When Elton John and John Lennon refused to see Andy Warhol
The friendship between Elton John and John Lennon was a brief but prosperous affair. The two Brits were at widely different points in their careers when they first became acquainted: Elton couldn’t have been bigger, and Lennon could use a boost. Although he was still a Beatle, Lennon’s solo career had been only moderately successful by 1974, illustrated by being the only one of his former bandmates not to have a number one single in the US. Elton had two by that point and was staring down another four in the next two years.
“I met him when he was just finishing his crazy phase and going into his laughing phase,” Elton recalled to Graham Norton in 2019. “He’d just done the Rock & Roll album, which was a very hard album for him to do with Phil Spector, and I think he had a lot of issues at that point.”
“He was with May Pang, he had broken off with Yoko, and we more or less hung out together for about a year-and-a-half, two years,” Elton added. “He sang on my records, I sang on his. We did a lot of drugs together, but we had so many laughs. Him and Rod Stewart are probably the two people I’ve laughed with the most – and Freddie Mercury.”
Lennon and Elton’s friendship bled into their musical careers, with Elton being partially responsible for Lennon’s sole US number one during his lifetime – ‘Whatever Gets You Thru The Night’. Elton was sure that the song would go to number one, but Lennon was so pessimistic that he promised Elton a live appearance if it did. Elton was right, and Lennon paid up by appearing at Madison Square Garden on Thanksgiving 1974 with Elton’s band.
As two of the most famous British artists of the day, Lennon and Elton preferred to keep their drug-fueled hangout sessions out of the public eye. One night, the pair were up until the early hours of the morning when an unexpected guest appeared at their door. “We were doing cocaine, and it was like 1:30 in the morning,” Elton said. “There’s a ring on the doorbell, and I said, ‘Aw, who’s this?’ It took me about ten minutes to creep over to the eyehole.”
“I went to him – ‘Andy Warhol!'” Elton exclaimed. “And John went [throat-cutting motion]. So we didn’t answer the door, and I said, ‘Why didn’t you want to let Andy in?’ And he goes, ‘He’s always got a bloody camera with him. Nothing’s sacred. Nothing’s private with Andy.’ And so I thought, ‘Ah, he wouldn’t let Andy Warhol in.’ But that’s because we were high as a kite.”
Check out Elton talking about his friendships with John Lennon and Rod Stewart down below.
