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.
REMEMBER WHEN the Stones and Beatles were English bands? If you do then it's just barely, because both ceased being such bands years ago, somewhere around the time their dollar income began to exceed the accumulation of those stable pound sterling.
Same thing goes for Elton John and his wordsmith Bernie Taupin, who now have perched a short tier below the BeatleStones on the mass pop scale (not sexy enough; too many ballads). Goodbye Yellow Brick Road confirms it more than ever before: it's their best album (most listenable) to date, and it just might as well be subtitled ‘The Americanization of Elton John.’
Certainly it's a Hollywood album, both superficially and in the grooves. It's closer to the front and less presumptuous than the obsession with the American West that clearly marked John and Taupin as posers on, say, Tumbleweed Connection, though that experience was Hollywood too: how else do European kids get to know about America, except through cowboy movies? (This was before the annual collegiate exodus that's turned Europe's major cities into quaint outposts of Berkeley or Boulder or Ann Arbor or New Paltz.)
It figures that Elton and Bernie would choose Dorothy as their muse this time around. Lou Reed wishes he could relate to Dorothy, without invoking Garlands of self-pity; Bette [Midler] wishes she knew how. Elton knows the Wizard of Oz was a movie, and only becomes a lifestyle when you've blown all your options. While Reed couldn't find his way to or from the yellow brick road unless you shot him up with sodium pentathol, Elton's so far past that: just put on your platform shoes, and let's mostly rock.
What's best about this album is that through the variety of these four sides, Elton John doesn't always sound like Elton John. He's finally become uninhibited enough to engage in total tongue adaptation: dig the Slade-Sweet slambang of ‘Saturday Night's Alright for Fighting’. Taupin's lyrics have loosened up as well. He can be amusing and entertaining, as on ‘Jamaica Jerk-Off’ or ‘Your Sister Can't Twist’, the latter of which says more about Loggins and Messina's limitations than a dozen fanged rock critics. He can sometimes even be nostalgic without being cloying, and make a message work when he wants to, like on ‘Social Disease’, a putdown of the new-old alcoholism: "I get juiced on Mateus and just hang loose."
But mostly, this is about the people, and power of the movies. ‘Candle in the Wind’ is an overly sentimental farewell to Marilyn Monroe that works if you're in the mood. ‘I've Seen That Movie Too’ boasts one of Taupin's best written lines. ‘Roy Rogers’ is a song that Don McLean probably wishes he had written, while the title song is pretty but unconvincing in its literal message, which is about forgetting about the glitter of success and getting back to the rural roots. Haven't I heard that somewhere before?
But more than being soundtrack composers or frustrated film directors, Elton and Bernie are more like film critics. They deal on a literary, rather than cinema verite plateau, which underlines the classic contradictions of the bizarrely extroverted E.J. stage personality with the serious introvert he's reputed to be away from the spotlight. Unlike his earliest albums, there's enough attention to dynamics in this Gus Dudgeon production to stand up through four sides. And watch out for ‘Bennie and the Jets.’ ‘They're so spaced out’. Indeed.