Today is the birthday of flamboyant glam rock songwriter and performer Sir Elton John (b. Reginald Dwight, 1947).
Sir Elton’s career has had at least three major phases.
The first phase was about showmanship and costume and outrageousness and “rumored bisexuality” (that’s as far as anyone would admit in those days). The flamboyant performer almost single-handedly revived piano as a rock and roll instrument (fairly moribund since the days of Fats Domino, Little Richard and Jerry Lee Lewis). It’s seldom used as one any more even today, although it has great potential in that direction. (I suppose people associate it too much with the 1950s. Well, re-invent the damn thing, then. That’s what Elton did!)
His sense of style! On the one hand (with those boas) he evoked puppets like Wayland Flower’s Madame, and Frank Oz’s Miss Piggy, comedians like Rip Taylor, musicians like Liberace and Hildegarde. His operatic flair calls to mind the era of Rocky Horror and The Phantom of the Paradise. As a kid, I would have seen him on things like American Bandstand, and Cher’s variety show.
If you look through his song catalog, it’s almost insane how many popular songs he’s written and performed. In the early years, being a child I didn’t have his LPs, but I did have almost all the major singles on K-Tel and Ronco records and listened to them endlessly: “Rocket Man”, “Crocodile Rock” (1972), “Saturday Night’s Alright for Fighting,” “Goodbye Yellow Brick Road”, “Bennie and the Jets” (1973), “Philadelphia Freedom”, “Someone Saved My Life Tonight”, “Island Girl (1975), “Don’t Go Breaking My Heart” (1976, a duet with Kiki Dee). I heard his version of “Pinball Wizard” before I ever heard the Who’s, and his version of “Lucy in the Sky with Diamonds” before I ever heard The Beatles’. And I did actually have one LP, 1974’s Caribou on a cassette tape I got at a yardsale. This one had the epic “Don’t Let the Sun Go Down on Me”, and opens with “The Bitch is Back”, the lyrics to which for some reason appalled my parents, who used worse swear words before, during and after their morning cup of coffee.
Brief but rewarding digression: during his first flush of fame, Elton was a pal of the elderly Groucho Marx! True fact! So was Alice Cooper. I mean they weren’t besties or anything but they were show biz pals and socialized. And Elton even left a clue about his fandom; the cover of his 1973 album Don’t Shoot, I’m Only the Piano Player (above) features a poster for the Marx Brothers movie Go West. (I didn’t say he was a discerning fan.)
In the mid to late 70s as far as Americans were concerned, though he kept turning out records, Elton appeared to vanish off the face of the earth.
He was to come back in the mid 80s with yet another long string of hits for the MTV age. (His straw boater period, although properly speaking he was much more the vaudevillian during his feather-boa sporting glam phase). And then starting with Disney’s The Lion King (1994), he reinvented himself yet again by penning musicals for Hollywood and Broadway, as he still does to this day.
Ah…but you’re wondering about the title of this post, aren’t you? Very well. This was in early 2002. I was p.r. director for the New-York Historical Society which was then doing a rapid-response series of exhibitions related to September 11, from which the entire city was still recovering. And Sir Elton wanted to come see the current one, which had a lot of artifacts from the actual disaster. And neither my boss nor my boss-of-bosses were available to escort him through, so it fell to me. (We blocked it off so he had the place to himself).
The most amazing thing about the experience was that I think I blacked out. Well, one of two things happened, and I’ll never know which of them it was. I was standing near the historical society’s entrance desk at the top of a small flight stairs in the atrium. I saw Elton arrive, accompanied by Interview magazine’s editor Ingrid Sischy, through the glass doors. And either they took their time and I spaced out waiting for them, or….I went into immediate shock, which seems more likely, because the next thing I remember, they were standing next to me, waving their hands in front of my vacant stare saying, “Hello?” This happens to me sometimes.
I took them both through the exhibition and answered their questions. They were both appropriately somber (it had been less than six months since the World Trade Center attack). There was really no opportunity for me to do anything but be there for them, as opposed to something inappropriate like cracking jokes, or inviting them to come see my latest vaudeville show, or (what makes me saddest), gushing about how much Elton’s music and performances meant to me. He’d only have been annoyed in that particular context, I think. But yes, thanks to one of the worst things that has ever happened to New York, the hand that is typing this once shook Elton John’s. I hope I get a second opportunity, with no disaster as catalyst.
For more on the history of show business, consult No Applause, Just Throw Money: The Book That Made Vaudeville Famous, and please stay tuned for my upcoming Electric Vaudeville: A Century of Radio and TV Variety.
(Travalanche) 