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Thursday, Nov 26, 2009
John followed these estimable works with a gold-plated suces d'estime, the double album "Goodbye Yellow Brick Road," which took his pop expositions to both fanciful and quite moving levels. It is at once bombastic and overwhelming and yet also dotted with unexpected twists and turns and melodic delights. It's not as picaresque as the White Album -- John and his collaborators are merely high pop artists, not geniuses -- and it lacks the production vision of something like the Rolling Stones' "Exile on Main St." or Fleetwood Mac's "Tusk." That said, "Goodbye Yellow Brick Road" still swept the kids off their feet with track after track of surprising pop virtuosity.
Even after the lugubrious but powerful "Funeral For a Friend (Love Lies Bleeding)," the refreshingly unironic "Candle in the Wind," the rocking "Saturday Night's Alright for Fighting," the giddily incomprehensible "Grey Seal," and the surprisingly melodic title song, there is more -- tacked on at the end is arguably Taupin and John's simplest and prettiest song, the mournful "Harmony," and bursting off the first side (after "Funeral for a Friend" and "Candle in the Wind" and yet trumping them both) is John's greatest pop triumph, a sui generis masterpiece and a sonic marvel laden with falsetto, whistles and crowd rustle called "Bennie and the Jets," which unaccountably became a massive pop and R&B hit and a platinum single, back when that meant something.
The follow-up, "Caribou," is the least attractive work from this period, despite the powerful ballad "Don't Let The Sun Go Down on Me." John finally capped this productive era with an odd album. "Captain Fantastic and the Brown Dirt Cowboy" was a surprisingly sweet and confessional dual autobiography in which he and a suddenly straightforward Taupin recreated their first years together. "I wrote such childish words for you," Taupin tells his partner and their audience; looking back, he is right (too many people praise Taupin for his unconventionality, which is different from being good), but that only underscores the fact that the more mature reminiscences here represent laudable growth. On this album, too, there are surprises, most particularly the overwhelming and emotional "Someone Saved My Life Tonight," a bald confessional that told the story of a brush with marriage John had during his and Taupin's early years together.
It is, as a whole, overly mannered but audacious nonetheless, and its shocking commercial success -- "Captain Fantastic" debuted at No. 1 on the charts and stayed there, a feat unheard of in those days -- solidified his stardom.
John then did what many stars like him have done -- delivered a few more albums of fairly superior but relatively uninspired product. "Blue Moves," is a stark and emotional but uninvolving double album and after that ... well ... Even if, like me, you find his latter career dotted with tracks that range from the enjoyable ("Mama Can't Buy You Love," "Empty Garden") to the oddly likable ("I Guess That's Why They Call It the Blues," "I'm Still Standing"), it's hard to get really worked up about them.
As John's artistic life unfolded in this way, he lived like a surprised but willing star. To compensate for his portly appearance and studio tendency toward the soft, his stage show had evolved into a multi-costume, well-lit rock extravaganza, and he became a media darling with his fondness for his mother and his wholesome splendor -- a Liberace for the teen set.
Taupin's muse seemed unconcerned with what society demanded -- he could be cheerfully ribald, nasty, flippant -- but his lyrics and the melodies John set them to came in both instances from good souls with unwavering artistic integrity. The pair would never deliberately say something to offend people, true, but if they ever did offend people one could be sure they would never back down.
In the meantime, John was living with his manager -- a sometimes dictatorial martinet named John Reid. Let's see, a guy who traveled with his mom and shared an apartment with a special male friend. Could he be gay? Nah! It wasn't until a sensational Rolling Stone cover story in 1975 that he dropped the news, saying that he was "bisexual." The word seemed a euphemism at the time, but John periodically had female relationships and abruptly married a woman named Renate Blauel in 1984.
Yet no one -- aside from rival fans of the British soccer team he bought -- paid much attention. Soon came "Captain Fantastic" and a greatest hits collection that would become one of the biggest-selling albums of all time, but behind the scenes, he was beginning to drift. The quality of his albums tanked, whether he was working with Taupin or other lyricists. I saw him in the early 1980s at a small theater; he was more than plump -- bloated, really -- and, clad in what looked like blue silk pajamas, he padded around the stage like a drugged bear.
The '80s became a lost decade of pill and cocaine addiction, a fight against bulimia, and financial profligacy. The outside world intruded again and again -- there was a debilitating court fight against his original song publisher, Dick James Music, spearheaded by the relentless Reid, by then his ex-lover. In the late-1980s, he was dragged into an extraordinary, unprecedented years-long range war with the Sun, Britain's most merciless tabloid. His lawyers filed nearly two-dozen libel suits against the paper for its flame-throwing reports on everything from the star's alleged orgies with young boys to charges that he'd abused his guard dogs. But he persevered, and eventually won 1 million pounds, court costs and a front-page apology from the paper, which admitted the charges were untrue.
By the 1990s things had settled down. He broke up his professional relationship with Reid, abruptly, in 1998. He then sued his former manager, saying Reid had mishandled his money. Reid went gleefully to court and demonstrated that John was capable of blowing tens of millions of dollars a year. (The most notorious expenditures: $200,000 a year on flowers.)
