Mark Bego - Elton John: The Bitch Is Back

I NTRODUCTION - Sir Elton John ..............................................v

PLACE: The Monte Carlo Sporting Club, Monaco
DATE: August 1, 2008

Elton John represents many different things to many different people. To rock & roll devotees, he is the creator of the classic album Goodbye Yellow Brick Road . To English rock musicians who have known him since the early 1960s, he is still chubby Reg Dwight of Watford, England. To film buffs, he is the outrageous Pinball Wizard of Tommy fame. To British subjects and the royal family, he is now Sir Elton John. And, to those close friends whove always known about his gay/bisexual personal life, he is still jokingly known as Sharon. But as crazy and outlandish as he can be, it is his pop and rock music that has made the most enduring and lasting impression on the world. Legendary songs spanning five decades such as Crocodile Rock, Your Song, Daniel, Island Girl, Bennie and The Jets, Goodbye Yellow Brick Road, Dont Let the Sun Go Down on Me, The Bitch Is Back, and I Guess Thats Why They Call It the Blues, are all part of Eltons incredibly prolific musical catalogue.

He has sold over 200 million records and CDs worldwide, endured the rise and fall of disco, New Wave, and synthesizer rock, won five Grammy Awards, one Tony Award, and an Academy Award, outlasting enough one-hit-wonders to fill a football stadium. As recently as 2007, Elton was still scoring Top Ten albums

on both sides of the Atlantic. No one has had a musical career quite like the self-proclaimed Captain Fantastic. He has had so many incarnations that he has had to invent dozens of personas to accommodate his many moods, including both male and female pseudonyms for himself. Through it all, whenever someone announces that The Bitch is back, there is no doubt that they are talking about Elton John.

Elton has never been shy about expressing whatever is on his mindno matter how controversial it is at the time. His collaborations with songwriters such as Bernie Taupin, Tim Rice, and Gary Osborne have produced songs about topics that are deeply personal to Elton: Someone Saved My Life Tonight, about his own suicide attempt; Empty Garden, about the death of John Lennon; American Triangle, about the murder of Matthew Sheppard; and The Last Song, about a man dying of AIDS. He recorded a song about his own self-centered behavior (Ego), an ode to his own self-endurance (Im Still Standing), and even a bawdy ballad about having gay sex with a sailor on the top of an amusement park ride (Big Dipper).

In the 1970s, his string of Number One albums, including HonkyChteau (1972), DontShootMe,ImOnlythePianoPlayer (1973), GoodbyeYellowBrickRoad (1973), Caribou (1974), Elton John:GreatestHits (1974), CaptainFantasticandTheBrownDirt Cowboy (1975), and RockoftheWesties (1975) made him one of the most recognizable stars on the planet. His first GreatestHits album spent two months at the top of the American album charts, and his CaptainFantastic album was the first LP ever to enter the Billboard charts at Number One. By the end of the 1970s, Elton John had delivered an astonishing 20 albums and 37 singles.

The hits havent stopped coming for Elton. In his incomparable career he has managed to chart a Top 40 single in England and/or the United States every single year from 1970 to 2005. He has logged seven consecutive Number One albums on the United States charts. Eulogizing Great Britains Princess Diana in 1997, he and Bernie Taupin revamped one of their biggest hits, Candle in the Wind, selling over 37 million copies worldwide. It becamealmost overnightthe biggest-selling single in the history of recorded music, hitting Number One in the U.S.,

England, Germany, France, Australia, and dozens of other countries. According to Billboard magazines 2008 list of the 100 Greatest Artists of all timeson the publications Hot 100 singles charthe is surpassed in hit singles only by Madonna and The Beatles. This makes Elton the top-selling solo male singles artist ever.

In a marketplace which regularly creates disposable pop icons, Elton has not only been able to maintain his global popularity as a rock star, but he has grown and developed his talent into new arenas of expression, including composing the hit musicals TheLionKing Aida , and BillyElliott for Broadway and The West End, scoring film soundtracks, and garnering a whole new generation of fans via his gaudy and bawdy Las Vegas extravaganza TheRedPiano

True, during his five decades as a recording artist, he has suffered temporary slumps in creativity and sags in album sales. From time to time he has fallen out of favor with critics. But through it all, Elton John remains the most remarkably beloved rock and pop artist of rock history.

Meanwhile his personal life has been no less dramatic. Often Sir Elton is portrayed as a tasteful twenty-first George Gershwin. In reality his life more closely parallels that of a modernday Oscar Wilde. Wild, glitzy, boozy, and unconventional, Eltons story is filled with addictions, affairs, bouts with depression, a sexual-identity crisis, bulimia, drunkenness, and a pair of ludicrous suicide attempts.

After years of depression, failed gay love affairs, a masquerade of a marriage to a female recording engineer, and excessive drug use, Elton had a watershed moment in the 1990s when a RollingStone magazine reporter finally squeezed out of him the confession that he was indeed gay. Newly sober and drug-free, the singer found himself speaking frankly and publicly about his sobriety and his sexuality for the first time. He found selfconfidence and a new direction. In 2005, during the global controversy surrounding the legalization of gay marriage, Elton and his longtime boyfriend David Furnish joined in a legal union in England, making him the first major rock star to have been married to both a woman and a man. Always outspoken, Elton has become vastly generous, using his time, his money, and his fame to raise funds to fight AIDS.

Eltons scandal-filled life of rock & roll excesses continues to be both colorful and fascinating. His stylistic versatility, combined with his flamboyant stage shows and outlandish costumes, makes him into a flashy combination of Liberace, John Lennon, Noel Coward, Billy Joel, and Barry Manilow. There is no one quite like Sir Elton John, and this is his story.

It was in Pinner, Middlesex, England, on March 25, 1947, that Reginald Kenneth Dwight was born. His mother, Sheila Harris, and his father, Stanley Dwight, had lived in Pinner since marrying in January of 1945, twelve months before World War II ended. Dwight was a flyer with the Royal Air Forceboth during and after World War II.