Tom Doyle - Captain Fantastic: Elton John’s Stellar Trip Through the ’70s

I F YOU WERE TO TAKE a peek at random entries in his diary, 1969 seemed to have been a fairly humdrum year for Reg Dwight. A moon-faced twenty-one-year-old, going on twenty-two, from the northwest London suburb of Pinner, he cut a vaguely Beatleish figure in his bowl haircut and Lennon-inspired penny round glasses. His pleasures were simple: getting up early on Sunday mornings to play soccer; reading his collections of magazines on World War II and the Old Master painters; going to the cinema and returning home to jot down his thoughts on the films hed seen.

January 17, Sunday: Saw:Lady In Cementgood, Secret Life of An American Wifelousy.

Music, however, was his obsession. Regs poky bedroom in the small flat at 30A Frome Court, Pinner Road, where he lived with his mother, Sheila, and stepfather, Fred, was a virtual record libraryapproximately fourteen hundred singles, three hundred LPs, and one hundred EPs, which he lovingly played and cleaned and cataloged. There was an expression for people like him, who were utterly entranced by the sounds magically emanating from revolving black plastic discs: Its called vinyl in the blood, hed proudly state. His mum laughed and called him an old hoarder. Reg wouldnt ever let anyone borrow any of his records, for fear of them being scratched. He would get annoyed if anyone else even touched them.

To feed his obsession, he helped out, unpaid, at Musicland, a large record shop on the corner of Berwick and Noel streets in Soho, the seedy and thrillingly boho heart of London. Reg would drop in, have a cup of tea, then get behind the counter. Often hed wait there until late in the evening for the deliveries to come in, especially the American imports. In October 68, hed hung around for hours to get his hands on a copy of Jimi Hendrixs head-spinning double LP Electric Ladyland. In April of that year, he stayed on until nine oclock at night in eager anticipation of the arrival of Leonard Cohens stark second album, Songs from a Room.

There was a fetishistic element to Regs record collecting. He much preferred the thicker American cardboard covers to the flimsier British ones. Hed been delighted to discover that Laura Nyros wildly eclectic, piano-driven Eli and the Thirteenth Confession came with a lyric sheet perfumed with scented ink. Hed admit to anyone that when he was a solitary child, records had been his friends, and so they remained.

Sometimes, the outside world wasnt so friendly. In a violent disruption of his unremarkable everyday existence, one night, returning to Pinner from Soho, diffident, bespectacled Reg had been beaten up.

April 12, Saturday: Went into Musicland. Got duffed up on the way home. Went straight to bed.

Ten days later, perhaps not coincidentally, he became the proud owner of a boxy vehicle, which would ferry him around in comparative safety.

April 22, Tuesday: Got home tonight to find that Auntie Win and Mum had bought me a carHillman Husky EstateSuperb!!

In reality, Regs life wasnt as ordinary as it seemed. The year before, hed begun living a strange, parallel existence as Elton John: his stage nameand increasingly exaggerated persona. Stepping out of the shadows of Bluesology, the band in which for three years hed been an enthusiastic, if often teeth-grindingly frustrated, member, hammering away in the corner on his Vox Continental organ, he harbored a strong desirehighly unlikely youd think if you were to take just one look at himto become a pop star. Sometimes this shy and funny individual would suddenly erupt with excitement at the very thought.

Im going to be a star, do you hear me? hed loudly declare, with comic drama, as if assuming the role of a brattish character in a hackneyed rags-to-riches Hollywood biopic. A star!

But stardom was proving agonizingly tough to achieve. He had started off 1969 on a promising high with the release in January of his second single, Lady Samantha, a ghostly heavy rock ballad centered on a sad, spectral female protagonist wafting supernaturally across the hillsides and spooking the locals, as dreamed up by his lyric-writing partner, eighteen-year-old Bernie Taupin. It had been what was termed a turntable hit, pulling in an encouraging number of radio plays, before entirely failing to rouse the interest of the record-buying public.

There was an almost schizophrenic nature to the songs that Bernie and Elton had been writing for the past thirteen months as payroll employees of Dick James Musicthe former on 10 a week, the latter 15, since he was required to sing and play on their demonstration recordings. Half of these songs were in tune with the post-psychedelic, head-in-the-clouds mood of the times, bearing typical Wow, man titles such as A Dandelion Dies in the Wind and Tartan-Colored Lady. The other half were far straighter and more commercial-minded, written with a view to being sold off to chart singers looking for material. These, which the pair invariably viewed as stinkers, were usually intensely lovelorn: Youll Be Sorry to See Me Go, Theres Still Time for Me, When the First Tear Shows.

One song from this latter crop, I Cant Go on Living Without You, a frothy and upbeat pop soul track in the style of Dusty Springfield, was selected in February as a potential UK entry for the Eurovision Song Contest, that annual pancontinental clash of oompah tunes and overwrought ballads. I Cant Go on Living Without You, in competition with five other songs from British writers, was performed by the diminutive Scottish singing sensation Lulu on BBC1 that month and witnessed by a televisual audience of close to twenty million.

It came in sixth out of six in the ensuing postcard ballot. Even more depressing, the winning entry, the gibberish lovey-dovey anthem Boom Bang-a-Bang, went on to scoop the Eurovision prize for Britain. For Elton and Bernie, it was a sign that they were paddling in too-shallow waters. They resolved never again to write such pop pap.

Instead, they threw themselves into the making of what was to become the first Elton John album,