Bernie Taupin: Elton’s “Write” Hand Man
By Steven P. Wheeler
It is the summer of 1989. Six months of phone calls and patience has finally paid off. Bernie Taupin, the man who has been placing words into the mouth of Elton John since 1967, sits behind the desk in a cluttered office high atop Sunset Boulevard in Hollywood, California, willing to discuss all aspects of his illustrious career.
As one half of the most prolific and enduring songwriting team in pop music history, Taupin, like his more famous partner, is a musical legend.
The English-born lyricist arrived a few minutes late after flying in from Denver, Colorado, where Elton’s Sleeping With the Past Tour had made a stop. Taupin noted that he is accompanying Elton on the entire tour for the first time in more than a decade because “I’m really into this project and I want to be with him for this album [Sleeping With the Past]. I also wanted to do one more tour before I hang up my road shoes.”
With a long ponytail falling from underneath a baseball cap and earrings dangling from each ear, the then-39-year-old lyricist/poet/novelist has maintained his “bohemic” image after 20 years in the fickle business of music, and steadfastly believes that the John-Taupin partnership is producing some of its finest material to date.
Now that the scene has been set, I’ll also be adding in more dialogue that I had with Taupin when we sat down again in 1996 to discus his own band, Farm Dogs, as well as some current details of Bernie’s career as a visual artist to bring it all home.
The magical bio-pic Rocketman is also available now for home viewing this week, so check it out if you missed it in theaters.
The Ad That Changed Music History
Born May 22, 1950, the second of three sons, Bernie Taupin always dreamed of being a writer, but schooling wasn’t something that the future songwriting legend put a lot of stock in. Leaving school at 15, the closest he came to a writing career in those days was working in the printing room of the local newspaper.
Like many kids his age growing up in Lincolnshire, England, the dreamer with a fascination for America was a bit directionless and sought more than what his small town upbringing had to offer. “I was living in the north of England. I was basically a farm hand. It was either sink or swim for me at that time,” Taupin explained. “I was either going to break out of the area, because the area I was living in was sort of akin to living in Indiana or Nebraska, where you have two opportunities after you leave school: you either work on the land and drive a tractor or you go and work in the steel towns.
“Living in Lincolnshire, I did both of those things: I worked on the land and I worked in a factory. I did have a certain literary background on my mother’s side of the family. My mother was very instrumental in making me read good literature and she was always encouraging me to write. And my grandfather was a college professor, so I always had aspirations of writing. Obviously, it was very youthful writing at that time, but, again, it was an early time.”
Always a music fan, one day in 1967, Taupin was thumbing through his latest copy of the New Musical Express and happened upon an ad. Little did he know that his life was just about to change forever.
“I answered that ad out of desperation, really,” Taupin told me in 1989. “Elton and I did meet through an ad in the New Musical Express in 1967. It’s not that complicated really. We both answered the same ad, and just through the ingenuity of Ray Williams, one of the people involved in placing the ad—which was actually for Liberty Records when they broke away from EMI—we were put together.
“They were just starting a new company, and they needed everybody—they needed somebody to clean the floors, they needed somebody to write songs, they needed artists, they needed promo men.”
As for his part, Taupin says that his early attempt at writing song lyrics were heavily influenced by the era, which, in America, would become known as the Summer of Love.
“When we first met, the object was basically to write songs. There was no notion in our minds that Elton was to be a performer. It was just Bernie Taupin and Reg Dwight then, and we were signed to Dick James Music, and we were writing songs.”
Bernie Taupin (Interview by Steven P. Wheeler)
“It was the late ‘60s, and it was the era of tremendous pretention,” he stated with a laugh. “So the things that I was writing when I first attempted to write lyrics, which I didn’t really know what I was supposed to write, were appalling rip-offs of John Lennon material or Procol Harum or things like that.
“I was writing things like ‘The Chocolate Lakes of Your Mind,’ ‘The Year of the Teddy Bear’ and ‘Swan Queen of the Laughing Lake.’ They were all these sort of acid-trip things, which I had no justification in writing because I didn’t even know what acid looked like at the time.”
The Tin Pan Alley Twins
Eventually the two budding songwriters would meet and they were signed to Dick James Music. Contrary to his portrayal in the Rocketman movie, Dick James was a major player in the industry who owned The Beatles publishing.
“When we first met, the object was basically to write songs. There was no notion in our minds that Elton was to be a performer,” explained Taupin. “It was just Bernie Taupin and Reg Dwight then, and we were signed to Dick James Music, and we were writing songs.
“Now, this was still in the days of Tin Pan Alley and Denmark Street in London, when most singers who were making records were not writing their own songs. It was really the days of Tom Jones and Lulu. Even the groups that were out there were recording a lot of outside material. So there was a great demand for songs, and we weren’t nurtured and we weren’t encouraged to write what we wanted to write.
“We were sort of forced to write big-time ballads for people like Engelbert Humperdink and Tom Jones—not that they ever recorded any of our material because it really wasn’t any good.”
The Turning Point
Just as the unsung Ray Williams put the two songwriters together, another person lost to history who played a vital role in the evolution of the Dwight/Taupin team was a maverick within the Dick James company, as Bernie explained: “In order to make money we had to write that kind of material. But on the side, we started tinkering with a little bit more experimental songs.
“And sometime later on, a guy named Steve Brown came into the Dick James organization and heard some of the songs we were trying to write for other people, and he said, ‘Listen, don’t be writing this shit. Concentrate on writing exactly what you want to write. Don’t worry about Dick, I’ll pacify him,’ because Dick was still paying our way.”
“We were writing these kinds of songs, and it was at that point that we realized that the only people who could really record them was ourselves. And Elton had been singing on all the demos, so I just said, ‘Well, I guess it has to be you because you have the better voice and you play the piano.’ It could have been anybody, I guess, it could have been me.”
Bernie Taupin (Interview by Steven P. Wheeler)
“So we sort of went home and start writing what we felt like writing, and those were the nucleus of the early songs like ‘Lady Samantha’ that would eventually lead up to the Empty Sky album. We were writing these kinds of songs, and it was at that point that we realized that the only people who could really record them was ourselves. And Elton had been singing on all the demos, so I just said, ‘Well, I guess it has to be you because you have the better voice and you play the piano.’ It could have been anybody, I guess, it could have been me [laughs].”
Two Rooms
The most interesting aspect of the John/Taupin partnership is how they work. Taupin starts the process by writing or typing out his lyrics, passes them on to Elton and leaves the ivory-tickler to come up with the music. This bizarre working relationship is the same today as it was when they began in 1967.
“Over the years, the actual style of our writing has not changed,” Taupin states. “I’ve always written the lyrics first and given them to Elton and he writes the music. We’ve always worked totally separate, but it’s a 50-50 deal.
“In the early days, when we were writing those first initial songs, we were living at Elton’s mother’s apartment in Northwood Hills just outside of London, and it was very much like two young songwriters honing their craft. I mean, we were discovering the way each other worked. It’s about honing your craft, about discovering each other’s working patterns.”
“It was funny, I’d be in the bedroom writing lyrics and he’d be in the living room at the stand-up piano,” Taupin continued, “and I’d bring him some lyrics and go back to the bedroom and write some more. It was very childish.
“There’s a song on the Captain Fantastic and the Brown Dirt Cowboy album [the autobiographical classic released in 1975] called ‘Writing,’ which I think does a very good job about summing up that period of time.”
“Even to this day people find it very strange that that’s how we work. I mean, I don’t know any other songwriting team that’s ever done it this way. So we really broke the mold. And, for me, it was a dream come true because I didn’t have to conform to any restrictions. I could just write what I wanted.
“In those early days, I had no real sense of form. I was just writing very, very long pieces and Elton was honing them into songs. For historical note, a lot of those early songs probably had several more verses.”
