ounds​tudie​s Follow us on Twitter: @333books Like us on Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/33.3books For a complete list of books in this series, see the back of this book.

Forthcoming in the series: I’m Your Fan: The Songs of Leonard Cohen by Ray Padgett Timeless by Martin Deykers The Velvet Rope by Ayanna Dozier Band of Gypsys by Michael E. Veal From Elvis in Memphis by Eric Wolfson Suicide by Andi Coulter Ghetto: Misfortune’s Wealth by Zach Schonfeld Live at the Harlem Square Club, 1963 by Colin Fleming Murder Ballads by Santi Elijah Holley Once Upon a Time by Alex Jeffery Tapestry by Loren Glass Tin Drum by Agata Pyzik The Archandroid by Alyssa Favreau Avalon by Simon Morrison Rio by Annie Zaleski Vs. by Clint Brownlee xx by Jane Morgan and many more . . .

Blue Moves

Matthew Restall

BLOOMSBURY ACADEMIC Bloomsbury Publishing Inc 1385 Broadway, New York, NY 10018, USA 50 Bedford Square, London, WC1B 3DP, UK BLOOMSBURY, BLOOMSBURY ACADEMIC and the Diana logo are trademarks of Bloomsbury Publishing Plc First published in the United States of America 2020 Copyright © Matthew Restall, 2020 For legal purposes the Acknowledgments on p. 127 constitute an extension of this copyright page. All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or any information storage or retrieval system, without prior permission in writing from the publishers. Bloomsbury Publishing Inc does not have any control over, or responsibility for, any third-party websites referred to or in this book. All internet addresses given in this book were correct at the time of going to press. The author and publisher regret any inconvenience caused if addresses have changed or sites have ceased to exist, but can accept no responsibility for any such changes. Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Names: Restall, Matthew, 1964- author. Title: Blue moves / Matthew Restall. Description: New York: Bloomsbury Academic, 2020. | Series: 33 1/3 | Includes bibliographical references and index. Identifiers: LCCN 2019050910 | ISBN 9781501355424 (paperback) | ISBN 9781501355431 (epub) | ISBN 9781501355448 (pdf) Subjects: LCSH: John, Elton. Blue moves. | John, Elton–Criticism and interpretation. | Popular music–1971-1980–History and criticism. Classification: LCC ML410.J64 R47 2020 | DDC 782.42166092–dc23 LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2019050910 ISBN: PB: 978-1-5013-5542-4 ePDF: 978-1-5013-5544-8 eBook: 978-1-5013-5543-1

Series: 33 31 Typeset by Deanta Global Publishing Services, Chennai, India To find out more about our authors and books visit www.bloomsbury.com and sign up for our newsletters.

to my mother, for sharing classical music to my father, for sharing jazz and to both, for letting me be a pop kid and in memory of gus dudgeon (1942–2002) roger pope (1947–2013) paul buckmaster (1946–2017) james newton howard (1951–2018) daryl dragon (1942–2019)

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Contents

Track Listing

viii

1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9

1 13 21 43 59 75 91 109 123

A Dumb but Gorgeous One-Night Stand Just as Good Best of, Volume 300 Our Mount Everest A Few Surprises A Sad, Sad Situation It Could Be Me One of My Favorite Albums The Queen Mum of Pop

Acknowledgments Notes

127 129

Track Listing

Side One Your Starter for . . . (1′22″) Tonight (7′52″) One Horse Town (5′56″) Chameleon (5′27″) Side Two Boogie Pilgrim (6′03″) Cage the Songbird (3′25″) Crazy Water (5′42″) Shoulder Holster (5′08″) Side Three Sorry Seems to Be the Hardest Word (3′47″) Out of the Blue (6′14″)

T rack L isting

Between Seventeen and Twenty (5′17″) The Wide-Eyed and Laughing (3′27″) Someone’s Final Song (4′10″) Side Four Where’s the Shoorah? (4′09″) If There’s a God in Heaven (What’s He Waiting For?) (4′25″) Idol (4′08″) Theme from a Non-Existent TV Series (1′19″) Bite Your Lip (Get Up and Dance!) (6′41″)

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1 A Dumb but Gorgeous One-Night Stand

Blue Moves is an Elton John album. It is not his best. It is also very far from being the best selling of his thirtyfive studio LPs. While everyone has heard of Elton John—he is the best-selling male recording artist of all time—few are familiar with this 1976 double album. Blue Moves is a record that does not seem to stand out, at best a footnote marking the end of the singer’s unprecedented run of seven US #1 LPs, ushering in decades of mediocre product redeemed only by a Disney soundtrack and a retread of an old song in honor of a departed princess. So why write a book about it? Why not write about Goodbye Yellow Brick Road, which outsold Blue Moves by a factor of ten, and which to this day is John’s most critically acclaimed album? Why Blue instead of Yellow? I cannot answer that question without diverting you into my personal experience. For music is intrinsically personal. Like the proverbial tree that falls in the forest, without a listener—someone to lower a needle or pull a disc off a shelf or click a playlist or choose not to switch channels, and

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then, to have a personal response, to experience a flood of emotional associations—a piece of music does not exist. While true of all music, it seems particularly true of pop/ rock. The personal experience of mine that resulted in this book was an utterly mundane moment, revealed only in retrospect to be one of those numerous little “time-stopping exclamation points that punctuate all our lives.”1 But the moment planted a seed of a steadily growing mystery that I felt compelled to solve. I was digging through a box of old cassettes, looking for a jazz mixtape that my father had made me when I was a schoolboy in England; he was turning eighty, and I had an idea to reciprocate, decades later, in some grand way. I found it beside other old mixtapes, one titled Eltonian (for some long-lost reason), and beneath that, a stash of Elton John cassettes. Some were store bought, others pirate copies bought on the streets of Caracas or Jakarta (I had a peripatetic upbringing), others custom created. They stretched from Empty Sky, John’s debut album, released in 1969 in the UK only, and without success, to Leather Jackets, his dismal 1986 release, often cited as the lowest quality and sales point of his career. The time capsule ended there. I suspected none of the tapes had been played since 1986. In between relative failures Empty Sky and Leather Jackets were albums that were massive hits, like Goodbye Yellow Brick Road and lifetime favorites of mine, like Madman Across the Water, that I had long since duplicated on vinyl and CD. But others I had forgotten, and in a couple of cases—the 35-minute train wreck that is Victim of Love (1979)—so had the rest of the world. And then at the 2

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bottom of the stack lay my original store-bought cassette of Blue Moves. I picked up the cassette box, removed the tape, turned it over in my hands, read the track listing—and stepped into a time machine. I had overplayed this tape all through my teens. It was a witness to my youth. If it could talk, it could tell tales. Which of course it can, but—and here’s the best part—only I can understand them. Like the connection between a person and their conception of God, the tie that develops over the years between a piece of music and a listener is profoundly personal. But this book is not about tales of my youth; it is not a memoir, at least not of that ilk. There was more to my reaction that day than the predictable prompting of nostalgic recollections. Although I had not played this tape since 1986, I had listened to Blue Moves on vinyl and in digital form over the decades, with a few tracks migrating onto mixtapes and playlists. The album has had an afterlife in my own life, as well as in the larger world of pop history. All along, there was something that intrigued me—bothered me, really—about the LP’s fate. By trade I am a historian, trained to view texts from the past as ingredients to be mixed with other carefully selected ingredients and then served up as a coherent dish, a story spiced with analysis and argumentation. And viewed as an historical source, as an ingredient in a larger story of some kind, Blue Moves always struck me as a conundrum. Upon its release in October 1976, the LP shot up the charts. Its lead single, “Sorry Seems to Be the Hardest Word,” was soon all over the radio. The previous summer, John’s duet with Kiki Dee, “Don’t Go Breaking My Heart,” had 3

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been #1 for weeks on both sides of the Atlantic. Just when it seemed his core canon of hits must be complete, another came along. In the first half of the ’70s, Elton sold more records than the Rolling Stones, Led Zeppelin, David Bowie, and the ex-Beatles did in that entire decade—combined. The quirky, pudgy, piano-playing prodigy from Pinner (a London suburb you’d be forgiven for never having heard of) was the biggest pop star in the world. In 1975 alone, the public had paid more than $60 million for Elton John recordings and concert tickets, making him the highest earner in music history. Elton was “solely responsible for 2 percent of global record sales,” as one biographer put it. “Put simply, one in every fifty albums sold in the world that year was an Elton John record.” In the words of another, “He was not only a musical legend; he was an industry unto himself.”2 For six years, it had seemed as if he could do no wrong, and now he was moving into a seventh year in the stratosphere. But then came the reviews of Blue Moves. They ranged from mixed to murderous. John Tobler wrote in ZigZag that it was “absolutely essential listening” and Mick Brown of Sounds concluded it was “a disappointment in some areas; a triumph in others,” but Robert Christgau gave the LP a C in the Village Voice, calling it “impossibly weepy and excessive.” Christgau echoed the verdict of his wife, who asked him as the record played, “What is this tripe?” Ariel Swartley was unflinching in her condemnation of Blue Moves as “one of the most desperately pretentious albums around . . . the musical equivalent of a dumb but gorgeous one-night stand”; her review in Rolling Stone would be quoted for years as having accurately predicted the album’s career-stopping 4

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impact. “It sounds like it’s time for John to take a rest,” she concluded. Decades later, biographers and critics would echo her with remarks like “the release of the Blue Moves album was the end of an era for Elton,” stating that the double LP was “a career-freezing mess.”3 Elton John would spend so much of the ’80s and to some extent the ’90s as a critics’ punching bag, a pop artist decidedly on the wrong side of the cool/uncool divide built and policed by music writers, that it is easy to forget how favored he was by them in the early ’70s. It is almost impossible to be cool and commercial at the same time, to be popular and be a darling of the critics; but for a few glorious years, he managed it. Until Blue Moves, the album that seemed to bring that rare run to a halt. Chart disappointment followed negative press, as the album stalled at #3 in both the United Kingdom and the United States, with that lead single peaking at #3 in Canada, lower elsewhere. A couple of follow-up singles released in 1977 did poorly. Elton announced his retirement. He stopped touring. His run at the top was over. Rock music had moved on. And yet #3 is not a bad place to be. Even better to hit that spot in both the major English-speaking markets, as well as entering the Top 12 in ten additional countries. Such numbers reflect sales, and the LP would before long move over three million copies worldwide. So the notion that it was a failure so catastrophic as to terminate Elton John’s career—breaking up his legendary songwriting partnership with lyricist Bernie Taupin, forcing him into retirement, condemning him to decades of critical abuse, necessitating a series of challenging comebacks—didn’t quite make sense. There had to be more to the story. 5

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Similarly, while there was no shortage of claims by critics—from the closing years of the ’70s through the ’80s—that John was a has-been, there was also abundant evidence that he was still around. Amid the bad publicity, canceled tours, stalled or ill-received album projects, failed singles, and tabloid cruelty, the hits never stopped coming. After all, how many retirements and comebacks add up to rendering both concepts redundant? “I’m Still Standing” indeed.4 Full redemption would come too, to a spectacular degree: post-rehab, Elton became famous again, his infamy receding; in the ’90s, he recovered personally, publicly, and professionally. But by then, Blue Moves was long forgotten. The early peak was seen as 1973’s Goodbye Yellow Brick Road or 1975’s Captain Fantastic and the Brown Dirt Cowboy. Blue Moves was buried at the beginning of the bad years. Biographers and critics wondered whether Blue Moves actually caused the end of the John/Taupin golden age, or if it was simply collateral damage from the partnership’s explosive ending. Either way, little light was shed on the years immediately following the album’s release. Writers tended to breeze through the late ’70s as being less interesting than John’s meteoric stardom of the early ’70s; his cocaine-fueled comebacks and tabloid-covered tumbles of the ’80s; his elevation to the knighthood and rock royalty in the ’90s; and the septuagenarian’s colossal three-year Farewell Yellow Brick Road world tour. As with the real Queen of England, even nonfans marvel not only that Elizabeth and Elton are still going, but that they are doing so with apparent ease and elegance. 6

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If we pan back to take in Elton John’s entire half-century career, Blue Moves and its story seem to fade into a flurry of superlatives. He is the third best-selling recording artist, all categories combined, after the Beatles and Madonna, with total sales somewhere north of 350 million. If we add soundtracks, compilations, hits collections, and live albums to his thirty-five studio albums, the tally is over eighty-five— and counting. The campily titled hits package Diamonds (2017) is his fortieth album of any kind to enter the Top 40. Meanwhile, John put a single in the US Billboard Hot 100 every year from 1971 through to 2000 (another all-time record)—breezing right through those supposedly careerdead years after Blue Moves. The best-selling single of all time, selling 33 million copies (again, and counting) is his, released two decades after his early ’70s peak period (although its original version was from 1973; I am talking about “Candle in the Wind,” of course). His list of awards reads like a list of all the awards it is possible for an acclaimed musician to win: five Grammys (from thirty-four nominations), five Brit Awards, a Golden Globe, a Tony, and an Oscar. Since 1998, he has been Sir Elton John. Then there is Blue Moves itself. There would be no conundrum if the album was simply not very good. But here’s the thing: it is a four-sided masterpiece. It is as fantastic as Captain Fantastic and as colorful as Goodbye Yellow Brick Road. It rivetingly combines the three elements—piano-playing troubadour, full orchestra, and rock band—with which John and his collaborators redirected the evolution of popular music. The LP was a peak point, not an end point. If not his 7

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best (if not the peak), it comes close. At the very least, it is among his most intriguing and illustrative albums, one that helps to explain both his explosive career before the LP’s release in 1976 and his bumpy yet ultimately stratospheric career after it. In other words, it is his pivotal album, the one upon which his creative life turned. Such praise for the album is hardly objective appraisal. But what if we circle around my taste (one of this book’s leitmotifs is the whimsy of taste, the mimetic way in which consumers flock to embrace or abandon an artist), and dispassionately analyze the album’s musical style and lyrical tone? We find that on the four black vinyl sides of Blue Moves, John, his band, and the legendary producer Gus Dudgeon created an eighteen-song set that in various ways articulated the pop-cultural moment into which it was launched—and fizzled. The pianist-singer gave full musical expression to the emotional life of lyricist Taupin, more so than on any other album; and he was able to be himself, or rather, himselves— both Reginald Kenneth Dwight and Elton Hercules John. In interviews, the album’s creators seemed conscious of pieces of the story but unaware how all its elements tied together. “I just love it!” John would declare, or he would call it “one of my favorites,” a sentiment echoed by Taupin.5 Dudgeon insisted he had wanted to edit it down to a single album, yet, like its writers and musicians, he was proud of what was created, dismayed by its initial poor reception, and delighted—yet bemused—by its afterlife. No member of the Blue Moves creative team clearly explained why the album fared as it did. Their perspectives only deepened the conundrum. 8

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So the album’s history remained a mystery that followed me for decades. A simple “why?” is often the nagging demand that impels someone to write a book. In this case: Why did a successful album fail? The question so intrigued me, from the moment I held that rediscovered cassette tape, that I decided to try to solve it—even though I’d not planned to write about the album or Elton John or indeed pop music at all. My goal is not just to argue that Blue Moves deserves to be heard, but to explain why it has not been heard enough. More than that, I explore the afterlife it has gradually come to enjoy, leading to a satisfying inversion of the “why?” question above: Why did a failed album succeed? The eighteen tracks of Blue Moves are discussed in modest detail in the middle chapters. But I am more concerned with the album’s story, presented not as a musicological study, but as pop history. My primary purpose is to solve the album’s puzzle, rather than bang on about how much I love the record. That said, whether John is to your liking or not, I urge you to nudge your taste aside and give the album a listen (and not “just on those crappy little speakers built into your computer,” to borrow from Jonathan Lethem’s opening exhortation to his Fear of Music). If Elton is simply too uncool for you, then please consider (to borrow from another contributor to this series) scaling “the haughty fortifications of sarcastic conditioning that pose as critical wit” and playing Blue Moves. And play it loud.6 No one factor explains this album’s fate; the solution lies in the intersection of multiple factors. Explored below is the significance of events like the first appearance on British television of the Sex Pistols—inspiring “The Filth and the 9

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Fury” newspaper headline that helped make the interview a milestone in music history. Blue Moves had been out just weeks. In the ensuing months, punk captured the limelight, first in the United Kingdom, then the United States. Punk’s violent insertion of class issues into pop music, combined with its insistence that attitude trumped talent, instantly turned into dinosaurs the likes of Elton John—the ultimate millionaire virtuoso pop star of the day. Thus right as Blue Moves emerged, the larger popular culture of the album era shifted dramatically, leaving the LP to be “trampled to invisibility by the punk rock horde” (as one critic later put it).7 Starting in 1977, the megastar recording artists who had ruled the decade struggled to catch the wave of change and not get sucked under turbulent waters. One of the failed singles from Blue Moves—“Crazy Water”—now seems like a metaphor for the moment. John picked a poor time to change boats: by 1976, he, Taupin, and Dudgeon were finally free from contractual obligations to release an album on Rocket Records, the label they had founded in 1973. But they made a pricey double that was inevitably compared to their previous double. Goodbye Yellow Brick Road was one of the most successful albums of all time; combined with the hit records and concerts that followed, it created impossibly high expectations. Meanwhile, John’s previous label deflected commercial attention away from Blue Moves with a stream of back-catalog releases. There were other factors. The lyrics Taupin delivered for the album’s recording sessions articulated his struggle with a failing marriage. The same relationship that had produced 10

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“Tiny Dancer,” “Harmony,” and the other love songs that were treasured by fans now inspired songs of heartbreak— to the unhappy surprise of critics. Then two weeks before the release of Blue Moves, a cover interview with John appeared in Rolling Stone, in which he claimed “everybody’s bisexual”—himself included. In the United States, the negative press, public record burnings, and radio station bans did permanent damage to John’s popularity—just as similar revelations would irreversibly harm the images of Freddie Mercury, Boy George, George Michael, and others. Homophobia threatened to sink the new album. Meanwhile, John’s riveting concert performances, an annual average of over eighty, often to record-breaking audiences, had fueled his international Rocket Man stardom. But in 1976 and 1977, he made repeated retirement announcements. His concert average fell to just six a year. His career appeared to have collapsed. It had not, of course. The circumstances of an album’s making, the story of its youth and death and resurrection, combine to reveal something bigger than the album itself. In the case of Blue Moves, the album’s conundrum—how it was a success that failed, and yet also a failure that succeeded— acts as a window onto the dynamic interaction between pop music and popular culture in the great album era of the late twentieth century. Eventually, the circumstances and contexts that troubled Blue Moves in its early years receded and faded. The album persisted; it survives still. The thread connecting 1976 to the present was not broken by the late ’70s after all.

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2 Just as Good

It was a stroke of bad luck that first brought me Blue Moves. By the autumn of 1977 I had saved up enough pocket money to buy a couple of new albums. I turned thirteen that year, and moved to a new school, where I lived in a dorm room with five other boys. There was no question of having a record player; my only option was a portable radio cassette player, which I kept in a locked wooden box, with a few dozen cassettes, under my bed. That autumn I listened avidly to the weekly UK charts as they were read out on the radio, pondering what to buy when I could next afford a new cassette, enjoying the prolonged aural window-shopping. I could also hear the thumps and wails of ’70s pop and rock wafting down the corridor to my dorm room from the rooms of the older boys. When the Top 20 singles chart was played every Sunday night, I taperecorded parts of it, creating my own versions of the hit parade as it evolved from week to week. The only stations we could receive were BBC Radio 1 and—barely—Radio Luxembourg, which broadcast from a ship in the North Sea in order to

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avoid stringent British broadcasting laws. We reveled in its illegality, while breaking school rules listening to it at night on mono earbuds—a double frisson of lawbreaking. Elvis Presley had died that August, so the airwaves were full of his old songs. But the compilations of his hits that cluttered up the album charts held little appeal. Already familiar, the songs soon felt even older. Big albums from America—like Hotel California and Rumours—had invaded the charts earlier in the year. But I had managed to tape those from other people’s records over the summer. I loved the latest albums by ABBA and ELO—Arrival and New World Record—but I had those too. No, as the fall wore on, I decided I needed at least one cool new album. Musical coolness was an elusive entity in the Lord-of-the-Flies world of English schoolboys. But I was pretty sure that In the City, by the Jam, would do the trick. I planned to buy it the next time I went home for the weekend. I’d save enough for a second new album, and that would be one I could play around the house, without enduring the comments, subtle but derisive, that the Jam would incite. My mother was a fierce devotee of classical music, kind enough to tolerate Queen and Bowie in small doses, and even to humor my contention that Electric Light Orchestra albums were a sort of classical music. So not wishing to squander her indulgence, I resolved to buy a Greatest Hits, Volume II album that had just come out. It was by an English singer inescapable in the England of the mid-’70s, constantly on television, in the newspapers, played on the radio, his songs drifting from the windows of pubs, homes, and passing cars. My mother liked the fact that he was a piano player (if not exactly a 14

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pianist). I had some of his albums and had often played them in my mother’s small house without much objection. Finally, the cover to this Greatest Hits album depicted the singer at bat, playing cricket—hardly a countercultural statement. So it was decided: Elton John it would be. The weekend came, I was picked up from school on Saturday morning, and my mother drove me into the local market town. Picturesque buildings centuries old lined both sides of a single crooked shopping street, peppered with ancient pubs (one turned into an Indian restaurant), with separate shops for the butcher, fishmonger, and grocer. An off-license (liquor store) was adjacent to a fish ’n’ chip shop near the bus stop, a trifecta that my mother’s elderly friends in town insisted attracted undesirables (the kind who listened to the Jam, I mused). The town was not an obvious place to buy records (and, indeed, today it is impossible to buy music in such towns). But on this particular high street, in the ’70s, a pair of old shops had been turned into a single store selling electronics and appliances. The business was owned by a family with the unsettling name of Grimrod. “Mr. G. Senior” did a brisk business selling toasters and electric kettles to old ladies in one half of the store, and “Mr. G. Junior” peddled washing machines and stereo equipment in the other. Mr. G. Senior was kindly. Mr. G. Junior was intimidatingly intolerant of very young customers. But he also sold tapes and records. For miles around, he was the only pusher of the drug I craved. That Saturday, while Mr. G. Junior talked an elderly customer into buying a washing machine one size too big for his needs, I browsed the cassettes, picking them up and 15

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turning them over in my hands like jewels. When Mr. G. barked, “What are you looking for, son?” I asked for the Jam. He said he didn’t stock music for “yobboes” (hoodlums)—a line likely delivered for the benefit of the elderly customer, as I knew Mr. G. stocked whatever sold, including the album right in front of me on the shelves, the Sex Pistols’ Never Mind the Bollocks, which had come out since I had begun planning my new purchases earlier in the fall (it was possibly #1 that very week). In fact, there were lots of new albums out, and I wanted them all. It was agonizing. The Sex Pistols were a little too cool (older boys claimed a monopoly on them). But Queen and ELO had put out new albums, both in the same week. News of the World had been preceded a few weeks earlier by an irresistible lead single, “We Are the Champions/ We Will Rock You.” I had to have the album. But the ELO album, Out of the Blue, was a double. I had heard its distinctive combination of orchestral pop and recycled rock ’n’ roll booming from older boys’ rooms at school; it sounded amazing. My tastes were promiscuous enough that I was tempted by the new Rod Stewart album, by the latest from the Stranglers and from AC/DC, as well as a new Roxy Music Greatest Hits collection and a brand-new Donna Summer LP. But most tempting of all was the new David Bowie album. As recently as January of the same year, Bowie had put out Low. I had played the first side so much that I’d worn the tape down and had to record it again (it would be a year or two before I came to appreciate the dark instrumental collaborations with Brian Eno that made up the second side). Now here was “Heroes,” its sequel. How did Bowie do it? I grasped the black 16

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plastic case and stared at the black-and-white image on the cover. Forget the Jam; “Heroes” would be mine. However, the other album I purchased that day is the reason why I remember that Saturday at all; after all, my teenage years were dotted with forgettable and forgotten musicbuying moments. By purchase, theft, and piracy (mostly the last), I would soon acquire the albums just mentioned, and more, from the 1977 charts—Status Quo, Santana, JeanMichel Jarre, Graham Parker, Ian Dury, the Boomtown Rats, that Pistols album, and eventually the Jam. They would fill my head for years, be forgotten and rediscovered, be bought again on CD or vinyl or downloaded. But the other cassette I bought that day would be owned for less than an hour. Browsing Mr. G. Junior’s rack of tapes I soon found the Greatest Hits, Volume II, that I had planned to buy. I thought Elton looked a little silly on the cover, dressed in whites, but wearing a red cap, with pink sneakers, and at night. Still, I knew my mother would tolerate the music, especially if I skipped the first track (“The Bitch Is Back”) and mostly played the next half-dozen hits that followed (from “Lucy in the Sky with Diamonds” to “Philadelphia Freedom”). The box and tape were also yellow, to match my cassette copy of Goodbye Yellow Brick Road (see Figure 1). Purchased and slotted into the in-dash deck the minute we began the drive home, it sounded awful. As if Elton’s band were playing underwater and he was drowning while trying to sing. I’d suggested to my mother that we skip the first track, “if you don’t like it.” The car’s cassette deck had a track-skipping fast-forward feature, so on we went. “Lucy” sounded just as terrible. The problem wasn’t the music; we 17

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Figure 1  Old Tapes: The plastic cassette box for Blue Moves was black and the tape casing was white (this, my original 1977 copy, is worn to threads and no longer playable). In contrast, the plastic box and the tape for Greatest Hits Volume II is yellow, to match Goodbye Yellow Brick Road. Photograph by the author.

had been sold a dud copy of the album. Reluctantly my mother turned the car around. “Sounds fine to me,” said Mr. G. Junior. I stood silent, miserable. But my mother wanted to make this quick, so she 18

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brought in Mr. G. Senior. “Give the lad another copy!” he told his son. The problem was there was no other copy in stock. “Here,” said Junior, “have this instead. It costs more. It’s a double album. But I’ll give it to you for the same price.” He handed me a black cassette case. I was instantly suspicious. The case was scratched, which gave it the feel of being used (which it probably was, returned by a customer not because the tape was a dud copy, but because the album itself was seen as a dud). The spine read Elton John—Blue Moves. The cover appeared to be an oil painting of people lying around on a lawn, but rendered in shades of blue. Elton was nowhere to be seen. Silly or not, his presence would have been reassuring. I’d heard of this album; it had come out a year earlier, and jumped straight into the Top 10. But it did not reach #1, unlike most of his previous albums. And by now it was long gone from the charts. Only one single had been a hit, “Sorry Seems to Be the Hardest Word,” and it was included on the Greatest Hits album I had been forced to return. It was the only song I already knew. I sighed, my misery deepening. So many albums I wanted. This one, which had not even for one minute been on my wish list all autumn, was now in my reluctant hand. “No need to be glum,” said Mr. G. Junior. “This one’s just as good.”

