“There are limits”: the artist Elton John regretted working with
Every artist always has a unique way of approaching the stage. Even though someone can spend their entire lives and have their act down to a science whenever they play, it’s sometimes better to mix it up and try something that no one’s down before and see what happens with it. While Elton John was no stranger to thinking outside the box, he knew that some artists had a completely different style from what he had initially thought of as a professional musician.
Then again, John had always come from the glory years of great showmen in rock and roll. Although there are many moments where he could take any musician to school when he stepped behind the piano, there’s probably a good reason why his look with the outrageous glasses and lavish suits was not going to work when paired next to a band like Nirvana in a live setting.
However, as far as John was concerned, all of the fashions behind him were secondary to the music. No matter how much window dressing was around him, he could always tear it up onstage on anything from ballads to blistering rock and roll tunes, and even if not everyone thought of him as a rock god in the same way they looked at Keith Richards or Jimi Hendrix, John was more than worthy than being among that company from a technical standpoint, especially when looking at his first few albums that were indebted to classical music.
While a lot of the showmanship behind John was learned from playing in clubs night in and night out over the course of his career, he was no match for those who stood at the front the whole time. By nature, he was going to be confined to being behind the piano for most of his career, so the idea of strutting across the stage in the same way Jim Morrison or Mick Jagger would have felt like a pipe dream. Granted, even Jagger managed to get more than a few moves from working with Tina Turner.
“There’s an unspoken rule that musician don’t treat their fellow musicians like shit.”
Elton John
As much as Elvis Presley is praised as the King of Rock and Roll, Turner is indisputably the Queen behind it all. Despite many people insisting on focusing on the dark sides of her personal life, Turner was always willing to leave her best moments onstage, turning everything up to ten when she was playing and making sure that she put everyone else to shame singing ‘Proud Mary’.
Although John was delighted to work with someone like that, he remembered that Turner’s attitude was far from what he expected when performing ‘Proud Mary’ with her, saying, “‘You’re not playing the song right’, she snapped. ‘You don’t know how to play this song.’ The subsequent debate became heated quite quickly before I brought it to a conclusion by telling Tina Turner to stick her fucking song up her arse and storming off. I’ve thrown plenty of tantrums in my time, but there are limits: there’s an unspoken rule that musician don’t treat their fellow musicians like shit.”
However, it’s hard to really blame Turner for her insistence on playing it a certain way, either. No one’s going to argue that John is one of the finest musicians that the rock world has ever had, but listening back to one of your songs played differently would always be a bit tricky for any singer, let alone one that had been through the wringer like Turner.
So, while there might have been some friction, there’s certainly not any love lost between both of the rock icons. However, it’s safe to say that when that happened, it became abundantly clear that a duet version of ‘Saturday Night’s Alright For Fighting’ probably wasn’t in the cards.
