Elton John

Tag: 1970s

  • A Single Man in Moscow: Elton John’s 1979 Soviet Tour

    In May 1979, at a low commercial ebb and midway through the strangest stretch of his career, Elton John did something no amount of chart success could have arranged: he took a rock show into the Soviet Union. A handful of dates in Leningrad (now St Petersburg) and Moscow made him one of the first major Western rock performers to play behind the Iron Curtain — a distinction usually shared in the telling with Cliff Richard’s 1976 visit and Boney M’s 1978 appearance, each of which occupied a different corner of “first.”

    Two Men and a Lot of Percussion

    There was no band. The shows were performed as a duo with percussionist Ray Cooper — the first half solo at the piano, the second half joined by Cooper’s arsenal of drums, tambourines and theatrical intensity. The format was partly practical and partly aesthetic, and it proved so durable that John and Cooper revived the two-man show repeatedly over the following decades. Strip away the feathers and the light rig, the format argued, and the songs stand up on their own.

    What We Know, and What Is Folklore

    • Documented: the tour took place in May 1979, with runs in Leningrad and Moscow; audiences were partly allocated to officials, with ordinary fans famously more animated at the back of the halls than the dignitaries at the front.
    • Documented: the trip was filmed, surviving as the documentary To Russia… with Elton.
    • Reported consistently, treated here as anecdote: Soviet authorities are said to have discouraged the performance of “Back in the U.S.S.R.” — the Beatles cover he had been playing — and accounts differ on exactly what was agreed and what was played on which night. We flag it rather than assert a definitive version.

    1979 found him out of fashion at home and historic abroad. Sometimes the career low is where the interesting decisions get made.

    Rocket Man Archive — editorial

    The Soviet dates reframed him at exactly the moment the hits had cooled: not a fading glam act, but a serious musician doing something genuinely unprecedented for his scale of fame. The stripped format he built for those halls resurfaced on and off for forty years — a reminder that the most theatrical performer of the 1970s never actually needed the theatre. More landmark shows here.

  • Captain Fantastic: The First Album Ever to Debut at Number One

    Chart records get broken constantly; chart firsts happen once. In June 1975, Captain Fantastic and the Brown Dirt Cowboy became the first album in the history of the Billboard 200 to enter the chart at number one. Months later, Rock of the Westies did it again — meaning that for a while, the only two albums ever to debut at the top belonged to the same artist, released in the same year.

    An Autobiography in Ten Songs

    The commercial milestone tends to bury the more interesting fact: this is the most personal record in the catalogue. Bernie Taupin wrote the album as a chronological memoir of the pair’s lean years — 1967 to 1970, the Dick James staff-writer era, the bunk beds at Northwood Hills, the self-doubt before the Troubadour changed everything. “Captain Fantastic” is John; the “Brown Dirt Cowboy” is Taupin, the farm boy from Lincolnshire. The lyrics were written in sequence, and John composed the music in order too — reportedly much of it on a transatlantic crossing aboard the SS France in 1974.

    Its centrepiece, “Someone Saved My Life Tonight,” recounts — in Taupin’s words, not ours — the 1968 crisis in which John, engaged to be married and miserable, was talked out of the engagement and, by his own later telling, out of a genuine low point. It is as close as the songbook gets to a diary entry.

    The Details Collectors Care About

    • The cover is a dense allegorical illustration by Alan Aldridge, the artist behind much classic 1960s–70s British album and book art. Fans still mine it for hidden references.
    • One single. Only “Someone Saved My Life Tonight” was released as a single from the album — a nearly seven-minute ballad, released essentially uncut. The confidence of that decision says everything about his standing in 1975.
    • The farewell to the band. It was the last album of the era with the classic Dee Murray–Nigel Olsson rhythm section before the mid-70s lineup change; both were let go shortly after its completion, a decision long debated among fans.
    • The sequel. Thirty-one years later, The Captain & the Kid (2006) picked the story up from 1975 and carried it forward — same two characters, same division of labour.

    Where does it rank? Among fans it trades places with Goodbye Yellow Brick Road and Tumbleweed Connection depending on whether you value scale, songcraft or candour. Our view: it is the album where the partnership explained itself, and that makes it essential regardless of ranking. See the full discography by era.