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Was it really possible for an artist’s new album to be “just as good” as a “greatest hits” compilation? Surely, my thirteenyear-old self thought, the latter was better by definition. A hit was created by popular acclaim, deemed by thousands— even millions—to be such. And even if some hits were better than others (more hit-like, more popular), this collection was certified as not only a selection of hits, but the “greatest” ones. Little did I understand in 1977 that such thinking deprived me of the opportunity to make my own aesthetic choices, to explore my own tastes. It put me at the mercy of the tyrannical culture of hits denounced by Jean-Paul Sartre, condemning me to creating “the record collection of the Other, that is to say, the collection of no one.”1 (Years later I would plod through Sartre, and defiantly continue to embrace that culture of hits.) Nor did I grasp in 1977 that the album I had unwillingly bought, paired with the one I had wanted, symbolized a complex and conflictual moment in the career of the man who had very recently ceased to be the top-selling recording artist in the world. I knew they were

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different types of album, but I doubt I noticed that they were on different labels. Nor did I grasp the significance of the fact that one was put out by John and his creative team, while the other was released by record company executives. Nor too did I appreciate how these distinctions mattered to John himself—being the consummate record-collecting chartwatching observer of music industry trends that he was, and remains. Only now do I see the significance of which Elton John products were released, and by whom, during those closing years of the ’70s. But there was one aspect of the larger story that I did personally experience: disappointment. Because, at first, I found Blue Moves to be a challenge. I now see that I approached it with my own personal microcosmic version of the larger horizon of expectations that John’s worldwide stardom had generated in the six years leading up to the album’s release. I had wanted hits, simple and satisfying ones. Instead, I was given eighteen musically varied and sophisticated tracks, a few with no words at all, and many of the others with oddly gloomy lyrics. Blue moves, indeed. But the double album grew on me; it grew up with me. Elton’s hits collections became overly played and ragged with wear; his subsequent albums grew uneven. But Blue Moves matured. It held firm. The accidental way it came to me in 1977 began to feel like a providential gift. I realized, eventually, that this was an album I had been living with, year after year, decade after decade, as if it were one of my Desert Island Discs. In case you were wondering: yes, my mother let me play Blue Moves in the house, in time asking me to skip some 22

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songs but turn others up. It was also tolerated, even valued, by others who came to play important roles in my life. Many of them noticed that there was, in fact, a hit on the album: a huge one they knew well. It was the song, mentioned a moment ago, that also appeared on the second volume of Greatest Hits: “Sorry Seems to Be the Hardest Word.” It is the only track from Blue Moves that is instantly recognizable to most people, even to nonfans. From its first year in the world, “Sorry” took on two lives: one on the album, whose context gives it particular meaning; the other as an individual song, a worldwide hit in 1976–77, repeatedly covered ever since, a UK #1 hit again in 2002, a firm fixture on the endless series of John hits packages—including the latest, Diamonds. The divergent fates of “Sorry” and Blue Moves seem at first to reinforce the simple solution to the mystery of the album’s history: a weak album destroyed John’s reputation as an album artist, while the fact that its only hit was a ballad sealed his fate as a balladeer singles artist. But the closer we look at the larger history of Elton’s ’70s hits and misses, that explanation crumbles, and a more interesting story emerges. The concept of “horizons of expectations” is rooted in a theory of literature that originated half a century ago. It has thus had time to evolve its own subfield of academic study. It has stood the test of time and, like all the best theories of human behavior, can be applied to various situations at varying levels of simplicity or sophistication. Applied to popular music, it works like this: whenever we listen to an album, we bring with us the experiences and understandings drawn from the albums to which we have previously listened, 23

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especially by the same artist. Those earlier albums, and the sum of all that listening, has created a set—or horizon—of expectations, which inevitably influences how we react to a new album or piece of music that is new to us and by that artist.2 There are numerous critical and consumer responses that stem from such expectations. Our concern here is with the disappointment that results when expectations are not met, and more specifically with how a horizon can become so inflated that the likelihood of a negative reception is increased. The higher the horizon, the more distorted the expectations become, the larger the prospect of disappointment looms. Right around the time that I was grappling with my own experience of this phenomenon, specifically with respect to Blue Moves, the greatest horizon of expectation setup and collapse in music history was unfolding. Released in February 1977, Fleetwood Mac’s Rumours turned rapidly into a commercial juggernaut, soon becoming the bestselling album of all time (it would go on to sell over 40 million copies, and remains one of history’s ten top-selling albums). Many years later, Lindsay Buckingham ruminated on how “the ridiculous success” of Rumours became “detached from the music and more about the phenomenon” of the success, pushing the band “to do Rumours II.” His resolute response was “Let’s just not do that. Let’s very pointedly not do that.”3 The result was 1979’s Tusk, a double album that was, from its title and cover art to its length and contents, shockingly not Rumours II. Record buyers noticed. The album provoked fan outrage, critical derision, and sales setbacks on an epic scale. In the words of writer Rob Trucks, “No album in music 24

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history falls so precipitously from commercial grace.” Tusk, like Blue Moves, sold in numbers that would have made any new artist’s career, and which today would put an album at the top of the annual charts—3 to 4 million units. But by the same token, such scales of difference were unprecedented and unrepeatable; as Trucks puts it, “The Rumours to Tusk nosedive is a fall that will stand forever.”4 I am not suggesting that Tusk and Blue Moves stand up to close comparison. In terms of stylistic content, both were inconsistent. But whereas Blue Moves is one man’s basket of musical expressions, in harmony with another man’s lyrical expressions, Tusk is a schizophrenic battle between two interlaced albums. Although Blue and Tusk were both costly doubles, Tusk was priced much higher—an unprecedented $15 in the United States, compared to between $11 and $12 for Blue Moves (and between $7 and $8 for a typical single album).5 Also, the thirty-two-month wait for the Rumours sequel was long for the era, whereas the twelve-month gap between Blue Moves and John’s previous studio album was more typical (albeit the longest album gap of John’s career up to that point). Still, Blue Moves and Tusk are dramatic examples of how the recording artists of the great album era (late ’60s to century’s end) suffered the receiving end of a horizon of expectations. Many responded by trying to strike more gold in the same stylistic vein. After all, music consumers—like consumers of popular culture in general—are only outwardly and superficially neotheistic. That is, people crave, eagerly anticipate, and worship what is new—the latest trend, gossip, or product—but they want it to be familiar at the same time. 25

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If the new reminds people sufficiently of the familiar, it is interpreted as being successful, as “good.” In the words of Atlantic writer Derek Thompson, music consumers “love the recognition of a familiar pattern in a fresh setting, that special moment when the fuzzy anxiety of newness resolves into the crystalline clarity of understanding.”6 Seen in this light, the challenge of follow-up albums as familiar and yet new, successful in both critical and commercial terms, is considerable. Those who achieved it are among the most celebrated recording artists of all time. For four-year runs in the 1960s, John Coltrane, Bob Dylan, the Beatles, and the Beach Boys all managed it; as did Stevie Wonder for a brief, wonderful while in the early ’70s. In subsequent decades, it was achieved by acts as varied as Elvis Costello, Prince, Madonna, Oasis, Coldplay, and Adele. Meanwhile, of course, Elton John had managed it all through the early ’70s. But more often than not, artists failed to find the new/ familiar balance, resulting in both commercial and critical disappointment—with the artist accused of phoning it in with leftovers and covers, as Bowie, for example, was with the Let’s Dance sequel. If Bowie appeared not to take long enough to make Tonight, or perhaps not to take the task seriously enough, the Eagles were seen as taking so long to follow Hotel California (three years) that letdown was inevitable, with three hit singles and millions in sales insufficient to save the critical reputation of The Long Run.7 Others, in contrast, fearlessly embraced the Tusk precedent and defiantly chose to emphasize creative license, making albums whose sales disappointed industry executives 26

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but whose reviews were mostly positive. R.E.M.’s Monster, for example, was loved by critics and a solid enough seller, but seen as a slap in the face to fans expecting another Out of Time or Automatic for the People. A more controversial— and now legendary—case was that of George Michael’s Listen without Prejudice Vol. 1, which was deliberately not Faith II and led to a protracted lawsuit with Sony Records (detailed in the 2017 documentary Freedom). In the longterm, disappointing sequels seldom catch up. Monster is now esteemed, yet remains overshadowed by its predecessors. Listen without Prejudice is raved over today, but less so than the ever-popular Faith. And Tusk is now famous for being, as one critic recently put it, “a masterpiece that flopped.”8 The “unreasonable demand placed upon artists by their fair-weather audiences” is relentless. It insists upon satisfying product year after year, even decade after decade, with the artist unchanged, “forever young on our behalf.” The horizon of “such expectations is absolutely ridiculous.”9 And it never disappears. No amount of hindsight and critical reappraisal can ever erase all that came before. In Elton John’s case, it is worth lingering for a moment on how that unfolded. John’s origin as Reginald Kenneth Dwight—his trans­ formation from Reg into Elton—has been depicted for so long in the language of legend formation that it has acquired a fairy-tale quality. That tradition was reflected in the 2018 Christmas television advertisement for the British retailer John Lewis and Partners, dubbed “The Boy and the Piano.” The 2-minute ad aimed to convey how much a Christmas gift can mean by suggesting that Elton’s entire career—shown 27

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through recreated snippets of his legendary performances, from the hotel pub where he played for tips as a teenager to the Troubadour in 1970 to Dodger stadium—stemmed from the upright piano his mother gave him for Christmas when he was four.10 The transformation of Reg to Elton is not so much a story of rags to riches—although the rapid acquisition of unimaginable wealth, along with epic episodes of conspicuous consumption, is certainly part of it. It is more one of the ordinary turned into the extraordinary, a mundane life converted into a hyperbolic destiny, an ugly duckling metamorphosed as a dazzling—or bedazzled— swan.11 The object that made that alchemy possible was the piano and Reg’s innate affinity for it; he could, it is said, play by ear at the age of three. But such tales also need obstacles, to be overcome with a combination of sheer grit and fateful moments of good fortune. Reg faced two such obstacles. Leaving school at eighteen (in 1965), without taking his final exams (his A levels), he forged a career in music. But he found himself trapped by day as an office boy in a music publishing company and by night as the frustrated piano player in Bluesology, a teenage blues band whose members were reluctant to allow their front man to be “this overweight bespectacled thing” (in his own words).12 Not until 1970, in a club in Los Angeles, would he discover how to overcome that obstacle—seemingly as a fortuitous by-product of his pent-up frustration and tendency for temper tantrums. The other obstacle was, ironically, his lack of talent— for composing lyrics. When Bluesology backed Long John 28

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Baldry, who in 1967 had a UK #1 hit with “Let the Heartaches Begin,” Reg found himself even further from the microphone. So he took up offers with music publishing companies in London to write songs for other artists, and also to imitate successful artists by singing their recent hits for cheap cover albums. But he still had no gift for writing words. Then, while Reg—still living with his mother and stepfather in Pinner—toiled away making demos for Dick James Music (DJM) in London, an A&R man named Ray Williams suggested a solution. A farm boy in Owmby-bySpital in Lincolnshire had mailed in poems, in response to an advertisement in the New Musical Express. (According to one apocryphal version of the story, the boy’s mother mailed the poems after fishing them out of the trash, where the selfdoubting lad—named Bernard Taupin—had thrown them.) Reg started putting Bernie’s poems to music, and before long Bernie took the train down to London and the two “hit it off right away.” “They were like an old couple,” Williams later said. “That was the secret: Bernie didn’t want to be a singer or play piano and Elton really couldn’t write the lyrics, so it just fitted.”13 Reg quit Bluesology, borrowing his new name from that band’s saxophonist (Elton Dean) and its singer (John Baldry), and started making illicit recordings of his and Taupin’s new songs in DJM’s studio. When Dick James found out, instead of firing them he offered them a contract, one that they predictably leaped to sign and years later, equally predictably, disputed. In March of 1968 the first John/Taupin single, “I’ve Been Loving You,” was released. Bernie was seventeen, and he and Elton were sleeping on bunk beds in Elton’s mother’s 29

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house. The single sank without a trace. But the twist of fate that put Reg and Bernie together allowed Elton John to be created. The first obstacle, however, had still to be overcome. Even as Elton, Reg did not look like a rock star by any late-’60s definition. As he himself said, “I’m a tubby little singer and I can’t understand why people scream at me. There must be a reason, but God knows what it is.”14 At the time that John made such self-deprecating comments to journalists—and he made them often in the ’70s—he was selling so many records and tickets that his popularity, whether as a teen idol or an MOR favorite, was hardly a mystery. So it is tempting to read John’s comments as disingenuous. But I suspect they were sincere, that fans read them as sincere, and that his transparent insecurity over his weight, over his inelegant fingers, and over his receding hairline was crucial to his success. They humanized him while he was, paradoxically, becoming god-like. As Elton’s star rose in the rock firmament, the persistence of Reg, the vulnerable, self-doubting mortal, increasingly mattered. Above all, Reg’s humanity became increasingly important because of the way in which Elton sought to compensate for those perceived inadequacies with such elaborate and heartfelt gusto. The finesse with which he teased melodies, syncopations, and arpeggiated chords from the keyboard seemed to defy his own condemnation of his sausage fingers. Fans loved him for it. The way he threw his body into the air, under and on top of the piano, flew in the face of his own selfjudgment as unathletically “chubby.” For that, he was adored. As he was for the self-conscious way he insisted “I’m plain,” 30

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while adorning his face with increasingly outrageous glasses, substituting his fading hair with increasingly ornamental headdresses, and costuming himself with unapologetic absurdity. Reg’s transformative teenaged performances at the piano in the Northwood Hills pub were familiar to regulars in the early ’60s. But the venue where his distinctively energetic display of talent launched his career was nowhere near London, or even in England. It was in Los Angeles, at the tiny Troubadour Club. In 1970, local promoters—enthused by this unknown Brit’s new album—arranged a series of gigs there. This was before the costumes and glasses, before the full band, before anyone even dreamed of Elton John rocking stadiums. It was just John at the Troubadour’s piano, with his rhythm section of drummer Nigel Olsson and bassist Dee Murray. But when the shy singer of “Your Song”—soon to be a hit—kicked away the piano stool, barked angrily at the inattentive audience, and began to pound the keys, he ignited his career. That first night produced instant buzz. “The next morning, like, wham, bam,” Taupin later recollected, “there on the front of all the papers . . .”15 LA’s rock royalty flocked to the Troubadour to see him play. “Rejoice!” wrote Robert Hilburn in the Los Angeles Times. “Rock, which has been going through a rather uneventful period lately, has a new star!” As John himself later reminisced, the Troubadour experience “was the first time I knew something really big was happening; that was really when I became Elton.”16 As a result of the press from John’s Troubadour shows in the summer of 1970, he returned stateside that autumn for similar performances in New York, while the Elton John 31

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album climbed to #4 in the US charts. In the course of 1971, four Elton John albums would be released—his third and fourth studio albums (Tumbleweed Connection and Madman Across the Water), a live album named after the date it had been recorded and broadcast in a New York radio station studio (11.17.70 in the United States, 17.11.70 in the United Kingdom), and the Friends film soundtrack. At one point in 1971, they were all in the US charts, along with his previous album and “Your Song,” which quickly became Elton’s signature ballad—and still is. It had all begun in the United States, not in John’s home country. And although in 1971 he became a recognized star on both sides of the Atlantic, for the next five years he consistently charted higher and reached broader audiences in the States than in Britain. In the United States, the tidal wave of performances and product was ceaseless. John never left the charts. On the radio he was inescapable. His unique brand of pseudo-Americana pop/rock did more than capture the musical mood of pop culture in the early ’70s: it helped define it. By the end of 1974, his first Greatest Hits was out. It was far from a stretch. Over the previous five years, John had released seven albums. The four most recent, released within thirty-six months of Greatest Hits, had all reached #1 in America and lent the compilation most of its ten hit singles. Hits promptly hit the top of the charts in both the United States and the United Kingdom, ending up as America’s best-selling album of 1975, and its thirteenth bestseller of all time (worldwide, with 25 million sales, it is in the all-time Top 50). 32

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As if John wasn’t big enough in 1975, he released two new albums that year—in the spring, Captain Fantastic and the Brown Dirt Cowboy, and in the autumn, Rock of the Westies. Both went straight to #1 in America and Canada, and into the Top 10 in half a dozen other countries. In October that year, John and his band played two shows in LA’s Dodger Stadium, to rave reviews and a combined total of 120,000 people. Taupin later remembered that week as a career peak, “the absolute pinnacle” of their ’70s fame. A few weeks later, “Island Girl,” the first single from Westies, topped the US charts. The album itself hit the top the following week, further boosting the back catalog. This success story is well known, detailed in biographies, retold recently in two books titled Captain Fantastic, and given imaginative treatment in the 2019 “epic musical fantasy” film Rocketman.17 It is easy to see how the years generated an increasingly high horizon of expectations—and how Rock of the Westies revealed its precariousness. The album was a sales smash: like its predecessor, Captain Fantastic, it entered the US charts at #1. No album had done that before, let alone two in a row by the same artist. But that was achieved on the strength of preorders, on fan faith boosted by previous hits and by sales of advance singles and concert tickets. Fantastic validated that faith; Westies less so. Not universally received as one of John’s best, Westies suggested that the rock god might be mortal after all. To me, both Rock of the Westies and 1974’s Caribou were evidence of the fallibility of the John team. Each were buoyed up by a couple of great singles, but otherwise weighed down by filler tracks often forged in a cocaine- and alcohol-fueled 33

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recording frenzy. My view of Yellow, Caribou, Fantastic, and Westies as a peak-valley-peak-valley is of course merely that—my view. But it raises a question crucial to what then transpired: If consumers crave what is the same but also new—that “familiar pattern in a fresh setting”—what did that mean with specific respect to Elton John records in the mid-’70s? Subsequent chapters suggest answers to that big question, so it will suffice to note here: consumers wanted albums that continued to combine hit singles that were rockers or rock ballads, filled out with relatively unchallenging lesser tracks; the filler songs that for me reduce an album like Westies to “mere entertainment” were part of what made those albums, for millions of consumers, simply and reassuringly entertaining. What consumers did not want— including me, when I first found myself obliged to buy Blue Moves—was a “self-aware, rock-as-art-form creation” (to borrow phrases used by Tom Smucker to compare early Beach Boys hit albums to the expectation-confounding Pet Sounds).18 To be sure, one could argue that Goodbye Yellow Brick Road and Captain Fantastic were very much self-aware and came close to being rock-as-art-form concept albums. But that only reinforces the contribution of those albums to the horizon of expectations among John fans. Blue Moves was not enough like those other albums. It was too new, insufficiently familiar, self-aware in ways too novel, a suspiciously arty collection of explorations into the genres that fed into pop and rock. After all that came before—the unprecedented, record-breaking, rocket rush of tours and hits that made 34

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Elton John the world’s biggest rock star—the problem with Blue Moves was that it was, in a word, unexpected. There has always been a tension between those who compose and play music and those who commission or package or promote it. It is one of the underlying themes of the story of popular music—from Mozart and his archbishop patron to the numerous modern-day recording artists who felt ensnared by their contracts with Svengali industry moguls. One side wants the creative freedom to make music, the other wants executive control and—at least in their modern manifestation as producers, publishers, and label executives—money. Considering that Elton John’s half-century career spans the great album era, it would be surprising if the music/money tension was not part of the story. In fact, it is a relatively small part, as John and Taupin moved fairly early to acquire financial and executive control. But it played a role in determining the fate of Blue Moves. The music publishing company Dick James Music had launched John and Taupin. But by 1973 disagreements over royalties, choices of singles, and other details had soured relations. James’s decision to count the double LP Goodbye Yellow Brick Road as one album, not two, was a last straw, prompting John, Taupin, and Dudgeon to found their own label, Rocket Records. But although they thereby left DJM in 1975, the agreement that John and Taupin had signed with James in 1967 gave DJM copyright to their songs. Elton’s manager, John Reid, relentlessly disputed the fairness of that agreement, as well as the contracts signed with DJM in 1968 and 1970, arguing—eventually in the law courts—that James 35

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had taken advantage of two teenagers and had since taken too large a share of the hundreds of millions (in sterling and dollars) that Elton’s records had earned. In 1975 and 1976, Reid wanted to sue DJM. Elton was reluctant to move so aggressively against the man who had given him his first break and of whom he was still fond— even if their correspondence was now mediated by managers and lawyers. Furthermore, although John and Taupin still owed albums to DJM, they could meanwhile sign other acts to Rocket (like their good friend Kiki Dee, and comeback kids Neil Sedaka and Cliff Richard). More to the point, they were able to finally fulfill their DJM contract in 1976 with the release of a live album, Here and There. Thus Blue Moves was the first John album to come out on his own label. Dick James’s son Stephen, who ran DJM with his father in the ’70s, later claimed, “We could have sued to get Blue Moves, which turned out to be a big hit”—note the verdict on the album’s success—“but my father didn’t want to get into a legal fight with Elton.” In the end, matters were settled when Rocket licensed two of the tracks from the Blue Moves sessions to DJM, for use in Greatest Hits, Volume II.19 So what was the problem? The divorce from DJM had created two rival sources of Elton John product: the DJMowned back catalog of familiar hits; and the Rocket-owned new, unfamiliar releases. The competition between the two, hardly an even one, compounded the impact of that horizon of expectation. As the split between James and John/Taupin approached closure, DJM moved to maximize profits from the catalog while Elton still remained popular. The strategy was a short-term one, based on the assumption that his time 36

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at the top was limited. Indeed, when DJM saw sales of new John material slow down and his popularity falter as the ’70s drew to a close (ironic, in view of DJM’s role), the rereleasing of back-catalog items accelerated. The marketplace dumping of John/Taupin material began soon after the recording of Blue Moves. John might have surrendered the double album to DJM, had James offered to count it as two and thus finally fulfill their contract. But John was still miffed at James for refusing to double count Yellow. While Dudgeon was mixing Blue Moves, DJM put out Here and There, a flat and muddy live album that combined London and New York concert recordings from two years earlier. It looked and sounded like the contractual obligation record that it was. The New York tracks were not even from the legendary part of the Madison Square Garden concert when John Lennon joined Elton on stage (Elton insisted those tracks be omitted, as that “would have been taking advantage of John who did the gig as a favor”).20 “The thing that really destroyed me,” said Elton, speaking a year later about his label problems, “was putting Here and There out as the last one on DJM. It was ‘either release this album or, if you don’t, we’ll put it out later anyway.’ Which would have meant them getting Blue Moves as well.” Although John called it “a total fucking disaster,” Here and There reached #6 in Britain and #4 in the United States, where it stayed in the charts for the six months leading up to the release of Blue Moves. But John’s horizon of sales expectations was so high that such success seemed tepid, a portent of future setbacks.21 37

