The 1971 song that Elton John told Bob Dylan was “like having a wank”
When discussing one of his most beloved songs, Elton John flexed a curious analogy to describe a key track from 1971.
It’s unlikely Bob Dylan was expecting it. As the fan he is, the songsmith took part in a feature on The Guardian, where a litany of stars all submitted their burning questions to the Rocket Man as he was beginning to wind down the touring gig in 2019. Ever the astute interrogator, Dylan chucked John a wholly intelligent question, asking whether ‘Tiny Dancer’ realised its slow build-up to the chorus gradually, or whether such a quirk of the ballad was figured out from the word go.
Naturally, John managed to squeeze a frank reference to onanism in his answer to Dylan’s considered inquiry.
“’Tiny Dancer’ has a really long lyric, a very cinematic, California-in-the-early-70s lyric, so it had two verses and a middle eight before it even gets to the chorus, and it lent itself to a long buildup,” John explained. “The middle eight sets it up well, then it slows down for a moment – ‘when I say softly, slowly…’ That line suggested a big chorus. I don’t remember much about writing it, but I do remember trying to make it sound as Californian as possible.”
He’s not wrong. Madman Across the Water’s second single takes a whopping three minutes to arrive at the celestial chorus, incrementally revealing further lyrical flashes of Los Angeles’ bohemian pull across its love letter to both co-writer Bernie Taupin’s ballet dancer wife and the litany of women he’d crossed paths with on the Sunset Strip. Such a narrative wander demanded a dramatic unfolding to cast its evocative pedal steel guitar and piano stir.
But such a distance demands one hell of a payoff. Thankfully, John and Taupin knew just when to strike with ‘Tiny Dancer’s twirling chorus, holding off the crescendo til just the right moment and elevating the “Hold me closer, tiny dancer” line to John’s immortality. Such an apogee was afforded a colourful parallel from the singer himself.
“Writing a song like that’s a bit like having a wank, really,” he told Dylan frankly. “You want the climax to be good, but you don’t want it to be over too quickly – you want to work your way up to it.”
You’d think such advice was better suited to ‘Jamaican Jerk-Off’ or ‘Guilty Pleasure’, but John indeed found an apt explainer for ‘Tiny Dancer’s water treading power. For a long time, ‘Tiny Dancer’ was thought to serve as an artful euphemism for masturbation, especially down to the “Tiny dancer in my hand” line, but John’s romantic stirrer can join the likes of ‘The Great Gig in the Sky’ or ‘A Day in the Life’ in taking cues from the ‘big O’ when dreaming up its surging pop explosion.
“Bernie’s lyric took such a long time to get to the chorus, I thought, ‘Fuck, the chorus had better be something special when it finally arrives,’” John concluded. “And it’s ‘here I come’, literally.”
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