Elton John

Tag: live-shows

  • 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.

  • 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.