  • Goodbye Yellow Brick Road: Anatomy of a Double Album

    Every major artist has one album that becomes shorthand for the whole career. For Elton John it is Goodbye Yellow Brick Road, released in October 1973 — a seventeen-track double album written and recorded at a pace that would be considered reckless today, and which topped the charts on both sides of the Atlantic.

    The Jamaica Detour

    The album was originally meant to be recorded in Kingston, Jamaica. The sessions there collapsed almost immediately — equipment problems and an unworkable studio situation — and the operation relocated to a familiar base: the Château d’Hérouville in France, where Honky Château and Don’t Shoot Me had been made. Once installed, the band worked at extraordinary speed. The bulk of the album was tracked in roughly two weeks, with John famously writing melodies to Taupin’s lyric sheets in minutes, at the piano, over breakfast.

    FactDetail
    ReleasedOctober 1973 (DJM/MCA)
    ProducerGus Dudgeon
    FormatDouble LP, 17 tracks
    ChartsNumber one album in both the UK and US
    Key singles“Goodbye Yellow Brick Road,” “Saturday Night’s Alright for Fighting,” “Bennie and the Jets,” “Candle in the Wind”

    Why a Double Album Holds Together

    Double albums usually sag. This one doesn’t, and the reason is range under discipline. It opens with the eleven-minute “Funeral for a Friend / Love Lies Bleeding” — a synthesizer overture crashing into hard rock — then pivots to the elegy of “Candle in the Wind,” the R&B strut of “Bennie and the Jets,” and the wistful title track, all within side one and the top of side two. Glam, balladry, vaudeville, hard rock and cinema-scale melancholy each get their turn, but Gus Dudgeon’s production keeps a single sonic signature over all of it: the piano forward, Davey Johnstone’s guitars layered wide, and those stacked Beach Boys-style backing vocals from Johnstone, Dee Murray and Nigel Olsson.

    Seventeen tracks, two weeks, no wasted sides. It is the sound of a band at the exact centre of its powers.

    Rocket Man Archive — editorial

    The Long Shadow

    The album has never really left. “Candle in the Wind” was rewritten in 1997 as the Diana tribute that became the best-selling chart single of all time. The title track gave the farewell tour its name and its closing number. And the record remains the standard first recommendation for new listeners — not because it is safe, but because it contains the entire range of what he could do, pressed into one object. See where it sits in the full discography.

  • The Troubadour, August 1970: The Six Nights That Made Elton John

    Careers rarely turn on a single booking. Elton John’s did. In late August 1970, the 23-year-old arrived in Los Angeles for a residency at the Troubadour, Doug Weston’s small club on Santa Monica Boulevard, with one modestly performing album in the American market and no reputation to speak of. He left with the beginnings of one of the biggest careers in popular music.

    The Setup

    The Elton John album — the one with “Your Song” — had presented him to the world as a hushed, orchestral singer-songwriter. What walked on stage at the Troubadour was something else entirely: a trio, with Dee Murray on bass and Nigel Olsson on drums, playing loud, physical, gospel-driven rock and roll. At various points he played handstands on the keyboard and kicked the piano stool away, Jerry Lee Lewis style. The gap between expectation and delivery is precisely what made the shows legendary.

    Robert Hilburn’s rave in the Los Angeles Times — declaring, in substance, that a major new star had arrived — is routinely cited as one of the most career-altering reviews in rock history. We paraphrase rather than quote it at length, but its effect is a matter of record: industry attention arrived overnight.

    Who Was in the Room

    • Accounts of the opening night consistently place significant industry and artist names in the audience — Quincy Jones and members of the LA singer-songwriter circle among those most often cited.
    • Neil Diamond, then a Troubadour regular, introduced the opening night — one of the better-documented details of the week.
    • The residency ran across multiple nights, giving word of mouth time to compound. By the final shows, the queue was the story.

    A caution worth stating plainly: the Troubadour week is one of the most mythologised events in rock history, and attendance claims have inflated over fifty years of retelling. We list only the names that appear consistently across credible accounts, and we treat everything else as folklore.

    Why It Worked

    Three things converged. The songs were already exceptional — the Elton John album was full of them. The performance style was a genuine shock, in a scene dominated by seated, earnest acoustic acts. And the timing was perfect: American rock was between eras, and an artist who could deliver singer-songwriter interiority and rock-and-roll spectacle in the same set filled a gap nobody had named yet. Fifty-three years later, the farewell tour ended in a stadium. It started in a room that held about 300 people. More on the live history here.