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That fact was not immediately apparent, as Here and There was followed by a brand new John single. Its music and one duet vocal were laid down during the Blue Moves sessions, with the other vocal eventually added by Kiki Dee. “Don’t Go Breaking My Heart” rapidly rose to the #1 spot on both sides of the Atlantic, staying there for four weeks in the United States, while John filled Madison Square Garden for one of those weeks. In the UK it was his first #1 single, topping the charts for six summer weeks. The downside of such success was that “Don’t Go Breaking” was frothy discopop, not rock. Fans of rock star John who imagined the duet was left off Blue Moves because the new album rocked were disappointed. Yet the millions of pop fans who made the duet the song of that summer were denied a whole album of similarly unchallenging pop. The decision to include “Don’t Go Breaking” on the DJM release Greatest Hits, Volume II, was diplomatically and artistically justifiable—it helped keep DJM and the John team out of the law courts, and the song nestled nicely with earlier hits—but it effectively gave DJM one more way to depress new John/Taupin sales while boosting that of the back catalog. Meanwhile, DJM continued to muddy the waters in the UK with single releases of older songs. “Pinball Wizard,” which charted for two months in the spring, had been recorded two years earlier for the Tommy soundtrack; its B-side (“Harmony”) was older still. In September, with “Don’t Go Breaking My Heart” still charting, DJM released another Yellow track, misspelled as “Benny and the Jets” (paired with the even older “Rock and Roll Madonna”). Buyers sensed the rip-off, and the single barely cracked the Top 40. 38

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When the lead single from Blue Moves came out a few weeks later, it took a month to chart in the UK. “Sorry” would end up doing well. But when DJM won the right to add it to Greatest Hits, Volume II, along with John’s other three UK singles of 1976 (“Pinball Wizard,” “Don’t Go Breaking,” and “Benny”), the commercial confusion was compounded, to DJM’s profit and at Rocket’s expense.22 Ten tracks on Greatest Hits, Volume II were bona fide hits. But DJM had pulled three from the period before the first Greatest Hits—released only three years earlier—making Volume II seem slightly premature and exploitative. Sure enough, sales of Volume II were disappointing. Meanwhile, having not gone more than nine months without a new studio album since 1970, John now went two years without one. Sensing a combination of unmet demand and career collapse, DJM ramped up the reissues. For several years following the second Greatest Hits, DJM and licensing partners like Pickwick carpet-bombed the UK and European markets with new compilations of old DJM-owned John recordings: a selection titled Candle in the Wind appeared in the Marks & Spencer retail chain; then live albums 1711-70 and Here and There were resold as Elton John Live and London & New York Live!—and again as The Elton John Live Collection; a 5-LP box set grouped 1969–75 tracks into categories like “Moods” and “Classics”; a reissue of early songs was titled, after one of them, Lady Samantha; compilations licensed to K-Tel were dubbed The Very Best of Elton John and Elton John Milestones; and so on. Back in 1976, at the start of this sustained bout of market saturation, Taupin had unhappily anticipated DJM’s strategy. 39

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“I know what the world doesn’t need now is another Elton John album,” he said, yet “Dick James is still going to put out tracks he’s compiled, like Best of, Volume 300. We get upset because people go, ‘Oh shit, not another Elton John album,’ and it’s so maddening because it’s not our fault.”23 The overexploitation of what had become the John/Taupin classic catalog did not stop in 1980. But Elton John had now entered a new phase of his career, in which a steady stream of new material was less overshadowed by older songs. “Little Jeannie” was a massive hit, especially in the United States, a radio-friendly pop song that dominated the airwaves in the summer of 1980, as “Don’t Go Breaking My Heart” had done four years earlier. Elton was now a pop artist, rather than a rock star, a producer of one-a-year singles albums—LPs of uneven content that served as homes for hit singles. Does that mean that the reception of Blue Moves was the fault of DJM? Not exactly. John was hardly unique in going from being a rock star album artist in the ’70s to a singlesalbum pop star in the ’80s. On the contrary, the central thrust of the entire industry moved that way. The industry-wide sales crisis that began in 1977, coupled with the genre crisis produced by disco and punk, forced rock into a survival category of “classic rock.” The “new” music, boosted in the early ’80s by the industry-reviving technologies of MTV and CDs, was pop, very broadly defined, driven more by singles (and their videos) than albums. John’s ’80s product sat comfortably right in the middle of that new pop world. And that had little to do with how DJM had treated his back catalog. 40

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Nor was DJM the first or last corporation in the music business to release material in ways that were prejudicial to the artist. DJM did nothing illegal. John admitted in 1973 that James “had made his fair share out of me,” that his royalty statements were honest, that DJM had been “a bloody good little record company,” and that “I don’t think we’ve gotten screwed as a lot of other people have.”24 Arguably few artists have suffered less from “the music industry’s poisonous labor politics” than John and Taupin, who never wrote a song that excoriated industry managers or label executives along the lines of Pink Floyd’s “Have a Cigar,” Queen’s “Death on Two Legs,” the Smiths’ “Paint a Vulgar Picture,” or NOFX’s “Dinosaurs Will Die.”25 Nonetheless, the timing of the DJM/John divorce was surely one of the factors that handicapped Blue Moves in the marketplace. The label’s strategy of extracting maximum profit from the John/Taupin catalog in the years surrounding that album’s release created fierce competition between familiar favorites and unknown flops—as they thereby became. Furthermore, the frenzy of re-releases was reminiscent of the industry’s reaction to the passing of former stars, such as Elvis, whose 1977 death prompted a chart-saturating stampede of reissues and compilations. Elton John wasn’t dead to Dick James, but DJM’s treatment of his catalog was a posthumous celebration that made it that much harder for the artist to remain alive in the public eye. The fact that the catalog being dumped consisted of the very songs that had created one of the highest horizons of expectation in pop/ rock history only served to exacerbate the challenge faced by Blue Moves. 41

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4 Our Mount Everest

The fate of Blue Moves was, from the start, inextricably tied to the staggering success of the double album released three years before it. “Within weeks” of its launch, Goodbye Yellow Brick Road confirmed John “as the biggest British star in the US since The Beatles.” It debuted stateside at #1, and stayed there all through November and December of 1973. It did not leave the charts for two years. It also leaped to #1 in the UK, sitting around in the charts for eighty-four weeks. The “epic, hulking masterwork” became a commercial and critical monster, overshadowing the albums that came before and after it.1 As the horizon of expectations among consumers of John’s music gathered steam during the early 1970s, Goodbye Yellow Brick Road acted as its most powerful engine. As John himself remarked, it soon became the album that was always “going to be hard to follow up.”2 It was thus inevitable that the 76 minutes of Goodbye Yellow Brick Road would be compared to the 84 minutes of Blue Moves. The former had a head start, buoyed by four hit singles and as many album tracks turned into FM radio staples. By my late teens I had acquired both a vinyl copy of Blue Moves

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and a girlfriend who had the Goodbye Yellow Brick Road LPs. We would lay the sleeves on the ground next to each other, play the eight sides interspersed, and debate their relative merits (in between doing the things that teenage couples listening to records have done since vinyl was invented). Shelved together, the yellow and blue of their oversized spines stood out, and we predictably referred to the albums as Yellow and Blue. I tended to prefer Blue; its long moody moments and paucity of rough edges struck me as a better soundtrack to immature romance. She preferred Yellow; she simply felt that, on balance, it was better. Perhaps she was right. Yellow would outsell Blue tenfold. But was it ten times better? Decades on, Yellow still eclipses Blue in lists of all kinds. At the turn of this century, Rolling Stone announced the “500 Greatest Albums of All Time,” and included six by Elton John, all from his 1970–75 heyday. The only one to crack the Top 100 was Yellow.3 In the 2012 three-volume guide to The Album edited by James Perone, there are two John entries: Tumbleweed Connection and Yellow. There are over seven hundred albums selected in Mojo magazine’s Ultimate Music Companion; Elton John’s single showing is Yellow. The writers of Classic Pop magazine’s 132-page 2016 special on “the Rocket Man” elevated two of his “classic albums” above the others, Captain Fantastic and Yellow, dubbing the latter “his most distinctive and diverse and, debatably, his best.” In Tom Moon’s 1,000 Recordings to Hear before You Die, there is likewise a single Elton entry: the ubiquitous Yellow.4 Moon calls Yellow “an end, of sorts.” Acknowledging that John “continued to crank out hits,” Moon concluded that “the later ones have all the nuance of the Disney films they 44

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sometimes accompany, especially when compared with the phantasmagoric oddities found here, along John’s yellow brick road.” Although the Disney jibe is justified, the leap from Yellow to the ’90s does to Blue what has often been done—assigns it to the graveyard of Elton’s apparently dodgy middle period. The title of John’s sprawling, worldwide 2018–21 retirement tour, Farewell Yellow Brick Road, privileges one album, and the tour’s promotional artwork and stage set play off its iconic cover. The setlist (so far) begins with two tracks from Yellow (“Bennie and the Jets” and “All the Girls Love Alice”) and closes with the album’s title track. In all, a quarter of the set draws from that album, twice as much as from any other album. So far, no tracks from Blue Moves have been played on the tour.5 It would seem, therefore, as if the dominance of Yellow over Blue is justifiably overwhelming. But I don’t think it is that simple. There is no doubt that Goodbye Yellow Brick Road is a masterful accomplishment. But doubtless too, the success of Yellow disadvantaged and distorted the reception and reputation of Blue. Viewed with the relative objectivity and benefit of hindsight, the two are more similar than they seemed in the 1970s—but with Blue arguably more mature, musically and lyrically, than Yellow. Seen through the lens of our era, Yellow is threaded with themes that seem outdated, if not disturbing—morbid fascination, misogyny, even homophobia and racism. Such themes are absent, or treated differently, in Blue. The immediate success of Goodbye Yellow Brick Road upon its release in October of 1973 is not surprising, in view of the 45

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groundwork of expectation that had been laid. During the previous twelve months, one hit single had followed another. There were two from Don’t Shoot Me, I’m Only the Piano Player and two from Yellow prior to its release—“Saturday Night’s Already for Fighting” was a summer smash, with the album’s title track an even bigger hit in the autumn. But once the album was out, would it have legs? There was the possibility of market saturation—six album sides of vinyl in one year, plus four hit singles (“Step into Christmas” made it five in Britain)—and cost concerns. John later admitted he’d fretted over “whether people would be ready for a double album from me. I was worried about the price.”6 Nor were all initial reviews of Yellow as glowing as the critical consensus would later become. Christgau, consistent in his derision for John, declared in Creem that the album was “at least three sides too long.” The churlish review by Stephen Davis in Rolling Stone called it “an overproduced array of musical portraits and hard rock & roll that always threatens to founder, too fat to float, artistically doomed by pretension.”7 Record buyers did not agree with Davis that Yellow was “a big fruity pie that simply doesn’t bake.” They gave it shelf life because of its big fruity pie quality, its assortment of ballads, up-tempo ballads, panoramic ballads, eccentric up-tempo numbers, rock ’n’ roll rave-ups, and full-bore rockers.8 A recent review compared it to a chocolate box, “a somethingfor-everyone collection of tones, tempos and styles, all smoothly reflective of Elton’s love of all kinds of music, from classical to rock, R&B to reggae. It’s hard to envisage a more complete Seventies album.”9 That is arguably because Yellow helped to define what made an album quintessentially ’70s, 46

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embracing disparate styles yet conceptually and artistically coherent, preparing the way for other something-foreveryone chocolate boxes like Queen’s A Night at the Opera. It is notoriously difficult to pull off diverse albums like Yellow and A Night at the Opera. If the tracks do not congeal, the album falls apart. So what makes such records coherent? The obvious answer is that both albums were created by performers so distinctive—Freddie Mercury’s vocals, Brian May’s guitar, Elton John’s vocals and piano—that their personal styles pull the pieces together. With respect to Yellow, we can dig deeper. In terms of musical performances, the album was created by a band that had been touring heavily, and had consequently become “lethally tight.”10 A few of the tracks had even been honed on the road before the band went into the studio. The core of the band was four-cornered: Olsson on drums, Murray on bass, Davey Johnstone on guitar, and John himself. They had originally flown to Jamaica in January of 1973, to the studio where the Rolling Stones had just recorded Goats Head Soup (destined to be knocked off the #1 slot by the very record John’s band were now trying to create). While waiting for the equipment they needed, John wrote melodies for lyrics that Taupin had penned a fortnight earlier. When it was clear that the studio was not going to work out, the band went back on the road, and the whole team reconvened in May at the studio in France where Honky Château and Don’t Shoot Me had been recorded. The combination of circumstances meant that Elton had three albums worth of songs ready to go, the band were well rehearsed, the setting was familiar, and in two intense weeks they laid down the whole record. 47

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Gus Dudgeon then spent months mixing and recording overdubs, helping the album to cohere further. There is also another way in which disparate elements are held together on Yellow. On song after song, the interplay between Taupin’s darkly imaginative, fantasist lyrics and John’s syncopated, pop-rock piano style is remarkably successful. John observed at the time of the album’s release that to him it was “the ultimate pop album,” and yet Taupin’s lyrics also made it “a very depressive album.”11 As Perone puts it, the “harsh reality” of Taupin’s lyrics contrasts with the “consistently engaging pop” style of John’s compositions. Although this threatens to compromise the album’s impact by giving the listener a “sense of distance” from each song’s subject, in the end that “yin-yang relationship creates a whole that is stronger than the sum of its parts.” What Perone means in his reference to “engaging pop” is the upbeat tempo that John injected into so many of his songs (on all his albums, not just on Yellow). John seldom just plays the chords that he has chosen for a song; as if his fingers have too much energy flowing through them to keep still, he syncopates (infusing tempo) and arpeggiates (running his fingers up and down the notes of the chord).12 That captivating signature style explains much of John’s success as a rock/pop composer. But equally important is the ambiguity generated when such a style is used to interpret somber lyrics. Taupin’s lyrical harshness took two forms. One was a morbid preoccupation with death. On Yellow, it began with the lugubrious rock opera of “Funeral for a Friend/Love Lies Bleeding” (often taken, rightly or wrongly, to be about the death of a groupie), and continued with the 48

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eulogy to Marilyn Monroe that is “Candle in the Wind.” In songs on subsequent sides of the album, central characters were murdered (“The Ballad of Danny Bailey”) or driven to suicide (“All the Girls Love Alice”). Other songs didn’t go as far as death, but lamented endings—the end of simple country life (the title track) or a love affair (“I’ve Seen That Movie Too”). The other element of lyrical harshness, even more pronounced, is that of misogyny. The album is full of female characters, flawed and unsympathetically portrayed. They are damaged (Dorothy in the title track, the “dyke” that is the protagonist in “All the Girls Love Alice”), deceitful (“I’ve Seen That Movie Too”), or sexually polluted and polluting (the masturbator in “Jamaica Jerk-Off,” the prostitute in “Sweet Painted Lady,” the promiscuous “Dirty Little Girl,” and the landlady who takes sex as a form of rent in “Social Disease”). “Dirty Little Girl” in particular has been criticized for lines about grabbing “that bitch by the ears” to rub and scrub and “turn her inside out,” about threatening to “put buckshot” in a girl’s pants, and opining that with dirty girls “you have to clean the oyster to find the pearl.” That one of the filthy or flawed women on Yellow is a black Jamaican and another a closeted lesbian has also drawn accusations of racism and (anti-lesbian) homophobia. This may be mild stuff compared to some of the cock rock lyrics of the era, but—as we’ll see momentarily—it seems stronger in comparison with the portrayal of women in Blue.13 The Taupin/John yin-yang dynamic was also reflected in the way that Yellow was unified by the theme of an imaginary “bittersweet nostalgia,” of a yearning for the beauty of the 49

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good old days and the simple country life, of a questioning of modernity and progress. The cultural references, however, are not directly autobiographical, but instead invoke the early Hollywood era; this is “a love letter to Americana” coming rather oddly from a pair of twenty-something Brits. It echoes patterns of mid-century cultural consumption by imaginative boys in the English countryside (Taupin) and suburbs (Dwight/John), drawn to the metropolis while simultaneously craving what they’d left behind. As Taupin explained, “Like any other child in my generation in England, I grew up on American music, American movies, and American television.” The album’s nostalgia is thus fantasist and child-like—“Its naiveté is the most pleasant thing about the record,” Elton has remarked.14 Because it drew upon those youthful yearnings and experiences, John proclaimed Yellow “the ultimate Elton John album—it’s got all my influences from the word go. It encompasses everything I ever wrote or sounded like.”15 The same could be said of Blue Moves. In fact, I would argue that Yellow is imprinted more heavily with Taupin’s influences—his anxieties, in particular—than with John’s musical inspirations. In contrast, as much as Taupin’s preoccupations color the mood of Blue, the album’s diverse and adventurous musicality is overwhelmingly reflective of John’s experiences—all the listening and composing of his teens and twenties. Blue Moves kicks off with an oft-maligned little instrumental piece, just a minute and third long, mid-tempo, with all seven members of the band playing (including John on 50

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piano). It was written by guitarist Caleb Quaye, who had been with Elton on and off since he was still Reg and they were teenage gophers together on Denmark Street (London’s Tin Pan Alley). But it was John himself, not Quaye, who usually supplied music to Taupin’s lyrics, which explains why the piece never became part of a full-fledged song. Or is it part of one? At first, it sounds like the title theme from a television show—a sibling piece, indeed, to “Theme from a Non-existing TV Series,” an instrumental of the same length that is the album’s penultimate track (and which in 1977 won an Ivor Novello songwriting award for best instrumental). The television connection is reinforced by the first track’s title, “Your Starter For . . . ,” which is a reference to the BBC quiz show, University Challenge, popular in the ’70s and still running today. On the show, the quizmaster famously offers the two teams “your starter for ten points.” The team who answers the question correctly then has first shot at the next set of questions. Blue Moves offers listeners “Your Starter For . . . Tonight.” “Tonight” is an 8-minute orchestral ballad, properly seen as attached to its “Starter” introduction. Together they make for a splendid start, well over 9 minutes, that introduces the three elements that comprise a classic Elton John record: the man himself singing at his piano; his six-man band; and the orchestrations of the late Paul Buckmaster (another long-term collaborator, here conducting the Martyn Ford Orchestra). Because of the long orchestral introduction to “Tonight,” we do not hear John’s voice until 4’19” into the record. We are only made to wait that long on one other album, Yellow, 51

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whose instrumental openings on its Side One are even longer (John doesn’t start singing on “Funeral For the Friend/ Love Lies Bleeding” until the 5’50” mark). That parallel has helped stoke Blue/Yellow comparisons. The full-band rock of Yellow’s opener, combined with the stomping rock of the record’s third number, “Bennie and the Jets”—with both “Funeral/Love” and “Bennie” serving as setlist staples and fan favorites on the concert circuit—gives Side One of that album a deserved reputation as the epitome of ’70s stadium rock on one side of vinyl. Add the fact that the other song on that side is the power ballad with a hit history worthy of its own book, “Candle in the Wind,” and you have a solid basis for arguing that Side One of Goodbye Yellow Brick Road was the genesis of the rock-pop power ballad. Side One of Blue Moves could hardly compete. Let us accept, then, that Blue’s Side One was never destined to equal the iconic status of Yellow’s Side One, but only complement it. Seen that way, the comparison arguably lifts up the 20 minutes of music begun by “Your Starter For . . . .” How so? Those three elements of the John sound— Elton at his piano, the band, and the orchestra—are arranged differently on the two Side Ones. Blue doesn’t just try to mimic or repeat the success of Yellow, but instead offers us new ways to enjoy those three elements. The third track on Side One, “One Horse Town,” also has a long instrumental opening passage. It begins gently, with a quiet keyboard melody played by James Newton-Howard on synthesizer (he received songwriting credit with John and Taupin). Then, 45 seconds in, the band crashes in with a trio of chords; it is a thrilling moment, made all the more so 52

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because we’ve been made to wait a long time for that familiar band sound. The chords are repeated, the guitars wail, the orchestra piles in, John is hammering away—and shortly after the 2-minute mark he begins to sing full-throttle that he saw a Cadillac “for the first time yesterday.” Finally, after more than 11 minutes since the beginning of the record, everyone is playing, loud and proud. With Taupin’s lyrics picking up his favorite theme of the old American West— here his imaginary one-horse town in Alabama at the turn of the twentieth century is a clear metaphor for his own escape from rural Lincolnshire—we are firmly in familiar John/ Taupin territory. Four minutes into “One Horse Town,” right as Caleb Quaye takes a guitar solo, John calls out, “Gonzales!” The reference is to the Looney Tunes cartoon character, Speedy Gonzales, “the Fastest Mouse in all Mexico,” and thus to the rapidity with which Quaye’s fingers could move up and down a fret. Quaye wasn’t the only old friend with whom John could joke around in the studio: Dudgeon had produced all his albums since 1970; Johnstone had played guitar on most of them; and John and Quaye had known the album’s drummer, Roger Pope, since 1967. “Popey” played on the first John/Taupin recordings, and on most of their ’70s albums. One of the engineers at the Toronto sessions remembered the atmosphere of good-humored professionalism among this gang of old London friends, how “Elton’s band was so tight, so on-point” and “Roger Pope was on fire.” The drum sound was particularly sensational on “One Horse Town,” the engineer’s “all-time favorite track of Elton’s. It has such energy and build to it, and Roger’s drumming was 53

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world-class throughout. It’s timeless, and—in my opinion— will never age.”16 Whereas Side One of Yellow alternates between stadium rock and power-piano ballads, Side One of Blue is a tad more subtle; it begins briefly at mid-tempo, moves into a lavish orchestral ballad, then pulls the pendulum all the way over to full-band rock, before bringing us back into the middle with one of the album’s best songs (perhaps one of the best in the John/Taupin catalog). “Chameleon” beautifully combines John’s use of arpeggios and chords to lay down a piano melody, with Taupin’s sentimental lyricism. The song begins with his surprise at seeing an old childhood friend, last heard of on a Mediterranean cruise, standing before him “very much alive in the English rain again.” The song is nostalgic, but ambiguously so. After the emotional turmoil that runs through “Tonight,” we might expect “Chameleon” to deliver more of Bernie’s romantic angst. Yet “Chameleon” never turns mawkish, picking up with a firm beat and strong backing vocal—a group of seven, including Toni Tennille of the Captain & Tennille, and the Beach Boys’ Bruce Johnston, who arranged the vocals. The song was originally written for Johnston and his bandmates, who chose not to record it. And although the soaring melody composed by John, and the rising and falling harmonies arranged by Johnston, may remind the listener of the Beach Boys, the vocal effects are also reminiscent of “Don’t Let the Sun Go Down on Me”—whose backing vocals were likewise arranged by Johnston, and sung by a crew that also included him and Tennille. Furthermore, it is as much the album’s gospel influences that are evoked in the song’s 54

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climax and fade, with a call and response between John and the other vocalists, and some falsetto scatting from the pianist as “Chameleon”—and thus Side One of the album— fades out. So Side One’s songs hardly support the maudlin “bummer” reputation of Blue Moves. Yes, Taupin’s presentations here of romantic relationships—“Tonight” and “Chameleon”—are not happy love songs. But nor are they caustic kiss-offs or bitter breakup tunes. One is wistful romantic nostalgia, in which an old flame is chameleon-like in her ability to bring back memories of lazy summer days when the lovers were so absorbed with each other that they had “no desire to talk to strangers.” And “Tonight,” for all the moody melancholy of its sweeping orchestral arrangement, is underpinned by hope. It begins with an anguished recognition of the crisis—asking if we have to fight again tonight. But it ends with a poignant plea, proposing a less defiant approach to the man who tonight would “love to see you smile.” Whereas on other songs, John tends to offset Taupin’s dark lyrics with upbeat piano playing, here he almost does the opposite, imbuing Taupin’s supplication with apparently heartfelt emotion. It is as if the more that Bernie clings to hope, the more Elton feels his (or his own) grief. Whereas earlier John/Taupin ballads, such as “Daniel” and “Candle in the Wind,” offer no surprises once they are underway (partly explaining their instant success and subsequent shelf life), the brilliance of “Tonight” lies in its unpredictability.17 Moreover, “Tonight” and “Chameleon” set the album’s tone toward women. Neither on Side One nor elsewhere on Blue 55

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is there any of the prurience, suspicion, or misogyny found on Yellow. Even the bitterness that often infuses breakup songs is absent or muted. Flipping the vinyl to Side Two, one encounters female characters in three of the four tracks. One is historic—Edith Piaf, to whom “Cage the Songbird” is an ode—depicted with reverence and respect, with no equivalent to the voyeurish “Candle in the Wind” line about Monroe being found in the nude. Another is the unnamed object of John’s pleas in “Crazy Water,” in which he begs for understanding and laments the ocean breakers that separate “you and me.” Taupin, of course, wrote the words, so he is presumably addressing his estranged wife. But Taupin is regretful, not angry, and the mournful potential of the lyrics is undermined by John’s upbeat musical contribution, turning the song into a foot-tapping rumination upon the general turbulence of relationships. The final track on Side Two introduces a third female character, the fictional Dolly Summers, a “simple girl” from the American mid-west who is at first reminiscent of the young women given rough treatment in Yellow. Her husband has run off with “a downtown black jack hustler,” so Dolly goes after him in her Mustang, a pistol in her shoulder holster. If the song were on Yellow, Dolly would have been viewed with scorn and her fate a dire one. But “Shoulder Holster” is on Blue, and in the end Dolly’s bitterness dissipates—after all, she had once loved the man, and realizes she had passed up chances to save the marriage—and she dumps the pistol and heads home alone. Dolly, in short, isn’t just a victim. She has agency. She may be simple, but she’s not simpleminded. 56

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Women—and Taupin’s feelings about the one he had married—return in the second half of Blue. But none are dirty or deceitful or doomed to be murdered like the women of Yellow. Similarly, the bittersweet and imaginary nostalgia for a long-lost America that is the primary conceptual theme of Yellow is also present in Blue, but only occasionally and without imbuing the whole album with wistful longing. Nor is there sign on Side One of Blue of the preoccupation with death that initiates, and is threaded throughout, Yellow. Yes, death makes an appearance on Blue—on Side Two, Piaf dies tragically, and the last track on Side Three is about a suicide. But overall, morbidity appears less often and less obsessively than on the previous double album. For John and Taupin, Blue built upon its predecessors, including Yellow, ascending to new heights. “Blue Moves was our Mount Everest,” Taupin later said. “We’d gone to the top. Elton had filled every major stadium in the world. We’d written strings of Number One records.” The only thing left to do was to climb that mountain—and then take a break. “We had tried to change with every album up to that point, but Blue Moves was the most drastic,” admitted John. “I was aware that we had been at the peak of our careers, and that that was going to level off.” He had always been encumbered, he claimed, by the impossible feeling that “I’ve got to try and please everybody.” And so “I tried not to do that with Blue Moves.” As a result, “we just did a blatantly un-commercial album.” But, he added, “it wasn’t on purpose.”18 In making Blue, John and Taupin and their old pals in the band were not chasing Yellow. Nonetheless, Yellow and Blue were a pair of doubles that soon became themselves a kind 57

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of double—a dyad, a pair of nonidentical twins endlessly influencing our opinions and feelings about one or the other. Their inseparability has for most of their lives been to the benefit of Yellow. But the closer ones looks at and listens to these twin twins, the more they illuminate each other, and the brighter Blue becomes.

