So I start my weekend off listening to Elton John, something I could never have imagined would ever happen when I first started listening to music about thirty five years ago. This album, one of the records he'd established his formidable reputation on with critics and fans a few years previously was already a fairly distant memory by then.
I bought it a few months back in 2015 on a summer afternoon from a Newcastle Quayside record stall. It's a great package, an artifact from the time when a record buyer would get a really good deal in return for their pennies. a gatefold sleeve, great album and lovingly presented inserts. A poster of the cover image for teenage walls and a beautifully compiled booklet of photos of the band, ticket stubs, press clippings and even a comic strip for the faithful to pore over.
The contents of the album itself are still not entirely to my tastes. It glides throughout down the middle of the Rock and Roll road, a place I'll never entirely occupy even as I settle into my fifties. The record is a somewhat overblown, (as befitted the time it was produced), autobiographical concept detailing the journey that John and his lyric writer Bernie Taupin have taken. Their hard road to success. What the words allude to are beyond me as I'm not sufficiently a devotee to follow the trails left here.
But it does have some great moments and I've posted the ones that appeal most to me. First and last songs on the first side are both barnstormers, neutralising some of the more negligible fare that lies between. The other side is also patchy though I'll imagine it all went down will in the Midwest and to fans in Britain who by this sense will already have got the sense that they grew up with John and Taupin. That their hard-won glory was somehow their own.
Meanwhile forty one years later I'm gritting my teeth slightly as the needle winds its way slowly through Meal Ticket, the opening track of Side 2. John, will never entirely be for me. I imagine I'll always find my way back to Lou Reed, Bowie, Iggy Pop, Marvin Gaye, Roxy Music, Can, Al Green, The New York Dolls, Curtis Mayfield and Sly Stone as my soundtrack soundtrack to an early part of a decade that I was a part of but far too young to be properly aware of at the time. His is just too contented a vision for my tastes.
Still, I can admire the craft in here. There are a couple of full on tear-jerking gems on Side 2. Most obviously final track Curtains which fittingly is one long curtain call. I imagine it finished John's sets during the period to a sea of uplifted lighters before the band was called back after a suitable lull for their encores. Captain Fantastic & the Brown Dirt Cowboy goes back into its sleeve. It's a pretty decent record though not I'd say a great one. Still, I'm glad I have it and it will get played again. At least it helps me forgive John and Taupin for I'm Still Standing
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