It’s funny how a movie can change our memories. Before the 2000 movie Almost Famous, a fictionalised version of Cameron Crowe’s experiences as a rock journalist in the 1970s, Elton John was really not cool. It had only been a couple of years beforehand, after all, that the new version of ‘Candle In The Wind’ memorialising Princess Diana had been omnipresent. And it’s not like Diana song made anyone suddenly realise he was lame. Before that, it was his tunes off The Lion King – ‘Can You Feel The Love Tonight?’ – that made you think he was lame. And, well, the late 70s and 80s weren’t kind to the idea that Elton could possibly be cool/musically worthwhile; the likes of ‘Sacrifice’ and ‘Nikita’ were often pretty painful to listen to unless you have a love of cheese. (NB. I have a love of cheese).
But now your experience of Elton John has now been forever altered. It’s all because of that famous scene towards the end of Almost Famous, where the main characters in the movie sit glumly in the tour bus, until they are cheered up, reminded of why they’re all there, when they spontaneously sing along to Elton’s ‘Tiny Dancer’, from his 1971 album Madman Across The Water. Hearing ‘Tiny Dancer’, at the time, was to hear your preconceptions about Elton challenged – it was a song that had a fair measure of dignity and quietude to it, which didn’t pander and wallow in cheesiness the way that, say, ‘Candle In The Wind ‘98’ or ‘Sacrifice’ did. And you didn’t have to watch the movie for the song to sink into your consciousness. ‘Tiny Dancer’ – which was never a hit – suddenly became a staple of Elton’s various greatest hits compilations. Fans seeing Elton live now saw it as a highlight of the set. You began to hear it regularly on classic hits solid gold radio stations. ‘Life On Mars?’ by David Bowie offers a similar tale of an unjustly neglected early-70s gem getting a new lease of life because of the power of film/TV.
So, after Almost Famous, a bunch of people (like me) realised that Elton John’s music wasn’t always so cheesy and smarmy. In fact, when Elton first emerged in the early 1970s, he came across as a serious singer-songwriter along the lines of Van Morrison or Carole King. When music critic Lester Bangs (played in Almost Famous by Philip Seymour Hoffmann) mentions Elton in his notorious 1971 essay ‘James Taylor Marked For Death’, he describes his music as ‘I-Rock’ – arguing that his music is ponderous, over-serious, self-obsessed bullshit (similar charges are levelled these days at Bright Eyes or Sufjan Stevens). It wasn’t until 1973 or so that Elton’s music and stage persona started to get real cheesy/kitschy/outlandish – that’s when the likes of ‘Crocodile Rock’ started appearing.
I do disagree with Bangs about early Elton, though. Unlike, say, James Taylor, Elton’s music often has a groove to it, and his lyrics are rarely self-obsessed, largely because they’re a) pretty cryptic at the best of times and b) written by someone else. Elton’s lyrics, in his early period, are fixated with the idea of America, even though he and Bernie Taupin only really know America from watching it on TV. He’s musically also fixated with The Band (see ‘The Weight’), a bunch of Canadians who were similarly fixated on America. But because he’s a gay English piano-player rather than a Canadian who’s seen the world touring with Dylan, he ends up sounding like his own thing.
‘Take Me To The Pilot’ (from his self-titled 1970 album) is as good an illustration of Elton’s early work as anything else. This is not your mother’s Elton John. In 1970, Elton was shy, unsure of who he was, years away from wearing wigs and silly glasses on stage. He hadn’t quite come to believe he was a great vocalist yet, and he didn’t yet have a cocaine habit he needed to fund with hit singles. So there’s a certain naturalness to ‘Take Me To The Pilot’ that started to get lost a few years later on.
Not that the song sounds like uncertainty and shyness; by 1970, Elton knew exactly what he was doing; he just didn’t realise it yet. There’s a soulful fury to Elton’s vocals here when he sings ‘I’m on trial and I’m here in your prison’ in the first verse, and a funkiness to the rhythms of his piano playing. And the way the first verse builds up from just Elton and a piano, to Elton, piano and strings, before eventually exploding in a wash of soulful female backing vocals is something just a tiny bit magical. And then, bam! The band kicks in, and suddenly it’s down home funk time, the band trying to be The Band. Elton’s doing his best Ray Charles impression here, especially when, towards the end, he falsetto coos “take me, take me” as the backing singers do the ‘na na na’s. And seeing as whole genres have been more or less about doing Ray Charles impressions (e.g., soul and funk), this is no bad thing.
It may well be that upcoming years will be unkind to your current favourite artists, the way they were unkind to Elton. They were pretty unkind to plenty of the bands I grew up with as a teenager – for example, being a Smashing Pumpkins fan is pretty embarrassing these days, considering Billy Corgan’s been more or less a disaster zone since 2005 (and that’s being charitable). Plenty of people who were fans of Kings of Leon in their early more-rockin’ days ended up disappointed by the likes of ‘Use Somebody’. That new band you love, the one with the cool songs? In 10 years, they may well be making music you despise. The record industry is set up that way these days – publicity budgets and recording budgets in standard contracts often increase with each album, meaning that the band is pressured to become more and more pandering and mainstream with every album. And if they don’t, they get pushed off the treadmill. Sometimes all this makes it hard to hear the early stuff without being reminded of the musical choices you don’t like in the later, more mainstream stuff. So I can’t blame you if you listen to ‘Take Me To The Pilot’ and still mostly hear cheese. But you should know that it wasn’t always about the cheese.
Elton John – ‘Take Me To The Pilot’
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