This “honing’ process even happened as late as 1972 and resulted in one of pop music’s classic hits. “It’s like the famous story of ‘Daniel.’ The original lyric of ‘Daniel’ had another verse, which basically explained what the song was about. But because it was too long, we left it out and, of course, to this day people are still wondering what that song is about.
“It’s basically about a young boy whose older brother is a Vietnam vet who comes home to the farm, and he can’t find any peace, so he flies off to Spain where he can hopefully find some. It’s written from the boy’s point of view as he watches him fly away.”
“Empty Sky” Album
With the encouragement of Steve Brown at Dick James Music, it was time to try and push the newly christened Elton John to do an album after the less than successful singles. With a very small budget and Brown helming the sessions as producer, the result was the album Empty Sky, which was only released in England. America would have to wait.
Looking back on that debut album, one can’t help but feel Taupin’s fondness for that first big moment in their career. Still in his teens at the time, and Elton only 22, this was an early dream come true for the pair, even if there was no sign that stardom was on the horizon.
“[Empty Sky] got a modicum of good reaction. It got just as much bad reaction,” the lyricist says with a laugh. “It was a slightly sort of pretentious album. I think we were still finding our way. It was a very naïve album.
“Lyrically, it was steeped in Norse mythology and sort of based on what I was reading at the time, which was a lot of science fiction by writers like H.G. Wells and H.P. Lovecraft. So it came across like that.”
Despite being recorded in a primitive two-track studio, some of the magic of the John/Taupin partnership could be seen. When pushed, Taupin does agree that this first effort did include some worthy material.
“It did have its moments,” he agreed. “The title track was quite interesting. I actually wouldn’t mind re-recording that song because it was done in a two-track studio at the time [laughs]. We were basically trying to do ‘Sympathy for the Devil’ with that introduction [Bernie drums on the desk like the conga intro of the song].
“But that one track really stands out for me, and, in fact, until sometime in the mid-‘70s Elton used to do that song on stage. It would be interesting to do that song again, I think.”
When Taupin is reminded of another song from the album, he readily agrees: “There’s a couple of other decent songs on that album. ‘Skyline Pigeon’ is on there, which is a fairly naïve lyric, but it’s actually a good song, a good melody.”
‘Skyline Pigeon’ & Ryan White
Elton has said that 1969’s “Skyline Pigeon” was the first song that he and Bernie had felt truly excited about; that they had found their voice for the first time.
Bu twenty years later, the significance of the song would take on an entirely new meaning as Elton would perform this song at the funeral for teenage AIDS victim Ryan White. White made national news after he had contracted the deadly virus through a blood transfusion in 1984 at the age of 13. He died in 1990 at 18, with a quote from Bernie’s lyric gracing his headstone.
During the final week of Ryan’s life in Indiana, Elton spent a lot of time with Ryan and his family. The pampered superstar was humbled by the family who bore no ill will towards the bigotry and indignation they suffered during those early days of the AIDS crisis: protests to keep White from returning to his high school, gunshots fired at their home, which forced them to leave their hometown.
It was Ryan’s forgiveness and grace and his mother’s humility in the face of losing her child that impacted Elton and made him look at his own life. At that point in time, Elton was a major drug addict who lived a life of privilege and wealth with no sense of reality; even to the point of calling his management company to have them do something about the strong wind that was blowing outside his hotel room and keeping him awake.
Within six months of Ryan’s death, Elton would get sober and has remained so ever since. He also started his own AIDS Foundation in 1992 that has raised nearly half-a-billion dollars over the past 27 years.
The Beginning of Fame
Although Empty Sky barely made a ripple of an impact in England, Dick James did put his money where his mouth was and spent a lot of money on the next album. The self-titled album would be the first to be released in America and it was the first major step in what has become a 50-year journey of fame and fortune for the two songwriters.
“I don’t know what we expected from that record,” Taupin recalls, “but I think it gave Dick James some confidence in us. At the time of the Empty Sky album, I think Dick realized that he had something going because at that time in England there was nobody of that ilk. America had its Van Morrisons, its Joni Mitchells, its Carole Kings and James Taylors, but there was nobody like that in England. So I guess we were the Great English Hope.
“And Dick, to all his credit, poured a lot of money into the Elton John album. And Steve Brown, who had produced the Empty Sky album only because he happened to be there at the time, said, ‘For this next album, we’ve got to get the right producer, we’ve got to get the right arranger, and we’ve got to build the right team around us.’ And that’s what we did with [producer] Gus Dudgeon and [arranger] Paul Buckmaster.”
In a bold move, Dick James sent Elton and Bernie to America, along with drummer Nigel Olsson and bassist Dee Murray. The legendary concert engagement at The Troubadour in Los Angeles resulted in massive media coverage and word about the piano-playing madman spread across the U.S. like wildfire.
Bernie recalled those heady days when his childhood dream of coming to America was soon realized. “Luckily, the Elton John album was the one that took off. Funny enough, it actually took off in America first, and sort of boomeranged back to England. By the time we actually came to America to promote the Elton John album, we had already gotten the Tumbleweed Connection album in the bag too, which was to be the follow-up.
“When we first came to the States, we brought the tapes of the Tumbleweed album with us. I remember playing it for Robbie Robertson [chief songwriter and guitarist for The Band] in a hotel in New York. And from there, as they say, the rest is history.”
The American Dream
The mention of the Tumbleweed Connection classic instantly brings to mind visions of America in the days of simple pioneering days and the gunslinging Wild West. Ironically these vivid scenes and scenarios came from the pen of a teenage English kid who had never set foot on Yankee soil.
“Coming to the States was something that every kid in England wanted to do at that time,” Taupin says with a childlike enthusiasm. “When we got the opportunity at the time of the Elton John album in 1970, I think the real reason that Elton and I wanted to come here was so that we could see the record stores, because we were vinyl junkies back then. As a matter of fact, we still are.
“Plus, as a kid I kind of fed on Americana—American television, American literature—and I was obsessed with the American West. Like I said, we even did the Tumbleweed Connection album even before we came here, because I was so influenced by a mixture of things from The Band to Dylan, but definitely The Band because The Band to me epitomized Americana and that timeless quality. I loved The Band. I mean, The Band is probably still my all-time favorite rock and roll band. I think they encompass everything that is good in that art form.”
“A lot of the stuff we were listening to was coming out of the West Coast of America—people like Love, The Doors and Buffalo Springfield. It was that nucleus time. So we had this sort of preconceived notion of the Promised Land being California.”
Bernie Taupin (Interview by Steven P. Wheeler)
While he had a dream of what America was really like, I asked Bernie if the States lived up to his expectations. His answer came swift and strong: “Oh yeah, absolutely, and even more probably. I don’t think anybody in Europe can understand America until they’ve actually been here. And when we first came here, the last thing on our mind was actually thinking about playing shows or performing. We just wanted to come and see it! It was phenomenal.
“As soon as I got here, I said that America is where I wanted to be. It was everything that I ever dreamed it was going to be and more. Before I knew it I had sold up shop and I was here, and I’ve never wanted to go back, and now I’m an American citizen.”
Bernie Taupin (Interview by Steven P. Wheeler)
The question is whether he still feels the same nearly 50 years later? “Obviously a bit of the shine has worn off over the years,” he answers, “but as soon as I got here, after a couple of days, I said that America is where I wanted to be. It was everything that I ever dreamed it was going to be and more.
“In the next year or so, I got to discover America more by touring, which we did a lot of, and you see the expanse of the country and you see how different people live in different walks of life in America—from the shine here in L.A. to the blue-collar areas to the East Coast—and all those variables just appealed to me. Before I knew it I had sold up shop and I was here, and I’ve never wanted to go back, and now I’m an American citizen.”
American Music
“You see, the thing was that Elton and I fed on American imports while we were growing up in England,” the lifelong music lover explains, “and we just fed on American music. There used to be a place on Berwick Street in London, called One Stop Records, and it was really the only place in London that used to get all the American imports.
