If I had to compile a list of my favourite rock bands, then it would mainly comprise miserable pricks from benighted corners of the liberal-democratic-capitalist West who unashamedly embraced, dramatized, celebrated, even exaggerated their Weltschmerz, and thereby said something to me about my life in the rainswept northern hemisphere. Joy Division invoke the deep and dark pre-Thatcher Manchester of the 70s; the Smiths, the same drizzly city but in the sardonic and obstreperous 80s; Alice in Chains, the desolate, smack-addicted rustbelt of the Pacific Rim; the National, a middle-aged malaise on the dreary North Atlantic seaboard. Even Oasis, chipper and triumphant as they are, come from a place of mid-90s post-industrial truculence.
The polar opposite to this pointed miserabilism is Tumbleweed Connection, Elton John’s 1970 sophomore album. At its core, this record is an escapist retreat into a fantasy world extravagantly detached from the origins of its architects, an ode to an imagined American West by someone who grew up in frigging Lincolnshire. Which points to something that I deeply resent about much 60s and 70s British “foundational rock” – the unseemly obsession with “the States”; the spectacle of the Rolling Stones, four chimney sweeping scrotes from the Thames valley, packing their records with country and western hillbilly twang; or Led Zeppelin, a motley assortment of middle-class, Middle English art school bums, covering songs about flooded Appalachian farmsteads.
Had Damon Albarn been of age, such anal rimming of the “special relationship” would surely have provoked an incensed four-hour triple album about Ian Botham. But I digress. Tumbleweed Connection elevates this obnoxious John Wayne cosplay to Daniel Day-Lewis levels of method acting. It was Elton’s second album, written and recorded after he achieved relative success with “Your Song” but before he toured the US, which explains why the America it depicts appears to have been drawn from the five-hour Spaghetti Westerns that still air in the late afternoon on BBC2 for pensioners to perish in front of.
Responsibility for this unrestrained shagging of the Star-Spangled Banner must surely be laid at the door of Bernie Taupin, Elton’s lyric-scrawling brain-in-a-jar, who was quite evidently so obsessed with Cowboys and Indians that he forced his pet songsmith to come up with an entire concept album about them. Fully four tracks centre around people with guns; everyone lives on a farmstead; outlaws and washed up Confederate soldiers roam the fields; starving denizens of the dustbowl rise up and burn down government buildings, like something from a John Steinbeck novel. It’s not exactly Morrissey checking in at the YWCA.
Needless to say, John does the job required of him and interprets Bernard’s lyrics accordingly. At the centre of it lies the familiar piano – sometimes jabbing, sometimes elegant, but invariably indecently accompanied by all the necessary accoutrements of New Orleans R&B: swamp-rock sliding guitars (“Country Comforts”), gospel choirs (“Son of your Father”), self-consciously “epic” and “cinematic” soundscapes (“My Father’s Gun”) and twangy Simon and Garfunkel-style Travis picking (“Love Song”). By the way, all of this was recorded in some drab, non-descript suburb of London, by people whose notion of the American West derived largely from getting tonked and watching The Alamo at 3AM.
Why, then – oh why, oh why – do I like it? The first few times I put it on, it made little impression on me but, with continued listening, and as always with Elton John, it proved seductive, irresistible, and eminently digestible. I would maintain that Tumbleweed Connection’s standout moments are in fact those that are less unapologetically steeped in cartoonish Americana – the elegant and lovestruck “Come Down in Time”, the funky, fast-paced “Where To Now St. Peter?” – whereas the rest of it works despite, not because of, the hackneyed image of an idealised Walton Family-style pastoral idyll that it aims to conjure. The only feasible explanation for this is that John and Taupin were such extraordinarily talented songwriters that they managed to make something compelling out of a subject that I instinctively find uninteresting, but there you are, it’s all I’ve got, and they’re among the GOATS for a good reason.
Rating: * * * * / *
Standout track: “Where To Now St. Peter?”