My parents repeatedly played Too Low For Zero in our car during the 80s, so Elton John reminds me vividly of my childhood. But I’ve always been mystified by his stratospheric fame. He has none of the otherworldly allure of Bowie, or the seedy, simian charisma of Jagger – he comes across as a fat little bespectacled geek plonked on his piano stool, hammering away at the keys, a strangely removed on-stage presence. There’s a distinct lack of sex appeal, which I always assumed is central to building a mass following in the erotic cult that is rock music. In interviews, he presents as dry and matter of fact. Who finds this guy compelling, for what reasons, and how has he sold so many records? As a kid, I just liked the songs themselves and, when I grew up a bit, I was fascinated by his partnership with Bernie Taupin because, as a teenager, I was more interested in writing lyrics than music. But this only reinforced my impression of Elton John as an empty cipher, putting music to someone else’s words, but somehow not fully present in the songs. A thoroughly weird package, overall.
And yet, if I had to make a list of my fifty favourite songs, maybe three or four of them are by Elton John. Perhaps therein lies the explanation – he’s a musician first and foremost, and his mass appeal is based on his musical craft, and maybe to some extent on Taupin’s lyrics. That said, I’d never really got into an album of his – I liked the singles but even Too Low For Zero fizzled out after “Crystal.” Goodbye Yellow Brick Road is apparently considered his magnum opus, a gargantuan double album released at the height of his fame in the early 70s and which sold a gazillion copies. And so, on my journey through the annals of rock music, it was the obvious choice for a review.
Taupin once described this as a ‘concept album’ which, in my opinion, invests it with an undue thematic coherence. Certainly, though, a lot of the songs are about success and celebrity, how appealing and how disillusioning fame can be. By the time Goodbye Yellow Brick Road was released, Elton John was arguably the biggest pop-rock artist in the world. Many British acts strived for years to crack America and never pulled it off – T. Rex, the Smiths, Oasis, Robbie Williams – but Elton John did it seemingly by accident and, indeed, apparently made it in the US before he was universally celebrated in the UK, a most unorthodox trajectory. But judging by the songs on this album, Bernard, at least, apparently had mixed feelings about their newfound celebrity. On the one hand, the beautiful and soulful title track is obviously about Taupin wanting to depart from the path of fame and return to his provincial, pastoral roots in rural Lincolnshire. But on the other, “This Song Has No Title” describes an aspirational young man who longs for fame and the “wild side of life” – that is, the deep, dark, illicit pleasures of celebrity and the city after growing up in the stultifying sticks.
In a roundabout way, fame is also the subject of the bizarre, erratic “Bennie and the Jets”, a Ziggy Stardust-style depiction of a fictional over-the-top glam rock band at the height of the twinkling, dingy decadence of the early 70s. It remains incomprehensible to me that the stabbing, staccato-like pianos and demented synths of this weird number landed Elton John a massive US radio hit. But “Bennie and the Jets” is only one of many songs on Goodbye Yellow Brick Road which approach the psychologically unhinging problematique of fame through the medium of character study. The other notable example is, of course, “Candle in the Wind.” I have only limited sympathy for Marilyn Monroe – yes, they set her on a treadmill and made her change her name but, presumably, she wanted to be famous, she could’ve backed out of it, so tough cookies if there turned out to be some downsides. Maybe the compulsive, narcissistic need to be famous, rather than the system that exploited such errant impulses, is what begs exploration. That said, “Candle in the Wind” is also about our cultural preoccupation with dying young and beautiful, the “27 Club” that has a particular resonance in rock music. “The Ballad of Danny Bailey” is about the same thing – the youthful ruffian with a heart of gold, driven to crime by poverty, taken too soon by “some punk with a shotgun.” Young, famous, beautiful, pure of heart, and dead as a door nail because of the machinations of the corrupt establishment; this was apparently what fascinated Taupin, who was around 20 years old at the time that he wrote these lyrics.
In fact, Goodbye Yellow Brick Road is flushed from start to finish with the ghosts of Taupin’s childhood, spent on a rural farmstead in the north of England during the 1950s. It can’t be a coincidence that these ghosts revisited him as he stood on the cusp of mega stardom. “Roy Rogers” is a wistful tribute to television cowboys, and to the fantasy world in which an isolated young Bernard sought refuge. Significantly, though, it’s written from the perspective of an adult Taupin, evidently trying to reconnect with his youth. This sentiment is there again on “Saturday Night’s Alright (For Fighting)”, with its slashing glam rock guitars narrating a violent and drunken night out on the town in the north of England. Actually, its lyrics remain poignant, as anyone who’s recently been out in Manchester or Newcastle knows all too well. But what’s more intriguing is that Taupin felt compelled to tackle these youthful experiences in his lyrics at this precise point in his life, as he stood uncertainly on the precipice of all-conquering fame. Clearly he wasn’t sure whether to take a step forward or a step back.
