When you picture the archetypal swaggering rock star, Elton John is not the fellow who springs to mind. You’re more likely to mentally associate him with the archetypal image of a Great British Bake Off judge, in truth. But the diminutive rocketman was raised revering the great rock ‘n’ rollers even as he pursued a scholarship at a classical institution.
So, once he finally found fame after a few years of hard knocks, he was determined not to be pigeonholed as a withdrawn singer-songwriter, crooning for accountants just because he was plonked behind his piano. He endeavoured to ensure that his shows had a rock ‘n’ roll edge, engaging in the scene whenever he could. On one comic occasion, he even took to Iggy Pop’s stage dressed as a gorilla, but Pop was so adled on drugs that he forgot about the planned stunt, perceived Elton John to be a genuine primate, and promptly attacked him.
That might not have been the sort of episode Elton had in mind when he decided to rockify his image, but with rock ‘n’ roll, you have to take the rough with the smooth. In fact, that very volatile notion was exactly what he wanted to introduce to his own sets, breaking up the ballads with a pulse of passion. “I don’t want to sit down and do slow things all night,” he told Martin Webb in 1972. “I’d go to sleep.”
With his first big hit being the decidedly slow and stately ballad, ‘Your Song’, it would’ve been easy for Elton to rest on that softer laurel, so he clarified, “No really, I’ve been a rock and roll freak for a long time, but people seem to think that I have to do rock and roll just to prove that I’m a hip young man. Well, I was brought up on rock and roll. I’ve always been into rock and roll. That’s my favourite sort of music.”
There was even one group he was keen to emulate in his own individual way at the time. “The Rolling Stones are my idols,” he said, “and that’s it.” This was a particularly profound statement at the time, given that the British group were being battered in the press following the fallout of the Altamont tragedy. So, it was not without a degree of subversion that Elton wished to follow in their footsteps.
As we now know, the ‘Crocadile Rock’ singer is keen on progressive liberation, and he saw rock ‘n’ roll as the subversive tool to push that philosophy forward, coming with the added bonus of adding some bop to his pop set. “Rock ‘n’ roll music is the most important music to me,” he continued, even slightly deriding his own staple by adding, “So I’m not going to sit there and sing all these boring songs.”
Sadly, things have since gone awry between Elton John and his former “idols”. Lord knows how the feud began, but at one point, Keith Richards slandered the ‘Tiny Dancer’ singer by calling him “an old bitch” and adding that ”his writing is limited to songs about dead blondes”. The Rocketman was determined not to be outdone, and his response is also comically commendable. “It would be awful to be like Keith Richards,“ he said. “He’s pathetic. It’s like a monkey with arthritis, trying to go on stage and look young. I have great respect for the Stones but they would have been better if they had thrown Keith out 15 years ago.“
This mark of begrudging respect is commonplace among Stones detractors. When Steve Coogan was cutting them down to size, he still admitted, “They’ve only written about eight brilliant songs“. However, aside from having Richards in their ranks, Elton’s once lauding respect for the band was chipped away further by what he saw as proliferating pretence and hypocrisy.
When Richards called his act simple ”showbiz”, he replied with, “Please, if the Rolling Stones aren’t showbiz, then what is? You know, with their inflatable naked women.” Maybe the Stones themselves became an emulation of rock ‘n’ roll?
