Songs from the West Coast Review

Elton John

1969: Empty Sky. 1970: Elton John. 1971: Tumbleweed Connection * 11-17-70 * Madman Across the Water. 1972: Honky Chateau. 1973: Don’t Shoot Me, I’m Only the Piano Player * Goodbye Yellow Brick Road. 1974: Caribou * Greatest Hits. 1975: Captain Fantastic and the Brown Dirt Cowboy * Rock of the Westies. 1976: Blue Moves * Here and There. 1977: Elton John’s Greatest Hits, Vol. 2. 1978: A Single Man. 1979: Fox. 1982: Too Low for Zero. 1984: Breaking Hearts. 1987: Live in Australia * Greatest Hits, Vol. 3. 1988: Reg Strikes Back. 1989: Sleeping With the Past. 1990: To Be Continued. 1992: The One. 1995: Made in England. 1997: Duets. 2001: Songs from the West Coast.

Honky Chateau, one of Elton John’s most fondly remembered albums, is possibly most representative of his problems as an artist. At the heart of the Bernie Taupin/Elton John song style is a two-headed schizophrenia that delineates neither artist particularly well. Taupin approaches pop lyric themes as one might approach an exotic smorgasbord of food, by loading up without much discernment. The more you eat, the more you get your money’s worth. How else explain the contradictions of Honky Chateau’s "Salvation," a gospel-tinged song complete with a fulsome sounding choir and a resolutely straight-forward exhortation towards repentance; and the equally unabashed hedonism of "Honky Cat" and "Susie." Condescension and insensitivity corrupt Honky Chateau: on "Think I’m Going to Kill Myself," a satirical send up of teenage suicide; on "Susie," a pseudo-country song about screwing a rural girl who is "living with her funky family, in a derelict old alley" (where do you find alleys in the country?); and on "Slave" where we find Elton singing from the point of view of an African-American in bondage. Musically, Honky Chateau is equally perverse. Elton tries to pass off Stax/Volt horn punctuation as contrapuntal New Orleans rhythms on "Honky Cat." He enlists jazz-fusion violinist Jean Luc Ponty to add country flavoring to "Amy" and "Mellow," and Ponty’s bleating electric tone is out of context, as is all of this English band’s attempts at country sounds on "Susie," "Salvation" and "Slave." Elton’s and Bernie’s Americana is unconvincing. This shows most consistently on the Band-inspired (according to Elton) country songs that started with "No Shoestrings on Louise" on the 1969 Elton John – and song styles which turned up on Tumbleweed Connection and continued intermittently through the albums that led up to Elton’s conversion to "sophisticated" disco man circa 1978. A reference point for Honky Chateau would be the Kinks’ Muswell Hillbillies, an album that is adamantly British, yet metaphorically engages the cross-cultural differences and likenesses between American/British peoples.

Honky Chateau is adamantly unBritish, but never manages to be anything else either. On Honky Chateau, only "Rocket Man" and "Mona Lisas and Mad Hatters" avoid misguided American regionalism and transcend the rest of the material with melody and intelligence. "Hercules" also fares pretty well since doo-wop and rock and roll are much more an elemental part of John’s resources than country-western music.

