The 1986 song Elton John didn’t want to be seen with: “I declined to put my name on it”
When Elton John debuted to the world, he was never trying to make some of the most experimental music out there by any stretch.
He wanted the chance to make great songwriter tunes that he and Bernie Taupin loved whenever they made records, and even if some of their tunes didn’t work, it was all about woodshedding what they were doing half the time. But some of the greatest partnerships don’t really know what they have going for them until they realise that they don’t have it anymore.
Then again, John and Taupin were never going to have a clean break throughout their time together. They were the best of friends in and out of the studio, and even if they needed some time apart every now and again, John could at least find time to work with other writers like Tim Rice whenever he put together tracks for The Lion King. And it’s not like he and Taupin saw eye-to-eye on every single one of their records.
They could at least agree that a song like ‘Crocodile Rock’ was far from their greatest work, but Leather Jackets seemed to be one of the few times where John felt that there was nothing salvageable about what they worked on. That might have had to do with the drugs that he was taking in the studio, but it also had to do with the fact that he was throwing everything he could onto the record to make it sound great.
Because Leather Jackets isn’t so much an album as it is a patchwork job on every other song. John was trying his best to make an album of material, so that meant digging up some old “diamonds in the rough” that wouldn’t have even been considered good enough for B-sides on some of his biggest albums. But the song ‘Don’t Trust That Woman’ went past terrible in John’s mind.
Anyone getting the opportunity to collaborate with Cher would have been taking the opportunity seriously, but John was out there to have a good time and not worry about the kind of record he was making. The song is one of the more mindless tunes that he ever made, but since there was no Taupin around to tighten up some of the lyrics, all that he was left with was the kind of record that made him feel too embarrassed to even put his name on the final product.
There were bad Elton John songs before him, but even if this tune turned up on one of his albums, he felt that it was too bad for him to even be associated with it, saying, “The lyrics were just beyond belief: ‘You can rear-end her/oooh, it’ll send her.’ You could tell what I thought of that by the fact that I declined to put my own name to it, crediting the song to Cher and my old made-up studio character Lady Choc Ice.”
“Of course, if you hate a song so much that you won’t actually admit you wrote it, it’s generally speaking a good idea not to record and release it.”
Elton John
But that was beyond John’s grasp at this time. This was the sound of him grasping at straws, and since he would spend the next few years working on himself and finally leading a more sober lifestyle, you can hear him transform on some of his later projects. That high voice of his youth may have been gone, but he was more than happy to make tunes that had a lot more nuance to them, like he had heard when listening to old Leon Russell records.
When you look at a tune like this, though, it does give you a little tinge of sadness when you realise that this was the same person who made classics like ‘Candle in the Wind’ and ‘Goodbye Yellow Brick Road’. He could write some of the finest pop music ever made, and yet the fact that he made this song as well is at least comforting, knowing that even the biggest stars have their bad days.
