Rocketman (2019)

I first saw the preview for this movie at the same time I first saw the preview for Bohemian Rhapsody so the two movies have always seemed a little linked to me. Glad they finally put this one out, timed to coincide with Elton John's farewell (until the next one no doubt) tour. There are other connections, such as the obvious: '70s gay rock star lifestyle writing hits cocaine abuse consequences biopic, etc. The director of Rocketman, Dexter Fletcher, was listed as an executive producer on Bohemian Rhapsody after he stepped in to finish it when director Bryan Singer stepped out. That reminds me of the way Bill Pohlad, who directed the Brian Wilson / Beach Boys picture Love & Mercy, from 2014, has spent most of his career as a producer (Brokeback Mountain, The Tree of Life, 12 Years a Slave). Can producers just not resist the opportunity to direct these behemoth rock star exercises? Or are they that easy? Somehow it makes me think of Jann Wenner writing a record review. The movie that nagged at me most during Rocketman was the Beatles show from 2007, Across the Universe. They both basically combine history, biopic, old-fashioned musical, and newfangled music video modes into swirling demi-psychedelic demi-head-trip jukebox musicals, with valuable trivia. Lots of familiar Elton John faves for one and all are deployed to illustrate phases of his life: "The Bitch Is Back," "Saturday Night's Alright (for Fighting)," "Honky Cat," "Your Song," "Tiny Dancer," more. They're not the originals but they're usually close enough (again like Across the Universe). "Crocodile Rock" notably gets a terrific treatment, asserting itself again as one of the great rock 'n' roll songs of the '70s. Never mind it's given as performed at the historic Troubador stand (another feature of Rocketman: all songs all out of sequence). And just when you think they're running out of them, along come "Don't Let the Sun Go Down on Me," "Goodbye Yellow Brick Road," or the redoubtable "Bennie and the Jets."

But the other piece about Bohemian Rhapsody that occurred to me with Rocketman was the controversy about biopics and truth. Bohemian Rhapsody had a major whitewasher falsehood that profoundly disrespected Freddie Mercury and what he wanted to be to fans, for the sake of a big rousing finish. That doesn't happen in Rocketman, though obviously there are exaggerations, distortions, and the usual biopic problems related to moviemaker liberties (this one with a sense of history as if ripped to shreds by a slasher). But it does take the emotional travails of Elton John quite seriously, chasing down his issues with his father and his mother, his alcoholism and drug problems, his inability to sustain a relationship, and more than anything the sadness at the center of his life. As a conceit, the frame story is set in a group therapy session at a rehab clinic. Or maybe it was just a plain old AA meeting. Well, not exactly a plain old anything as Elton is in costume for much of it (and of course out of costume at the end of it). But there he is laying it all right out on us. The result is a much more honest picture but somehow with much fewer pure highs of pleasure. I'm wondering if that's really the terms of this trade-off, or maybe it just happened by accident here. It made me think of a spirited defense I read of Bohemian Rhapsody (by Christopher Frizzelle in the Seattle Stranger) which makes the argument that Freddie Mercury didn't want to be remembered as a casualty. He wanted to be remembered as an electrifying performer. I went to Rocketman with high expectations, so that might be part of the problem too. It's tremendous at many points. Elton's friendship with Bernie Taupin is wonderful, an unusual union and very touching. Also interesting to see Elton treated as an early musical prodigy—I hadn't known that. And it's probably honest, right?! Still, I would have appreciated a little higher quotient of electrifying performances in Rocketman. After all, it's what we know Elton John can do.

Sleeping With the Past (1989)

This is the other Elton John album I pulled out of the slush pile the same day I picked up the Thom Bell set. It was officially the new one at the time, hailed by fast-talking PR types who called me on the phone as some kind of rapprochement and reunion of Elton and his long-time lyricist Bernie Taupin. Something about it certainly struck home for me as I played it quite a bit, used various tracks as staples on mix tapes I made for years ("Sacrifice," "Sleeping With the Past," "Club at the End of the Street"), and in general just had myself a real nice glowing Elton John renaissance over it. I don't hear much of that as clearly now—though the music has well-grooved associations with a momentous period of my life and so some value on that level. I had the whole thing on the side of a tape that I took with me on a trip to New York, playing it a lot on my walkman as I pounded the streets and stopped into stores such as the Strand bookstore, and it worked nicely in that context, surprisingly. But mostly it sounds ponderous and lumbering to me now, though with all the usual high production values and some occasional moments that whip themselves up to a fine spirit or to very lovely passages or both, much like virtually all of Elton John for 30 years or more. In the end, maybe Elton John has become a kind of Elvis Presley for me. I'm still mostly enamored with much of his early work and certainly all the hits when he exploded in the '70s. He has steadily ossified into nothing ever particularly surprising, let alone meaningful. "I'm Still Standing" indeed, career statement of purpose. I said before that people were grateful for his reworking of "Candle in the Wind" as an elegy for Princess Diana, but I wasn't actually one of them. On the other hand, I wanted to stand on a chair and cheer when he and Eminem pulled their little stunt. So I don't actually have anything against him or resent him his success the way I might some others. I'm glad he's around and still out there and it's even nice to hear this again once in awhile.