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5 A Few Surprises

In comparing albums, it is easy to forget how we tend to view them in a kind of temporal vacuum, in the moment that we listen to them. As much as we might try to be conscious of each album’s context of production—the historical circumstances of their composition, creation, distribution, and reception— we cannot help but be caught up in our own immediate experience, our reception of the music now. That is more or less what I do in this book’s track-by-track discussions, and more or less what you do when you press play. But to fully understand an album’s life, from conception to maturity, we must consider its “conditions of artistic production” and the circumstances of its consumption as commodity.1 To grasp that context for Blue, we must linger a little longer on its comparison to Yellow. Elton was a massive global rock star when both albums were released, and yet the pop cultural world in which they were birthed had shifted between 1973–74 and 1976–77. John’s stardom—his high productivity and the rapid, mass consumption of that product—intensified the production/reception dynamic

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surrounding his albums. In theory, with all things being equal—that is, the world around John/Taupin and their fans remaining unaltered—that dynamic loop should have continued indefinitely, with fan expectations being met and thereby raised, met again and thereby raised again, and so on. But the world did not remain unaltered. Nor was the world that consumed John/Taupin homogeneous. Language and other cultural commonalities bridged the ocean between US and UK consumers neither entirely nor consistently. Yellow and Blue were thus born into worlds shaped by two factors of difference: the United States versus the United Kingdom and 1973 versus 1976. Consider the year in which John and his team wrote, recorded, released, promoted, and celebrated the success of Goodbye Yellow Brick Road. In Britain, a Conservative government was increasingly at war with trade unions, with power cuts imminent. Across the Atlantic, the Watergate affair had begun, with no resolution in sight either to that crisis or to the seemingly interminable nightmare of the Vietnam War. In the month of Yellow’s release, the global oil crisis began, and the following month the United States and the United Kingdom slipped into a prolonged recession. Consumers were eager for escapist entertainment to reassure them of a better past that promised a better future. As one John biographer, Philip Norman, noted, Yellow “perfectly mirrored this mood with its nostalgia and whimsy.” Norman claimed the album’s “total lack of concept or focus” was ideal, meeting the desire “for an album so lushly, complicatedly, portentously and passionately adding up to nothing.” 60

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I argued earlier that Yellow does have a concept. But it is suitably unchallenging, offering a comfortingly fictional escape through the frame of the cover art, where Elton and his road of yellow bricks beckoned. If the political world of 1973 turned British and American societies into similarly receptive grounds for Yellow’s escapism, the pop musical lay of the land was remarkably divergent on each side of the Atlantic. A comparison of the #1 songs of the year in the United States and the United Kingdom shows a stark contrast. With the forgettable exception of Dawn’s “Tie a Yellow Ribbon Round the Ole Oak Tree,” no songs or artists hit the top in both countries. As Bob Stanley remarked in his history of pop music, “essentially, the States were still pretending the Beatles hadn’t split.”2 Three of the ex-Fab Four had US #1s, as did the likes of the Rolling Stones, the Carpenters, Jim Croce (two of them), and Stevie Wonder (two as well). Also on the US list was Elton John. The #1 single? “Crocodile Rock,” a retro-rock ’n’ roll pop song that helped place him right in the middle of America’s smooth rock/pop mood, nestled among #1s that were also pop sing-alongs (like Carly Simon’s “You’re So Vain”) or ballads by rock stars (“Angie” by the Stones, and “My Love” by McCartney and Wings). Considering what was most played on the radio and bought in record stores in America in 1973-74, it is not surprising that John rose so rapidly to the top of the sales heap there. (Nor surprising that in 1973 he declared that he preferred “the American chart,” finding the British one “boring” and full of “so much dreck.”3) His politically neutral pop/rock formula gave him both 61

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urban radio play and appeal in states where country music predominated. Indeed, the fake southern twang with which he often sang, giving voice to Taupin’s country-boy-in-thecity idealization of a rural American golden age, made him seem American—if not country—to many a casual fan in both the United States and the United Kingdom. John’s biographer David Buckley is a Brit who grew up thinking Elton “was American and [I] was surprised to discover he was actually English.”4 The list of UK #1 singles in 1973 wasn’t just strikingly different from the US list (no Stones or ex-Beatles or Motown ballads), it was overwhelmingly dominated by one genre du jour, glam rock. Five British glam acts between them occupied the top slot for most of the year: Slade (three #1s), Gary Glitter (two #1s), Wizzard (also with two), Suzi Quatro, and Sweet. Those bands, and a dozen others long forgotten, had not created glam—its inventors were Marc Bolan (via T. Rex), David Bowie (as Ziggy Stardust), and Bryan Ferry (via Roxy Music), but they rode that white swan for all it was worth from 1972 through 1974. Glam was pop/rock history condensed for Britain’s impatient and restless youth. Its song titles were laced with trigger terms like “teenage” and “rock ’n’ roll,” drawing upon the teen-rebel posing of the late ’50s while consciously rejecting the late ’60s. Glam was, in Stanley’s words, “garish, ultracommercial, and colorful as a paint chart”—the hippie counterculture’s “worst nightmare.”5 Glam was also called glitter rock (for the face glitter popularized by Bolan and Bowie) and, by music press reactionaries, fag rock. Glam rockers and followers wore their hair long, but they also wore makeup and embraced a new 62

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androgyny—which nobody pulled off with the same riveting combination of commitment and ambiguity as Bowie did. So did glam leave Elton John out in the cold? Hardly. He did not appear on that list of #1 singles, but neither did Bolan and Bowie. What John did have was three Top 10 singles that year, two #1 albums, sold-out shows with screaming girls who inspired “teen idol” press headlines, and sales and appeal of which the lads from Slade and Sweet could only dream. His increasingly glittery costumes did not make him androgynous; they made him a showman. Bowie, in a fit of pique, had called John “the Liberace, the token queen of rock ’n’ roll,” which John thought “a cunty thing to say” (“But then he’s a cunt anyway”).6 As Bowie knew, unlike most glam rockers, John really was gay. But that was not public knowledge, and in 1973 John was years from being willingly open about his sexuality. It was his presence as a performer, his deep grasp of rock history, and his synergy with a band of musicians who looked like Slade’s siblings that allowed him to tap into the swagger and energy of glam—most obviously in his big summer hit that year, a preview of the upcoming Yellow album, “Saturday Night’s Alright for Fighting.” But the range and pop accessibility of his growing catalog made him a radio staple acceptable not just to glam fans, but to their mums. And, with songs like “Daniel” and “Candle in the Wind,” which hit even bigger than “Saturday Night’s Alright,” he was tolerable for many of those glam teen’s grandmothers. In short, Elton was gran glam.7 Glam faded as fast as it had appeared. Its teen fans moved on. Bowie killed off Ziggy, rotating through alter egos until he teamed up with Roxy-refugee Eno. Prog rock’s popularity 63

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cycle lasted a year or two longer, and although John could hardly be called a prog rock artist, the autobiographicalconcept album Captain Fantastic and the Brown Dirt Cowboy sounds as if it comes from the same era as an album like Pink Floyd’s Wish You Were Here—just more pop/rock, and with a hit single. John not only survived “the dead zone of 1975 and ’76, a period when no new vital sound came along to replace glam and prog” (in Stanley’s words),8 but in that relative vacuum he rose to be the biggest selling rock star in Britain. And then came punk. Two days before the release of the Blue Moves lead single— “Sorry Seems to Be the Hardest Word,” B-sided by “Shoulder Holster”—the Sex Pistols signed their much-publicized and ill-fated contract with EMI. Just weeks before Blue Moves itself came out, the Pistols made the television appearance that launched the punk revolution (so declared the British press). “I sat there in my bed in Windsor watching it,” John remarked of TV appearances by the Pistols, the Clash, and other punk bands, “and I got slagged off by one of them. But it was kind of endearing.” Admitting in 1977 that his initial reaction to punks was “silly sods, bloody ridiculous going round with safety pins in them,” he added “then I thought I must be getting old because that’s the sort of thing my mother used to say to me about ten years ago.” There were more moments of self-doubt: “I thought, Yes you are a lazy fat cunt.” John also insisted he liked many of the new bands: “When people like Generation X or Sham 69 have a go at me they don’t stop to think that maybe I’ve bought their records.” 64

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Also, America was in need of “the British punk revolution. That’s great music.”9 Such bravado masked an increasing anxiety as John watched the weekly music charts in 1977, seeing Blue Moves fade early and the singles that followed “Sorry” appear to be “trampled to invisibility by the punk rock horde” (to repeat Norman’s memorable conclusion).10 In the short run, the timing seemed extraordinary. The fifteen months when the Sex Pistols dominated headlines coincided with the first fifteen months of John’s latest album; by the time the Pistols broke up in January of 1978, Blue Moves could not have been more dead. Furthermore, punk seemed to have dramatically upended pop music and rock culture. Punk was “all about aspiring to move down the social scale,” with 1977 hits like “God Save the Queen” scandalously flipping off the establishment. Meanwhile John, a notoriously conspicuous example of an upwardly mobile musician, had just moved into his new mansion down the road from the Queen’s palace at Windsor.11 Punk in the UK was so tied to politics—“the cultural consequence of a Labour government”12—that it demanded that all music be political. More than that, it delegitimized music that was music-centered, because punk was not ultimately about music at all; it was about using anger, shock, and anything taboo in order to invert what was prestigious, and doing so with a visual packaging and sonic attitude that screamed amateur (even if it wasn’t). In contrast, John (like other punk targets such as Floyd, Zeppelin, McCartney, and the Stones) was a consummate musician whose products and performances exhibited the rarified skills of other musicians and industry professionals. 65

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That said, in the long run, John’s dismissal of punk rivals as “cheeky buggers” who would end up like him—“with RollsRoyces and accountants”—was prescient. The accusations of hypocrisy that he threw at the likes of Ian Dury and Johnny Rotten were justifiable (never one to take it lying down, Elton liked to “have a go” back at the punks who claimed to prefer poverty).13 In the United Kingdom, punk was not to last long, either as a musical revolution or as a social movement. In the United States, punk had also emerged, but not as a nationwide shockwave; it was initially, overwhelmingly a New York City phenomenon, and only later would its suburban spawn spread across America. So if punk sunk Blue Moves, it did so in more indirect ways than might at first appear. Indicative of the cultural waters in which Blue Moves struggled to float was a now-legendary 1978 performance by Blondie in New York’s punk club, CBGB. They ended their pop-punk set with “I Feel Love,” the ’77 Donna Summer disco hit. The crowd reacted “as if something very wrong had happened—something horrible,” in the words of David Hajdu, who heard a guy from the audience come up to Debbie Harry afterward and yell, “You don’t need love! You need hate!”14 Punk and disco are easily imagined at opposite and oppositional ends of a spectrum, with love and hate as their signifiers. But they were both popular, grassroots antidotes to musical malaise, reactions to a rock music culture that had become an industry from which teenagers and twentysomethings felt alienated. Fed up with millionaire rock stars and ex-hippies taking themselves and their pomp-infused albums too seriously, the youth of America and Britain could 66

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vent their anger through punk or escape onto the dance floor. It was inevitable that the former would have instant, but fleeting, appeal, while the latter—so readily turned into a mating ritual, often drug enhanced—would ultimately triumph. By the end of the ’70s, the most inspired bands from the Village scene would figure out how to merge punk and disco—Blondie bouncing from that CBGB performance into the brilliance of Parallel Lines, with Talking Heads achieving a similar alchemy in Fear of Music. Disco soon birthed a new dance pop, and its core elements would conquer the world in the form of EDM (Electronic Dance Music) and all its variants. That larger story, combined with the massive commercial success of disco on both sides of the Atlantic (in 1978, the soundtrack to Saturday Night Fever was #1 for twenty-four weeks in the United States, and for eighteen weeks in the United Kingdom), makes it easy to forget that “disco music was probably more subversive than punk rock” (as Clem Burke, Blondie’s drummer, put it).15 Disco’s early-’70s origins in black and gay dance clubs in northern US cities gives it a resonant cultural significance, and by the same token helps to expose the racist and homophobic underpinnings of the “Disco Sucks!” reaction of the end of that decade. Straight white men had been at the center of popular music since rock ’n’ roll’s ’50s genesis, and disco threatened to displace them.16 Such “turbulent cultural dynamics” would have posed a challenge for Elton John regardless of the kinds of albums he released.17 They help explain the history of what he recorded in the wake of the apparent failure of Blue Moves. An album with R&B producer Thom Bell (one of the creators of the Philadelphia Sound, a cornerstone of disco), was begun in 67

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1977 but never finished. A 1978 album without Taupin’s lyrics or Dudgeon’s production—A Single Man—fared worse than Blue Moves. And an unflinching 1979 foray into disco produced the truly dire Victim of Love, for which John wrote none of the music nor played a note of piano. But there was light at the tunnel’s end, and John saw it: the clash and convergence of genres had resolved itself by 1980 into an array of hybrid pop varieties, into which John threw himself enthusiastically, emerging as a chart-topping pop singles artist that very summer. So if Blue Moves was neither punk nor disco, was it an ill-conceived attempt to reproduce its predecessors, or an illfated experiment in contemporary genres like its immediate successors? In fact, the long-term saving grace of Blue Moves, which was at the same time part of its short-term problem, was that it was squarely none of those things—and yet a little bit of them all. Reading the condemnations of Blue Moves as a weepy bummer—biographers Susan Crimp and Patricia Burstein called it “pretentious and full of self-loathing,” comprising nothing but “slow romantic songs,” “self-pitying” ones, and instrumentals18—one wonders if such writers bothered to open up the gatefold of the double album or flip the first record over and listen to Side Two. Certainly the album cover seemed to match the mood of serious Side One tracks like “Tonight.” But inside the gatefold the smiling band and Elton’s goofy grin suggested a very different disposition (see Figure 2), one matched by “Boogie Pilgrim,” the funky, R&Binfused opening song of Side Two. 68

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Figure 2  The Elton John Band: Inside the gatefold of my battered vinyl edition of Blue Moves is a whacky Elton facing the band for the Toronto sessions (from left: Kenny Passarelli, Roger “Popey” Pope [in glasses], James Newton-Howard [in front], Ray Cooper, John himself, Caleb Quaye, and Davey Johnstone). Photograph by the author.

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In the photograph of John, his arms are forward, as if there is a piano below the frame (although to twenty-first-century eyes it looks incongruously as if he’s taking a selfie), and he is wearing a designer-made black-and-white striped jacket. The image is decidedly un-punk, as is “Boogie Pilgrim,” which emerged from a jam session and is credited to Johnstone and Quaye as well as John/Taupin. Far from being selfpitying or pretentious, it is an upbeat, jazzy, gospel-tinged slice of piano-based R&B. Its horn section has punch (the Brecker Brothers with Barry Rogers and David Sanborn) and the backing vocals are huge (the Cornerstone Institutional Baptist and Southern Californian Choir, directed by Rev. James Cleveland). The repeated phrase at the center of the song, “I never felt better,” seems to reflect the way that John engages the words with considerable vocal range and style. Indeed, he plays with his voice more on Blue Moves than on any previous or subsequent album, and “Boogie Pilgrim” is a prime example of how well that experimentation works.19 John and Taupin have described their famous songwriting method countless times. For example, John recounted to Kacey Musgraves in 2018 how Taupin has always written the lyrics first, and that upon first reading them John is drawn to a particular phrase or word—“the title normally, and I look at it, and a little film starts in my head, and I think fast, slow, country, R&B, whatever, and I sit there and the chord comes, and off I go.”20 Side Two of Blue Moves contains two examples of John latching onto a term in Taupin’s titles: the first word of “Boogie Pilgrim” inspired its tempo and genre; and the first of “Crazy Water” inspired piano and bass lines “that can only 70

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be described as demented” (by one biographer).21 To my ears, the track’s craziness is as controlled and expertly compiled as anything on the album, held in place by Pope’s expert drumming, with the most unhinged contribution being the chanting backing vocal by the late Daryl Dragon (as Dudgeon later put it, “Daryl came in with this idea that was fucking mad. And I loved it”). Both Dragon—aka the Captain— and Tennille, as well as Beach Boy Johnston, are among the fifteen musicians who created this under-appreciated gem. The bass singer was “fabulous,” Toni Tennille reminisced, “I love that song.” Paul Buckmaster echoed her fondness for the track, whose “crazy background voices had me in stints of laughter.”22 Happy to be working with Dudgeon on a John album for the first time in four years, Buckmaster scored the churning orchestral undercurrent to “Crazy Water.” The song would surely have become part of the core canon of subsequent compilations had it been on a different album at a different time. But released as a single in Britain (not America) in February of 1977, the month Blue dropped off the charts, “Crazy” peaked quickly and quietly at #27. If “Crazy Water” was out of synch with the charts, the other two tracks on Side Two were either (depending on your taste) insufficiently forward looking or timeless. The Edith Piaf tribute, “Cage the Songbird,” was from the start compared to “Candle in the Wind,” both being ballads to legendary performers who came to tragic ends. But “Songbird” is saved by having been spared the ubiquity of “Candle,” by its relatively measured maturity, and by its unusual (for a John ballad) folkiness: there is no John piano, 71

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only Newton-Howard’s synthesizer and mellotron; the acoustic guitars are by Quaye and Johnstone, who co-wrote the song. It originated in the Rock of the Westies sessions at Caribou Ranch, when—after recording all night—Johnstone and John walked into the horse corral for some dawn air, and the guitarist played Elton “this little fingerpicking piece” he had been working on. “That’s beautiful. Wait a minute . . . ,” said the singer, as Johnstone later remembered it, “And he pulled out a sheet of lyrics and said, ‘Play it again,’ which I did. He sang the lyrics, and literally that was it.”23 “Songbird” was not put to tape until the Blue sessions in Toronto, and later still David Crosby and Graham Nash added backing vocals. Side Two is a showcase for the album’s impressive cast, and the horns that fuel “Boogie Pilgrim” return on the side’s closer, “Shoulder Holster,” a brass-driven country stomper with a superb Sanborn saxophone solo and classic fake-Southern vocal intonations by John. Side Two’s four tracks are thus something of a John/ Taupin musical history and—especially considered along with Side One and with the compositional contributions of Quaye, Johnstone, and Newton-Howard—they are a window onto how the larger cast of writers, players, and producer channeled the popular music of the late ’60s to mid-’70s. What those songs did not reflect, however, was where pop/ rock was headed in the late ’70s. The genres that had sustained Elton John, and which he had even helped define in the first half of the decade, ran out of steam right as Blue Moves was born. Glam, prog rock, and the virtuoso pop/rock that would soon be relabeled classic rock, were temporarily replaced by punk and disco, which 72

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themselves quickly evolved with the accelerated splitting and splicing of genres that characterized the album era’s later decades. Meanwhile, what survived—indeed, flourished more than ever—was the grab bag of radio-friendly genres variously called AOR, soft rock, easy listening, or simply pop. “Don’t Go Breaking My Heart” and “Sorry Seems to Be the Hardest Word” sat well in that territory. But one was left off Blue Moves and the other enjoyed its own life apart from its original parent album. That album, meanwhile, was further removed from punk than any of the harder rocking or glam-like tracks from previous John albums; its funk tracks were closer to gospel than disco, and no more disco than John’s previous forays into R&B; while its ballads were varied in style and not consistently AOR or easy listening or pop (there was a reason, after all, why John and Dudgeon agreed that “Don’t Go Breaking My Heart” did not belong on the album). Instead, Blue Moves was a music lover’s album—a pastiche of genre explorations played by an extraordinary cast of musicians, made coherent by John/Taupin’s compositions and by Dudgeon’s production choices. “Every artist comes to the same crossroads and they either cross it or they don’t, and if they do, they’re going to come to another crossroads. I’m at that second one as far as recordings go, and hopefully I can cross it with Blue Moves,” John told Rolling Stone. “It’s got a few surprises.” Smucker has commented on the shift that took place in rock music and pop culture in the late ’60s, more profound and different in many ways from the shift of a decade later, but nonetheless a dramatic moving of the goal posts of cool. His 73

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focus was the Beach Boys, “who struggled along with their audience with the imperatives of hip as it was understood in white pop music of the ’60s and ’70s.” They were rock stars— and then suddenly they were former rock stars—“as well- and ill-prepared for the era’s changes as were their fans.”24 John faced an equally bewildering late-’70s shift. He responded to it by embracing music, rather than feeling betrayed by it, a reaction that was ultimately endearing. For the enduring charm of Blue Moves is its unabashed albumness, its celebration of musicality without the preoccupation with hit singles and in-vogue genres that influenced some of its predecessors and successors. As David Hepworth recently concluded, “Sir Elton John’s undiminished passion for the love that got him started may be the thing we like most about him.”25 Upon its release, John clearly hoped Blue Moves would be well received, but at the same time recognized, without regret, that he had made the album he wanted to make, not the one he thought was expected. “But who knows, I’m not worried. That’s the fun of it.”26

