The kind of life Elton John has lived is the kind that only a few people in show business can accurately describe.
The amount of classics that he has put out would have been enough to fill the careers of ten different superstars, but when working with Bernie Taupin, John always felt at home performing rather than someone who laboured over every single note they sang. It was always a pleasure to work on any of his records, and even when he reached the bottom, he could still find solace in music before anything else.
That’s not to say that every single thing he made was a masterpiece by any stretch. Goodbye Yellow Brick Road and Madman Across the Water are both stone-cold classics from the time, but when listening to an album like Victim of Love, it was clear that the cocaine was doing a lot of the talking for him behind the scenes. But since even that album is at least decent in spots, it’s not like John ever faltered from a musical perspective.
Because when looking at the decades that he had lost to substances, John knew that the only thing that would help him crawl out of his own physical hell was music. Even during his horrible stints in rehab over the years, ‘Don’t Give Up’ by Peter Gabriel was practically like medicine to him when he started to put himself back together. But it turns out that he wrote one of his best comeback songs when he was still loaded.
Despite the 1980s being tailor-made for John’s style and swagger, the MTV generation wasn’t always kind to him. He could still make fantastic material if the time called for it, but if you look at all of the chaos that went into making the video for ‘I’m Still Standing’, it’s practically a miracle that John was able to stand up the next day, let alone go on to make countless other classics afterwards.
But of all the lyrics that he wrote, John felt that tune spoke a lot more truth than even he was willing to admit at the time, saying, “‘Looking like a true survivor/feeling like a little kid’. That’s me in a nutshell. I am a true survivor, and I am a little kid underneath. I survived a lot of things in my life. I’m trying to survive things at the moment, and you have to go back to being an optimist and a little kid and think of yourself as having that kind of energy. When I started with the band on the road in the 1970s, we had so much energy.”
And while he might not be as youthful as he used to be in those iconic shots of him playing at Dodger Stadium back in the day, you can still see a glimpse of that person underneath everything when he plays. He’s not going to be throwing the piano around like Little Richard or anything, but there’s a certain sense of abandon that carried on from playing ‘Saturday Night’s Alright for Fighting’ back in the 1970s all the way through to today.
Then again, that’s also the great contradiction about John’s work. There’s a lot of spontaneity whenever he takes to the stage, but there’s a lot of carefully constructed moments that are impossible for anyone else to reproduce, like that iconic opening piano line of ‘Don’t Let the Sun Go Down On Me’ or that kind of space-age guitar slide that kicks off different parts of ‘Rocket Man’.
But even if ‘I’m Still Standing’ was the last thing John ever recorded, it would have served as a fitting send-off for his career. Most of his contemporaries wouldn’t have been able to say that they survived the 1970s, and while there were a few casualties on the charts, John never had to worry about his musical DNA failing him every single time he sat down with one of Taupin’s lyrics.