The Complete Thom Bell Sessions (1977)

It may seem vaguely comical to label something that amounts to all of six songs totaling just 35 minutes of music "complete," but complete is complete, and the reference here is to an EP released in 1979 with just three of these tracks. This complete set, though recorded in 1977, didn't come along until the end of the '80s, well after Elton John had settled into the calcified glamour he has occupied so well over recent decades and producer Thom Bell had registered his greatest work with the Delfonics, Stylistics, and Spinners (who show up here singing background vocals). Those soul acts rank way high for me among those from the late '60s into the '70s and Elton John of course is a lifelong favorite, so this was a bit of a natural when I fished it out of a slush pile circa 1989. Yet it nevertheless came as a surprise as I had not been particularly aware of the EP and its associations with Bell and the Spinners. The truth is I was about done with Elton John by 1979, though now and then I took a chance on one of his albums, such as 21 at 33 (which usually proved disappointing). The general thrust is apparent just from scanning the titles, where the word "love" appears in four of the six, though not always without something of a bite: "Nice and Slow," "Country Love Song," "Shine on Through" (which showed up in different form on 1978's A Single Man), "Mama Can't Buy You Love," "Are You Ready for Love," and "Three Way Love Affair." Elton gets songwriting credit for three of them, and Bell also for three; the only one they collaborated on was "Nice and Slow," with Bernie Taupin chipping in lyrics. Two songs come in close to or over eight minutes, and the rest are about five minutes each, so there's some stretching out here but not to unruly lengths. To me there's a slightly muffled sound to the recording, as if the seals were fixed too tight and the oxygen depleting, which something could maybe be done about in a remastering, or perhaps that's the way Bell and John intended it. It's not that distracting—the main attraction is the late-disco sound verging on adult contemporary that moves so confidently through everything here. Those are a couple of genres where it's all too easy to go wrong and where so many before and since have wrecked. But there's something sweet and poignant about this set, a feeling that history waited too long but it's good to have at last, a feeling that persists. I still hear these songs as revelation and surprise, with some sadness I can't quite pin down, nonetheless inflected, enlivened, heartened, even redeemed by the joy they bear. It's one '70s set that seems likely to quietly endure a good long time.

Goodbye Yellow Brick Road (1973)

At one time, along about 1975, I was pretty sure Elton John was that decade's natural heir to Elvis Presley and the Beatles. Later I thought that was pretty ridiculous. But I guess the last laugh is on me when I look up the numbers in my Billboard book: There, on the list of 100 Top Artists 1955-2009, is Elton John at #4, behind Elvis, the Beatles, and Madonna (yes), and just ahead of Mariah Carey, Stevie Wonder, and Michael Jackson. Wikipedia pipes up, somewhat tentatively, that this iconic double-LP package "has come to be regarded as Elton John's best and most popular album," noting that it's his best-selling anyway, with some 31 million copies moved. Checking around, I see that's good enough to put it in the vicinity of the top 20 all-time bestsellers, no small feat. So when I call it my favorite I understand that puts me with the rest of the unwashed, but at least I've pretty much thought as much since the day it came out. There has always been something a little bit different about Elton John, and I don't mean just that he was the only rock star of the time pretending to be gay who actually was gay. From his various folkie-cum-country-rock-raver postures early to the glittering glamour and pure pop insouciance on display here to the range seen across his strings of hits, he's a tough one to figure out. Me, I gave in entirely with this, a big pop confection that opens with an 11-minute suite in which you don't even hear his voice until nearly the 6:00 marker—that's "Funeral for a Friend/Love Lies Bleeding." It's followed by a valentine to Marilyn Monroe, "Candle in the Wind," so universally beloved and genuinely touching he was able to rework it in memory of Princess Diana after her death 24 years later, and a lot of people were grateful. Then the weird faux live glam of "Bennie and the Jets," a song I am still waiting to understand, but one that nevertheless continues to thrill me. Then the title song, which verily cracks it open: that's it, this is all a big fat hosanna to beauty in the face of debilitating nostalgia, knowing the moment would never be so right because, and perhaps he even knew this too on some level, the moment would always be so right, from that point forward. And on it goes: the luscious piano textures of "Grey Seal," the sassy rock 'n' roller "Saturday Night's Alright for Fighting," something about a made-up cowboy, "Roy Rogers," something about a made-up Depression-era gangster, "The Ballad of Danny Bailey (1909-1934)," and something about "I've Seen That Movie Too." My favorite song has always been "Sweet Painted Lady," even recognizing all the execrable prostitute clichés it bears. It's so goddam fucking beautiful it makes me want to cry in spite of everything, and that's how the whole album affects me, when the moment is right, and often when it isn't. We don't know how many right moments this guy has left, except we've already seen that movie too. And now it's 40 years later.

"Bennie and the Jets" (1974)

96. Elton John, "Bennie and the Jets" (March 2, 1974, #1)

What is it about this one? I have never understood anything about it except my enduring attraction to it. It's plodding, mostly witless, annoyingly fake, the stuttering and hissing an empty mannerism, and yet I have been entranced by it—entranced, I tell you—from the first moment I heard those inevitable piano chords go crashing into the faux crowd noises, from even the very first clunk of noise, as the thing lumbers into existence, even in that moment saying to myself, "What is it about this one?" (At least I know I'm in estimable company—Axl Rose has said this song inspired him to become a singer, and I bet he can't explain it either.) (And now I'm reading on Wikipedia that even the band thought it was "one of the oddest songs we ever recorded," "too plain and unoriginal," and Elton himself thought it a mistake to release as a single.) (And there we all were poised to make it a #1.) I'll guess that the attraction must exist somewhere in the tension between what it purports to be and what it is, a song celebrating a band that seems hard to believe even exists and at any rate the song doesn't appear to be that excited about it, in spite of what it says ("We'll kill the fatted calf tonight, so stick around") and even with all the pro forma hoopla generated, or attempting to be generated, with those obviously dubbed in crowd noises. Instead, it reveals itself as something sturdy and homely, even stalwart, going about its business with no evident second-guessing or even appearing to try hard. And the brilliant, deliberate, hammering chords that pound it home so resolutely over and over by its very sound.