Elton John's Fall 1970 U.S. Tour

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. 😊

Elton John Has Arrived

Fifty years ago, in the summer of 1970, Elton John made his successful American debut with a six-night residency at the Troubadour in Los Angeles to promote his self-tilted second album, which was his first U.S. release.  He was quickly recognized as the obvious successor to the Beatles, who had broken up in April 1970, for the enthusiastic response he generated from record buyers and audiences.  It was quite a turnaround from where Elton and his songwriting partner, lyricist Bernie Taupin (below, right, with Elton) had been at the start of the year.

Elton signed a record contract with Beatles song publisher Dick James' record company in 1968, and James was convinced that the young Reginald Dwight, as our hero was then known, was going to go places.  But Elton went nowhere fast.  After three failed singles and the underwhelming reaction from the press and the public to his debut album, 1969's Empty Sky, Elton found himself in January 1970 recording faked versions of original hit songs of the time for a compilation record.  You may remember such records - in both Britain and America, anonymous performers would copy the instruments and the vocals of hit songs and then the recordings would be compiled into an album called "Greatest Hits of 1970" or something like that, and sold in either five-and-dime stores or on TV.  The performances would be credited to a studio group, but the credit would appear in small print; it was a deceptive way to get people to buy compilations of hit songs that they thought were recordings from the original artists.  Elton's contributions to such a ripoff record included covers of Robin Gibb's U.K. solo hit "Saved By the Bell" and Creedence Clearwater Revival's "Up Around the Bend," among other tracks, in which he tried to sound exactly, or at least virtually, like the original artists.  Elton John pretending to be John Fogerty?  It happened.  Elton needed the money, and so pretending to be someone else was a way to pay the bills while a career at being himself was foundering. Ironically, his efforts at mimicking others revealed what ultimately made him so successful - his ability to play any kind of song in any pop genre.

Soon after, James put Elton on notice.  He told him that the record company couldn't afford to fund Elton's recording career unless his records started selling.  Therefore, his second album had to be a commercial success, otherwise his contract would be terminated, because James couldn't afford to keep spending money on him if it wasn't yielding results.  Steve Brown, whose job at Dick James Music involved working as a coordinator for Elton, decided to throw everything he could at having Elton making a top-notch, high-quality pop record; if this was to be Elton's last chance, he was going to make the most of it.

Not only did Brown enlist a crack session band, he sought out the best producer and the best arranger possible. He approached Beatles producer George Martin to produce the LP, but Martin wanted to arrange the songs as well as produce the recording sessions, and Brown wanted to keep those duties separate.  He eventually settled on Gus Dudgeon to produce the record.  Dudgeon had been a sound engineer for the Zombies and for John Mayall and co-produced Ten Years After's debut album.  He also produced David Bowie's "Space Oddity," which was arranged by conductor Paul Buckmaster; it was likely that record that got Buckmaster the job for arranging Elton's second album.  With that team in place, Elton went to work on what became his second album - self-titled but known as the Black Album for its black backdrop, which I reviewed in May 2016.

The Black Album did get on the British charts when it was released in the U.K. in the early spring of 1970 and "Border Song," one of its cuts - and one of the few songs Elton ever wrote a lyric for (the third verse) - got airplay on the BBC.  But it was a very qualified success at best, and it only gave Elton and Bernie a temporary reprieve.  They were still living very much on the knife's edge, and James was ready to drop Elton if the record didn't start showing real dividends.  And the best hope for that was to introduce Elton in America, which had been turning more toward homegrown talent at the time.

It took Russ Regan (above), the president of UNI Records in Los Angeles, to get pop-music fans on both sides of the Atlantic to turn Elton John into the star Dick James knew Elton could become. As Regan recalled, Lenny Hodes, a representative from from Dick James Music, came to his office one day and told him he had an LP and a couple of singles from this new artist who had already been rejected by five American labels. As soon as Regan, who loved music as much as the pop fans who bought records, had the chance to hear them, he thought, "This guy is really good. I wonder what the problem is?" When he telephoned Hodes, Hodes told Regan he could have Elton for no money.

In stories like this, the hotshot offered a deal for no money usually turns down the offer - because there must be something wrong with it if it's for free - and realizes too late after that he threw away a golden opportunity.  Regan did nothing of the sort; he jumped at the chance to sign this Elton John kid to UNI and accepted Hodes' offer.

The Black Album was released in the U.S. in July 1970. Now all Regan and UNI publicist Norm Winter had to do was get Elton to come over and promote it.  Elton was quickly booked for the Troubadour club in Los Angeles to play a six-night engagement, beginning on Tuesday, August 25, 1970.  He and Bernie Taupin set out for LA a few days in advance with two of the three musicians that would form the Elton John Band - bassist Dee Murray and drummer Nigel Olsson.  Session guitarist Caleb Quaye joined them for the trip; Davey Johnstone hadn't come into the picture yet.

The first sight that greeted Elton and Bernie (at left in the picture above) on American soil was not an auspicious one.  A bunch of British double-decker buses were waiting for them and their entourage at Los Angeles International Airport with placards plastered on both sides of the buses.  The placards, using typeface borrowed from the artwork on the Black Album, bore the legend "Elton John has arrived."  To UNI, this was a clever way of promoting its new British discovery; to Elton, it was a humiliation, having to ride the same double-decker buses he'd ridden when he was a struggling musician without a penny to his name.  But he did take to Los Angeles, taking in the sights before the Troubadour shows and buying records at the local record stores. For Elton, getting one of the first copies of Neil Young's After the Gold Rush was as big a highlight as his own Troubadour gig.

But this was a business trip, not a leisure trip. Elton had a lot riding on the Troubadour gig.  As Caleb Quaye later said, "Sending him over there was actually the last desperate attempt by Dick James Music to get him across to the public."

To be continued . . .