“On Fridays, we used to go down there and just wait for these shipments to come in. In those days, in England, they didn’t shrink-wrap records like they shrink-wrap records here, and there was just a difference in the materials that the album covers and the records were made with. It was really exciting to get the new Hendrix album or whatever, because every thing would usually come out in America first.”
Despite their overwhelming success, Taupin notes that it is their undying love for music that keeps them moving creatively. “Elton and I love all kinds of music,” he notes. “I don’t care if it’s jazz, blues, rock & roll, metal or folk; if it’s good, I like it. There are certain things that Elton listens to more than me. Elton likes dance music. I don’t particularly listen to it. Most of the stuff I listen to now is country music. That’s really all I listen to.”
“We’re still vinyl junkies,” Taupin continues, “and I think that’s what still makes us viable because we train each other on what we’ve been listening to. Whenever we talk after we’ve been away from each other for a while, the first thing we say is, ‘Have you heard this? Have you heard that?’ We’re still the biggest music fans in the world.”
Looking Back
While there are countless John/Taupin songs over the past half-century destined to outlive their creators in the hearts and minds of music fans, Taupin still has to deal with critics who have not always been kind to the Tin Pan Alley Twins.
“The thing that people tend to forget is that we were very young when we started. Elton and I met in mid-1967, and I was only 17. So it’s interesting to me when I see reviews of Elton’s concerts today. It’s like when the New York Times did a review of a show on last year’s tour when Elton played some of our older material like ‘Sixty Years On’ and ‘The King Must Die,’ and this guy pointed out how pretentious the lyrics to ‘Sixty Years On’ and ‘The King Must Die’ are, and I felt like writing a letter saying, ‘Excuse me, I was 17 years old when I wrote that.’ They don’t seem to realize that.”
This topic comes up again when I ask about their first major hit, which has become an unquestionable pop standard. “It’s like the perennial ballad ‘Your Song,’ which has got to be one of the most naïve and childish lyrics in the entire repertoire of music, but I think the reason it still stands up is because it was real at the time. That was exactly what I was feeling. I was 17 or 18 years old and it was coming from someone whose outlook on love or experience with love was totally new and naïve.
“Now I could never write that song again or emulate it because the songs I write now that talk about love coming from people my age usually deal with broken marriages and where the children go [laughs]. You have to write from where you are at a particular point in time, and ‘Your Song’ is exactly where I was coming from back then.”
Working Backwards
Since they have been writing together for more than 50 years, I was curious if they had ever switched their Modus Operandi where Bernie wrote lyrics to Elton’s melody. Surprisingly it did happen at one point during the early ’80s.
“We did do it the other way around at one point, and it wasn’t that we tried to do it that way. It just ended up that way. Elton was staying in Paris, and our time schedule was very off. He had been locked in this studio writing all these melodies and he asked me to write some lyrics to a handful of them. I did, and those songs were on an album called Jump Up! [released in 1982], which for me is probably the worst album we’ve ever made.
“It’s a very messy album. The songs are awful. I only wrote five songs on that album, so I’m not going to pass comment on some of the other songs. But it’s a messy album, very inconsistent. We’ve made some bum albums, believe me. There are albums like The Fox, too, which I thought was a complete disaster, even though it had a couple of good songs on it.”
“There is one song where [Elton] did come up with the melody line before I came up with a lyric, and it’s the only time that method worked for us. That was on a song called ‘Sorry Seems to Be the Hardest Word.’”
Bernie Taupin (Interview by Steven P. Wheeler)
However the Jump Up! did include one John/Taupin classic, which was written about their dear friend John Lennon after his tragic murder in 1980. “In fact, the only song that’s any good is ‘Empty Garden,’ which is the only one where I wrote the lyrics first on. It’s really the only song on that album that’s any good.”
Before moving on to the next topic, Bernie stops me in mid-sentence to point out that there was one instance where writing a lyric to Elton’s melody did result in a great song. “Wait a minute, I lied,” he says with a laugh. “There is one other song where he did come up with the melody line before I came up with a lyric, and it’s the only time that method worked for us. That was on a song called ‘Sorry Seems to Be the Hardest Word.’
“I don’t think he was intending on writing a song but we were sitting around an apartment in Los Angeles, and he was playing around on the piano and he came up with this melody line, and I said, ‘Hey, that’s really nice.’ For some reason this lyrical line ‘Sorry seems to be the hardest word’ ran through my head, and it fit perfectly with what he was playing. So I said, ‘Don’t do anything more to that, let me go write something,’ so I wrote it out in a few minutes and we had the song.”
Tuneful Telepathy
Since Elton writes the music to Bernie’s lyrics, another burning question is whether or not the lyricist has ever been disappointed in the music that has been applied to his words. “Well, we’ve been writing together so long that it’s almost telepathic now,” he says matter of factly. “There’s also much more communication in our writing now. At one time, I would just give him a stack of stuff and he’d pick out what appealed to him. Nowadays, I’m more confident and he’s more confident, and we’re more confident with each other, so we talk about things more.
“I also don’t give him as much material to play with as I once did. I’m not afraid to give him a lyric and say: ‘Elton, I think this one is really good. I see it in this light.’ But I don’t like to tread on his toes too much because he’s so inventive and he’s so brilliant that it’s really not necessary to complicate matters and get in his way.
“I’m sure it has happened occasionally in the past where I’ve been not necessarily disappointed with what he’s done, but surprised. The last episode I can remember was with the last track on the Reg Strikes Back album [released in 1987], a song called ‘Since God Invented Girls.’ I had written it more as an up-tempo Beach Boys’ salute, and he turned it into more of a Brian Wilson opus than I had imagined it. Then again, I preferred it the way he did it, and we used the Beach Boys on it.
“So, yeah, it usually can be said that it turns out the way I want it to, but like I said I explain things to him much more than I ever did. Then again, you’ve also got to remember that by the subject matter of a lyric you can kind of tell which direction a song should go. I mean if you write ‘Saturday night’s alright for fighting,’ you’re really not going to write a ballad.”
Quality AND Quantity
Another amazing aspect of the John/Taupin partnership is not only the quality of the songs but also the seemingly endless quantity. How in the world were they able to fulfill a backbreaking contract that called for two albums per year for nearly ten years?
Taupin shrugs and says, “We’re just very prolific writers, who enjoy writing. Don’t ever let anybody tell you that if it takes you a long time to write a song it’s going to be any better than if you write it in ten minutes. Certain people like Don Henley or Robbie Robertson are great writers, but they slave over the songs and it takes them three years to make an album because they’re meticulous in the sense that they go over and over and over things.
“I’m the sort of writer to where if it’s not working for me in like ten minutes, I know it’s going nowhere. My best stuff comes straight out and pours out, and the same with Elton. We just happen to write very quickly, and while some of our material might suffer for it, we’re just those kind of writers.”
Obviously, over the years, they have slowed down that ridiculous pace. “We don’t write as much as we used to,” he revealed to me in 1989. “I mean in the early ‘70s that’s all we did was write songs continually. We had huge backlogs of material.
“Now I certainly have other outside interests, and songwriting takes up a very, very small percentage of my time. But I probably enjoy doing it more now than I ever did because when I sit down to write now, I think my ideas are much more concentrated and I think my ideas are probably better. Maybe they’re just more adult. That’s why I don’t really consider myself to be a songwriter, I think of myself as a writer.”
Poetry vs. Lyrics
When it comes to the topic of poetry and lyrics, Bernie takes a firm stance about the difference. “People, who are being very sweet and well meaning, are always telling me that my lyrics are poetry, which absolutely makes me barf,” he says. “My lyrics are nothing like poetry. They’re supposed to be heard with a melody. I don’t like people taking my lyrics out of context and reading it as poetry. They were written to be sung; they were not written to be recited.”
“People, who are being very sweet and well meaning, are always telling me that my lyrics are poetry, which absolutely makes me barf. My lyrics are nothing like poetry. They’re supposed to be heard with a melody. They were written to be sung; they were not written to be recited.”
