Elton John - Tumbleweed Connection (1970)

"Good melodies and bad Westerns" is how Robert Christgau described Elton John's Tumbleweed Connection album, and even though I enjoy the record, it's easy to agree with the dean of American rock critics, at least to a point.

Released in Britain in October 1970 and in America in January 1971, Tumbleweed Connection is ostensibly a theme album devoted to the fondness of Elton and lyricist Bernie Taupin for rural and Western Americana. The duo are sincere enough in their interest in America's cultural heritage, but some of these songs depict scenes and vignettes that were clearly more inspired by Hollywood movies than the real thing. The overall production is a little too slick, and Paul Buckmaster's orchestral arrangements have an inescapable symphonic grandeur that (mostly) doesn't jibe with the LP's rustic pretensions. One of the best songs on this record sounds more English than American; "Come Down In Time," a ballad, is a gorgeous, intricately arranged track anchored by oboe and acoustic bass, with delicate harp notes creeping like a spider, all backed by Buckmaster's lovely strings. Beautiful stuff, but hardly home on the range.

Part of the authenticity problem with Tumbleweed Connection is the fact that Elton and Bernie Taupin had not yet visited America when this album was recorded, so, unlike the Band - a group of four Canadians and Arkansan Levon Helm, who had a closer relationship with this country as Bob Dylan's backing group before they made their recording debut - they approached Americana as outsiders. The Civil War ballad "My Father's Gun" is the most obvious proof of this. Against a mannered ensemble of guitar and piano - and Buckmaster's orchestra - Elton's Confederate soldier sings of having buried his dead father and vowed to carry on the fight with his father's rifle "until the cause is fought and won," eager to "plant the seeds of justice" and hear the "laughter when the bells of freedom ring" when it's all over. As the Band made clear in "The Night They Drove Old Dixie Down," poor white Southerners were fighting for their homes and their land, even though their commanders were fighting to preserve the sanctity of slavery. What freedom are Elton and Bernie talking about?

Having said all that, there's a lot on Tumbleweed Connection that works. The music has a rich quality to it, with some of Elton's most energetic piano playing backed by scratching, cutting guitars from Caleb Quaye and expressive drumming from Roger Pope, Barry Morgan, and Nigel Olsson. And after all of his esoteric prose on Elton's earlier efforts, Bernie Taupin has improved his lyrical focus, sharpening his descriptive skills and working within traditional song form. More importantly, when Elton and Bernie do get the rural Americana or Old West feel in their songs right, they do so spectacularly. "Country Comfort" is the best such effort on this album, with its charming pastoral imagery of a rural town, while "Amoreena" is a colorful, lusty portrait of country comforts as the narrator imagines his lady enjoying them; the song is practically a deeply hued nineteenth-century painting come to life. The LP's meatiest number, the outlaw-mythologizing "Ballad Of a Well-Known Gun," has some nice bite to it, while "Burn Down The Mission," the closing cut, makes sense of Buckmaster's orchestrations with strings and horns that vividly illustrate the flames lighting the heavens. The lighter moments include the heartbreaking "Talking Old Soldiers," a dialogue between an old man sadly remembering his youth and a younger man who sympathizes with him, with Elton backed only by his own piano, and, for the first time on an Elton John album, a cover - he performs singer-songwriter Lesley Duncan's "Love Song" backed by only Duncan herself on guitar and backing vocals and, curiously, sound effects of children playing by the seaside. Here Elton only sings without his own music or instrumentation, and he pulls it off.

As a country-rock album, Tumbleweed Connection doesn't quite make it, but it's more intimate than many of the other albums of Elton's classic period, and it has a lot of heart. So when I hear him sing about a farm in "East Virginia" in "Son Of Your Father," I don't care very much about that. I don't even mind that the "Old West" train station on the sleeve is actually a station in West Sussex. I'm too busy singing along.