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6 A Sad, Sad Situation

In 2017, Elton John turned seventy and announced his retirement. But that did not mean fans would be denied the pleasure of his podcasts, new album releases, or live performances. Retirement, Elton style, meant half a decade of frenzied activity: numerous television appearances, weekly podcasts, that elaborately packaged new 3-CD compilation, a pair of tribute albums (one country-themed, one pop-rock), and—to top it all—the Farewell Yellow Brick Road threeyear world tour, whose ticket sales broke records before the concerts had even begun. The tour began in Pennsylvania. I happen to live there, and caught one of the first shows. Elton seemed older, but not old. He did not leap onto his piano or kick away his piano stool. Yet piano and stool were clearly where he felt at home, where he belonged. They were the source of his longevity, his survival, as if they were a docking station recharging his batteries, keeping him going nonstop through two dozen songs. Seeing how much he clearly relished being on stage, how the years seemed to fall off him as the audience’s energy flowed through his key-stabbing fingers, I could not help but

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remember how often John has retired before—beginning back in 1976, the year upon which this book turns. Any performer who commits so totally to each show will inevitably experience burnout. By the same token, someone accustomed to doing things by extremes is likely to keep going as long as possible—with each break a “retirement.” Such was John’s experience of the phenomenon in the 1970s. His dynamism on stage, beginning with those legendary Troubadour gigs in 1970, had fueled his rapid rise to global stardom. But as the tours got bigger and more exhausting, John turned increasingly to alcohol and cocaine, until he flamed out, repeatedly. His late-’70s retirements were another important factor explaining the fate of Blue Moves. For unlike the protracted retirement of 2017–21, with its focus on the canon of John/ Taupin classics, the retirements that immediately preceded and followed Blue Moves were spontaneous withdrawals from the very activities that underpinned the successful release of new recordings. Across the six and a half years before Blue Moves, John gave over 530 concerts; in the seven months after the album’s release, he gave none at all, performing only thirteen times in all of 1977 and 1978 combined. Those rare concerts were mostly small solo performances, and in a few he repeated his retirement speech, generating a boywho-cried-wolf malaise among consumers. Without the aid of tours as promotional tools, record sales faltered. It all combined to give the impression of a career in free fall. The Elton John Band’s tour across America in the summer of 1973 was hyperbolic in every way. They flew from city to 76

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city in their own jet airliner, specially painted, luxuriously appointed, complete with an onboard piano. One attendance record after another, many set by Presley or in the era of his heyday, was broken. At the Hollywood Bowl, pornstar Linda Lovelace introduced John as “the Queen of England” (which was insufficient to “out” him), and he descended a redcarpeted staircase to cavort among five grand pianos with open lids spelling ELTON. John had toured in the United States, the United Kingdom, Europe, Australia, and Japan almost continually since his first performances in Los Angeles in 1970 through to his Bowl shows there three years later, his band steadily growing with the scale of the tours. His massive 1973 US tour wound down in October, but the following February he was on the road again, virtually nonstop into 1975. By August of that year he had launched another US tour, with bigger shows that consistently broke music industry records. The tour climaxed with that legendary pair of Dodger Stadium concerts. Both sold out in 90 minutes. The last rock band to play the stadium had been the Beatles in 1966. Their show lasted 35 minutes; John played for three and half hours each night. The photograph of Elton in his bedazzled Dodgers uniform, fingers on the keyboard, head thrown back in song, with 60,000 fans filling the stadium behind him, is one of the most iconic images of the rock era. The break from touring that John took in the winter of 1975–76—the longest yet of his career—was not a break from working: Blue Moves was written and recorded during those months. By April he was back on the road, and in the summer he was stateside again. The Louder than Concorde 77

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tour (named after Princess Margaret’s response to a reporter asking how she enjoyed Elton in concert) broke yet another record, with seven consecutive sold-out concerts at Madison Square Garden. On the penultimate night, with the band gathered around him in his dressing room before the show, he began to sob, blurting out, “I just can’t do this anymore. I love you all, and this is the greatest, but I have to take some time off.” He had announced during an earlier concert that it would be “my last,” and he now told the New York audience that they would not see him “for a while,” adding “but I’ll be back—someday.”1 Ambiguous announcements, perhaps, but after the final Garden concert, the band were given a year’s salary and let go. John could not, of course, stay away from the stage for long. As Hepworth has observed of this “curiously restless figure,” playing live “appears to be the only thing that inoculates him against his greatest fear, which is inactivity.”2 But for the thirteen months following his retirement announcement, he only played one solo show in Scotland and a handful of charity gigs with percussionist Ray Cooper in London. The band was not reassembled. There was no tour. There were no big shows in the United States. And eleven of those thirteen months were the first eleven months that Blue Moves was for sale. If there was ever any question whether John’s status as the world’s biggest rock star was dependent upon his relentless touring and riveting live shows, 1977 offered a clear answer. Furthermore, his next attempt to come out of retirement— in the autumn of 1977—was aborted immediately. Having gathered a band (with Cooper and Blue Moves alums such as Johnstone and Newton-Howard) and rehearsed with 78

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them for weeks, John realized he had returned too soon. He made it thirteen songs into the first gig before announcing, “I’ve made a decision tonight.” Thanking the 12,000 fans in London’s Wembley Empire Pool arena, he told them “this is going to be the last show. All right?” The crowd roared “No!” He repeated, “this is the last one I’m gonna do.”3 During that exchange, John’s fingers repeated the opening chords to “Sorry Seems to Be the Hardest Word.” The last song of the encore was also a Blue Moves track, “Bite Your Lip (Get Up and Dance!),” with Stevie Wonder joining the onstage jam. The evening offered a hint of how the album might have been promoted, a reminder of how much it had suffered that lack of performances. Not for another fifteen months would John try touring again (he gave three solo gigs in all of 1978). And although this time he stuck with it, playing 125 shows in nine months of 1979, by then A Single Man was the new album being promoted. Why did Elton John follow his hectic, ceaseless, astonishingly successful international touring of 1970–76 with a series of tortured attempts to retire from performing live in 1976–78? The question answers itself. He loved playing, yet it was killing him. He could no longer endure “the singular agony of the man at the top.”4 But the story was also more complicated than that. For example, in the wake of John’s successful rehab, as he went from being British tabloid fodder to a national treasure, a slew of biographies and glossy photo books blamed drug use.5 One bio for young adults summarized John’s late ’70s as “Rocket Man Falls and Returns,” with drugs the culprit and Elton’s struggle a morality tale for YA readers: 79

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Like so many people who try drugs, at first he used them only at parties. Then it was only on weekends. Then, only at night. Soon Elton fell into the cyclical trap of addiction. . . . His moods sank, and soon his music did, too. Though he was still moving through his life performing and recording music, none of it felt like it mattered to him anymore.6 The details don’t quite add up. Even in the version simplified for a YA audience, John returned to touring in 1979, to writing with Taupin in 1980, and to producing hit songs that same year. But not until the ’90s did he “finally stop abusing drugs and chose his own health and happiness.” Still, increasingly intense cocaine and alcohol consumption in the mid-’70s undoubtedly contributed to the burnout that hit both John and Taupin by the end of 1976. One former therapist of John claimed he was “a totally obsessive, compulsive person. He was born an addict.” This shrink listed the five big addictions of drugs, alcohol, food, casual relationships, and shopping, concluding “you know what? I think he’s got all five.”7 Another dimension to the story of John’s ’70s burnout centers on his “moodies” (as he called sudden attacks of depression), and his suicide attempts—two of them, both given dramatic attention in print and on film, and both classic “cries for help.” When he was still just Reg, Elton had put his head in the oven and turned on the gas, to avoid marrying his fiancée. But he opened the windows and made sure to put a pillow in the oven so his head would be comfortable. The incident was immortalized in “Someone Saved My Life Tonight”—the “someone” being Long John Baldry, who

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persuaded Reg to break off the engagement, pointing out that Reg was as gay as he himself was. A similar cry for help was made at the climax of the 1975 US tour. Faced with the enormous pressure of the Dodgers Stadium concerts, to which he had flown family, friends, and Rocket Records employees from Britain in the band’s touring jet, he downed sixty valium pills and jumped into a swimming pool. But— the equivalent to the open window—right before he hit the water, he announced what he’d done to his family and friends sitting around the pool (“I’m gonna be dead in an hour”). He later claimed that, as they pulled him out, he overheard his grandmother saying, “I suppose we’ve all got to go home now.”8 A final symptom of impending burnout was the sudden sackings of the teams responsible for the John albums and shows. In 1975, John fired Olsson and Murray in peremptory fashion. His backing band at the Troubadour and other career-launching shows, they had played on all his albums and at all his gigs since 1970. They were elemental to what had become the classic Elton John Band sound. They had played on Captain Fantastic, but were not to be allowed to perform it. It was an early sign of John’s efforts to both stop and continue, to experience the relief of quitting while still holding onto the joy of succeeding. Olsson and Murray were replaced by old band members Pope and Quaye; Johnstone stayed as guitarist; the gang of Brits was joined by two Americans, Kenny Passarelli and James Newton-Howard. They would all play on and help shape Blue Moves—but then themselves be dismissed before the album was released. 81

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There was more. Gus Dudgeon had produced all ten studio albums from Elton John through Blue Moves, as well as working on the two live albums and various non-album singles and compilation records. Dudgeon’s creative use of the studio as a meta-instrument made his role crucial to the development of the Elton John sound; “Gus had an amazing pair of ears,” said Martyn Ford (whose orchestra played on Blue Moves).9 Dudgeon was also a co-founder of Rocket Records, finding and producing many of the artists signed to the new label, and acting as its official head of A&R. But Dudgeon had become frustrated with how Rocket was being run, and soon after the release of Blue Moves, he quit his A&R role, and told Elton he would not be producing his records for a while. Dudgeon’s departure would prove to be a mere sabbatical. But as Blue Moves dropped out of the charts, and no new Elton John album appeared, the breakup seemed permanent. Also in the year of Blue Moves, John broke up with Reid, his live-in boyfriend since 1972. The breakup was amicable enough that Reid continued as manager until 1998 (and remained, in Passarelli’s words, a “brilliant . . . super loyal . . . crazy son of a bitch”).10 But at the time, Elton later confessed, he felt utterly bereft, moving from the home he had shared with Reid into a huge new house in Windsor—where his numerous possessions, vast record collection, and oftenfilled guest rooms failed to make him feel any less lonely. Taupin was no longer around either (note his absence in Figure 2). Ever since Bernie had moved into Reg’s mother’s house, where they slept on bunk beds in Reg’s room, the two had been inseparable. Although Taupin was not a band 82

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member, he had joined the band on every tour and during every recording session. But by 1976, he too was burned out and in need of a break. He later admitted he feared that consumers had been fed too much John/Taupin product, that “people must be sick of reading about us.” Sensing the logical ramification of a high horizon of expectation, he admitted, “I was frightened of failure. In this business there’s a pinnacle you can reach, but ultimately you’ve got to sink down. Everybody sinks down.”11 Shortly before John moved to Windsor, Taupin relocated to Los Angeles. He continued to write lyrics, but now for other acts—Jefferson Starship (“We Built This City”), Heart, and Alice Cooper. The latter became Taupin’s regular drinking buddy, and on one epic months-long binge they went to Mexico to booze it up, raise hell, and write an album. It would be a few years before Taupin stopped drinking, found happiness with his second wife, and started writing lyrics for John again. Meanwhile, Taupin’s parting gift to John was a pile of poetry. John had those words, without the comfort of his old friend’s companionship, when he entered the Toronto studio to record Blue Moves. Side Three begins with a single note, played on a violin. You may recognize the song from that opening note. Or you will know it from the piano chords that gently come in at the 5-second point. Then, as John’s right hand rolls into a beautiful melody, the strings swell and a cello fills out the bottom of the chord. It is reminiscent of any number of deceptively simple opening arrangements, but for me, it evokes the initial bars of the Adagio to Mozart’s Serenade #10 83

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in B Flat. Those bars are among the best known in the Mozart canon, made famous by lines put into the mouth of Salieri in the movie Amadeus, describing the beginning as “just a pulse. Bassoons and basset horns, like a rusty squeezebox. And then suddenly, high above it, an oboe. A single note, hanging there, unwavering.” Until a clarinet takes over and sweetens it into “a phrase of such delight!” Is the reference too high brow? Some Mozart fanatics might think so. (Actually, most classical music fans probably would.) But they’d be missing the point. Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart and Elton Hercules John were both in the pop music business. They were both high and low brow—creators of the equalizing “all brow” music that is pop, played to and enjoyed by princesses and proletarians alike. They both had a rare genius for capturing listeners with opening melodic hooks that create, feed, but never satiate an addiction— leaving one to crave it all again, to replay it from the start. In that particular Mozart Adagio, the oboe gently enters at 23”, and the clarinet rounds out the melody a little after the minute mark. The whole thing is just over 6 minutes. In “Sorry Seems to Be the Hardest Word”—for that is the song that opens Side Three of Blue Moves—the opening melody runs 21”. It is played again roughly three and a half minutes in, as the song comes to a close. Both the Mozart and John compositions open with phrases of such delight; both are exquisite, unforgettable little pieces of pop music. But while the musical phrases of the Adagio and of “Sorry” prompt a pleasant, melancholic ache, the Side Three opener has the advantage of words—and an initial line that is a plaintive cry: “What have I got to do to make you love me?” The line 84

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is a rare example of a lyric written by John, one to which he perfectly matched chords and melody. No matter how rich and famous Reg Dwight-turned-Elton John was by 1976, he still suffered the agony of not knowing quite who he was, and of being denied the reassurance of a romantic partner who also knew who he was. You have to be cold-hearted indeed not to sense some of that pain in the rasp of his voice. But all the song’s lyrics are not his. The pain is not all his. What is being revealed to us is Bernie Taupin’s misery as he grapples with the collapse of his marriage. “Sorry” may seem like a simple song of woe, even a cheesy one. But it delivers layers of lovelorn angst. Its poignant pleasure is a perfect dose of schadenfreude. It is stirring, vital, both of its moment and yet unmoored from it. It is a song that will never cease to be played. My earliest memory of “Sorry” is hearing it coming from the radio in the kitchen at home. I walked in to talk to my mother, but her back was to me, the radio was turned up, and she was sobbing. Soon after, I learned that my parents were getting divorced. Later still, I realized that “Sorry” was indeed, in part, a divorce song. Bernie Taupin and Maxine Feibelman had met in Los Angeles the week of John’s fabled Troubadour gigs in 1970. They fell fast, and were married the following April in Taupin’s home county of Lincolnshire. Some of the most beloved and enduring John/Taupin songs from their hypercreative early ’70s period are about Maxine. Arguably, Maxine was the muse that allowed the Elton John team—Taupin and John as writers, Dudgeon as producer, Buckmaster as arranger—to perfect the rock ballad.12 85

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Songs that were about Maxine appeared on John records through to “Harmony” (the Maxine-inspired love song that closes Yellow), and in some sense through Blue Moves. But none matched “Tiny Dancer.” Often hailed as the zenith of John/Taupin creative originality, “Tiny Dancer” offers snapshots of Bernie and Maxine’s early months together— before the “seamstress for the band” became Mrs. Taupin (“you’ll marry a music man”). They are wistful, adoring, but not quite saccharine. John’s melodies and phrasing, combined with Buckmaster’s arrangements, capture the spirit of the love poem with deft skill. The strings are “lavish and ornate but not overbearing. Within this luxury, ‘Tiny Dancer’ is a beautifully crafted gem.”13 But the rock star lifestyle of the ’70s was notoriously unconducive to domesticity and stable romance. By the time of the Toronto sessions for Blue Moves—where a moody Elton listened to 10cc’s “I’m Not in Love” over and over— Bernie and Maxine were separated. Taupin did not travel to Toronto, leaving John with lyrics in which “for the first time I wrote about the disillusionment of love and marriage and, y’know, let my pain be released.” To add to the emotional energy, nobody mentioned, but everybody (except Taupin) knew, that the band’s bassist, Kenny Passarelli, was having an affair with Maxine. “It was tense,” remarked Pope.14 Thus the album’s title, and its inclusion of heartache ballads like “Sorry Seems to Be the Hardest Word,” appeared to highlight the depressing end to a romance that had given cherished love songs to the world. Seemingly symbolic of the dark drama underpinning the album was the fact that Passarelli had to play bass to Taupin’s anguished musings 86

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over whether “a close friend” was sharing his wife’s bed. That, at least, was one of the lines to “Between Seventeen and Twenty,” a Side Three track whose title referred to the age Maxine and Bernie were when they met. But is Blue Moves really so blue? To be sure, the moments on the album where John and Taupin together manifest heartache do stand out, largely because they are so effectively and skillfully composed and executed. But once you know that they express part of the arc of a love story, the giddy joy of its beginning and the agonizing unraveling of its ending, it becomes impossible to divorce the songs from each other. Falling-in songs like “Tiny Dancer” anticipate falling-out ones like “Sorry,” while the latter echo the former. Each set of songs is incomplete without the other. Nor are the falling-out songs as gloomy as some critics claimed. After all, John ended up rejecting the Taupin lyrics that were the most “dark and sad” and “real desperate.” “They were so down I couldn’t sing them,” he later said.15 Taupin’s collapsing marriage was a thick thread through the album, but not the only one, with only eight of the album’s eighteen tracks touching on the theme. And of those eight, three are given mid- or up-tempo musical treatment by John. Only a close listen to songs like “Crazy Water” and “Shoulder Holster” reveal their relevance to Taupin’s troubles. Four of those eight songs appear on Side Three. “Sorry” begins the side, followed by an instrumental—and not a short one, like those on Sides One and Four, but one clocking in at six and a quarter minutes. The sequencing seems odd at first, but it serves a purpose. Titled “Out of the Blue,” the mid-tempo rocker lifts the listener out of the 87

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blue mood of “Sorry,” borne aloft by Johnstone and Quaye’s sparring guitars. Solos by Quaye and John engagingly draw the number out. (The track has reached a new audience since 2002 as the end music to the BBC’s car program, Top Gear.) Since the Shadows stormed the charts at the turn of the 1960s, instrumentals as album tracks, or even as hit singles, were not unusual—whether instrumental snippets like those on Pet Sounds, drawn-out jams of the kind found on ’70s hard rock and progressive rock albums, or the extended grooves of soul and disco records. John himself has peppered his albums with instrumentals—from Empty Sky (1969) to The Diving Board (2013). That said, the three instrumentals on Blue Moves total 9 minutes. That made “Out of the Blue” seem to some like filler. Early CD versions omitted it. Internet-era online chatter gives it less love than other Blue tracks. Yet Dudgeon surely knew what he was doing: “Out of the Blue” offers crucial relief from John and Taupin’s romantic angst before we are dropped back into it—in the form of a trio of superb ruminations on life’s sad endings. That trio comprises 13 minutes of classic John/Taupin creative interaction. The playing is perfect, the band inspired, the production crisp, the songs packed with little fills and melodies that sometimes indulge, sometimes offset, the ache in the words. “Between Seventeen and Twenty” throws us right in: the opening bars are full-band and mid-tempo, picking up the pace smoothly from the previous track, and John beginning with that line wondering if “you” are sleeping with a close friend “that I know so well.” But the song is not accusatory; both here and in “The Wide Eyed and Laughing,” 88

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which follows it, Taupin confesses his own transgressions far more than he makes allegations. The side’s closing number, “Someone’s Final Song,” is the only one on the album to be unambiguously maudlin. The song is about a suicide, and John makes no attempt to musically cover that up. And yet he picks out a gentle melody of such tentative beauty, and Dudgeon gives the backing vocals—arranged by Johnston and Curt Becher— such subtle separation, that the end result is more poignant than depressing. Tennille, one of the vocalists, said that when they heard the playback in the studio, “we just looked at each other and smiled. It was just a wonderful sound.”16 The vocal arrangement hints at gospel, suggesting spiritual as much as romantic anguish, setting up the listener for the full-fledged gospel sounds of the track that follows—the first on Side Four. And after that, Taupin’s breakup is left behind. The press seized on Bernie’s absence from the Blue Moves sessions as if he and Elton were a divorcing couple, a distortion of their personal and professional relationship that persisted for decades. As Taupin told Hilburn of the LA Times in 2001, “1976 is when a lot of people think everything ended for us.”17 But 1976 was an end neither to their careers nor to their collaboration. Most of the songs they co-wrote that charted as singles in the Top 100 in the United States or the United Kingdom—more than eighty of them—date from after 1976. In that 2001 interview, Taupin confessed, “If I were to write down a list of my favorite songs with Elton, I guarantee you that over half of them would be from albums after 1976.” 89

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His point was not to denigrate “what everybody dubs the classic years,” but to extol the results of the John/Taupin collaborative writing of the 1980s and subsequent decades. Neither Hilburn nor Taupin specifically mentioned Blue Moves and its reputation as a downer, but it seemed to echo in their discussion of “why there was so much bitterness” in the lyrics for Songs from the West Coast—and in particular in “I Want Love,” whose words emerged from the wake of Taupin’s third divorce in the late ’90s. “I Want Love” was a Top 10 hit in the United Kingdom and Canada in 2001 (it bombed in the United States), and is one of the most stirring examples of how Elton has musically channeled Bernie’s written emotions; it shimmers with a tension between acrimony and hope. When Taupin talked about those emotions in 2001, he seemed to refer to all his divorces, and all the songs they had inspired—going back to 1976. “Sometimes you break up because you are too young. Sometimes you make a mistake and marry the wrong person, but sometimes the marriage works, and that’s the hardest breakup of all—the case in which you really, really love each other, but you can’t live together.” The hardest words, the hardest breakups, underpin “some of the greatest songs ever written.” That’s Taupin again, not referring to his own work, but he could have been. In 1976, people wanted to hear the pop fizz of “Don’t Go Breaking My Heart,” not the lyrical and musical melancholy of much of Blue Moves. Years later, he “couldn’t stand” the lightweight songs he’d co-written, such as that hit duet; they don’t “hold up” the way the sad songs do.

