Elton John: Three years powered by rocket fuel
Six albums, six styles and a №1 … all in the space of 23 months!
Elton John (1970) ★★★★★
Study the cover before you drop the needle. A young man stares back: awkward haircut, thick unfashionable glasses, unremarkable in every way. Within months that face would vanish under sequins and platform boots. Elton John is the last document of the before.
The leap from Empty Sky is one of pop’s most startling transformations. Gus Dudgeon, fresh from Bowie’s Space Oddity, gave the songs room to breathe. Paul Buckmaster gave them muscle, with strings that grieve and insist rather than decorate, recorded live with the band. Bernie Taupin’s lyrics find their first full flowering, and Elton meets each one with uncanny melodic generosity.
Your Song gets the headlines, rightly. But Sixty Years On has a desolate grandeur, and Border Song a gospel conviction, that mark this as a statement rather than a single.
The Beatles broke up the week it arrived. The world needed a new voice. Here it was.
Tumbleweed Connection (1970) ★★★★★
John had barely become a star when he walked back into Trident Studios to make a record with no singles. Two young Englishmen who barely knew America conjured Civil War soldiers, frontier towns and gospel fires, and made them feel more lived-in than the real thing.
The audacity is breathtaking.
The Band’s shadow falls long, but John and Taupin don’t dabble. They immerse. Taupin’s mythologised America is romantic, violent, occasionally troubling, and Elton’s melodies unfold in movements rather than tidy choruses. Buckmaster now serves mood rather than spectacle, and the result plays like an unmade Western about loyalty and loss.
My Father’s Gun inhabits its war rather than trivialising it. The album never winks, and that sincerity saves it from pastiche.
The sepia cover, two young men in costume at a weathered station, is the whole philosophy made visual.
A road not taken. And what a road it was.
Friends (Original Soundtrack, 1971) ★★★
Elton told Rolling Stone in 1973 that he regretted giving Honey Roll and Can I Put You On to a forgotten French film. He wanted them on a proper album. That tension, between what Friends is and what it might have been, runs through every groove.
It was a commission taken before the hits arrived, finished in four frantic weeks and padded with orchestral interludes to reach album length. The wonder is that it holds together.
Buckmaster is again the secret weapon. Variations on Michelle’s Song, all flute and French horn, achieves a pastoral beauty with nothing to prove. Seasons is the loveliest of the vocal tracks, tender and unhurried, while Can I Put You On crackles with real rock and roll blood.
Friends is not essential, but it shows two young men meeting an obligation with more craft than it deserved.
Bread and butter work, occasionally transcendent. That’s enough.
17–11–70 (1971) ★★★★
Nobody planned this. The label released it because bootleggers were already selling it.
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Strip away the orchestras, Buckmaster’s strings and Dudgeon’s careful production. What remains, on a November night in New York before a small, lucky studio audience and a much larger one on WABC-FM, is simply a young man at a piano with Dee Murray on bass and Nigel Olsson on drums, playing like the building is on fire.
Take Me to the Pilot sets the temperature, rawer than the studio take. Sixty Years On sheds its grandeur and turns naked. Then Burn Down the Mission swallows My Baby Left Me and Get Back, the sound of a pianist raised on Little Richard allowed to go all the way. The Honky Tonk Women cover is presumptuous. He gets away with it.
This is the Elton underneath the rhinestones. Wilder, hungrier, more dangerous.
The bootleggers understood first. They usually do.
Madman Across the Water (1971) ★★★★
Three albums in less than a year should have broken him. Instead, exhaustion produced some of the darkest, most honest music of his early career. The imagined West is gone, replaced by isolation and the peculiar loneliness of becoming famous in someone else’s country.
Buckmaster’s strings no longer soar. They coil and brood. The title track, rescued from the Tumbleweed sessions with a young Davey Johnstone on guitar, is among the most haunting things Elton ever recorded. Nobody has quite decoded it. Nobody needs to.
Tiny Dancer waited decades for Almost Famous to make it an anthem, yet six minutes pass like two. Levon very nearly matches it.
There are weaknesses. The back half sags under orchestral weight, Rotten Peaches is busier than it needs to be, and the choir on All the Nasties overshoots.
But Goodbye, 100 seconds of piano and apology, closes everything perfectly.
He needn’t have bothered.
Honky Château (1972) ★★★★★
A French country house. His own band in the studio at last. A producer who knew when to step back. For the first time in his recording life, John was comfortable, and comfort suited him magnificently.
The previous albums had been remarkable but constrained. Here the anxiety evaporates, replaced by something looser and warmer: rock, soul, gospel, music hall and science fiction sharing the same unhurried air.
Rocket Man takes Ray Bradbury’s astronaut father and makes the cosmic domestic. Its loneliness is not dramatic. It is the loneliness of routine. Mona Lisas and Mad Hatters, born of Taupin’s first disillusioned visit to New York, is set to bare piano and mandolin, among the most unguarded moments of Elton’s career.
No filler here. Honky Cat bounces with New Orleans mischief, and Susie (Dramas) remains overlooked.
It became his first American №1 album.
He would not look back for years.
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