Bernie Taupin (Interview by Steven P. Wheeler)
“I’m very adamant about that because nobody’s ever seen my poetry. Poetry is one of my first loves, and I think of myself as a poet but I also think of myself as a lyricist and a writer. So that’s why I’d rather be known as a writer instead of a songwriter, because songwriting is such a small part of my life. I love writing, that is my life.
“My poetry is very dear to me, and I’ve worked very hard on it. What I did recently is I went through all my old notebooks and I put all of my poetry in the word processor [Ed. Note: Kids, computers in the ’80s were often referred to as “word processors” ;)], re-evaluated it, edited it, and added to it, and came up with my first volume of poetry, which I hope will be out next year.”
In 1988, Bernie’s memoir about his pre-fame days called A Cradle of Haloes: Sketches of a Childhood was published and, in 1991, his first book of poetry entitled The Devil at High Noon was also published.
“As long as I’m doing something in any field of writing I’m happy. I’ve got to have something feeding me all the time. My dream of the future is to be able to retire to my wherever and just write. That’s all I want to do. There’s just not enough hours in the day for me to do that.”
“Disposable Pop”
Over the years, Elton has dubbed many of their songs as “disposable pop,” so I asked Bernie if he agreed. “We’ve made an incredible amount of ‘disposable pop,’ especially in the early-to-mid ‘70s with things like ‘Crocodile Rock,’ ‘Honky Cat’ and ‘Don’t Go Breaking My Heart.’ Yeah, it’s very disposable. It’s music for the moment.
“I don’t want people to remember me for ‘Crocodile Rock.’ I’d much rather they remember me for songs like ‘Candle in the Wind’ and ‘Empty Garden,’ songs that convey a message. Well, they don’t really have to convey a message, as long as they convey a feeling. There are certain love songs or ballads that we’ve written that have an intensity and an integrity that I think will remain intact for a very long time. With things like ‘Sorry Seems to Be the Hardest Word’ and ‘Daniel,’ I can honestly say that I’m pretty proud of our output as far as commercial singles are concerned.
“But there are other things that are probably very ‘surface,’ where the feeling is not really that realistic, things like ‘Crocodile Rock,’ which was fun at the time, but it was ‘pop fluff.’ It was like, ‘Okay, that was fun for now, throw it away and here’s the next one.’ So there’s a certain element of our music that is disposable, but I think you’ll find that in anybody’s catalog.”
“Unfortunately, today, people think that ‘pop’ is a dirty word. It’s got to be rock & roll or post-modern,” he continued. “Fuck, it’s all pop. As much as I love John Cougar Mellencamp, ‘never wanted to be a pop singer,’ yes he did! [laughs]. Pop singer means popular singer; to be popular.
“Frank Sinatra was a pop singer. Bruce Springsteen is a pop singer. I’m sorry, if anyone says otherwise, they’re full of shit because that’s what it means. Rock & roll is a much earthier term to use—yeah, rock & roll singer—but they’re all pop singers. U2 is a pop group, I’m sorry. I’ve got as much social conscience as anybody, believe me, but we are all pop singers.”
Goodbye Yellow Brick Road
In 1973, their legendary double-album Goodbye Yellow Brick Road thrust Bernie and Elton into the stratosphere of superstardom. It was still a time of innocence, when fame was new and wealth was starting to build up incredibly fast. It was also a time when they began merging into the proverbial hedonistic fastlane of sex, drugs and rock & roll, with no detours yet in the distance.
(Photo by Terry O’Neill/Iconic Images/Getty Images)
I asked Bernie to recount that album and he revealed his own personal thoughts on the classic album that has become synonymous with the career of Elton John and Bernie Taupin.
“I think the reason that Yellow Brick Road stands out is because it’s that sort of album that everybody claims to be a classic,” he stated, “which I don’t necessarily agree with. If people were to ask me to name my favorite Elton John album, I don’t necessarily think that it would be Yellow Brick Road, although it’s a very good album.
“I wrote most of the lyrics for that album within about a week, and while the band would be eating breakfast, Elton would take a lyric and write the song and they’d go in and record it. As soon as they finished, Elton would find another one, and that’s the way we did it.”
Bernie Taupin (Interview by Steven P. Wheeler)
“What happened with that album was that it was our intention to record it in Jamica, in Kingston, at Byron Lee’s studio, because the Rolling Stones had just been there and done Goat’s Head Soup. And they said, ‘Go down there, go down there and do it,’ not telling us the nightmares they had making the record over there, and that they had just managed to make it there.
“So we went down there thinking that it was going to be a great atmosphere, and the thing turned into an absolute nightmare. The studio was a joke. We couldn’t make anything work, and it was surrounded by guards with machine guns keeping people out, which is not the best atmosphere to work in. And the locals for some reason just didn’t like outsiders, and it was just a very intense experience and not a good working environment.
“In the end, we said, ‘We cannot work here,’ because our original intention was to do the writing for the album there, but we didn’t get anything done. So Elton and I basically fled, and we went back to New York and reassessed the situation, and we decided to go back to the Chateau in France, where we had done the previous couple of albums.”
Once they were back in France, they were under the gun to get some material together after the Jamaica debacle. “So we went back there and that’s when we realized that we had no songs,” he said, with a laugh. “So we sat down and started writing and the band came over. I wrote a few things, and for some reason it all just fell out.
“I wrote most of the lyrics for that album within about a week, and while the band would be eating breakfast, Elton would take a lyric and write the song and they’d go in and record it. As soon as they finished, Elton would find another one, and that’s the way we did it.
“I don’t remember how long it took us to write the songs for that album. It’s probably all been lost in myth and fable,” he jokes. “Over the years, I probably said that we wrote all those songs in a day or something. I really don’t remember how long it took us, but it went really fast.”
With their little Motown hit factory cranking out songs at a feverish pace, they began to think about the possibility of making it a double-album. “We just kept recording,” Taupin recalled, “and then suddenly we realized, ‘Shit we’ve got like 20 songs here, and they’re all pretty strong.’ [Producer] Gus Dudgeon did a great job putting that album together, threading all the songs and making that running order work the way it does.”
Fantastic the Feedback
Looking in the rearview mirror today, it’s difficult to really explain the mass popularity of Elton John between 1973-75. While free-form radio on the FM side of the dial was playing the progressive rock of “Funeral For a Friend/Love Lies Bleeding,” “Saturday Night’s Alright For Fighting,” “Grey Seal” and others, the AM fans were pushing songs like “Goodbye Yellow Brick Road” and “Bennie and the Jets” to the top of the charts.
Sure-fire hit singles like “Candle in the Wind” and “Harmony” from their double-album extravaganza never even got a chance to be released since Elton and Bernie had already finished the follow-up album Caribou within six months. And just like that, two more EJ/BT classics “The Bitch is Back” and “Don’t Let the Sun Go Down On Me” were shooting up the charts.
And then in January 1975, Elton’s cover of The Beatles’ classic “Lucy in the Sky With Diamonds” (featuring John Lennon on guitar and backing vocals) topped the charts, only to be replaced at Number One by Bernie and Elton’s single “Philadelphia Freedom” weeks later.
You literally could not listen to a radio in America for more than 30 minutes without hearing an Elton John song. And after Caribou topped the charts, in May of 1975 came Bernie and Elton’s autobiographical masterpiece Captain Fantastic and the Brown Dirt Cowboy. The album was promoted for months prior to its release, including a television commercial which was unheard of at the time.
The buzz was so big that the album became the first one in history to enter the charts at Number One, selling 500,000 copies in pre-orders alone. Elton and Bernie were at their zenith of popularity. It was something that only four lads from Liverpool could relate to. In fact, Bernie and Elton’s friend John Lennon was so amazed at how much airplay their songs were getting at the time that he joked: “If you die, I’m throwing my fuckin’ radio out the window.”
