Elton John says goodbye to the gimmicks

Press, 6 October 1989, Page 29

Elton John says goodbye to the gimmicks

Music

By

GARY GRAFF

NZPA-KRDDetroit

For most of this decade, Elton John, the man who once called himself Captain Fantastic, has had some kind of hook to promote his concert tours.

In 1982, he staged a comeback. Two years later, he was on his Farewell Tour, followed by the Who Said I Was Leaving? Un-Farewell Tour of 1986. And before last year’s outing, he auctioned off all the outrageous stage garb and glasses accumulated in 20 years of performing, peroxided his locks and declared an end to the cartoonish, though beloved, Elton John character.

This year, there is no gimmick. All the singer-songwriter-pianist — born Reginald Dwight 42 years ago in Pinner, England — has to promote himself is his music.

That’s nothing to dismiss, of course. John’s career is laden with million-selling . albums and hit singles, including the No. 2 “I Don’t Wanna Go On With You Like That” from last year’s “Reg Strikes Back” album, which signalled yet another commercial comeback.

And this year, John thinks he’s got another winner with the just-re-leased “Sleeping With the Past,” which, like most of his best work, was completely co-written with Bernie Taupin, who writes his lyrics separately, while John composes the music. “Bernie and I thought a lot about it because ‘Reg Strikes Back’ kind of reestablished a pattern of better album sales and more success,” says the press-shy John in a videotaped interview distributed by his record company, MCA. “We really wanted to make this album something a bit more special because the band was more of an R’n’B-influ-enced band ... I thought, ‘What can we do with this band? What sort of album could we do with it? 1 “Bernie hatched the idea maybe to do a sort of album based on soul songs which we grew up on and loved. That was the music when I first met Bernie that we both liked very much.” So “Sleeping With The

Past,” recorded in Denmark earlier this year, became a pastiche of ’6os R’n’B influences, which included Motown, Jackie Wilson, Sam and Dave and dozens of other artists.

Sometimes the ties are direct: Taupin acknowledges that Lee Dorsey’s 1966 hit, “Workin’ In A Coal Mine,” is the foundation of a new song called “Durban Deep,” while Marvin Gaye’s “I Heard It Through the Grapevine” is the cornerstone of “A Stone’s Throw From Hurtin’.” John adds that Aretha Franklin’s “Do Right Woman” was the inspiration for “Sacrifice.” “None of the songs are carbon copies,” John says. “It’s just the spirit and the influence of these old artists and souls ... As one album we’ve made since ‘Captain Fantastic’ (in 1975), it’s one style of music throughout” Taupin says, “I think maybe there were a lot of people out there used to seeing another album coming out I’m really against people thinking, ‘Oh, it’s another Elton/ Bernie album. They’ll just go in, write another bunch of songs, put out another album.’ I was very conscious of that “I really wanted to prove that we could really concentrate and write great songs. ” Whether the recordbuying public recognises that or not is of moderate but not overwhelming concern to John these days. Having gone through extreme phases — of being perhaps the biggest pop star in the world between 1972 and 1976, an arid spell between 1977 and 1981, career-threatening throat surgery in 1987 — John says he’s finally putting more stock in his own evaluation of his work rather than what the ledgers tell him. “The saving grace for me has been playing live

... the real secret behind the longevity of a good artist is the ability to play well and perform to people. No matter how your record sales go up and down — and they will because you’re not going to make the best record of all time every time — people will forget that and come and see you because you make them feel part of that evening and you try to make them feel special.”