Elton John on the album that nearly destroyed him: “They’re just going to kill us”
It usually takes a Herculean effort on everyone’s part to put together a great album. There might seem some pieces that don’t work as well from behind the glass, but whatever hang-ups are going on on the studio floor, artists have been known to hunker down under the worst circumstances to create something magical. Or, in the case of Elton John, you get to the point where you’re nearly killed halfway through making Goodbye Yellow Brick Road.
For as monumental a project as John’s double album ended up being, it was never supposed to be anything too extravagant. John had never thought that the double-album experience was that good of an idea in the first place, but the power behind the songs that he and Bernie Taupin were writing was too good to ignore.
Even though there are more than a few songs that seem lesser among tracks like ‘Bennie and the Jets’ and ‘Candle in the Wind’, there’s hardly a bum note on any one of them. You could make cuts if you want to, but there’s a good chance that keeping a song like ‘Roy Rogers’ or ‘The Ballad of Danny Bailey’ would rob the album of its greatest moments.
Although John reconvened at a studio in France to put the album together, his first choice was to work in Jamaica. It made sense at the time, too. The reggae explosion was just starting, and since The Rolling Stones and Paul McCartney had travelled outside of England to create their masterpieces, it wasn’t out of the question.
By the time John had gotten to the studio, he was greeted with some of the worst accommodations that he could have imagined. According to guitarist Davey Johnstone, the studio was in shambles and was hardly operational for a proper rock band, telling Classic Albums, “The guy who ran the studio saying, ‘Get the microphone’, and I said, ‘Hold on, the microphone? We usually put twenty microphones on the drums in those days’”.
While the studio management insisted that the equipment would be coming, the band waited for days, and nothing was done. By the time they got around to looking at what was going on around the country, they realised that there were far greater problems happening there than just making some good music. There had been growing political tension right where they were recording, and Taupin remembered barbed wire being around the studio and people with machine guns watching over the grounds.
By the time John and Taupin loaded into a taxi to leave, he was convinced that they were never going to see home again, saying, “We decided to leave early, and they impounded our equipment, they took away our rental cars. When Bernie and I were being driven to the airport, I thought, ‘They’re just going to kill us’”.
John did survive to see another day, and it turns out that horrible experience became a bit of a blessing in disguise. As much as the band hated working in the studio in Jamaica, their joy of finally being able to work in a regular studio environment led to all the songs coming out in no time at all.
Whereas it took a few days for one song to come together, John would knock out songs within hours while also casually putting together melodies that could break your heart. John may have been ready to take over the world well before Goodbye Yellow Brick Road, but that brush with eternity was the kick he needed to become a superstar.
