Elton John is the first phase of a very, very long goodbye. His “Farewell Yellow Brick Road” tour—his last, supposedly—will take him to five continents for more than 300 shows. It won’t wrap up until 2021. Elton’s yellow brick road is a long one indeed.
The tour wended its way to Washington, D.C., on Friday night for the first of two sold out shows in the nation’s capital. Now 71 years old, perennially heavy-set Elton displayed remarkable stamina, playing for nearly three hours in a cavalcade of hits spanning his career. (Singers half his age regularly struggle to break the two hour mark.) And yes, while he’s seated for most of the show, he’s working hard, crooning with remarkable strength and displaying genuine virtuosity on his grand piano. Backed by a small band, John does not use back up singers, which many an aging rock act rely on.
There’s an essential weirdness—almost a fraudulence—to Elton John. John is a famously unlikable person; a withering 2004 Daily Mail appraisal labeled him “a vain, bitter and empty man who loathes himself and a lot of other people, too, a man bored to fury by his own excesses.” His temper tantrums are legendary. So too are his vanity and materialism: John, one of the most successful singers of the past half century, nearly bankrupted himself buying clothes, shoes, wigs, and other baubles. He has been open about having been a terror to deal with in the 1970s and ’80s, which he now attributes to his drug addiction. But John has been clean since 1990, and the stories of his petulance haven’t let up.
The weirdness, then, is that such a profoundly hollow man sings songs whose lyrics display such exquisite sensitivity. That, of course, is thanks to the remarkable skills of John’s long-time lyricist, Bernie Taupin. The two aren’t collaborators in the traditional sense: Taupin writes lyrics and sends them to Elton. Elton then puts them to a melody.
So in Elton John you have a famously empty man providing some of the most poetic descriptions of what it means to be human ever put to pop music. “Someone Saved My Life Tonight,” is a searing description of depression and recovery. “Rocket Man” takes a tale of loneliness and literally sets it in outer space. “Your Song” displays an extraordinary generosity of spirit. Even “Candle in the Wind,” largely mocked these days after he recycled his ode to Marilyn Monroe and repurposed it for Princess Diana after her death (leading Keith Richards to quip that Elton’s “writing is limited to songs for dead blondes,”) is based on a beautifully wrought image of a flame struggling to stay burning in tough circumstances.
John sings with passion—genuine pathos was on display on Friday night. But the lyrics, the sentiments, aren’t his. An Elton John concert is an acting performance that isn’t labeled as such. What makes the experience all the odder is that lyrics are central to an Elton John show; the guitars and percussion are turned way down. What Elton is singing is front and center.
To his credit, John has long been open about his debt to Taupin: He mentioned his collaborator several times on Friday night, and he has said in multiple venues that he simply can’t write lyrics himself. Indeed, as arrogant as Elton John can be, he displayed genuine humility and wisdom when he decided to outsource his lyric-writing to Taupin. He could always have deluded himself into thinking he can actually write lyrics—kind of like his fellow piano man Billy Joel did to often disastrous results. (Nobody has ever, ever called it a “tonic and gin.”) How wonderful John’s output has been with Bernie Taupin in the world.
