In a lot of ways, music is a workplace like any other. One that’s a little more glamorous than most, at least from the outside, but the more you discover about the world of rock ‘n’ roll, the more it becomes something strangely relatable.
The work’s never really over, in most cases it’s embarrassingly underpaid, and your co-workers can vary from some of the best friends you’ll ever meet to some of the most terminally annoying dickheads imaginable. I’ll leave you to imagine which of those two notorious prima donnas Elton John both encountered and (let’s be real here) embodied in his time in rock ‘n’ roll.
In a way, our rock heroes become a lot more relatable when imagined through that lens. Who’s going to sit there with a straight face and tell us that they’ve always been the most admirable, patient and empathetic version of themselves when they’re at work? In a way, this gets worse when you graduate from a jobbing musician to a world-conquering phenomenon. No matter how much we might imagine that level of success equating limitless luxury and only ever working when you feel like it, the opposite seems to be true.
Essentially, every waking moment of your life becomes a moment you are being monitored by someone who expects you to be the version of you they have in their head. You can’t just be Reg from Pinner when your boiler goes and your plumber discovers today’s job is with Elton John. So, take how irritable one can get at work. Add never ever really having a day off from it. Then multiply it by how you can’t even imply that there are downsides to it because of how great people who don’t know you think your life is. Frustrating, right?
The diva behaviour of Elton becomes somewhat more relatable when viewed from this vantage point. Then you add onto all of that the fact that life, even at the upper end of rock stardom, is chock full of absolutely maddening shit. Suddenly ‘The Bitch Is Back’ turns from a bashful mea culpa for all his temper tantrums to an anthem of defiance, of standing up for yourself when someone like Eric Burdon tries to push his luck much, much further than he should.
What happened between Eric Burdon and Elton John?
A word of caution here. The following is taken from an interview Elton John conducted with Rolling Stone in 1971. This was after ‘Your Song’ and ‘Tiny Dancer’ had made him a genuine, bona fide pop star but before Honky Chateau and Goodbye Yellow Brick Road would make him a megastar. More importantly though, this was the start of a point where his intake of drink and drugs would get so herculean that… well, not for nothing did he change his middle name to Hercules.
The point is that John himself would tell you to take any recollections of his from this period of time with a fistful of salt, especially if he was talking about them at the time. However, with the way that the egos of rock stars clash I’d be surprised if this little set to with Eric Burdon and his post-Animals funk project War didn’t happen at all. It begins with a concert in France, as Elton tells it, “I went to this French festival, a gala, and Eric Burdon and War were on before me.”
“Everybody had 15 minutes, sort of a big meeting of everybody in the music publishing world,” John continues, “But Eric Burdon went on for an hour and a quarter so I couldn’t go on at all. I just stomped around, I was furious. I was really miffed.” Considering the behaviour Elton John was known for even before his superstardom later in the decade, miffed is probably selling it desperately short.
However, can you blame the guy? If anything, this is one of the few cases where the famous Elton temper seems to be being deployed at someone who deserves it, let alone someone showing more diva behaviour than himself. I’m sure he gave Burdon absolute hell after the show, in a way that we all wish we could do to that one colleague who never fails to make everyone lose their rag every single day.