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The middle track of Side Four of Blue Moves was laid down in Toronto by a stripped-down, jazz-trio version of the band: John singing at the piano, Passarelli on bass, Pope using brushes. Later on, at the Sunset Sound Recorders studio in Los Angeles, a horn section by the Brecker Brothers was overdubbed, featuring an artful saxophone solo by Sanborn. “Idol” is the jazziest song on Blue Moves, and one of the most genuinely jazz-inflected tracks on any John album. The lyrics portray a former teen idol—a man for all seasons who had been “the number one crush” in the eyes of schoolgirls, “a light star, tripping on a high wire.” But when the ’50s “shifted out of gear,” his music changed, his face changed, and he was no longer the same. The reference could be to a generic ’50s idol, or to Elvis Presley—although John did not meet Presley until June of 1976, months after “Idol” was written and recorded, and Taupin later claimed that it was written about John from the imaginary viewpoint of a music critic ten years in the future. Elton and Bernie were asked if the song was a self-reference, a question further

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prompted by the career collapse that seemed to follow Blue Moves. “Yeah,” John conceded, “it could be me”—meaning a future, has-been version of himself. “Will I end up at the Swiss Cottage Holiday Inn when I’m seventy-five in a fishtail coat, a cigarette hanging out of me [sic] mouth, singing ‘Idol’ in cabaret?”1 The notion of John as a teen idol on the verge of becoming a has-been was not implausible. During the tours of the early ’70s, he had developed a fanatical following among teenage girls, who screamed at his concerts, tried to grab him on stage (a few times succeeding), and chased him down alleyways behind theatres. In 1973, a Melody Maker front-page headline had proclaimed, “Now Elton’s a Teen Idol!” The reference to “I’m Going to Be a Teenage Idol” was obvious at the time, as the album that carried it had been released just a couple of months earlier. Although John and Taupin had written that song about their friend Marc Bolan (“I think he liked it,” remarked Elton; “he didn’t hit me, anyway”), the press inevitably made it about John. Just as inevitably, three years later, critics used the lyrics of “Idol” to poke at the singer. In her crushing Rolling Stone review of Blue Moves, Swartley referred back to “I’m Going to Be a Teenage Idol” as a “tongue in cheek” self-referential number, and then deployed “Idol” to deliver the closing blow. Although “intended as a sort of farewell album” and thus “clearly meant to have a more lasting effect,” she concluded instead that Blue Moves sounds like it’s time for John to take a rest. “Idol” sums it up neatly: He was an idol then, now he’s an idol here, / But

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his face has changed, he’s not the same no-more, / And I have to say that I liked the way his music sounded before.2 With that line highlighted in a major music magazine review, one might expect “Idol” to have ended up as an epitaph to the album (and perhaps the album as the epitaph to a career). Indeed, “Idol” did not have much impact at the time—it was never a single, almost never performed by Elton live, and it was buried by Dudgeon in the middle of Side Four. Before it, Dudgeon sequenced “Where’s the Shoorah?” and “If There’s a God in Heaven (What’s He Waiting For?),” two of the lyrically least compelling tracks on the album. After “Idol,” the producer slotted the shortest number in the collection, the 80-second instrumental “Theme from a Non-existent TV Series,” followed by the barnstorming “Bite Your Lip (Get Up and Dance!)”—with its deliberately vapid dance-song lyrics. If Taupin’s words give us relatively little on the first two and last two tracks of Side Four, the whole side’s 20 minutes of music is a creative exploration of genres delivered by an impressive array of performers. “Shoorah?” is given a rich gospel sound by John’s harmonium playing and the backing vocals of the Rev. Cleveland’s choir. The interplay between John’s electric harpsichord and Newton-Howard’s electric piano on the award-winning “Theme” is droll. The horn playing by the Breckers and Sanborn on “Idol” is sheer delight. And “Bite Your Lip,” whose verses and chorus are over around the 2-minute mark, careens off the rails for another four and half minutes of marvelously deranged rock-funk-gospel-disco; John appears to be having the time of his life, his flying fingers barely kept in check by the other six band members, by Cleveland’s choir, and

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by the Gene Page Strings conducted by Newton-Howard. The track laid down by John and his band was not only a live take; it was the only take—a run-through whose extended jam was created on the spot by John, who immediately declared “That’s a hit!” and refused to record another take.3 (In fact, “Bite Your Lip” only reached #28 on both sides of the Atlantic, but it was a memorable encore to that 1977 retirement concert, and to the 1980 Central Park concert, when John sang it wearing a giant Donald Duck costume.) The initial impression, then, of a buried “Idol,” soon gives way to an appreciation of the song as the stand-out track on the highly engaging (albeit not entirely successful) final side. What’s more, “Idol” has an afterlife, and its afterlife takes us somewhere interesting and important. But to get there, we must detour to a song from another John/Taupin album. Every great pop song has a thrilling moment—an artful bridge that always surprises, a perfectly engineered drop, a key change that adjusts our mood in just the right way. There are many such moments scattered across the vast John corpus. But there is one that occurs in a particular version of a particular John song, only happening once in the entire body of his recorded songs. And while it is his song, it isn’t really his recording; it’s George Michael’s. The track begins with the white noise of an audience cheering. Then a piano kicks in. It takes the audience just 3 seconds to recognize “Don’t Let the Sun Go Down on Me,” and they cheer even louder. At 20 seconds, George Michael starts singing Taupin’s lines. He’s channeling John, but he’s singing about himself too. At “It’s much too late, to save 94

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myself from falling,” his voice cracks and the emotional energy level goes up a notch; the audience senses that Michael is not going to hold back on this one (did he ever?), and sure enough he piles into the first chorus with controlled gusto. A first-time listener is likely to wonder at this point, is this version going to rival Elton’s? And then, 3 minutes into the song, just over the halfway point, Michael shouts out, “Ladies and Gentlemen . . . Mr. Elton John!” The announcement happens right in that space between the melody being played by the pianist’s right hand and the run played by the left hand, leading into the verse. The audience, taken by surprise, cheers even louder as Elton begins to sing the second verse. Michael and John sing the second chorus together, the cheering spikes again, and they go into the third and final chorus. The pairing is perfect, the chemistry electrifying, and 25 seconds before the end Michael repeats, “Mr. Elton John!” The duet was recorded in London’s Wembley Arena, on March 23, 1991. Michael and John had originally performed the song at Wembley back in 1985, for the epic charity concert Live Aid, but Elton had only played piano while George sang. “Don’t Let the Sun” became a staple in the set list for Michael’s Cover to Cover tour, but he did not bring John out in person until the very last UK show. Listening to the recording from that March night in 1991, it is impossible not to be struck by the sheer alchemy of the performance. Michael and John both knew it, and Michael was keen to release it as a single. John argued against it, on the grounds that it would undermine the success of Michael’s second solo album, Listen without Prejudice (released six 95

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months earlier to mixed reviews; although it equaled Faith’s success in Britain, it struggled to make as big of a commercial splash in the United States). John’s relationship with the song had its own complicated history. The original studio version was recorded in 1974 for Caribou, but Elton was dissatisfied with his vocals and argued that the track should be left off the album. Olsson, who drummed on it, was convinced from the moment he heard John first nail down the melody “that it would be a number one hit.” Dudgeon agreed. John reluctantly gave in. Released as a single, it went to #2 in the United States (#1 in Canada, and Top 20 in the United Kingdom and a handful of other countries), earning a double Grammy nomination. Elton’s discomfort over the 1974 recording was excised partly by its success, and partly by his satisfaction with a live version recorded in 1986 in Sydney (released the following year). That precedent, combined with the suggestion that all proceeds go to charity, helped Michael to persuade John. Their live duet came out as a single in November 1991. A video was recorded at a Michael concert in Chicago, whose 70,000 attendees were as noisily surprised when John was announced as the Wembley crowd had been. The single was a smash, reaching #1 in Britain in December, and in America the following February. It was also nominated for a Grammy. It would boost both men’s careers. The song was not the only John/Taupin composition recorded by George Michael. He also released live recordings of two other songs, both of them from Blue Moves. The privileging of that album reflected the fact that Blue had long persisted as a fan favorite respected by other 96

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musicians. The first song from the album chosen by Michael was “Tonight”: his live recording was included on the 1991 John/Taupin tribute album, Two Rooms, released just weeks before the “Don’t Let the Sun” single. The other song was “Idol.” In the summer of 2011, George Michael embarked on an orchestral tour of Europe, the UK, and Australia. Many dates were canceled or postponed, due to “illness,” but early in the tour, at a show in London’s Royal Albert Hall, Michael added “Idol” to the setlist. His vocals at that concert ended up on 2014’s Symphonica. “This is a song from the late ’70s written by Mr. Elton John,” Michael announces at the start; then, pausing for seven seconds as the pianist lays down Elton’s opening melody, he adds, “This is ‘Idol.’” In Michael’s hands, Taupin’s lyrics take on another dimension, and “Idol” emerges as a companion piece to his own “Through”—which Michael highlighted as the closing track to Patience (his final studio album) and the opening track to Symphonica (his final album). Tortured for decades by ambiguous feelings toward fame, by repulsion for an industry in which he had so proudly flourished, and by a predatory press, George exclaims at the start of “Through” that the hatred may just make him strong enough “to walk away.” “Idol” warned its singer not to pretend that it won’t end “in the depth of your despair”; the singer of “Through” has already reached that place. Where a fan or critic remarks in “Idol” that they liked “the way his music sounded before”— the last line of the chorus, given a stinging resonance by John as he lifts his hands off the keys to round out the phrase—in “Through,” the ageing idol has felt that sting one too many 97

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times. “I’ve enough of these chains,” sings Michael, conceding that they’re of his making, that no one else is to blame “for where I stand today.” But suddenly, he adds, “the audience is so cruel.” The live version of “Through” is better than the studio original; Michael infuses it with the same controlled anguish that he gives “Idol,” while the Symphonica Orchestra use their strings to underscore both songs as lamentations. Michael is singing about himself, but he’s also channeling 1976 Elton. As with his recording of “Tonight” two decades earlier, his cover of “Idol” is a faithful copy, not an interpretation. It is an expression of respect, reflected in that use of “Mister” before Elton’s name, an echo of his use of the title twice on the “Don’t Let the Sun” duet. It is how a musician introduces one of his idols. That echo bounced even further back: Elton John has over the decades called various musicians his idols, but one above all is John Lennon. He was “the only person in this business that I’ve ever looked up to . . . who is one-hundred percent sacred to me,” declared Elton in 1974, when the two became friends and collaborated on several of each other’s recordings, “the only person.” Later that year, Elton coaxed the ex-Beatle onto the stage at Madison Square Garden to perform several songs with him. The appearance became legendary, partly because Lennon did it with great reluctance to honor a bet he lost to Elton (when “Whatever Gets You Thru the Night,” upon which Elton played piano, hit #1), and partly because it would be Lennon’s last live performance. Lennon’s entrance, like Elton’s walk-on at the George Michael concert seventeen years later, was a surprise to the audience. After two hours of 98

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high-energy piano playing, Elton announced to a crowd as wired and tired as his band: “Seeing it’s Thanksgiving, and Thanksgiving’s a joyous occasion, we thought we’d make tonight a little bit of a joyous occasion by inviting someone up with us onto stage. And I’m sure he will be no stranger to anybody in the audience when I say, its our great privilege, and your great privilege, to see and hear”—he paused—“Mr. John Lennon.” The Garden “detonated” (as one music critic later put it), the audience giving Lennon a full 10-minute standing ovation before he and Elton could start playing.4 At the end of their three-song set, Elton, eyes closed but with tears rolling down his face, launched into “Don’t Let the Sun Go Down on Me.” These “Misters” therefore comprised a chain of influences and idols. Elton, still Reg, had idolized Lennon as he sat with Bernie listening to Beatles records in his bedroom at his mother’s house in the late ’60s; just as George, still Georgios Panayiotou, bonded with (future Wham! partner) Andrew Ridgeley in their childhood bedrooms in the late ’70s over their love for Goodbye Yellow Brick Road. Then, just as Elton and Lennon collaborated together on stage and in the studio in the mid-’70s, so did Elton and George in the mid-’80s: Elton played on the final Wham! album and single, while George sang backup on “Nikita”—a worldwide smash for Elton in 1985–86—and its follow-up, “Wrap Her Up.” The video for “Nikita” depicted a woman, but Nikita is a man’s name in Slavic languages; the song described John’s crush on a bodyguard in East Germany. The inside joke was 99

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repeated in “Wrap Her Up,” in which John and Michael namecall dozens of famous women. For there is, of course, a further thread to all this, a deeper psychological and artistic connection between John and Michael: at the heart of their stories, their career ups and downs (including the fate of records like Blue Moves)—at times overlapping, at times linked, at times mirroring each other—was a struggle with sexual identity. In their late teens, both Reg and Georgios had relationships with girls that were seldom successful, as they came to realize they were attracted to men. Both concluded that they were bisexual, an unsatisfactory compromise that was compounded by enormous societal pressure to pretend to be straight. That pressure became unbearable as their careers took off and they both became teen idols (“the number one crush in a schoolgirl’s eyes”). Elton’s single status was treated not as an embarrassment but as a way to sell magazines to female fans. It was explained in publications such as 16 Magazine by his shyness and his commitment to his music (16 gave him three cover stories in 1975 alone, with titles like “ELTON-SHY GUY!” and “ELTON HOT SECRETS”). The theme was repeated in the bonus material that accompanied the lavishly packaged Captain Fantastic album, whose full-sized booklet reproduced a four-page 1975 Jackie magazine cartoon titled “The Life and Loves of Elton John.” In the final frame, Elton responds to a question about “girls, and marriage” with the declaration that “it would be great to meet someone and fall in love, wham! Like Bernie.” A year later, Taupin’s marriage was on the rocks, and John was approaching a state of burnout resulting not only 100

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from those years of ceaseless recording, touring, and abusing cocaine and alcohol, but also from pretending he was waiting for the woman of his dreams. Just days after his first retirement announcement, he was interviewed by music writer Cliff Jahr. Chatting in a New York City hotel room, the lid on the pressure cooker of John’s closeted sexuality popped off— not completely, but enough to create a worldwide reaction. Admitting that he was desperately lonely (at night “I go home and fall in love with my vinyl”), he blurted out that “I crave to be loved,” that “any sign of affection would be welcome on a sexual level,” but that “I haven’t met anybody that I would like to settle down with—of either sex.” Jahr asked if John was saying he was bisexual, to which he responded, There’s nothing wrong with going to bed with somebody of your own sex. I think everybody’s bisexual to a certain degree. I don’t think it’s just me. It’s not a bad thing to be. I think you’re bisexual. I think everybody is.5 Before the interview was printed, Rolling Stone editor Jann Wenner called John to ask, “Are you sure you want to do this?” John consented, and so Wenner (who would not himself come out until the ’90s) made the story a cover piece, titling it “ELTON’S FRANK TALK: The Lonely Love Life of a Superstar.” It hit the newsstands—coincidentally—just two weeks before the release of Blue Moves. It would soon become, and remains to this day, the best-known and mostcited interview John ever gave. It had, in one biographer’s phrase, “tectonic ramifications,” especially in the United States—where radio stations dropped his songs from rotation and his records were publicly burned. 16 Magazine promptly 101

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and permanently stopped mentioning him. Overnight he went from “celebrated media darling to a foreigner with dubious leanings.” Fewer people bought his albums; some wrote offended (and offensive) letters to Rolling Stone and other magazines, calling “shattering” the revelation that John was “a gross perverter of the sacred” with “decrepit morality.” Others phoned DJs at radio stations demanding they stop playing records by “faggots.”6 John’s sexual orientation had been something of an open secret throughout his ’70s heyday. His rocky, romantic relationship with manager Reid was widely known in the business. But in the pre-internet age, celebrity rumor and gossip often failed to travel fast or at all. For example, while touring in Italy in 1973, a local newspaper published an article claiming that John was gay. Olsson’s groupie girlfriend, Jozy Pollock, translated the piece for John. “How would they know?” he mused. “Look in the mirror!” Pollock exclaimed. “How do you think they know!”7 But neither Elton’s flamboyant costumes nor such occasional newspaper reports negatively impacted his image or sales. The Rolling Stone interview changed all that. It is impossible to know how much the bisexuality confession affected Blue Moves, relative to other damaging factors. Might an unambiguous “I’m gay!” declaration have fared better than a half-hearted bisexuality one? Maybe. Yet his confession, one reporter later concluded, “although not true, was brave.” As John admitted many years later, “I was probably scared. . . . I suppose it was a cop-out, but at the time I thought, Well, let’s be diplomatic about it.” He added, unwittingly hinting at the internal conflicts behind 102

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the admission, “I thought everybody knew anyway.” He regretted that, in the United States, hatred was “rammed into kids by their parents,” and “people burnt my records,” but he insisted “it was a very small price to pay for the freedom that it gave me.”8 Worth it or not, the timing of the Rolling Stone interview was such that it seemed to depress US sales. The response in the UK was more mixed. On the one hand, the Sun newspaper canceled a contest in which fifty copies of Blue Moves were to be given away as prizes, because the album’s cover—Patrick Procktor’s painting, The Guardian Readers—showed blue-hued men lounging in a blue-hued park. “I bought it without realizing it was all blokes. It fitted the mood of the album exactly,” said John, laughing off the newspaper’s bigotry, “Silly, isn’t it?”9 Meanwhile, crowds at Watford Football Club games took to chanting homophobic songs whenever John was in the owner’s box (he had become chairman in 1976). “He’s bald! He’s queer! He takes it up the rear!” they chanted; and “Elton John’s a homosexual” to the tune of “John Brown’s Body.” Fans of rival teams took to calling Watford the “poof ” team, and breaking into rounds of “Don’t bend down when Elton’s around, or you’ll get a penis up your arse” to the tune on “My Old Man Said Follow the Van.” “Very nice when it’s sung by fifteen hundred Halifax supporters and it echoes around the stadium,” remarked John with wry good humor; “I can take all that until the cows come home.”10 Yet the British press did not attack John the way they would in the late’80s (prompting a successful lawsuit by him). Nor is there evidence that radio play or sales were directly impacted in the United Kingdom the way they were in the United States. 103

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In fact, if we look at the chart history of John’s albums across his whole career, 1976 marks a permanent shift in the contrast between his UK and his US popularity. His career had first taken off in the United States, and he had always been more popular there than at home. But, based purely on album chart rankings, his US popularity never recovered from the “monumental revelation” of his sexuality—“a turning point in his career,” his close friend Rod Stewart believed.11 But in the United Kingdom, relative to the United States, Elton was more popular after 1976. This is an inexact science, but the pattern is clear. Using album chart numbers as an index, John was twice as popular in America as he was in Britain during his early rock star years (leading up to Blue Moves): an average chart peak of 2.6 vs. 6.4. By the same index, during the years of his many comebacks (1978–92), the contrast was reversed: he then became twice as popular in the United Kingdom, with a rounded out peak there of 12, versus 28 in the United States. (If we extend that period, making it 1978–97, to include the boost from The Lion King, the contrast is comparable: 11 in the United Kingdom, versus 25 in the United States.) In John’s mature period, the years since the turn of this century, the contrast softened (8.3 in United Kingdom, 10.8 in the United States). That is hardly surprising, as the terrain became very different for John specifically (who shifted to making occasional albums, rather than seeking hit singles to anchor regular albums), and for the music industry in general—both in terms of the role played by albums and of attitudes toward the sexuality of artists.12 104

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As for George Michael, like Elton John he had experienced years of being idolized and promoted as a heartthrob, as tantalizingly single, as too tied up in an explosive career to settle down with the right woman—while all along his gay identity and relationships were a secret that grew more and more open. In later interviews, Michael “comes across as deeply conflicted,” often internalizing the leering homophobia of the press and the record-buying public in ways that turned his homosexuality into a kind of tortured bisexuality; he justified staying in the closet for fear of hurting his mother (who feared he would end up like her gay brother, who had committed suicide).13 Just as Elton came out in an indirect way (through his Rolling Stone interview), so did George (by cruising public restrooms until he was arrested—in a Beverly Hills park in 1998). Whereas Elton took another fifteen years to fully be out (with a short marriage to a woman in the meantime), George’s arrest forced an immediate declaration that he was “Outside”—the title to a celebratory tongue-incheek single recorded and released soon after the incident. To be sure, social attitudes toward homosexuality had shifted considerably between 1976 and 1998. But that only makes the parallels between the two stories more striking. Just as John’s US popularity was damaged by his bisexuality admission, so did Michael’s outing effectively terminate his stateside career. In the UK, the publicity seemed only to help—to some extent echoing the UK response to John’s semi-outing in 1976. There “Outside” promptly went to #2, while Ladies & Gentlemen: The Best of George Michael (also released in 1998, with “Outside” kicking off its second disc) hit #1. The hits collection would prove to be Michael’s 105

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best-selling UK album (helping it to move 15 million units worldwide). One critic raved that it showed how Michael “at his best, rivaled his idol Elton John in crafting state-ofthe-art pop songs and productions.”14 But radio stations in America refused to play “Outside,” and it failed to crack the Billboard Top 100. Ladies & Gentlemen did meager business in the United States, compared to the United Kingdom, and the album’s second single—a duet with Mary J. Blige of Stevie Wonder’s “As”—was left off the US release because Blige’s record company found Michael, now that he was “Outside,” to be objectionable. Michael would release fifteen more singles over the next sixteen years, all of which would chart in markets around the world. In the United States, not a single one would crack the Top 100. In September of 2016, John performed with some of his old band members at a massive outdoor concert in London’s Hyde Park. Near the end of his sixteen-song set, sitting at his grand piano, John told the tens of thousands gathered in the park, “I want to dedicate this song to one of the greatest talents that I ever met out of Great Britain; this is for you, George Michael. I love you. I think you’re amazing” (the reference was to one of Michael’s biggest UK hits, whose chorus is, “I think you’re amazing”). John then launched into a muscular version of a song that had long gone from being his to being theirs, “Don’t Let the Sun Go Down on Me.” Three months later George Michael was dead. John had long feared an unhappy ending to Michael’s struggle with addiction, but Michael found his old idol’s efforts to help him to be patronizing (Elton—said George in 2009—“will not be 106

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happy until I bang on his door in the middle of the night saying, ‘Please, please, help me, Elton. Take me to rehab.’ It’s not going to happen”).15 Days after Michael’s sudden death, John was performing at Caesar’s Palace in Las Vegas. The ageing survivor in this chain of idols sang “Empty Garden (Hey Hey Johnny),” the tribute to John Lennon he had written with Taupin after Lennon’s death (the title references that 1974 Madison Square Garden performance). Then George Michael’s picture appeared on the huge screen above Elton and his piano. “I only wish George was here to sing it with me,” he said, as he picked out on the keyboard the opening chords to “Don’t Let the Sun Go Down on Me.” After the song, he turned his back on the audience, his head down and shoulders shaking.16 Just as John’s collaboration on stage with Michael turned “Don’t Let the Sun Go Down on Me” into their song, so have Michael’s live recordings of “Tonight” and “Idol” given those Blue Moves songs an additional resonance. The two “Idol”s have become inseparable twins, helping to give Blue its afterlife. It is hard to listen to the album without hearing it through Michael—his singing of songs from it, his appreciation for it, his emulation of its unabashed juxtaposition of heartfelt ballads about love’s painful losses with joyful dance numbers. The long-term impact of Blue Moves has come via idolizers such as George Michael. It is also impossible to listen to either recording of “Idol” without remembering that John is now a septuagenarian. And while he may perform “Idol” when he turns seventyfive in 2022, it is extremely unlikely that the scene will be a seedy cabaret in the Swiss Cottage Holiday Inn; nor will there 107

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be “a cigarette hanging out of me mouth.” And while John eventually kicked the booze and drugs—surviving to enjoy family life in middle age, followed by stately senior years, his career glowing with an immortal sheen—“Idol” reminds us that Michael was not so lucky. His “Idol,” with its evocation of “Through,” seems to presage his premature demise. “Idol” had anticipated a similar future for John. But keep the needle in the groove of Side Four of Blue Moves, and see what happens: the album shakes off that ominous cloud as it zips through the 1-minute “Theme” and into “Bite Your Lip (Get Up and Dance!).” The song is the album’s silliest track, one of those mindless dance tracks that John and Michael were so good at delivering—reminding us that there is sometimes a happier alternative ending.

