Elton John
A new autobiography highlights John’s songwriting partner – someone who wrote lyrics with astonishing sensitivity and deftly documented the music scene that surrounded the couple
Fri September 15, 2023 2:04 p.m. BST
As befits a lengthy autobiography from an artist who is, as the cover puts it, “a famous private person,” we learn a lot about the lyricist in Scattershot: Life, Music, Elton and Me, published this week Bernie Taupin.
We find that Taupin enjoyed the fruits of his success, whether in little public attention or not, in almost as lavish a manner as his songwriting partner Elton John: during a holiday in Barbados in the mid-’70s, he remedied the problem of having forgotten , buying a birthday present for his then-girlfriend by simply flying to New York, picking something up at Tiffany’s and then immediately flying back to the Caribbean. We learn that the man who wrote the lyrics for Candle in the Wind was not a fan of Marilyn Monroe and that the man who rewrote the lyrics for Candle in the Wind so that it could be used at the funeral of Diana, Princess of Wales, was not a fan of Marilyn Monroe. I am not enthusiastic about the institution of the monarchy. And we learn that, again like his most famous songwriting partner, he has a winsome, whimsical sense of humor. As for the harsh live reviews, his opinion from the audience at the Rolling Stones’ legendary, Shelley-quoting, butterfly-popping Hyde Park performance in 1969 is overwhelming: “Then the Stones came along,” he writes, “and acted as if.” They were sorry that Brian Jones had done it.”dead.”
We learn that Bernie Taupin is remarkably self-deprecating and avoids the title “songwriter” entirely – Elton John is the songwriter in their partnership, he insists, and “all concrete evidence shows that I…” [am] “Doing anything other than flying by the seat of your pants has yet to be presented” – and we learn that, bizarrely, Taupin writes his lyrics with a guitar and then presents them to John. The finished product is not Elton John writing music to Taupin’s words, but Elton John actually writing a completely different melody and accompaniment to a song that already exists but that he hasn’t heard yet.
Taupin in 2020. Photo: Chris Pizzello/Invision/AP
However complicated their songwriting process may be, they have sold some 300 million records between them, yet Taupin is a perpetually underrated lyricist – which may have something to do with the John Taupin partnership’s signature song. At the center of “Your Song” is a clever conceit – a song about writing a song – but ultimately it’s a love song written by a teenage virgin, with all the naive awkwardness that suggests, “I sat on the roof and kicked the moss off / Well a Some of the verses, well, they make me pretty angry.” His occasional awkwardness may well be part of his enduring appeal – there’s something charming about the prosaic shrug “That’s the best I can do” – but it is not the stuff of critical acclaim.
But Taupin quickly learned on the job. A born Americanophile, he conjured Civil War and Wild West fantasies under the band’s influence on the 1970 album Tumbleweed Connection – Bob Dylan approved of My Father’s Gun – but it wasn’t until he actually reached the US that things really took off Come on. With his eyes fixed on LA, he wrote one of the city’s great paeans. The subject of “Tiny Dancer” is the subject of some controversy (the general assumption is that it is about Maxine Feibelman, who became Taupin’s first wife, but Taupin insists that this is not the case, which may have something to do with the bitterness of her later divorce), but the truth might be that the issue is Los Angeles itself. Its verses are as evocative of the immediate post-’60s city as the pages of Scattershot, recalling its many joys.
When Elton John returned from his first trip to America, he came out to his friends. Taupin, who already knew John was gay, responded with 1971’s “All the Nasties,” in which the singer reflects on what would happen if he came out publicly: “Would they criticize behind my back? / Maybe I should let her.” It is an extraordinary, heartfelt act of empathy; It’s hard to imagine it being written by anyone other than the person singing it, which says a lot about the close bond between the two, and it wouldn’t be the last time he achieved the extremely delicate feat of writing from that point of view of the partner.
The trickiest song of all might be 1980’s “White Lady White Powder,” in which he had the cocaine-addicted John sing, “I’m a catatonic son of a bitch who’s had a touch too much white powder… I could just escape.” “while the others could die”. The most powerful may be “The Last Song” from 1992, a harrowing memorial to the countless friends and former partners John saw die of AIDS, which the singer was initially unable to record without dissolving it: “As light as straw and brittle as a bird, Today I weigh less than a shadow on the wall… As the fear grows, please hold me in your arms.”
Familiarity with Elton John’s most famous songs blinds people to how good Taupin’s contributions were. Songs about space exploration had understandably become popular around the time of the first moon landing, but in “Rocket Man” Taupin brilliantly manages to bring them up to date for a time when the Apollo missions had become commonplace and were subject to declining public interest. There is none of the fear and anxiety that characterizes David Bowie’s Space Oddity; The newspapers no longer want to know whose shirt the astronaut is wearing, and the whole thing only elicits a tired shrug: “It’s just my job, five days a week.” “Bennie and the Jets” is a fantastic reminder of that The kind of gig almost everyone has been to: the band is overrated, the atmosphere is equal parts anticipation and cynicism, everything great you’ve heard about them has been conveyed through breathless journalism. “Did you see her already? …they are strange and wonderful…I read it in a magazine.”
And sometimes you have to dig into Elton John’s deep insights to find Bernie Taupin’s pearls. Roy Rogers, buried near the end of the double album Goodbye Yellow Brick Road, is an eerily moving portrait of a thwarted Middle Ages: its strange emotional power may come from the suggestion that the figure it depicts might be Taupin, if he John would never have met him: he collapsed in front of a western on television and dreaded the next day at work.
“Ticking,” from the 1974 film “Caribou,” is something else entirely: a chilling depiction of a bar siege centered on the gunman — “What brought the cop car screaming into your driveway / to tell your parents about the way.” “You died?” – has been eerily amplified over the years. It reads more like something written recently, in the age of school shootings and the heated debate over gun control in the US, than almost 50 years ago.
His greatest success is probably the song cycle “Captain Fantastic and the Brown Dirt Cowboy” from 1975, which is about the difficult early years of the John/Taupin partnership and which also paints an impressive picture of London in the 1960s: a tougher, dirtier city than the era’s mythology would suggest Did you believe? It is written from the perspective of someone with his nose pressed against the glass of the exclusive party taking place in London to which he decidedly failed to secure an invitation. Later, he’s particularly great in 2001’s Songs from the West Coast, home to the midlife crisis of This Train Don’t Stop There Any More and the harrowing depiction of the homophobic murder of Matthew Shepard in American Triangle “.
But in Scattershot he seems carefree. You don’t think the lyrics to “Don’t Go Breaking My Heart” are much cop? No problem, neither did he: he wrote it to order, in 10 minutes, pissed at a hotel swimming pool. And being unrecognized has its advantages. I once found him sitting behind me at an Elton John show at Madison Square Garden in New York with his wife and children. It was in the middle of the highest-grossing tour in rock history; There were more than 20,000 people there, and the man who had co-written literally every song on the gig’s setlist had walked to his spot in the middle of the arena, apparently without any of them noticing and certainly not without one of them stopped him. I had the impression that it suited him quite well.
• Scattershot: Life, Music, Elton and Me is published by Octopus (£25). To support the Guardian and Observer, order your copy from Guardianbookshop.com. Shipping costs may apply.
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