Elton John: Goodbye Yellow Brick Road

Album Review, Creem, January 1974

I’m always a little surprised at how many readers remember my work from Creem (1971-1975), because when I read my back pages from that time, I’m often disappointed, especially by the record reviews. We were so young, and brazen, and hypercritical, and sometimes wrong. But then I remember that we were little more than just kids, engaged in an experimental journalistic enterprise, in keeping with what was happening with mainstream newspaper and magazines. What Tom Wolfe, Hunter S. Thompson, Jimmy Breslin, and others were to conventional journalism, Creem was to the voice of the so-called “counter-culture” as represented by Rolling Stone, especially in its increasingly uniform record reviews section.

So we threw around references that weren’t always germane, threw punches that didn’t always land. If the punch did hit a target, like any number of scenes in Buster Keaton’s anti-authoritarian 1922 silent farce Cops, it hit the wrong person. Well, it was their fault if they didn’t duck.

REMEM…