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8 One of My Favorite Albums

The day before John’s seventieth birthday, Rolling Stone ran a piece by Rob Sheffield on the “weird and wonderful” singer’s “essential albums.” Sheffield began by noting “Elton John has spent 50 glorious years building one of the strangest songbooks in music,” ranging from “albums that hold up as timeless masterworks” to “flops so obscure nobody has ever played them twice, including Elton himself.” I have enjoyed Sheffield’s writings for many years. The fact that his taste often dovetails with mine, yet occasionally deviates dramatically from it, makes his opinions intriguingly unpredictable to me. So I was eager to read how he separated John’s “classics” from his “underrated deep cuts.” Sheffield grouped seventeen studio albums into three categories. Our tastes overlapped well in his “Further Listening” list, less so with his “Going Deeper” selections (I would be content never to hear Duets again), but among his four “Must-Haves” I found the biggest surprise. There was Yellow, of course, Honky Château, and Songs from the West Coast—a laudable choice, for the 2001 gem is very much “a

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bona fide Elton John album” that “was worth waiting for.” But, shockingly, rounding out Sheffield’s foursome was Greatest Hits, Volume II. He justified nesting a hits collection in among studio albums by noting how many of the tracks were smash singles not included on other albums (fair enough). And, in light of my own memory of trying to acquire the album when it came out in 1977, I could hardly disagree that it was “an iconic Seventies artifact, right down to the cover photo of Elton playing a late-night game of cricket.” But Sheffield began his short description of Hits II by declaring it to be “no random cash-in product.” Yet I characterize the album as exactly that: a cash-in—part of the DJM campaign to squeeze revenue from the back catalog, with the unfortunate side effect of eclipsing Blue Moves. Blue was not included in Sheffield’s seventeen selections, but at the end of his summary of Rock of the Westies, he remarked, “His next album was a crashing bummer—the career-freezing mess Blue Moves—so Westies served as a farewell to the first golden era.”1 Here, in a nutshell, was the old sawhorse about Blue, the old myth of its fatal function as a career crusher, but entwined with my own initial feelings about Greatest Hits, Volume II as desirable and Blue Moves as not. It was as if my own halfbaked opinion at the age of thirteen was being validated by a veteran, venerable music writer. Yet as a teenager I had soon come to change that view, re-crafting my later opinion into this book. So who was right? Boy-me and adult-Rob Sheffield, or adult-me? And what did Sheffield’s judgment say about the afterlife of Blue Moves, about the lingering 110

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effects of its original reception? Could an album, once it was deemed a failure, ever be a success? My cassette copy of Blue Moves, the one I had been coerced into buying in 1977, began to deteriorate after a few years. Record companies tended to use low-grade tape for prerecorded cassettes, so the more the album grew on me, the more I wore it out. In 1980, my father took a job in Tokyo, and thus in the early ’80s I spent many of my school holiday months in Japan. To my amazement, I discovered that one could rent records in Tokyo. Such a business was unthinkable in Thatcher’s Britain (wouldn’t people have scratched or stolen the records?). But Japanese music consumers were apparently more civilized; I was able to borrow record after record, all in perfect condition, and to make my own tapes of the ones I liked. One of the first records I rented was Blue Moves. I was first struck by the inclusion of inserts containing Japanese translations of the lyrics. Then I noticed something else: the songs were sequenced differently. Furthermore, they seemed a tiny bit longer. I realized that in order to fit the album on a single cassette, all the effort that Dudgeon and his team had put into sequencing had been ignored; the tracks had been jumbled up and trimmed a little. The album I had listened to for years was not the album that the band and producer had intended to give me. I should not have been surprised. After all, cassette editions of albums put out in the 1970s were notorious for their sacrilegious treatment of running orders. I’m not sure there was a single Beatles album that was not abused in that 111

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way; I even owned one, a cassette copy of Revolver that began with “Good Day Sunshine” (instead of “Taxman,” which opened my father’s vinyl copy). I had a Led Zeppelin tape with the wrong running order, and a boy in my school had another Zeppelin album on cassette in which sides A and B were inexplicably reversed. But in the pre-internet age, I only had access to anecdotal evidence, and was unaware of how extensive the phenomenon was. I immediately made my own recording of Blue, with the correct running order. And while at first I missed “Crazy Water” coming third, right after “Tonight,” I soon began to appreciate why “One Horse Town” had been selected by Dudgeon for that slot. Likewise, having assumed for years that “Boogie Pilgrim” was the natural way to end the album, I soon realized that “Bite Your Lip” should have been there all along (the vandals who sequenced the cassette had swapped them). My suspicions raised, I started comparing the vinyl and tape versions of other albums. I found that Yellow had also been messed with on tape, although only with one song swap—“The Ballad of Danny Bailey” for “Benny [sic] and the Jets” (the origin of that misspelling). Over the years, I kept my eyes open for other variants on Blue Moves, in effect slowly doing research that today can be done in minutes on a smartphone. An Australian friend told me that back home she had a double cassette edition of the album, with correct running order (her memory was accurate). Then, when my first car came with an in-dash 8-track player (it was a used 1979 Ford), I briefly bought old 8-tracks on the cheap—including Blue Moves. I discovered that when Rocket released the 8-track version back in 1976, 112

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it had abused the running order even more than on the cassette. “Someone’s Final Song” had been removed, and half the remaining seventeen tracks were shuffled around (“Chameleon” and “Out of the Blue” were swapped, as were “Crazy Water” and “One Horse Town,” and so on). In 1986, Blue Moves came out on CD for the first time. By this point, my teenage outrage had turned to bemused low expectations. Sure enough, a staggering four tracks were cut completely—“Cage the Songbird,” “Shoulder Holster,” “The Wide-Eyed and Laughing,” and “Where’s the Shoorah?”— with the rest all trimmed by a few seconds each, reducing the album to 68 minutes. (I later learned that trimming the tracks by seconds dated back to 1976, as even the vinyl edition in some markets ran to 82’31” instead of 83’14”.) A different CD version was released in Europe and some other markets in 1988, this one with fifteen tracks (leaving out “Shoulder Holster,” “Out of the Blue,” and “The Wide-Eyed and Laughing”). In the internet age, online derision for those butchered fifteen- and fourteen-track editions is widespread—as is the respect that fans give to the complete, unabridged doubleCD version of the album, remastered by Dudgeon, that came out in 1996. Finally, after two decades of abuse, the album conceived by Dudgeon and the band was available in a medium other than vinyl. Today, two decades further on, it can be purchased in unabridged form, brand new, on vinyl or CD, or downloaded in seconds. I was not the only music consumer to be incensed in the ’70s and ’80s by the discovery that record companies were willing to ignore the creative work of artists and producers, 113

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who had painstakingly sequenced their albums, just to save a penny or two on tape (by ensuring each side was the same length). But nor am I the only consumer in the digital age to revel and delight in my freedom to abuse albums in the very same way, just with a few dashes of my finger on a track pad. In other words, it wasn’t the disrespect to albums that bothered us; it was the attempt by record companies to retain a monopoly on the power to commit such acts of disrespect. Now that power has been passed to us, we can pretend to be record company executives ourselves—editing, deleting, and reshuffling, blithely ignoring the fact that someone like Dudgeon spent countless hours mixing, selecting, and sequencing. The hypocrisy of my outrage over abridged albums actually goes back to adolescence. An avid tape mixologist, I tried to “improve” albums as soon as I had a tape deck hooked up to a record player. I don’t know who first remarked that the White Album might have been the best album of all time, had it been a single LP; but soon after I heard or read that comment, I had a go at creating a version that could be squeezed onto one side of a C-90 cassette. It was harder than you’d imagine. Easier was to take my favorite tracks from Goat’s Head Soup (1973) and It’s Only Rock ‘n Roll (1974) to make what I thought was a far better Stones album (which I called It’s Only Goats ‘n Head).2 Playing such games with records and tapes took time—hours as opposed to the minutes it takes to shuffle, add, and delete on a laptop. But the analog world offered simple tools not easily replicated in the digital one: by lifting the needle or stopping the tape recorder (or deploying a tape splicing kit) one could cut and trim songs, abusing 114

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them even more than those record company philistines had done. My hypocrisy runs deeper: I also reworked Elton John albums, creating what I thought was a superb 60-minute Hello Yellow Brick Road [sic]. And then there was Blue Moves. Within days of recording my own tape copy of the album— sitting on the living room floor in front of my father’s stereo system in his Tokyo apartment—and while my indignation over the cassette’s re-sequencing of the running order had not yet cooled, I began to mix up my own versions of the album. I had read somewhere that a song recorded during the Blue Moves sessions in Toronto had been left off the album because it didn’t seem to fit, in terms of mood and style. It was, of course, “Don’t Go Breaking My Heart,” that mostplayed song worldwide and #1 in a dozen countries in the summer before Blue Moves came out. It was sequenced right after “Sorry Seems to Be the Hardest Word” on Greatest Hits Volume II (and right before it on subsequent hits packages), prompting the thought: What would I have done if my job with Rocket Records had been to go back in time and rewrite history, turning Blue into Elton’s eighth US #1 album in a row? I’ve played this game a few times over the years. Here’s just one outcome: Side One packed with hits (actual and imagined), opening with “Tonight,” followed by “Don’t Go Breaking My Heart,” “Chameleon” (released in my imagination as the follow-up single to “Sorry Seems to Be the Hardest Word,” instead of wasted as a B-side), closing with “Sorry” itself. At 21 minutes and change, “Your Starter 115

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For . . .” could be squeezed in the front without pushing the grooves too close together. “One Horse Town” would begin an over-stuffed Side Two, followed by “Between Seventeen and Twenty,” “Crazy Water,” and “Cage the Songbird,” with “Idol” closing. This is trivial fun, but it reflects the exercise that Dudgeon began to do prior to the final mixing of the album at Marquee Studios in London’s Soho. He had planned to create a “solid” single album from the twenty or so tracks recorded in Toronto. In his mind, “Shoulder Holster,” “Boogie Pilgrim,” and “Where’s the Shoorah?” were already in the bin from which B-sides could be selected. Likewise “The Wide-Eyed and Laughing,” which Dudgeon hated for its “sitars [that go on] for bloody years” and the fact that Crosby and Nash sang backing vocals (“Crosby was such an unbelievable arsehole, so, yeah—not my favorite”). Nor was he thrilled by “Bite Your Lip” and its “ninety-five-year fadeout.”3 We cannot be sure what Dudgeon’s single Blue Moves would have been (he died in a car accident in 2002), but it likely would not have included the instrumentals (as Quaye’s version would have done), instead comprising a Side One very similar to the final version, with a Side Two drawn from the three vinyl sides that were eventually released. However, the album that Dudgeon had anticipated was never mixed. As he later admitted, I made the mistake of letting it slip at this luncheon I was attending with some of the MCA brass that we’d actually recorded enough material for a double album. They immediately rang up John Reid, and next thing I knew, I

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was back in England mixing a double album instead of a single. It was a great shame.4 It was not a shame for us, of course. Because by completing the overdubs and mixing work on a full eighteen tracks, Dudgeon gifted us an album that we can now make our own. Since its release, there has never been just one Blue Moves. Depending on which copy we pick up, on what medium, or how we move around the digital files, we can enjoy many Blue Moves. That does not mean we can make it better, any more than using software on our laptops to reorder the pieces of Elgar’s Enigma Variations, Austen’s Emma, or Picasso’s Guernica can make those works better (and yes, those are parallels that absurdly but deliberately flatter John, Taupin, Dudgeon, et al.). Using technology to play with the pieces is an act of appreciation, one appropriate to a cultural phenomenon whose evolution over the past century has been driven by technological change. We cannot really trim Blue, because once we know the full album, we hear the missing tracks in between the ones we’ve chosen. Aren’t mixtapes and playlists all reminders and echoes of original albums? Imagine that an album’s life begins with the partum of its release, its day of birth, and with its immediate reception by critics, fans, DJs, music-buyers, and (nowadays) streamers. Two things can then happen. In a minority of cases, the album grows and thrives and enjoys a long life. Extreme examples are two albums that came out just a few months after Blue Moves—its classmates, if you like—Rumours and Hotel California, which continue to sell another million

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copies every few years. But in most cases, the album dies in infancy. The album mortality rate is disturbingly high, and in the internet age it has been rising. A hit single or a couple of songs may survive as radio plays, on compilations, or as individual downloads, but the album as an entity becomes buried and forgotten. By the time I first acquired Blue Moves, a year after its release, that appeared to be its fate, one confirmed as the ’80s arrived. During that decade, John survived through a dual strategy of churning out catchy but inane hits—including what appeared to be the amusingly self-referential “I’m Still Standing” (it was actually another of Taupin’s relationship songs)—coupled with live performances centered on his hits of the early ’70s. There was no room in that strategy for Blue: the nostalgia part of it was Yellow; Blue Moves was replaced by “I Guess That’s Why They Call It the Blues” and “Blue Eyes.” But, it turns out, there is a third possibility for an album. It can gain an afterlife. At the turn of this century, the music magazine Mojo published a 1,000-page volume of reviews of The Greatest Albums of All Time. I mentioned earlier that it included one John/Taupin album, the inevitable Yellow. What I did not mention is that in the margins of each review, one additional album is listed as “Further listening”; Mojo suggested “Elton’s other double album Blue Moves.”5 John himself has played an important role in keeping Blue Moves alive. In 1987, he released his first live album in over a decade. Live in Australia with the Melbourne Symphony Orchestra was the length of one of his double LPs, but was put out on CD only. Two of its fourteen tracks were from 118

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Blue Moves, prominently placed together as the fourth and fifth numbers on the album; John introduced “Tonight” and “Sorry Seems to Be the Hardest Word” with the words, “we’re gonna switch albums to Blue Moves, which was one of my favorite albums.” The album charted respectably, proving predictably popular in Australia itself, where it peaked at #5. Two singles from the album went nowhere (“Your Song” and “Take Me to the Pilot”)—not surprisingly, as cuts from live albums tended traditionally to draw attention to their parent LPs but not chart highly themselves. But a third single did extraordinarily well. “Candle in the Wind,” with “Sorry Seems to Be the Hardest Word” as its B-side, went Top 10 in the United Kingdom and the United States. It was even nominated for a Grammy Award for Best Pop Vocal Performance. Although the original studio version of “Candle in the Wind” had been a UK hit back in 1974, it had never been released as a single in the United States, which partly explained the success of the 1987 live version. (As mentioned earlier, its re-recording a decade later in memory of Princess Diana would become the best-selling single, worldwide, of all time.) The 1987 pairing of “Candle” with “Sorry” now seems symbolic of the perpetual relationship of their two parent double LPs; Yellow overshadowing Blue, the latter a B to the former’s A. But equally important is the fact that as the years passed and the John catalog grew, increasing the number of gradually forgotten or eclipsed albums, Blue Moves lived on. There was also a double Laserdisc version of Live in Australia, the first disc of which contained excerpts from the full-band segment of that tour. Its opening track was “Funeral for a 119

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Friend,” but instead of running into “Love Lies Bleeding” (as it does on Yellow), it is followed by “One Horse Town”—the first full-band track on the first side of Blue. Live in Australia would prove to be a turning point in John’s career, as well as the turning point in the afterlife of Blue Moves. The tour and its album helped John fans to overlook 1986’s Leather Jackets. And although 1988’s Reg Strikes Back was not the creative comeback for which its titled hoped, it was a Top 20 album on both sides of the Atlantic, and was followed by a bona fide hit, Sleeping with the Past—which hit #1 in the UK and produced John’s first solo #1 UK single, “Sacrifice.” A year later, John went into rehab, and did not relapse. Against the odds, the life and career turnaround took hold. New compilations released in 1990 did well; The Very Best of topped charts worldwide. While the US version, To Be Continued . . ., only reached #82, it was a pricey four-CD box set that was well reviewed and whose title was seen less as wishful thinking—as it might have done just a few years earlier—and more as a welcome promise. In the interview with Van Lustbader included in the box set’s liner notes, John reflected on Blue Moves, admitting that by the time of its Toronto recording sessions “we were all weary, feeling the pressure and needed a break.” But the result, he insisted, was a successful channeling of emotions. “Out of those situations comes rawness.” Not for the first time, he declared, “I just love the album.” So did George Michael. As we saw, his fondness and respect for Blue extended into the next century. Meanwhile, a new generation of musicians and consumers, unaffected or 120

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ignorant of the double album’s old reputation, discovered it as one of the treasures in the trove of John’s back catalog. One illuminative example is that of two Australian EDM/ synthpop musicians, Nick Littlemore and Peter Mayes, who record under the band name Pnau. In 2012, Littlemore and Mayes released an album titled Good Morning to the Night, billed as “Elton John vs. Pnau.” In collaboration with John himself, who had admired their earlier work and become a career mentor, they used samples from three dozen John recordings to craft eight new EDM tracks. Reflecting the growing respect accorded to Blue Moves, it can be heard all over Good Morning to the Night. Pnau borrowed musical and lyrical segments from six of its songs—a third of the album—making Blue and Yellow the two albums most deeply mined by the project. Good Morning to the Night went to #1 in the UK, where the single “Sad” (which sampled both “Sorry Seems to Be the Hardest Word” and “Crazy Water”) was a minor hit. Improbably, the album works, and works very well. Even more improbably, Good Morning to the Night not only “brought Elton back onto the dance floor again,” but did so using six tracks from Blue— who would have believed that, had they been told it in the autumn of 1976? One would expect that a recent fan special by the UK’s Classic Pop magazine, titled The Rocket Man, would have a low critical bar. So while mentioning how Blue was “widely dismissed, even denigrated” upon its release, given a “critical mauling” and “stinging reviews,” the magazine asserts that the album is now appreciated as “an underrated piece of work, admired by Elton John diehards as well as by the man 121

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himself.” But the praise goes further still, reflecting how far the album’s rehabilitation has come: “Blue Moves remains Elton’s last truly great album” of the ’70s, “an overlooked trove of blue-mood music and etiolated funk, just ripe for exploring.”6

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9 The Queen Mum of Pop

Elton John’s twenties saw him go from being Reg Dwight, office boy at a music publisher and keyboard player in someone else’s mediocre band, to being the biggest rock star the world had known. His thirties saw him struggle with the legacy of that success. But his career nadir was neither caused by nor marked by Blue Moves, the album that came out months before he turned thirty. It came as he approached forty—reeling from an ill-conceived marriage, at the mercy of coke and booze, hounded by the British tabloids, his latest studio album peaking in the United States at a lifetime low of #91. The fate he had dreaded throughout his thirties—that of Elvis Presley—seemed closer than ever. But then, in his forties, he began an extraordinary pop cultural transformation. Having saved himself, and having set up a foundation to save others, in his fifties and sixties he kept going, choosing to spend his early seventies in an elaborate global retirement enterprise. Perhaps most extraordinary of all, at the exposed heart of his phoenix act is the part of him that was most hidden and willfully ignored in his early ’70s

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heyday: his sexual orientation. How did he go from being an openly closeted gay rock star, to a frequently reviled (in the United States) and mocked (in the United Kingdom) bisexual tabloid celebrity/pop star, to a living legend who is not only openly homosexual but famously so? How did he become “the most famous gay man on the planet” (as gay activist Mark Segal called him in 2004), or (as John himself proclaimed a few years after that) “the most famous poof in the world!”?1 The question deserves a longer answer than I can give it here, and much of it is surely to do with the global shift in attitudes toward homosexuality over the past half century. But it also has to do with that turning point in John’s life when he emerged from rehab, stayed drug-free, and settled down with a partner, eventually marrying him and having two children. In other words, middle-aged and elderly Elton has been a conservative figure. And just as his reformed lifestyle contradicted the gay stereotypes perpetuated by the media and political right, especially during the first decade of the AIDS epidemic, so his philanthropic organization— the Elton John AIDS Foundation (EJAF)—confronted the stigma attached to the epidemic during the ’80s and ’90s. In his promotion of the EJAF, John is, again, not a radical activist but a more conservative figure—a fundraising president of a charitable foundation. Ever since the explosion in sales of Elvis merchandise following his death, it has been a “ghoulish music biz jest” (in Smucker’s words) that the best thing a recording artist can do when their prime has passed is to pass away.2 But as the rock star era recedes, one-time rock and pop stars have 124

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achieved variations on that theme. Yes, there have been a growing number of cases in the Elvis mold—global names like Whitney Houston, George Michael, Amy Winehouse, and Prince, redeemed or sanctified through premature death. But there have also been as many examples of a prolonged retirement, followed by a celebrated second act that boosts back catalogs while attracting new fans—be that second act cut short by death (Bowie) or surprisingly prolonged (Brian Wilson). There are also those who soldier on or trot out periodic nostalgia tours (and as a concertgoing music fan, I’m grateful to all of them). A small percentage of those evolve into institutions. Some attain such a state by becoming a corporation (the Rolling Stones) or through sheer tenacity and longevity (Aerosmith, U2). An even smaller percentage reaches institutional status through association with the very institutions of “the establishment” to which rock culture was once antithetical. Nobel Prize–winning Bob Dylan is a (rather complicated) case in point. But the prime example is Sir Elton John. To call him “the Queen Mum of Pop” (as the British press has) is not just a way to play on Michael Jackson’s “King of Pop” title while referencing John’s sexual orientation.3 It also evokes his connection to Britain’s ultimate institution—the ties of his lifelong respect for the royal family, his performances for them over the decades, his decision in his twenties to live in Windsor (down the road from the Queen), his friendships with the Princesses Margaret and Diana, his funeral elegy to Diana, his knighthood. Jackson’s self-proclaimed kingship was a reference to Elvis as “the King,” itself a reference more to a fairy-tale ideal than a real person or office; in contrast, 125

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the Queen Mother was a real person, beloved in Britain. The notion of Elton as royalty has profound echoes. Whatever their career twists and turns, and however onetime rock stars in the post-rock era can surprise us with their bids for immortality, they all have one thing in common: their own catalog of albums that people still rediscover and replay and perceive as a part of their lives and who they are. The factors that determined how Blue Moves fared at the time of its birth are certainly revealing, opening a fascinating window into pop culture during the rock era. But those factors all proved to be temporary. Eventually, so will Elton himself. We all will. But Blue Moves will still be here.

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Acknowledgments

When Bryan McCann presented at Penn State University his study of the 1964 bossa nova classic, Getz/Gilberto, I attended because Bryan is a fellow historian of Latin America, and that album, precisely my age, I have always loved. His riveting lecture introduced me to the 33 1/3 series (in which his book was published in 2018) and inspired me to see how my embryonic Blue Moves project might find a home in it. Thank you to Bryan; to Geri Thoma, my always generous and enthusiastic literary agent; and to Leah BabbRosenfeld, boice-Terrel Allen, their 33 1/3 colleagues, and the Bloomsbury team for their encouragement and skilled work. Thank you too to my supportive colleagues at Penn State University, especially Deans Susan Welch and Clarence Lang for making possible over two happy decades of writing, and Chris Heaney and Zach Morgan for crucial writinggroup contributions. I play in two local cover bands—very badly (on a good night), but very happily. I am grateful, therefore, to my fellow amateurs for tolerating my inclusion: Dan Beaver, Jens-Uwe Guettel, Mark Guiltinan, Dan Letwin, the late Bill Pencak; the half dozen others who were sometime members of one or other of the bands (especially Ben Vinson, and the jazz

Acknowledgments

musicologist and professional saxophonist Barry Kernfeld, unfailingly generous to me); above all, On-cho Ng (leader of the Irreconcilable Differences), who also plays in both bands, so is doubly tolerant; and James Collins (leader of Norm and the Mystakahs), who in numerous ways encouraged me to write about pop music both as a professional historian and as a nonacademic memoirist. Steve Christensen and Liz Grove, whose own cover band is the best I know, have also inspired me in numerous ways. I am deeply grateful to my parents—Robin (who bought me my first saxophone in Chicago months before I first acquired Blue Moves), Judy, and Mariela—and to my spouse Amara Solari, for pretending never to mind sharing the room with the likes of Elton John. I also thank the family and friends who over the decades have shared, listened to, gone to see, and talked about music with me; in addition to those already mentioned, they include Bob Aronson, Soraya Betterton, Elvis Blake, Sue Braithwaite, Laurent Cases, Richard Conway, Julio d’Escriván, Spencer Delbridge, Robert Denby (and the Denboys), the late Garrett Fagan (who would have scoffed at this book’s subject matter, while being its most loyal and supportive reader), Jake Frederick, Larry Gorenflo, Carter Hunt, Mark Koschny, Michael Kulikowski, Kris Lane, George Lovell, Rob Mackay, Gillie Marshall, Jonathan Mathews, Rob Nairn, Paula Powers, Joe Richardson, Sophie de Schaepdrijver, Steve Sherrill, Stephen Shoemaker, Eric Spielvogel, Tom Vaizey, Louis Warren; my dear brothers(-in-law) David and Ian; my treasured sister Emma; my daughters Isabel, Lucy, and Sophie, who have contributed to this book through innumerable conversations about pop music; and their little sister Catalina. For her and Amara, I write everything. 128

Notes

Chapter 1 1 Dave Hickey, Air Guitar: Essays on Art & Democracy (Los Angeles: Art Issue Press, 1997), 10. 2 Tom Doyle, Captain Fantastic: Elton John’s Stellar Trip Through the ’70s (New York: Ballantine, 2017), 194; Mark Bego, Elton John: The Bitch Is Back (Beverly Hills, CA: Phoenix Books, 2009), 178. 3 Bego, Elton John, 195–96; Christgau’s reviews searchable on robertchristgau.com; Ariel Swartley, “Blue Moves,” Rolling Stone, December 30, 1976; “mess” is Rob Sheffield, “Elton John’s Essential Albums,” Rolling Stone, March 24, 2017. 4 The title of a worldwide John hit in the summer of 1983. 5 For example, John’s in-concert commentary on Live in Australia (1987). 6 Or in Lethem’s words, “Turn It Up, for Fuck’s Sake,” Fear of Music (New York: Bloomsbury, 2012), vii; Zeth Lundy, Songs in the Key of Life (New York: Continuum, 2007), 24. 7 Philip Norman, Elton John (New York: Harmony Books, 1991), 345.

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Chapter 3 1 From Sartre’s Critique of Dialectical Reason, originally published in 1960, quoted by David Hajdu, Love for Sale: Pop Music in America (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2016), 62, paraphrased here. 2 For an introduction to this theory, see “horizons of expectation” entry in any Oxford Dictionary of Literary Terms edition; also Cyrus R. K. Patell, Some Girls (New York: Continuum, 2011), 14–16. 3 2006 interview quoted by Rob Trucks, Tusk (New York: Bloomsbury, 2011), 62. 4 Trucks, Tusk, 26–27. 5 Note that prices varied between countries and regions, and record prices rose between the release of Blue Moves (October 1976) and that of Tusk (October 1979). 6 Derek Thompson, Hit Makers: How Things Become Popular (London: Penguin, 2017), xii (“neotheistic” line paraphrased from xi). 7 Another example is Into the Fire, the 2-million-selling sequel to Bryan Adams’s 12-million-selling Reckless; Adams said, “I suppose the perception was that it wasn’t Reckless II! Who cares?” (en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Into_the_Fire_). 8 Jeff Giles’s October 12, 2015, post on http:​//ult​imate​class​icroc​ k.com​/flee​twood​-mac-​tusk/​. 9 Quotes by Lundy, Songs in the Key of Life, 104, save for the “forever young” quote by David Hepworth, Uncommon People: The Rise and Fall of the Rock Stars (London: Penguin, 2017), xviii.