The sterling autobiographical album showed Bernie’s lyricism at its finest as he detailed the lives of the two songwriters from their early childhood to before they recorded their first album in 1969. Bernie and Elton still speak fondly of the album to this day. (In 2006, Bernie and Elton wrote the long-awaited sequel The Captain and the Kid, which begins right where Captain Fantastic left off. It is a brilliant musical journey thru their incredible career from the ’70s thru the ’80s, ’90s and 2000s. Read my detailed analysis of the album here https://rokritr.com/2019/06/07/the-captain-and-the-kid-the-real-rocketman/)
“I love the Captain Fantastic album,” Bernie says warmly. “I think, lyrically, the Captain Fantastic album is one of our finest. I mean those songs were written all about us from the time we first met up until our first album together. It was written from my standpoint and from his, although I was putting the words in his mouth.”
All the songs illustrate their lonely childhoods, their early musical failures, survival, and their love for one another. The classic single from the album “Someone Saved My Life Tonight” was about Elton’s first suicide attempt after he broke off an early wedding engagement to a domineering woman.
“Rock of the Westies”
Riding high, figuratively and literally, in April of 1975, longtime drummer Nigel Olsson and bassist Dee Murray were unceremoniously fired. It was caviler treatment to the two musicians who had been with Elton since his legendary shows at The Troubadour in 1970.
Their replacements—drummer Roger Pope, who had worked with Elton going back to his Empty Sky album, and bassist Kenny Passarelli—were joined by keyboardist James Newton-Howard and another longtime Elton ally, guitarist Caleb Quaye. Previous band members guitarist Davey Johnstone and percussionist Ray Cooper remained.
The new outfit would record the Rock of the Westies album in the summer of that year, resulting in one more chart-topping album and single in “Island Girl.” It would prove to be the hardest rockin’ album of the songwriting duo’s career.
Bernie recalled that period of time in the mountains of Colorado at the Caribou Studios where they had recorded the previous two Number One albums: “Rock of the Westies is one of my favorite albums. I just love that record,” Bernie said without hesitation. “I think we really achieved what we wanted to do at the time. It was an interesting period of time because Nigel and Dee had exited. I don’t think there was any animosity. Well, there might have been at the time. Unfortunately that period of time is a little foggy,” he continued with a laugh, “because we were going through a period where we were not really on the ball.”
“We wanted to put a rock & roll band together, and it was basically a fucked-up band. We were all at the highpoint there of abusing ourselves to the max. It was Jack Daniels and lines on the console.”
Bernie Taupin (Interview by Steven P. Wheeler)
It would also prove to be a time when the booze and drugs had become part of the recording process, as Bernie candidly explained: “We wanted to put a rock & roll band together, and that’s what we did. We went to Caribou Studios in the Rockies [Colorado]. It was a good place, it was a funky place, and it was basically a fucked-up band. We were all at the highpoint there of abusing ourselves to the max. It was Jack Daniels and lines on the console, and somehow we got it done.
“I don’t remember anything about the sessions, and I don’t think anybody in that band will remember them either, but for some reason it paid off. Luckily, we’re all still alive to tell the tale. It wasn’t glamorous by any means; it was a rough period.”
Top of the World
In three-and-a-half years between May of 1972 and October of 1975, Elton and Bernie had a record-breaking SEVEN consecutive Number One albums; a feat only matched by The Beatles, who did it between 1964-67. To put this into proper perspective, it took the Rolling Stones TEN YEARS to pull off seven straight chart-topping albums.
As for more recent artists who have managed to hit that plateau, it would take Jay-Z nine years to accomplish it, Kanye West took 13 Years and the Dave Matthews Band would take 20.
Add to the fact that Elton’s 1975 tour included his career-cementing two concerts at Dodger Stadium in Los Angeles, and it was clear beneath all the drugs and drink that something would have to give.
“At that point in time, Elton John farting would have sold, and that’s intense pressure to be under because you suddenly realize that there’s no other place to go but down.”
Bernie Taupin (Interview by Steven P. Wheeler)
Bernie explained his frame of mind during that heady era by saying that the realization that their unmatched success would have to end at some point led to him finding comfort in the drug abusing whirlpool that had become their life. “We had seven consecutive Number One albums. In fact, the last two albums—Captain Fantastic and Rock of the Westies—had entered the charts at Number One, which no one had ever done before. And, again, you can’t go straight to anywhere else, except down.
(Photo by Brad Elterman/FilmMagic)
“At that point in time, Elton John farting would have sold, and that’s intense pressure to be under because you suddenly realize that there’s no other place to go but down. You know that every album you do from now on is not going to go to Number One. And I think that’s why the Blue Moves album was so introspective.”
“Blues Moves”
[It wasn’t just the professional pressure that was impacting Bernie at the time of the Blue Moves album in 1976. His marriage to Maxine—the L.A. Lady and seamstress for the band that he wrote about in ‘Tiny Dancer’ only five years before—was coming to an end. Infidelities on both sides played a part in their impending divorce, including her affair with Bernie’s closest friend in the band, bassist Kenny Passarelli.
The duo’s second double-album in three years did manage to get to #3, and included their Top Ten hit, “Sorry Seems to Be the Hardest Word,” but it broke their streak of seven Number One albums in a row. Bernie’s lyrics, which had always touched on darker themes, this time around were even more morose than usual and filled with disillusionment and regret, not to mention a few songs about suicide.
“I think the Blue Moves album is really one of our most underrated albums, because it was really an exercise in saying, ‘Here it is, this is us, and this could be it,’ and it could have been it. After the Blue Moves album, I had to get away because I think we were all killing ourselves.”
The Split
It was at this time that Bernie found himself crawling out of the “Crazy Water” that was engulfing him. “After the Blue Moves album, I went and lived in Mexico for like six months, and went through some changes,” he said. “I’m not going to go into that because it’s boring to hear ‘drying out’ stories. But after that album, I said, ‘That’s it, I’ve got to get away from this for a while.’ And, at that point, I really didn’t know if I’d be able to do it again.
“That’s where the separation between Elton and I came for a little while,” he continued. “But everybody seems to think that we fell out and we weren’t going to ever work together again. It wasn’t that. We never fell out. I think we just needed to get away from it for a while.”
Alice Cooper
Following the professional split between Elton and Bernie, Elton would work with lyricist Gary Osborne on his rather bland album A Single Man, while Bernie would surprisingly team up with shock-rocker Alice Cooper on 1978’s concept album about getting clean and sober, From the Inside. But what seemed surprising at first glance wasn’t since the Cooper and Taupin team were close friends outside their professional careers.
“Alice had always been a friend of mine,” Bernie explained. “I think that when you’re in a situation like I was in, you have to find a crutch who’s in the same sort of condition or the same state that you are. Everybody’s familiar with Alice’s problems and I guess I didn’t help him [laughs].
“During that period Alice and I were inseparable. Alice was my best friend. After the Elton thing, Alice and I were basically living together up in his house. It was a messed up, fucked up time.”
Bernie Taupin (Interview by Steven P. Wheeler)
“During that period Alice and I were inseparable. Alice was my best friend. After the Elton thing, Alice and I were basically living together up in his house. It was a messed up, fucked up time. We just figured that we’d try to do this thing together and we had always threatened to do a project together. It was just one of those things that fell together at the time.
“Like I said, I needed a crutch. Alice had sort of dried out at the time, and I think I was sort of going through the motions, not very well. But we spent so much time together that making that album was just a natural extension of our relationship.”
The album did include the hit single, “How You Gonna See Me Now” and a treasure trove of rockers. When prompted because of my love for the album, Bernie said: “Looking back on it, it was an interesting album. Yeah, there’s some good stuff on it. It was an interesting process, because it was two lyricists working together, which is very odd. But it’s interesting now, looking back, because I can see my lines and I can see his.
“There were things where I had complete lyrics and he would take little pieces out and put pieces of his own in there, but, yeah, it was an interesting project. And aside from my own personal projects and a few songs that I’ve written here and there with other people, as a collaboration in its entirety that album is the only thing I’ve done outside of Elton’s stuff.”
