The Elton John album he thought could match Jimi Hendrix: “It ranks up there”
Any rock star is getting into dangerous territory when they must compare their records to the greatest artists of all time. It’s one thing to be proud of every song you create, but is it really good enough to go toe-to-toe with The Beatles of the world? Elton John may have cut his teeth as a working songwriter rather than a rock god, but looking back on the album Goodbye Yellow Brick Road, he believed it was good enough to stand alongside legends like Jimi Hendrix.
Looking at the sales figures, it’s not exactly hard to argue with what John had created. The rock scene had already graduated to singer-songwriter territory in the early 1970s, and while John didn’t play a guitar like James Taylor or write lyrics from the heart like Joni Mitchell, his way of internalising Bernie Taupin’s lyrics was the kind of partnership made in heaven once they made tracks like ‘Your Song’.
By the time Goodbye Yellow Brick Road rolled around, though, the group had already been used to having at least a few singles under their belt on each album. Honky Chateau had given the world ‘Rocket Man’, and it’s hard to think of Madman Across the Water without hearing those opening twinkles of ‘Tiny Dancer’ or the melodrama of ‘Levon’. There was only one problem this time around: there were too many hits that could fit onto just one album.
Although John had enough material for a double record, producer Gus Dudgeon said that the group had initially shot down the idea, telling Classic Albums, “We always said we would never do a double album. We could only think of three or four that were worth bothering with, and most of them were full of padding. And then we said, even if we throw out some songs that aren’t that great, maybe we do have a double album.”
While most great double records are usually made by artists in their prime, John was at another creative level. Outside of the hits like ‘Candle in the Wind’ and ‘Bennie and the Jets’, tracks like ‘Roy Rogers’ and ‘Sweet Painted Lady’ deserve to be in the running for his greatest songs as well, almost bringing a Broadway-style sense of melody to his repertoire.
It was an innocent time for John and Taupin when writing the tunes, but John thought that once they came up for air, they had an all-time classic, saying, “If you listen to double albums, there’s Hendrix’s Electric Ladyland and a couple of Stones album. I’m not saying it’s as good as that, but quality-wise, I think it ranks up there.”
It’s not like he’s that far off, either. Sure, Electric Ladyland may be a more advanced musical journey, all things considered, but when looking through one classic track after another, John created the flipside of an album like Songs in the Key of Life by Stevie Wonder, taking every piece of music that influenced and giving it a space to shine on one of the record’s classic tracks.
Electric Ladyland may have been given legendary status only a couple of years after its release, but with years of hindsight, it’s not hard to think of John in those terms. He was already on the pop side of rock and roll, but that didn’t mean he couldn’t still deliver kickass tunes whenever he got the chance.