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10 Within a month of the ad first airing in Britain and being posted online, it had been viewed 13 million times on YouTube (www.youtube.com/watch?v=mNbSgMEZ_Tw). 11 In John’s own words, “Fuck! My life has been incredible!” (Doyle, Captain Fantastic, xxiv). 12 Rik Flynn, ed., Elton John, The Rocket Man: 50 Years and Still Standing (Classic Pop Special Edition) (London: Anthem, 2016), 11. 13 Flynn, ed., Elton John, 13. 14 A quote frequently repeated, for example, Mick St. Michael, Elton John (New York: Smithmark, 1994), 7. 15 Paul Gambaccini, A Conversation with Elton John and Bernie Taupin (New York: Flash Books, 1975), 26. 16 St. Michael, Elton John, 16; Patrick Humphries, The Elton John Story (London: Aurum Press, 1998), 109. Also see Keith Hayward’s 2013 and 2015 books on the Dwight/John early years. 17 Also see the charmingly self-deprecating version in Elton John, Me (New York: Henry Holt & Co., 2019), 1–136. 18 Tom Smucker, Why the Beach Boys Matter (Austin: University of Texas Press, 2018), 80, 132. 19 Norman, Elton John, 395. 20 The 1995 two-CD rerelease of Here and There is brighter and extended to twenty-six tracks—including the three that featured Lennon. Paul Gambaccini’s rave review of the 1974 concert is included in the liner notes. “Contractual obligation” sentence paraphrases Bego, Elton, 179. John quote from an interview by Phil Sutcliffe in Sounds, reprinted in Juke (April 15, 1977); Elizabeth J. Rosenthal, His Song: The Musical Journey of Elton John (New York: Billboard Books, 2001), 139. 131

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21 Ibid; David John DeCouto, Captain Fantastic: Elton John in the ‘70s (Chandler, AZ: Triple Wood Press, 2016), 588. 22 The situation was reminiscent of the reaction by Capitol Records executives to the “suspiciously arty” Pet Sounds: two months after its release in the United States, they rushed out The Best of the Beach Boys Volume 1, which immediately “knocked Pet Sounds down and then off the charts, to face at least a decade with a reputation as a failure” (Smucker, Beach Boys Matter, 79–80). 23 Taupin interview by Jaan Uhelszki in Creem (September 1976), quoted by Rosenthal, His Song, 183–84. 24 Gambaccini, A Conversation, 78; “I loved Dick,” says John of James (Me, 161). 25 Quote by Kembrew McLeod, Parallel Lines (New York: Bloomsbury, 2016), 87.

Chapter 4 1 Quotes from the review in The Mojo Collection: The Ultimate Music Companion, 4th ed. (Edinburgh: Canongate, 2007), 317. 2 Gambaccini, A Conversation, 107. 3 In the revised 2012 list, one of the six was dropped (Elton John had been #468), keeping Tumbleweed Connection at #458, Honky Château at #359, Captain Fantastic and the Brown Dirt Cowboy at #158, Greatest Hits at #136, and Yellow at #91. 4 James E. Perone, The Album: A Guide to Pop Music’s Most Provocative, Influential, and Important Creations, 3 vols. (Santa Barbara: Praeger, 2012), Vol. 2, 123–27, 247–54; Tom Moon, 1,000 Recordings to Hear Before You Die (New York: Workman, 2008),

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399. In Smash Hits: The 100 Songs That Defined America (Santa Barbara: Greenwood, 2016), Perone includes “Candle in the Wind” as one of the “100 songs that defined America” (241–44). 5 Setlist statistics for the whole tour are updated constantly on setlist.fm, plus breakdowns by song and album for John’s live performances since 1968. Over that fifty-year span, Goodbye Yellow Brick Road has held primacy, with roughly a third of all songs played live being from that album. Viewed another way, fourteen of Yellow’s seventeen songs have been played live by John, compared to eight of Blue’s eighteen tracks; in other words, he has been five times more likely to play a Yellow song than a Blue one. 6 From a 1974 interview with Eric Van Lustbader for Contemporary Music, quoted in Rosenthal, His Song, 71. 7 Christgau’s C+ verdict in Creem was later upgraded to a B (John entries in robertchristgau.com); Stephen Davis, “Goodbye Yellow Brick Road,” Rolling Stone, November 22, 1973; also Rosenthal, His Song, 76. 8 As categorized by Rosenthal, His Song, 62–71. 9 Flynn, ed., Elton John, 37. 10 Ibid., 33. 11 Susan Black, Elton John: In His Own Words (London: Omnibus, 1993), 26; Doyle, Captain Fantastic, 126. 12 In technical terms, “John’s melodies overwhelmingly tend to feature syncopation at the level of the quadruple subdivision of the beat (at the level of the 16th note in conventional 4/4 meter)” (Perone, The Album, Vol. 2, 248, 253–54). 13 On cock rock and rock as “a male form,” see Simon Frith, Music for Pleasure: Essays in the Sociology of Pop (New York:

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Routledge, 1988), 43–46; Mary Celeste Kearney, Gender and Rock (New York: Oxford University Press, 2017), 97–98. 14 All quotes, including by Taupin and John, from Flynn, ed., Elton John, 33. 15 From a 1974 Van Lustbader interview, quoted by Rosenthal, His Song, 63. 16 Gary Bremner, trainee engineer at the Toronto sessions, quoted by DeCouto, Captain Fantastic, 632–33. 17 As articulated by Rosenthal, His Song, 136–37, paraphrased here. 18 Quotes appear variously, for example, Black, Words, 31; Bego, Elton, 197; DeCouto, Captain Fantastic, 635–37; Doyle, Captain Fantastic, 226.

Chapter 5 1 Frith, Music for Pleasure, 6. 2 Bob Stanley, Yeah! Yeah! Yeah! The Story of Pop Music from Bill Haley to Beyoncé (New York: Norton, 2014), 247. 3 Gambaccini, A Conversation, 76. 4 David Buckley, Elton: The Biography (Chicago: Chicago Review Press, 2008), 9. The country flavors of Americana love letters like Yellow and Tumbleweed Connection (a concept album about love and loss in the American Civil War era?) echo to this day (e.g., on Tumbleweed’s “My Father’s Gun” by Miranda Lambert, and Yellow’s “Roy Rogers” by Kacey Musgraves, on the 2018 John/Taupin country tribute album Restoration).

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5 Stanley, Yeah! Yeah! Yeah!, 243. 6 Joe Hagan, Sticky Fingers: The Life and Times of Jann Wenner and Rolling Stone Magazine (New York: Knopf, 2017), 322. 7 Barney Hoskyns dubbed John “a glam Liberace” (but more “shameless”) (Glam! Bowie, Bolan and the Glitter Rock Revolution [New York: Pocket Books, 1998], 51, 88). 8 Stanley, Yeah! Yeah! Yeah!, 270; on glam’s end, Hoskyns, Glam!, 98–106. 9 Black, Words, 63, 112; Ian Parker, “He’s a Little Bit Funny,” The New Yorker, August 26, 1996, 110; Norman, Elton John, 345; also see John, Me, 159–60. 10 Norman, Elton John, 345. 11 Quote from Hepworth, Uncommon People, 237. “God Save the Queen” was a #2 hit for the Sex Pistols in June 1977, widely believed to have been kept off the #1 spot by the BBC (who banned the song from their radio and TV stations) “fixing” the chart. 12 Quote by Frith, Pleasure, 203; the Labour Party took office in 1974. Also see Dave Laing, One Chord Wonders: Power and Meaning in Punk Rock (Milton Keynes: Open University Press, 1985), 1–40. 13 Buckley, Elton, 227. 14 Hajdu, Love for Sale, 173–74. 15 McLeod, Parallel Lines, 12. 16 To paraphrase McLeod, Parallel Lines, 11. 17 The phrase is Patell’s, from Some Girls, 157. 18 Susan Crimp and Patricia Burstein, The Many Lives of Elton John (New York: Birch Lane Press, 1992), 156–57.

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19 Point made by Rosenthal, His Song, 137, paraphrased here. 20 From an April 24, 2018, episode of the podcast Elton John’s Rocket Hour. 21 Rosenthal again: His Song, 137. 22 DeCouto, Captain Fantastic, 573 (“undercurrent” in next line is also his phrase). 23 DeCouto, Captain Fantastic, 579. 24 Smucker, Beach Boys Matter, 92. 25 Hepworth, Uncommon People, 329. 26 Cliff Jahr, “Elton’s Frank Talk: The Lonely Love Life of a Superstar,” Rolling Stone, October 7, 1976.

Chapter 6 1 Black, Words, 45; Doyle, Captain Fantastic, 209–10. 2 Hepworth, Uncommon People, 323, 329. 3 Doyle, Captain Fantastic, 223–24; Claude Bernardin and Tom Stanton, Elton John from A-Z (Westport, CN: Praeger, 1996), 156. 4 To quote Hepworth, Uncommon People, 103. 5 There were very few such books before Norman’s Elton John (1991), then a flurry in the ’90s (mostly with British presses), and then a small but steady stream this century. 6 Katherine White, Rock & Roll Hall of Famers: Elton John (New York: Rosen Central, 2003), 73–75. 7 Celebrity therapist Beechy Colclough, quoted by Humphries, Elton John Story, 42; John’s own, poignantly funny account of his addictions (Me, 107–247) effectively confirms that diagnosis.

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8 An oft-told incident, depicted dramatically in Rocketman and mentioned in all biographies (e.g., Doyle, Captain Fantastic, 187–88); also see Black, Words, 49–55; John, Me, 133. 9 Virgil Moorefield, The Producer as Composer: Shaping the Sounds of Popular Music (Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press, 2005), 54; DeCouto, Captain Fantastic, 581. 10 DeCouto, Captain Fantastic, 568. 11 Humphries, Elton John Story, 126. 12 John and Taupin “took the sentimental song (as commercialised in the late nineteenth century), keeping its easy melodic lines, its use of rising pitch to unleash emotion, its lyric sense of expansive self-pity, but giving it a new rock-based dynamism (in terms of rhythm and amplification). In particular, Elton John’s vocal approach was taken from soul music: he sings with a hesitancy, an introversion, an intimacy which contrasts markedly with the full, extrovert, confident vocal tone of the Victorian ballad singer” (Simon Frith, Will Straw, and John Street, eds., The Cambridge Companion to Pop and Rock [Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001], 93; Frith, Seriously, 167). 13 Toby Creswell, 1001 Songs: The Great Songs of All Time (New York: Thunder’s Mouth Press, 2006), 183 (“Dancer” is one of four John-Taupin songs). 14 Buckley, Elton, 221; DeCouto, Captain Fantastic, 576. 15 John Tobler, Elton John: 25 Years in the Charts (London: Hamlyn, 1995), 105; Doyle, Captain Fantastic, 199. 16 John “sculpts a lament so private it begs to be left alone” (Rosenthal, His Song, 133); DeCouto, Captain Fantastic, 583 (Tennille). 17 Robert Hilburn, “The Man with the Words: Bernie Taupin Offers a Rare Look into His Collaborations with Elton John,” Los Angeles Times, September 30, 2001, p. F5.

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Chapter 7 1 DeCouto, Captain Fantastic, 583. 2 Swartley, “Blue Moves.” 3 Caleb Quaye, A Voice Louder Than Rock & Roll (Harrisonburg: Vision Publishing, 2006), 112; Doyle, Captain Fantastic, 200; DeCouto, Captain Fantastic, 570. 4 DeCouto, Captain Fantastic, 462. 5 Jahr, “Elton’s Frank Talk.” 6 Hagan, Sticky Fingers, 322–23; DeCouto, Captain Fantastic, 627–28 (“tectonic” and “dubious” are his phrases); on ’70s US radio as a “very conservative industry,” Hoskyns, Glam!, 73. 7 DeCouto, Captain Fantastic, 314. 8 “Brave” phrase is Parker’s, “Funny,” 110; John quotes in Gary Clarke, Elton, My Elton (London: Smith Gryphon, 1995), 13–14; DeCouto, Captain Fantastic, 628. 9 DeCouto, Captain Fantastic, 635. According to the album’s art director, it was launched at a London art gallery, with “signed lithos” of the cover painting, “plus blue drinks” (Buckley, Elton, 223). 10 Black, Words, 58; Clarke, Elton, 60; DeCouto, Captain Fantastic, 629. 11 DeCouto, Captain Fantastic, 630. 12 Average peak point of studio albums only: of nine albums before 1976 (not counting Empty Sky), US #2.6, UK #6.4; twelve albums of 1978–93, US #27.7, UK #11.9 (or fourteen albums, 1978–97, US #25.3, UK #10.6); mature period of six albums, 2001–16, US #10.8, UK #8.3.

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13 Emily Herbert, George Michael: The Life, 1963–2016 (New York: Lesser Gods, 2017), 33 (“conflicted” quote). 14 Stephen Thomas Erlewine on allmusic.com, also quoted by Herbert, Michael, 173. 15 Herbert, Michael, 232. 16 Quoted in Herbert, Michael, 233, but easily accessible on YouTube and other sites.

Chapter 8 1 www.r​ollin​gston​e.com​/musi​c/lis​ts/el​ton-j​ohns-​essen​tial-​album​ s-w47​3447.​ 2 Two more examples of this perverse way to enjoy favorites: decouple the Lindsay Buckingham songs from Tusk to create a great Buckingham solo album and a so-so Fleetwood Mac one; defile Low and “Heroes” by combining their Side A’s into an album of songs, and their Side B’s into one of instrumentals (sorry, Bowie and Eno). 3 DeCouto, Captain Fantastic, 631. 4 Quaye, Voice, 113–14. In 1979, Quaye had a religious epiphany and for decades has been a minister in California. 5 The Mojo Collection, 317. 6 Flynn, ed., Elton John, 26, 30.

Chapter 9 1 April 5, 2007, article in San Francisco Bay Times quoted in Bego, Elton, 345 (“poof ”). Segal quote in And Then I Danced: 139

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Traveling the Road to LGBT Equality (Brooklyn: Open Lens/ Akashic Books, 2015), 241 (Segal wrote in 2015 of John’s fame in 2004, the year he met him). 2 Smucker, Beach Boys Matter, 145. 3 David Buckley, “A Life Less Ordinary: The Continued Comeback of the Queen Mum of Pop,” Mojo, October 12, 2006.

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Also available in the series

1. Dusty Springfield’s Dusty in Memphis by Warren Zanes 2. Love’s Forever Changes by Andrew Hultkrans 3. Neil Young’s Harvest by Sam Inglis 4. The Kinks’ The Kinks Are the Village Green Preservation Society by Andy Miller 5. The Smiths’ Meat Is Murder by Joe Pernice 6. Pink Floyd’s The Piper at the Gates of Dawn by John Cavanagh 7. ABBA’s ABBA Gold: Greatest Hits by Elisabeth Vincentelli 8. The Jimi Hendrix Experience’s Electric Ladyland by John Perry 9. Joy Division’s Unknown Pleasures by Chris Ott 10. Prince’s Sign “☮” the Times by Michaelangelo Matos

11. The Velvet Underground’s The Velvet Underground & Nico by Joe Harvard 12. The Beatles’ Let It Be by Steve Matteo 13. James Brown’s Live at the Apollo by Douglas Wolk 14. Jethro Tull’s Aqualung by Allan Moore 15. Radiohead’s OK Computer by Dai Griffiths 16. The Replacements’ Let It Be by Colin Meloy 17. Led Zeppelin’s Led Zeppelin IV by Erik Davis 18. The Rolling Stones’ Exile on Main St. by Bill Janovitz 19. The Beach Boys’ Pet Sounds by Jim Fusilli 20. Ramones’ Ramones by Nicholas Rombes 21. Elvis Costello’s Armed Forces by Franklin Bruno 22. R.E.M.’s Murmur by J. Niimi

A lso available in the series

23. Jeff Buckley’s Grace by Daphne Brooks 24. DJ Shadow’s Endtroducing . . . by Eliot Wilder 25. MC5’s Kick Out the Jams by Don McLeese 26. David Bowie’s Low by Hugo Wilcken 27. Bruce Springsteen’s Born in the U.S.A. by Geoffrey Himes 28. The Band’s Music from Big Pink by John Niven 29. Neutral Milk Hotel’s In the Aeroplane over the Sea by Kim Cooper 30. Beastie Boys’ Paul’s Boutique by Dan Le Roy 31. Pixies’ Doolittle by Ben Sisario 32. Sly and the Family Stone’s There’s a Riot Goin’ On by Miles Marshall Lewis 33. The Stone Roses’ The Stone Roses by Alex Green 34. Nirvana’s In Utero by Gillian G. Gaar 35. Bob Dylan’s Highway 61 Revisited by Mark Polizzotti 36. My Bloody Valentine’s Loveless by Mike McGonigal 37. The Who’s The Who Sell Out by John Dougan 38. Guided by Voices’ Bee Thousand by Marc Woodworth 39. Sonic Youth’s Daydream Nation by Matthew Stearns

40. Joni Mitchell’s Court and Spark by Sean Nelson 41. Guns N’ Roses’ Use Your Illusion I and II by Eric Weisbard 42. Stevie Wonder’s Songs in the Key of Life by Zeth Lundy 43. The Byrds’ The Notorious Byrd Brothers by Ric Menck 44. Captain Beefheart’s Trout Mask Replica by Kevin Courrier 45. Minutemen’s Double Nickels on the Dime by Michael T. Fournier 46. Steely Dan’s Aja by Don Breithaupt 47. A Tribe Called Quest’s People’s Instinctive Travels and the Paths of Rhythm by Shawn Taylor 48. PJ Harvey’s Rid of Me by Kate Schatz 49. U2’s Achtung Baby by Stephen Catanzarite 50. Belle & Sebastian’s If You’re Feeling Sinister by Scott Plagenhoef 51. Nick Drake’s Pink Moon by Amanda Petrusich 52. Celine Dion’s Let’s Talk About Love by Carl Wilson 53. Tom Waits’ Swordfishtrombones by David Smay 54. Throbbing Gristle’s 20 Jazz Funk Greats by Drew Daniel

142

A lso available in the series

55. Patti Smith’s Horses by Philip Shaw 56. Black Sabbath’s Master of Reality by John Darnielle 57. Slayer’s Reign in Blood by D.X. Ferris 58. Richard and Linda Thompson’s Shoot Out the Lights by Hayden Childs 59. The Afghan Whigs’ Gentlemen by Bob Gendron 60. The Pogues’ Rum, Sodomy, and the Lash by Jeffery T. Roesgen 61. The Flying Burrito Brothers’ The Gilded Palace of Sin by Bob Proehl 62. Wire’s Pink Flag by Wilson Neate 63. Elliott Smith’s XO by Mathew Lemay 64. Nas’ Illmatic by Matthew Gasteier 65. Big Star’s Radio City by Bruce Eaton 66. Madness’ One Step Beyond . . . by Terry Edwards 67. Brian Eno’s Another Green World by Geeta Dayal 68. The Flaming Lips’ Zaireeka by Mark Richardson 69. The Magnetic Fields’ 69 Love Songs by LD Beghtol 70. Israel Kamakawiwo’ole’s Facing Future by Dan Kois 71. Public Enemy’s It Takes a Nation of Millions to Hold

72. 73. 74. 75. 76. 77. 78. 79. 80. 81. 82. 83. 84. 85. 86. 87.

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Us Back by Christopher R. Weingarten Pavement’s Wowee Zowee by Bryan Charles AC/DC’s Highway to Hell by Joe Bonomo Van Dyke Parks’s Song Cycle by Richard Henderson Slint’s Spiderland by Scott Tennent Radiohead’s Kid A by Marvin Lin Fleetwood Mac’s Tusk by Rob Trucks Nine Inch Nails’ Pretty Hate Machine by Daphne Carr Ween’s Chocolate and Cheese by Hank Shteamer Johnny Cash’s American Recordings by Tony Tost The Rolling Stones’ Some Girls by Cyrus Patell Dinosaur Jr.’s You’re Living All Over Me by Nick Attfield Television’s Marquee Moon by Bryan Waterman Aretha Franklin’s Amazing Grace by Aaron Cohen Portishead’s Dummy by RJ Wheaton Talking Heads’ Fear of Music by Jonathan Lethem Serge Gainsbourg’s Histoire de Melody Nelson by Darran Anderson

A lso available in the series

88. They Might Be Giants’ Flood by S. Alexander Reed and Elizabeth Sandifer 89. Andrew W.K.’s I Get Wet by Phillip Crandall 90. Aphex Twin’s Selected Ambient Works Volume II by Marc Weidenbaum 91. Gang of Four’s Entertainment by Kevin J.H. Dettmar 92. Richard Hell and the Voidoids’ Blank Generation by Pete Astor 93. J Dilla’s Donuts by Jordan Ferguson 94. The Beach Boys’ Smile by Luis Sanchez 95. Oasis’ Definitely Maybe by Alex Niven 96. Liz Phair’s Exile in Guyville by Gina Arnold 97. Kanye West’s My Beautiful Dark Twisted Fantasy by Kirk Walker Graves 98. Danger Mouse’s The Grey Album by Charles Fairchild 99. Sigur Rós’s () by Ethan Hayden 100. Michael Jackson’s Dangerous by Susan Fast 101. Can’s Tago Mago by Alan Warner 102. Bobbie Gentry’s Ode to Billie Joe by Tara Murtha 103. Hole’s Live Through This by Anwen Crawford

104. Devo’s Freedom of Choice by Evie Nagy 105. Dead Kennedys’ Fresh Fruit for Rotting Vegetables by Michael Stewart Foley 106. Koji Kondo’s Super Mario Bros. by Andrew Schartmann 107. Beat Happening’s Beat Happening by Bryan C. Parker 108. Metallica’s Metallica by David Masciotra 109. Phish’s A Live One by Walter Holland 110. Miles Davis’ Bitches Brew by George Grella Jr. 111. Blondie’s Parallel Lines by Kembrew McLeod 112. Grateful Dead’s Workingman’s Dead by Buzz Poole 113. New Kids On The Block’s Hangin’ Tough by Rebecca Wallwork 114. The Geto Boys’ The Geto Boys by Rolf Potts 115. Sleater-Kinney’s Dig Me Out by Jovana Babovic 116. LCD Soundsystem’s Sound of Silver by Ryan Leas 117. Donny Hathaway’s Donny Hathaway Live by Emily J. Lordi 118. The Jesus and Mary Chain’s Psychocandy by Paula Mejia 119. The Modern Lovers’ The Modern Lovers by Sean L. Maloney

144

A lso available in the series

120. Angelo Badalamenti’s Soundtrack from Twin Peaks by Clare Nina Norelli 121. Young Marble Giants’ Colossal Youth by Michael Blair and Joe Bucciero 122. The Pharcyde’s Bizarre Ride II the Pharcyde by Andrew Barker 123. Arcade Fire’s The Suburbs by Eric Eidelstein 124. Bob Mould’s Workbook by Walter Biggins and Daniel Couch 125. Camp Lo’s Uptown Saturday Night by Patrick Rivers and Will Fulton 126. The Raincoats’ The Raincoats by Jenn Pelly 127. Björk’s Homogenic by Emily Mackay 128. Merle Haggard’s Okie from Muskogee by Rachel Lee Rubin 129. Fugazi’s In on the Kill Taker by Joe Gross 130. Jawbreaker’s 24 Hour Revenge Therapy by Ronen Givony 131. Lou Reed’s Transformer by Ezra Furman

132. Siouxsie and the Banshees’ Peepshow by Samantha Bennett 133. Drive-By Truckers’ Southern Rock Opera by Rien Fertel 134. dc Talk’s Jesus Freak by Will Stockton and D. Gilson 135. Tori Amos’s Boys for Pele by Amy Gentry 136. Odetta’s One Grain of Sand by Matthew Frye Jacobson 137. Manic Street Preachers’ The Holy Bible by David Evans 138. The Shangri-Las’ Golden Hits of the Shangri-Las by Ada Wolin 139. Tom Petty’s Southern Accents by Michael Washburn 140. Massive Attack’s Blue Lines by Ian Bourland 141. Wendy Carlos’s Switched-On Bach by Roshanak Kheshti 142. The Wild Tchoupitoulas’ The Wild Tchoupitoulas by Bryan Wagner 143. David Bowie’s Diamond Dogs by Glenn Hendler 144. D’Angelo’s Voodoo by Faith A. Pennick 145. Judy Garland’s Judy at Carnegie Hall by Manuel Betancourt

145

146