First Steps Back Together
While Elton would continue to work with other lyricists for the next several years, following 1978’s A Single Man and his disastrous 1979 disco album Victim of Love, he did reach out to Bernie while writing for his next album 21 at 33, which would be his first album of the ’80s and the first hint at recapturing a bit of the ’70s magic.
“The first song we wrote again together was a song called ‘Two Rooms At the End of the World,’ which was about coming back together. There’s another song on there called ‘White Lady, White Powder,’ which speaks for itself.”
Bernie Taupin (Interview by Steven P. Wheeler)
The three songs that Bernie would write for that album were also three autobiographical songs detailing where they’d been and a feeling that they would be there again. “The first song we wrote again together was a song called ‘Two Rooms At the End of the World,’ which was about coming back together. There’s another song on there called ‘White Lady, White Powder,’ which speaks for itself,” he says with a laugh. “They were all exorcism songs, like ‘Chasing the Crown.’
“They were songs saying, ‘Yeah, we’ve been there, now let’s get it back together.’ I think those three songs were all about getting back together. Unfortunately, with that album which was 21 at 33, those three songs were mixed in with a lot of substandard material and because of that I think a lot of people haven’t gotten to hear those songs, and they’ve gotten lost.
“It bothers me that people have become so obsessed with the Yellow Brick Road period. I know it was a good period and a lot of those early songs were good, but there’s a lot of really great songs and interesting songs that have gotten lost in the rebirth. Things like ‘Two Rooms,’ which is a really good song. It’s an interesting song. A lot of the material of the later period, which are some of the best songs we’ve ever written, are songs that a lot of people haven’t heard.”
The Full Reunion
While Elton and Bernie would collaborate on a handful of songs over the next few albums, including the previously mentioned hit ode to the memory of John Lennon, “Empty Garden,” it wasn’t until the late summer of 1982 that the two songwriters would be working together as they did in the beginning… and have been the only songwriters on all of Elton’s 14 studio albums from 1983’s Too Low For Zero through their most recent one, Wonderful Crazy Night in 2016.
Their first full reunion, which took place for 1983’s Too Low For Zero also featured the return of the original band of Nigel Olsson, Dee Murray and Davey Johnstone. The classic Elton John sound was back and the impact was immediate. Their new anthem “I’m Still Standing” and Bernie’s beautiful ode to his second wife, Toni Russo, sister of actress Rene Russo, “I Guess That’s Why They Call It the Blues” were monster hits on both radio and the new video world of MTV. Elton and Bernie were back!
Asked if this was a conscious attempt to recapture the glory days, Taupin replied: “I guess so. Too Low For Zero was the first album since Blue Moves where we wrote everything together. Before that, it had been a couple of songs here and there. Prior to that, we were both in the wasteland playing with other projects, and neither of us too successfully.
“We both knew that we wanted to work together again but we had to wait until it just fell into place. We knew that when the time was right it would just happen. Like everything else in our careers, we don’t pressure it. We just allow time to elapse until things fall into place, and that’s how it happened with the Too Low For Zero album. And it worked. It was a very successful album. I like that album.”
The magical reunion of Bernie and the original band continued the following year with the release of Breaking Hearts, featuring further hits “Sad Songs (Say So Much),” “In Neon” and “Who Wears These Shoes.”
“Actually, Breaking Hearts, the album after that, is really one of my favorite albums,” Taupin notes. “I think it’s my favorite album of that particular period, though Too Low’s got some very good songs on it.”
More Chart-Toppers
What’s little known by many fans of ’80s music is that two of that decade’s biggest hits were penned by Taupin, and they had nothing to do with Elton. Taupin had also begun working with composer/singer-songwriter Martin Page during this era.
Two of their songs went to Number One in a span of only four months! First came the Starship’s “We Built This City,” a song Bernie had written about the clubs in Los Angeles no longer supporting live bands and becoming dance clubs instead. It was a dark-edge look at how corporations were destroying the live music scene in the early ’80s. Martin Page wrote the music and recorded a demo.
The demo made its way to Starship, and their producer Peter Wolf (not the J. Geils Band lead singer), who played up the “we built this city” line with repetition. The cheesy video helped propel the song to the top of the charts.
Taupin and Page also wrote a song, “These Dreams,” specifically for Stevie Nicks who was enjoying her solo stardom, but the Fleetwood Mac frontwoman turned the song down. Bernie’s lyrics perfectly captured the aura of Stevie, but it was not to be so the song was shopped elsewhere and eventually recorded by the rock band Heart. The result was Bernie’s second chart-topping hit in less than four months.
In spite of all his successes, Bernie still doesn’t think of himself as a songwriter per se, saying, “There have been periods of time where I’ve been here and Elton’s been in England, and I’ve mailed him lyrics or we get together and I hand him things and go away. We have never, ever sat down side-by-side.
“That’s what songwriters do, and the last thing I ever consider myself to be is a songwriter. I know that sounds totally ridiculous, but I’m not really a songwriter in the textbook sense.
“Songwriters are people out there who sit in their little studios and crank out songs. I can’t do that; it bores the shit out of me. That’s why I don’t write much with other people. I do what I do in a very bizarre way, and I have my own terms and rules.”
New Directions
After the huge successes of Too Low For Zero and Breaking Hearts, as well as a massively successful world tour, Elton once again dropped his rhythm section of Olsson and Murray and moved into a soul and synth direction with his next two albums. Along for the ride was original producer Gus Dudgeon. The results were a mixed bag.
“Well, Ice on Fire was a slicker album because that was produced by Gus Dudgeon,” Bernie said, “while Too Low For Zero and Breaking Hearts were produced by Chris Thomas, who is far more of an edge-producer. Not to put Gus Dudgeon down, but I think Gus Dudgeon worked for his time. I think Ice on Fire was a little overly produced and a little too slick for my liking.”
Although the 1985 album did include another Top Ten hit, “Nikita,” and the Top 20 dance smash, “Wrap Her Up.”
The follow-up album in 1986, Leather Jackets, however would become one of Elton and Bernie’s worst-selling albums, even though it contains one of Bernie’s personally favorite songs.
“There’s a song on that album called ‘Hoop of Fire’ that is one of my favorite songs. I tried to get Roy Orbison to record it because I think he would have killed that song. We’ve also tried to get Eric Clapton to do it. I’d love to see somebody else do that songs because I honestly think it’s one of the best songs we’ve ever written.”
Bernie Taupin (Interview by Steven P. Wheeler)
“And the next album, Leather Jackets, absolutely died a death, even though I think there are a couple of tremendous songs on it that have been lost. I must admit that I think Gus just produced that album into the ground and just spent way too much time with it. It should have been a much edgier album, and it’s a shame that album has gotten lost because it has some very good songs on it.
“There’s a song on that album called ‘Hoop of Fire’ that is one of my favorite songs. I tried to get Roy Orbison to record it because I think he would have killed that song. We’ve also tried to get Eric Clapton to do it. I’d love to see somebody else do that songs because I honestly think it’s one of the best songs we’ve ever written.”
“Sleeping With the Past”
At the time of our interview in 1989, Elton and Bernie had just released their excellent album, Sleeping With the Past. Bernie’s love for their latest effort was understandable because it has gone on to become, arguably, the best album of the decade and one of the finest of their storied career. In fact, it is the best-selling album of their career in the U.K., and featured their first Number One single in their home country.
“My lyrics have had much more structure over the past ten years, and I think that has helped to make the songs better,” Taupin maintained. “People get trapped in nostalgia and will argue that the old songs are our best, but I think as songwriters we’re better than we’ve ever been, and I think this new album [1989’s Sleeping With the Past] proves that. I think these are the strongest, most uniform songs we’ve ever written.”
“The one thing I won’t do is live in the past. We’re not out to peddle nostalgia. I refuse to do that. If I honestly don’t feel that what I’m doing today isn’t the best work I’ve ever done, then I’m out of here. I wouldn’t want to do it anymore.”