Themes for Taupin/John are pop fodder. They have a pulp heart. When things go well, the result is genuine pop craft; when they don’t, the result is artificial pop opportunism with "important" themes being used carelessly, with little emotional attachment. (Tumbleweed Connection and Honky Chateau are twin failures in this respect.) In fact, it may be easier to think of Taupin as a bad lyricist, rather than a good one. He possesses a style that is literate, but only when judged against the primitivism of the Led Zeppelins, the Black Sabbaths, the "hey, hey baby gonna make you sweat’ type of writing that we often love for no reason other than it’s delivered with a powerful musical punch. In fact, Taupin’s lyrics often are obscure, lack focus, thread the cliché, are glib or flippant depending on the vehicle. So much of Elton John’s most important work from 1971 to 1974 is riddled with songs that just aren’t quite good enough, The British debut, Empty Sky, is without a good song. Elton John, the American debut, oozes a mournful tonality, but what are "Take Me to the Pilot," "Border Song" and "The King Must Die " really about? If, for instance, "The King Must Die" was a veiled comment on the Nixon administration, why didn’t they just come out and say it, like everybody else did? Why veil it in lines about Julius Caesar, whom Taupin probably knew even less about thanTricky Dick? Obscurity is fine as long as the suggestiveness has resonance and is somehow meaningful. But Robert Christgau has quoted Taupin as saying that his lyrics never mean more than they say. If Taupin was not being facetious, he is suggesting that when his lyrics aren’t saying anything definite – they really aren’t saying anything at all. And Elton’s arrangements aren’t often enough of the Led Zeppelin/The Band variety, which shift the emphasis from lyrical to musical statement. Elton hangs the weight of his songs on Taupin’s lyrics so closely that only the best melodies and arrangements can save them.

Aesthetically, Elton’s music floundered after 1975’s Captain Fantastic and the Brown Dirt Cowboy, perhaps earlier. Blue Moves (1976) was a double-album disaster, full of turgid ballads. "Sorry Seems to Be the Hardest Word" was the only hit, and would be representative of the one-good-song-per-album syndrome that would characterize Elton’s next ten albums (with the exception of Breaking Hearts, a fine album which was a fluke in Elton John’s mid-career in the same way Gorilla was a fluke in James Taylor’s mid-career). After Blue Moves the arrangements became so airtight that there’s not even room for the type of flamboyant, pumping, syncopated (he has a great left hand attack) piano work that is at the center Elton’s earlier material (on Goodbye Yellow Brick Road, Madman Across the Water, and Don’t Shoot Me, I’m Just the Piano Player, for instance). In the early days there was a distinct feeling that the band’s guitars were often competing with the piano for space, with neither instrument winning the high ground. But the mid-seventies and eighties albums are totally bereft of human interaction: the studio conceived arrangements bury the instrumentation and, on the majority of songs, Elton’s once cartoon-colorful, elastic enunciation, with it’s cutting, but exciting, drawling tonality, becomes a low-key masculine blur often indistinctive as it plies the lower register John tends to pillage and dump on his best recordings.

11-17-70 is a live album with just Elton on piano and vocals, Dee Murray on bass and vocals, and Nigel Olsen on drums and vocals. It’s rowdy, sloppy, and at times a bit overlong, but it’s a spirited record of a real band process, and shows how important John's dramatic rhythm section was to some of his most memorable songs. Madman Across the Water has a cinematic grandeur on the more ambitious tunes ("Tiny Dancer," "Levon," "Madman" and "Indian Summer"). Though Paul Buckmaster’s sting arrangements have been put down by purist and populist rock critics, they seem spunky like Norman Whitfield or deft, in a pseudo-classical way, and Buckmaster actually supplied more hooks in the arty songs than the guitarists did. The melodies on "Tiny Dancer" and "Levon" are among Elton’s best. Don’t Shoot Me, I’m Only the Piano Player is lighthearted, yet more honest in it’s manageable popisms than the misconceived Honky Chateau and the gloomy obscurities of Elton John. Goodbye Yellow Brick Road scores on both rockers and ballads, but was followed by the unmemorable Caribou which provided more pseudo-country ("Dixie Lily," "Stinker"), and more bad lyrics pretending to be about something ("You’re So Static," "I’ve Seen the Saucers," "Ticking"). Rock of the Westies was half-hearted funk mixed with unconvincing takes on street kids ("Street Kids"), the working class ("Hard Luck Story") and mental patients ("Feed Me" – which could have used Buckmaster). After the few good tunes on Captain Fantastic and the Brown Dirt Cowboy, the rest seems decline in pursuit of a buck. Word is he needs 400,000 of them each week. That adds up to absolute artistic sell-out. Lion King, indeed.

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