Some of the greatest artists seem to transcend generations. Anyone can hope to inspire the next bunch of musicians after them to pick up instruments of their own and learn how to play them, but Elton John felt that one of his heroes made him change his entire musical demeanour in one moment.
But when John first broke out on the scene, he didn’t really look like anyone else. He was a singer-songwriter in many senses, and yet he was dressing in the same way that people like Marc Bolan had dressed onstage, except he took it to the nth degree. People may have had problems with The Beatles’ mop-top haircuts back in the day, but seeing the sequinned outfits and massive sunglasses, John was impossible for anyone to look away from if they had tried.
Then again, John could still let his music do the talking whenever he wanted to. Many of his songs with Bernie Taupin were among the finest pop tracks of the 1970s, and even if not all of them were absolutely timeless, it was impossible to get them out of your head once you heard them. That comes from years of listening to records, but John knew that his influences extended beyond people like The Beatles.
The Fab Four had shifted the world of British music, but John had already gone to school learning classical pieces, which explains why some of his greatest songs are far more musically sophisticated than anything that the rest of the rock world had done. John had a far greater musical framework to work in, but he still took pleasure in listening to the best of Elvis Presley as well.
For any kid at John’s age, Presley was the ultimate rebel figure that anyone aspired to be. Nothing was cooler than seeing him strut across the stage, and even though some TV appearances insisted on showing him from the waist up because of all the gyrating going on, the piano icon knew that it was all about the music that came out of the speakers when songs like ‘Heartbreak Hotel’ came on.
When John met ‘The King’ at the end of his life, though, he could only feel regret, saying, “He looked very ill and I felt very sorry for him then. I thought, ‘My God.’ I don’t mean this in a bad way, but I said, ‘I hope this never happens to me.’ I’m not in any position to judge what happened to him. I just think it’s tragic what did happen to him. He had a tremendous talent. He had the best voice.”
And while John could soak up all the attention that he could when playing his masterpieces, he was eventually able to pull himself out of his own personal battles as well. The whole road to making an album like Victim of Love could have been considered a rock bottom, creatively speaking, but after pulling himself out of the doldrums, seeing John still being productive up to the modern day is one of the best redemption stories that any artist of his calibre could have hoped for.
But when looking at the end of Presley’s career, it all plays like a theatrical tragedy in real time. ‘The King of Rock and Roll’ had given everything he could to give his fans their fair share of thrills, but no one could have imagined how steep a price that would have come at during his glory years.