Bernie Taupin (Interview by Steven P. Wheeler)
Oddly enough, much of this change has to do with the fact that Bernie has taken to writing his lyrics with a guitar at hand. “Now when I write, I usually write with a guitar and just find chords. I don’t play guitar very well, I just know three chords but that’s enough to write a great song, just ask Leonard Cohen. But using a guitar just gives me a formula or a meter or a basis for a structure, so I don’t ramble on anymore.
“I’m sure some people will argue with that and say, ‘Yeah, but I like Yellow Brick Road and all those old songs,’ but I can’t do that. The one thing I won’t do is live in the past. We’re not out to peddle nostalgia. I refuse to do that. If I honestly don’t feel that what I’m doing today isn’t the best work I’ve ever done, then I’m out of here. I wouldn’t want to do it anymore.
“A lot of our recent albums have been fairly inconsistent,” he says candidly. “I wasn’t particularly happy with the last album [1988’s Reg Strikes Back], although it had its moments.”
“I just feel that over the last few years, our albums haven’t really had a cohesiveness; they’ve tended to confuse people because the musical styles and song structures have been so conflicting that they go up and down, up and down. I know that’s a salute to our diversity but I also think it confuses people.”
An R&B Salute
“Before we went into the studio to make this album, I said to Elton, ‘Listen, we can’t make another album where people are going to say it’s just another Elton John album.’ I mean, we’re up to like 30 albums now, and I said that we had to get a theme or a springboard of what we’re going to do.
“I said that we have to sit down and decide what we want to make, and make a cohesive album with a collection of songs that sound like they all fit together. So we came up with the idea of going back and listening to the songs that inspired us when we first started writing songs, the time when R&B records were really great—the Chess days, the Stax records, and when Motown was at its peak.
“You know, the real glory days with people like Otis Redding, Sam & Dave, the Four Tops, the Supremes, Jackie Wilson, Lee Dorsey and Ray Charles. Those were the records that really got us off. So we decided to make an album that was a salute to those people and those songs. So I started dragging out all these old records and listening to them to get a feel, and we decided to basically make a white-soul album for the late ‘80s, and I think that’s what we’ve done.”
Club at the End of the Street
“What I would do is I’d take a song like a Drifters’ song and I’d try to write a Drifters’ type of lyric. There’s a song on the album called ‘Club at the End of the Street,’ which is probably the straightest emulation of the one of those songs.
“When you hear it, it has the feel of a song like ‘Under the Boardwalk.’ It’s a real Drifters-style song, and it might be the second single. So what I would do is I’d make notes at the bottom of the lyric sheet, like, ‘Think Drifters, think this or think that.’”
Healing Hands
“They’re not a pinch of a song though,” the lyricist makes clear. “If you hear the first single, ‘Healing Hands,’ it could be the Four Tops because it’s kind of got a ‘Reach Out, I’ll Be There’ feel to it lyrically. They’re a pat-on-the-back; they’re not rip-offs. Whether it’s the best choice as the first single, I don’t know, but it seemed to be the most anthemic.”
“I think when Billy Joel did it with the music of that particular era that he did [1983’s An Innocent Man], and he did it well, too, I think, but his was a more direct emulation of the sound. Our album is a salute. It’s all inspired, and it says that on the album, there’s a little thing on there that says, ‘These songs were inspired by the soul pioneers of the ‘60s and ‘70s, whose music meant so much to us.’
“Due to that it’s really given the album a cohesiveness. It’s not a concept album, but there’s a concept in the ideas. More than any other record we’ve made, like with Tumbleweed Connection, this sounds like an album. It sounds like it all belongs together and I’m really, really proud of that.
“We worked really hard on this record, and we worked hand-in-hand on this one, and I think it shows our songwriting at our very best. I think it’s the strongest album we’ve ever made. I won’t say it’s the best, because people will argue with that, but I certainly think it’s the strongest.”
Sacrifice
“My favorite song at the moment is a song on the new album called ‘Sacrifice,’ which has a simple lyric. But it’s an intelligent adult lyric. It’s basically about the rigors of adult love, and it’s a million miles away from ‘Your Song.’
“Elton came up with a brilliant melody, and his performance on it gives it a lot of integrity and meaning. It’s not a surface song, and I think you’ll probably see that one in the coming months become a big, big hit.”
Sure enough, “Sacrifice” would became a Top 20 hit in America and would also become Elton and Bernie’s first ever Number One single in England, after nine chart-toppers in the U.S.
Trapped By Their Past
When it comes to creating new material, veteran artists would find it tough to get their latest songs on the radio in the late ’80s as Corporate America was creating more classic rock stations and focusing on promoting nostalgia versus new music.
“Who wants to hear ‘Funeral For a Friend’ every fucking day of their life. More than anything, I want the songs I’m writing now to be on the radio. If there’s a spot there, I’m much rather have it be one of my new ones, not because I’m trying to sell my new material but because I think it’s equally viable.”
Bernie Taupin (Interview by Steven P. Wheeler)
Bernie agreed with my assessment, saying: “I never ever listen to the radio. It’s just not something I do, because I figure why listen to the radio when I can play what I want to hear. And, quite honestly, radio today sucks. Radio needs a real good shake-up.
“Until they stop playing fucking ‘Stairway to Heaven,’ nothing’s going to change. And we’re just as much to blame. I mean who wants to hear ‘Funeral For a Friend’ every fucking day of their life [laughs].
“More than anything, I want the songs I’m writing now to be on the radio. If there’s a spot there, I’m much rather have it be one of my new ones, not because I’m trying to sell my new material but because I think it’s equally viable.
“The title of the new album is Sleeping With the Past, and the chorus is ‘don’t go sleeping with the past.’ In the context of the song, it doesn’t necessarily mean that, but I think it’s got a lot of connotations. It could be thought of as the album being based on old songs, and it could mean don’t go sleeping with the past.
“My motto has always been improve or die. I want to maintain my integrity and write the best material I’ve ever written, and I believe that I’m doing that. If I didn’t believe that, I’d just pack it up and write books.”
As for his hopes for their latest effort, the industry veteran is optimistic but knows that, ultimately, it’s all out of his hands. “I’m hoping that this album’s got legs because I think there are a lot of singles on this record. It’s tailor-made for radio without losing its integrity. Hopefully this album will be like a two-year album because I’d like to be in a situation where Elton and I don’t have to make another record for a few years.
“I think that would be great for us. So maybe this album will do that, and maybe it’ll fucking die overnight,” he says with knowing laughter. “Who knows? You can never tell in this business.”
“Dinosaurs”
Although at the time of our lengthy conversation in 1989 Taupin was still only 39 years old, in those days that was considered ancient in the music world. Of course today the legends are now touring in their Sixties and Seventies. Times have changed, but 30 years ago, ageism did exist in the music business.
“Music’s a healthy scene right now and sure I’d like to see some of the newer bands getting a chance on the radio,” Taupin concedes, “but, at the same time, it bothers me when younger groups say, ‘These old guys shouldn’t be out there, all these dinosaurs on the road.’ Hey, that’s their gig, that’s what they do.
“I don’t want some jerk from The Cure saying, ‘All these fucking dinosaurs should get out of the way. We’re out to change the world.’ Bullshit. There’s room for everybody.”
Bernie Taupin (Interview by Steven P. Wheeler)
“All these bands [reunite] and go out there. What are they supposed to do? That’s their job. It’s like being a carpenter or a plumber. If you play guitar, it shouldn’t be that you reach a certain age and you’re not allowed to do it anymore. There should be room for everybody. I mean, that’s their job.”
When I mention that I’d love to hear them tell the blues legend John Lee Hooker to hang it up, Taupin lets out a big laugh and says, “Exactly! I wouldn’t want to see these guys try and tell John Lee Hooker that. I mean whether you agree with the Doobie Brothers or The Who or Anderson, Bruford, Wakeman and Doodleflick getting back together, whether you like it or loathe it, there should be room for them to be allowed to do it.