In retrospect, if Bernie and Elton had known about the extent of their coming fame and how the world would change, there are several songs on Goodbye Yellow Brick Road that they might have thought twice about recording. “Jamaica Jerk Off” makes for an uncomfortable listen. Nominally, it’s about going to Jamaica and “having a good time.” But the fact is, it’s a send up of reggae, written after a disastrous attempt to record the album in Kingston which the band quickly cut short when the apparent limitations of the crew and the hostility of the locals became evident. It sounds like a dig and, from the perspective of 2023, a politically rather problematic one. Another sneering and ungenerous portrait of a now sacred demographic comes on “Social Disease”, a snarky portrayal of the workshy underclass which, in today’s dogmatically “progressive” climate, might leave Elton and Bernie with some explaining to do if summoned to one of the Labour Party’s Henry VIII-style Star Chambers.
But these clumsy stampedes through sensitive subjects pale in comparison to the three positively misogynistic songs which comprise side 3 of Goodbye Yellow Brick Road. They might still just about get away with the languid ballad “Sweet Painted Lady”, an unsentimental portrayal of prostitutes in port towns, where immoral pleasures await the myriad drunken sailors “like a rat in a drain”. But “Dirty Little Girl” and “All The Girls Love Alice” would surely get their asses Cancelled in 2023. The former is a rather mean-spirited song about a destitute, unwashed, down on her luck street waif, possibly a drug addict and prostitute, who Taupin basically threatens to shoot if she trespasses on his property. The latter, meanwhile, is a superb, swaggering, glammy rocker with unfortunate lyrics about a rich school girl whose mummy issues drive her to provide lesbian sexual favours and who, in the end, is found dead in the subway. There’s minimal sympathy for and, in fact, rather an abundance of hostility toward these wretched female characters, all of whom are sexually promiscuous in contrast to the saintly Norma Jean. It would be too obvious to mention the Madonna / Whore complex that runs throughout the lyrics of much 60s and 70s rock music but, well, you don’t need to be Sigmund Freud to notice it.
Freud would probably be equally unsurprised by Taupin’s rather tumultuous personal life, which provides the subject for the remaining songs on Goodbye Yellow Brick Road. “Funeral For a Friend / Love Lies Bleeding” is a monumental and thoroughly enjoyable slice of puffed up 70s glam rock over-indulgence, but it annoys me, because it should be formally split into two songs. What if I just want to listen to “Love Lies Bleeding” without sitting through the five minute dirge that comes before it? Admittedly, that doesn’t happen often; I almost always have time for the Clockwork Orange-style synths and swooping, overblown hilarity of “Funeral For a Friend” (which friend, by the way? Flash Gordon?) But sometimes I just want to go straight to the snarling stomp of “Love Lies Bleeding”, in which Bernie gets all worked up about being left by his ex-wife. I can’t imagine why that happened.
His moaning persists on “I’ve Seen That Movie Too”, a sulky ballad that’s so downbeat and defeated that it’s almost amusing, like Frank Drebin in the blues bar after Priscilla Presley leaves him in the Naked Gun. The lyrics are laced with references to the cinema, thereby marrying the album’s leitmotif of fame and celebrity with the intricacies of Bernie’s personal life, and perhaps also indicating a disturbing inability to recognise where fantasy ended and reality began – probably typical of someone in the early stages of being consumed by the Fame Monster. He’s equally charming on the album’s elegant closer, “Harmony”, in which he comes face to face with, presumably, the guilty party of “Love Lies Bleeding” and “I’ve Seen That Movie Too”, calls her a “spoiled child,” but still insists that she’s lucky to know him.
So how does the balance sheet look, in the end? Mean-spirited and resentful “love” songs; acerbic portrayals of prostitutes, lesbians, the poor, Jamaicans, and down-on-their-luck street waifs; a few fantastical retreats into the Wild West of the 1950s; and some sympathetic portrayals of criminals and dead movie stars. Maybe the only genuinely wholesome song on the record is “Grey Seal”, with its amazing, trippy, spacey chorus and mysterious lyrics about a wise but hard-nosed entity that is committed to the Reality Principle in a world of illusions. Maybe the Grey Seal is his mother, which would render this song as yet another insight into Bernie’s tumultuous unconscious. And indeed, it’s hard not to come away from Goodbye Yellow Brick Road with the impression that he was a bit of a twat, who used the musically ingenious but strangely vacant Elton as a conduit for unleashing his bad-tempered and sometimes misanthropic screeds upon the world. However politically problematic some of these may appear from the vantage point of 2023, I still find this to be a fascinating constellation, and conducive to some of the best rock music of the 70s. Put it this way; it’s a double album and I hardly skip any of it.
8/10
Highlights: “Funeral for a Friend / Love Lies Bleeding”, “Goodbye Yellow Brick Road”, “Saturday Night’s Alright (For Fighting)”