I must say, broadly speaking, this ongoing deep dive into Elton John’s 1970s “imperial phase” has impressed me more than the Rolling Stones marathon that I subjected myself to last spring. The Stones were purveyors of ramshackle rock, great for the bohemian middle-classes who acted like Lord Byron when they were doing their A Levels before inevitably ending up as solicitors in Essex market towns, but personally, I was a little underwhelmed by the conspicuous lack of tunes, beyond the obvious duke box staples. I have similar feelings toward Pink Floyd, with their interminable rock operas about psychotic breakdowns among minor civil servants, and even the Thin White Duke I find a bit hit-and-miss – for every “Life on Mars” that zips by, there’s a bewildering “Diamond Dogs” to be endured. I will refrain here from invoking the blood-pressure-spikingly overrated Led Zeppelin because it would be grotesque to imply that those lank-haired, perma-stoned, unshowered Dungeons and Dragons-dabbling fraudsters operated in the same stratosphere as any of the luminaries that I just mentioned. So I won’t.
Basically, the realisation that I’m gradually arriving at is that I like pop music, and in the 1970s, the premier exponent of that particular artform was undoubtedly Elton John (and, of course, his weirdo brain-in-a-jar pet poet Bernie Taupin). Everyone can list the hits, but it’s the plethora of crisp, digestible, perfectly formed, (nominal) “filler tracks” that I’ve been most taken by – “Come Down In Time”, “Where To Now St. Peter?”, “Grey Seal” – songs that never saw the light of day as singles, but which the likes of Keith Richards would have fallen over themselves to position as album openers, in the not-unwarranted hope that the listener might thereby be hoodwinked into sitting through a further 30 insipid minutes of twangy, bluesy, hillbilly brain rot.
But let’s cut to the chase. Captain Fantastic was Elton’s ninth album, and by 1975, he was already massive, having evolved into a feather boa-sporting, baseball gear-wearing cartoon character, maniacally jabbing keys on stage at the Dodger’s Stadium in front of a gazillion people. I’ve never quite understood how this level of fame attached itself to a socially anxious, bespectacled music-gimp, but apparently there was a place in 70s pop culture for someone so flagrantly uncool. Either way, at the zenith of their fame and success, Elton and Bernie decided to embark on that most noxiously self-indulgent of 70s projects – a “concept album” – one dedicated to mapping out and exploring their “origin story” and “artistic trajectory.”
We begin with the title track and the desolate, depraved-sounding “Tower of Babel”, which take us back to the dingy, smoke-filled bars and recording studios of London’s Weimar Berlin-esque late-60s music scene. The ensuing rush and ultimate indignity of gaining employment at Liberty Records as impoverished in-house songwriters, shut up in some dungeon writing saccharine claptrap for the likes of Cliff Richards, is expertly detailed on the cynical “Bitter Fingers” and “Meal Ticket”. The inevitable pitfalls of the pair’s gathering success are set out on the shimmering “Someone Saved My Life Tonight”, which apparently narrates poor Reginald’s sham marriage-induced breakdown, while the tender closing songs, “We All Fall In Love Sometimes” and “Curtains”, soppily relate the central importance of Elton’s and Bernie’s creative bond in terms of sustaining their prodigious success and longevity. The immense quantities of class A substances that they imbibed presumably helped with that as well.
Captain Fantastic is a good album. The “Tower of Babel” / “Bitter Fingers” double punch is particularly effective at conveying the speed-fuelled sense of desperation and urgency that drove “the tinpot alley twins” when they were no-names trying to make it big; “Someone Saved My Life Tonight” is elegiac but unapologetically cinematic; “We All Fall In Love Sometimes” offers an appropriately dreamy and starstruck conclusion to the origin story. But as interesting as the overall narrative arc is, I’m struck once more by the fact that only around 50% of the album is what could be considered “essential listening.” Will I ever again feel compelled to turn on “Tell Me When the Whistle Blows”, “Writing” or “Better Off Dead”? Probably not, but I’m sorry to say that those three filler songs constitute 30% of the entire running time of this supposed “classic.”
All of which further strengthens my growing conviction that the kingpins of foundation rock would have been better off releasing leaner records every three to four years, rather than a new LP every six months. But as “Bitter Fingers” observes, the 70s suits wanted them churned out thick and fast, and apparently nobody spared a thought for hobby music bloggers writing half a century later, the selfish pricks.
Rating: * * *
Standout track: “Someone Saved My Life Tonight”