“And if there are people that want to buy tickets to see them, good luck to them. But I don’t want some jerk from The Cure saying, ‘All these fucking dinosaurs should get out of the way. We’re out to change the world.’ Bullshit. There’s room for everybody. I think that’s just a case of sour grapes.”
Other Fav Songs
“Levon”
“It’s interesting, because I’m out on the road with Elton right now. It’s interesting when you hear some of those old songs onstage, because a lot of them sound much better, and I find myself re-evaluating them.
“Like the other night I was listening to Elton singing ‘Levon’ and I thought ‘God, that’s a really good song.’ It’s got that timeless quality to it. They sound much more powerful onstage now, because I guess technology has improved them. So every once in a while, I re-evaluate songs that I may have forgotten about.”
“Candle in the Wind”
“There are songs like ‘Candle in the Wind,’ which I think was a great marriage of a good lyric and a great melody. I mean, Elton’s probably the finest—his turn with a melodic phrase is unbeatable. When Elton’s on the ball, man, nobody writes melodies like Elton, and I’m proud to be the one who sticks the lyrics in there.”
Of course, the original version of “Candle in the Wind” on 1973’s classic double-album Goodbye Yellow Brick Road was Bernie’s tribute to Marilyn Monroe and the downside of fame. In 1987, the song became a Top Ten hit in America with the concert recording from the album Live in Australia.
Then in 1997, following the death of Princess Diana, Elton asked Bernie to rewrite the song for his late friend. The result was a solemn event seen around the globe and Bernie’s new lyrics turned “Candle in the Wind 1997” into the biggest selling single of all-time. A record that still stands today.
The John/Taupin Legacy
When it comes to incredible creative partnership of Elton John and Bernie Taupin, the wordsmith merely said: “I think the reason it’s worked so well so long is probably the old theory that opposites attract. I don’t think you can get two people who are more different than Elton and I. We don’t live in each other’s pockets. We’re like brothers, but we’re not best friends.
“It’s not a business relationship. We love each other dearly, but we have our own sets of friends and we’re both just very, very different people. I think the music is the thread that binds us together, and our love for it.
“We give each other enough space to conduct our lives, and we come together for the pure enjoyment of writing songs. I think if we were more intensely involved as people, and were the same kind of people, we’d drive each other nuts.
“I think that’s why it works, and we still enjoy what we do. We still get a buzz when we write a song. It’s never been a business. It’s always been a partnership that came together just for the love of creating good music.”
Solo Projects
Over the years, Bernie has recorded a handful of his own albums. In 1971, he recorded a spoken word album, simply titled Taupin, with musical accompaniment from people like Elton’s guitarists Davey Johnstone and Caleb Quaye.
In 1980, Bernie made his singing debut on his album He Who Rides the Tiger. While the record didn’t find commercial success, there are some fantastic songs, such as the autobiographical epic “Approaching Armageddon” with the lines: Married young and with my guns / I blew her out of my life / It’s easy to hold on to time / But it’s hard to keep a wife
In 1987, Taupin returned with his third solo effort Tribe, which was definitely of the era of polished pop and videos, such as this one for “Friend of the Flag,” featuring his then-sister-in-law Rene Russo.
Also from the album was this suave video for “Citizen Jane.”
Farm Dogs
In 1996, I sat down with Bernie again to discuss his latest solo project, Farm Dogs, a roots-rock band that he formed with Rod Stewart’s former collaborators Jim Cregan and Robin LeMesurier, and Dennis Tufano, the former leader of the ’60s band The Buckinghams.
Pictured (L-R): Jim Cregan, Bernie Taupin and Robin LeMesurier.
(Photo By JOEY MCLEISTER/Star Tribune via Getty Images)
Their brilliant debut album, Last Stand in Open Country, echoes the rootsy vibe of Tumbleweed Connection and the best of The Band. From the haunting allure of “Barstool” and the shimmering sexuality of “Burn This Bed” to the anti-Hollywood acidic rant of “Ballad of Dennis Hopper and Harry Dean” and the title track that would later be recorded by Willie Nelson, the album made my published Top Ten Albums of 1996 list and continues to be a go-to listen nearly 25 years later.
The album was recorded at Taupin’s spacious ranch in Santa Ynez, California, amidst the lush green fields and rolling hills surrounding the home studio. The resulting album is a no-frills acoustic-based approach with illuminating songwriting at its best.
Sitting with Bernie and Cregan in an office in Beverly Hills, the quick wit and sarcasm that flew around the room non-stop perfectly dove-tails with the down-home, unpretentious vibe of their work. With his dog (and band mascot) sitting in his lap, Bernie explained: “The great thing about this band is that it’s a great leveler, because there’s no room for arrogance in this band.”
As Cregan nodded in silent agreement, Bernie continued “There are four fierce bullshit monitors in that room, and each of them has no fear of administering it. This band is notorious for massacring each other unmercifully, and for that reason it’s very healthy because it keeps everybody focused on a realistic path.”
Cregan chimes in: “If there were two harsh words spoken throughout the time we were making this album, that would be it.” Before pausing and adding with a laugh: “One of them would be ‘fuck’ and the other would be ‘you.'”
Recording at home helped the creativity flow without having to abide by time restrictions. “It really was like a summer boys’ camp,” Bernie explained. “Our wives or girlfriends were out in the city, so we all fended for ourselves, like Farm Dogs. The sessions were only regimented by our hangovers. It’s interesting what a couple of shots of tequila will inspire in one’s soul. I guess we’re the difference between the thinking man’s band and the drinking man’s band.”
The process of the writing was different for Taupin, who not only penned the lyrics but was also involved in the creation of the music. “It was four guys sitting in a circle; playing, singing and coming up with ideas. For me, the most exciting part of this project was being able to take my songwriting worth a step further. Aside from just being a man of words who has melodies in the back of his head, I was able to propel those melodies forward.”
Taupin takes a good-natured poke at his most famous songwriting partner when he says: “Not mentioning any names, but certain parties in my alternative career don’t tend to read the lyric before they write the melody, and we both laugh about that.”
His excitement at being involved throughout the evolution of the Farm Dogs material is infectious, as he continued: “Don’t get me wrong, because I’m fiercely proud of everything I’ve done in my career, outside of the ‘clinkers’ we all write at one time or another. It’s just that this project was a very special experience for me. It was one of the pleasures of my life to really see the melodic marriage of what I envisioned when I came up with the lyrics.”
In describing the band, Bernie says, “The special thing is to have four people working together who not only enjoy each other’s company, but who also admire each other musically and artistically. I think it’s something that all bands start out professing wanting to do, but it all seems to go to shit over the course of time.” He laughs and adds, “And it probably will with us, too.”
The philosophy behind this special album is summed up by Taupin, who points to the epic title track and smiles confidently when he says: “The best part about artistic survival is using your talent to keep creating. That’s the whole gunfighter analogy of the story in ‘Last Stand,’ where when you get older there’s always someone coming up behind you to take your place, but you’ve still got bullets in your gun and you’re still dangerous. And I think we still have bullets in our guns, and believe me, we’re still dangerous.”
Farm Dogs did a small club tour in support of the album, including a memorable gig at The Troubadour where Elton launched his and Bernie’s career. Though acclaimed by critics, the album never scored big with mainstream radio although it did receive some solid rotation in smaller market Triple-A stations.
The band returned with a second album, Immigrant Sons, in 1998, which was a slightly more polished and more electric effort. Featuring more strong material, it didn’t quite capture the earlier magic of their debut. With a lack of airplay, the band dissolved after a brief tour.
I humbly recommend you pick up these two masterful Taupin albums.
Taupin the Visual Artist
At the dawn of the millennium, Bernie began his current career as a visual artist and his original artwork has been shown in galleries throughout North America over the past decade. Much of his work is of a patriotic nature for his adopted homeland of America through the use of the Stars & Stripes.
Thanks for more than 50 years of stories, Bernie.
