The 1979 album Elton John wanted nothing to do with: “I’m tired”
There aren’t many moments in rock history where Elton John ever slowed down.
He liked the idea of moving from one project to the next every single time that he found something new, and even if his friend Billy Joel retired from the recording life, John always wanted to search for the next hook that he felt people could latch onto. But even if he found himself moving from one place to the next in the 1970s, there are some moments when he couldn’t be bothered to do any work behind the scenes.
Then again, can you really blame John for needing a break during the 1970s? No one in their right mind would have thought that he would have made one of the most impressive runs in pop-rock history, but anyone would get a little bit frustrated at the top. Goodbye Yellow Brick Road was his magnum opus in lots of ways, but by the time that he reached Rock of the Westies and it didn’t sell in droves, it was like a horrible relief.
John didn’t want to be known as some musical god every single time he wrote one of his songs, but the next few years saw him taking a few dips for all the wrong reasons. It shouldn’t take a brain surgeon to figure out that John liked to do his fair share of partying back in the day, but when you listen to records like Victim of Love, he was definitely prioritising his time at Studio 54 a lot more than he did his actual songs.
But while a brief flirtation with disco wasn’t all that out of the ordinary for most hard rockers, there was a lot more for John to explore when he reached the R&B world. He already had a massive hit on the R&B charts with ‘Bennie and the Jets’, and if that was enough to have him invited onto Soul Train, what was the harm in making a few more tunes inspired by Motown? That all seemed well and good on paper, but the sessions that he had with Thom Bell showed a version of John that was only half there.
He wasn’t quite as spaced out as he would be later on in his career, but Bell remembered that John did everything he could to take his foot off the gas, saying, “When I first met Elton, he said, ‘Look, man, I’m tired. I want you to do everything… I want you to write, I want you to play. You just tell me when to sing.’” That sounds like a recipe for disaster in a lot of ways, but what’s even more shocking is how well it works together.
John was always a fantastic singer whenever he tried on his R&B voice, and while he wasn’t giving Stevie Wonder or Sam Cooke a run for their money or anything, hearing him sing ‘Mama Can’t Buy You Love’ is one of the greatest left turns that he ever made. But if that was the beginning of his disconnect from the studio, it only took a few more albums before he realised that something was definitely wrong.
Leather Jackets may not have been one of the worst records in Bernie Taupin’s eyes, but when looking through his entire discography, John felt that the whole thing was an absolute disaster from start to finish. His penchant for taking his foot off the gas had come back to bite him, and by the time he was able to straighten his life out and get sober, he seemed like a brand new artist altogether when he finally came back up for air.
So to have an album like this where John still makes legendary tracks without even thinking about it, you have to wonder what kind of musical high he was on during that time. He has many albums that are proof that cocaine is one hell of a drug, but the fact that this mini-album is still one of the highlights of his career is proof that even a broken musician plays the right notes occasionally.
