Elton John's career, as we have already seen, was expected to end as 1970 dawned, as he and his songwriting partner Bernie Taupin had gotten nowhere. But by the fall, Elton's long rock and roll odyssey was already beginning.
After a few concert dates in the U.S. in September 1970, he returned to England, and as the Beatles were going through a slow-motion split - it would not be until literally the end of 1970, December 31, when Paul McCartney sued to dissolve the band's legal partnership to dissociate himself from Apple manager Allen Klein - America moved on to Elton. The Black Album continued to sell in appreciable quantities, eventually peaking at number four on the Billboard album chart. That October, Elton released this third studio LP, Tumbleweed Connection, in England. It would not be released in the U.S. until January 1971, and Elton's activities in the States that November, when he would resume U.S. concert dates, would certainly be a catalyst for continued chart success. (Tumbleweed Connection would peak at number five on the Billboard album chart.)
He returned to America to begin another tour, playing a few gigs in Boston in the final three days of October at the Boston Tea Party, one of several small venues he would perform at in the coming weeks. (Arenas and stadiums would come later.) Meanwhile, "Your Song" was released as a single a few days before his autumn American tour began, eventually peaking at number eight in the U.S. From Boston, he would go to play the Electric Factory in Philadelphia, the Painters Wall Music Fair in Baltimore, the Fillmore West in San Francisco, and after a performance at Santa Monica's Civic Auditorium, he'd arrive in the city where, if he could make it there, he could make it anywhere.
Of course, by the time Elton arrived in New York City, he'd already made it everywhere in America; his Fillmore East gig would simply close the sale in the States. He spent a week in the Big Apple, performing a radio concert there on Tuesday, November 17, for WABC-FM (later WPLJ-FM), which must have seemed rather novel to radio listeners. (Live radio performances were much more common in Britain in 1970, with American radio stations mostly opting for records.) Elton wowed his audience with performances of songs from the Black Album and a cover of the Rolling Stones' "Honky Tonk Women" as well as songs from Tumbleweed Connection. After performing "Burn Down the Mission," he went into into a medley of Elvis Presley's "My Baby Left Me" and the Beatles' "Get Back," an obvious indication of the standard Elton had chosen for himself. Elton performed under a handicap; he'd cut his hand before going on, and by the time he was done, the keys of the piano he used were all bloodied.
Bootlegs of the radio concert soon circulated, and a 48-minute excerpt of the 80-minute concert would later be released as the album 17-11-70. In the United States, where it was issued as 11-17-70, it reached number eleven on the Billboard album chart. Critical opinion was divided, with some reviewers dismissing it as hammy and others finding it to be a fine document of Elton's live-performance abilities. You can read my opinion of it here. (A special 2017 two-record reissue of 11-17-70 would feature the full concert.)
The following Friday and Saturday, November 20 and 21, Elton played the Fillmore East, which had already been witness to another historic pair of shows that year - Joe Cocker's Mad Dogs and Englishmen shows of Easter weekend. A celebrity attendee of one of the Cocker concerts now showed up backstage after one of Elton's Fillmore East shows. Bernie Taupin actually failed to recognize the hawk-nosed, bearded guest at first, but the visitor made it clear that he loved Elton's music and Bernie's lyrics.
The following week, the British music magazine Melody Maker ran the following headline: DYLAN DIGS ELTON!
(Bob Dylan in 1970.)
"When I met Bob Dylan at the Fillmore East," Elton recalled in 2011, "he was standing on the staircase and he tells Bernie, 'Oh, I really like the lyrics to "Ballad of a Well-Known Gun,"' and Bernie [faked a heart attack]. There’s nothing like when your heroes rubber-stamp what you’re doing."
(And Dylan wasn't the only hero of Elton's that approved of him. It was also in 1970 that Neil Young came to Elton's apartment and played the entire song list of his then-current LP After the Gold Rush on Elton's piano until three in the morning. "How are you ever going to forget that?" Elton later said.)
On Elton went, playing at colleges in Bridgeport, Connecticut and Glassboro, New Jersey before heading toward the heartland. He made his mark with performances in Chicago, Cleveland, Detroit and Minneapolis before making an appearance at Westminster College in Fulton, Missouri, where another Englishman, Winston Churchill, had made his famous Iron Curtain speech. One could argue that Elton's concert there on December 1 was as equally important as Churchill's appearance, since it demonstrated his appeal in the real America in a state known for being Northern, Southern, and Midwestern all at once.
From there Elton performed three California dates in Anaheim, San Bernardino and, where it all started, Los Angeles - this time in the Royce Hall on the UCLA campus. With his peers singing his praises (Al Kooper called the Black Album "the ultimate album") and his records skyrocketing to the Top Ten and setting him up for a fantastic period of chart dominance that would price a string of hit singles and seven consecutive albums at number one, it was becoming quite clear what was going on. The sixties were over, the seventies had arrived, and Elton John was the new hero for the new decade. Let's all repeat what the late radio personality Bill Drake once said: "As Elvis was to the fifties, and as the Beatles were to the sixties, Elton John was to the seventies."
I need mention one other thing. The exact U.K. release date of Elton John's self-titled second album was April 10, 1970 - the day after Paul McCartney announced to the world that he was leaving the Beatles. (As noted in an earlier blog post, the Black Album was released in the U.S. in July 1970 - specifically, July 22.) Even though no one could have known it at the time, the Beatles were passing the torch to Elton. As John Lennon would later recall, "I remember hearing Elton John's 'Your Song', heard it in America - it was one of Elton's first big hits -and remember thinking, 'Great, that's the first new thing that's happened since we (The Beatles) happened.' It was a step forward. There was something about his vocal that was an improvement on all of the English vocals until then. I was pleased with it."
And so was everyone else. 😊
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