‘Here and There’: The album Elton John thought should never have been made
Every musician tends to forget that there should be an asterisk next to the industry side of their business. Even though most want to make records to express themselves and hopefully find an audience that relates to them, it doesn’t mean anything as long as they don’t have some singles to back it up, and that means pumping out material to keep the hot streak going. Although Elton John usually had a fast turnaround for all of his records, he admitted that there was never any point in releasing one of his albums in the 1970s.
By the time that John got on a roll, though, he was spewing out hits faster than most people could digest them. Most artists would feel privileged to have something like ‘Tiny Dancer’ in their arsenal and play it for the rest of their lives, but John was too busy working on the next masterpiece like ‘Rocket Man’ or ‘Goodbye Yellow Brick Road’ in that amount of time.
That’s because both he and Bernie Taupin weren’t strangers to be working songwriters. The beauty of having the pair bounce music and lyrics off each other is the fact that nothing ever got too monotonous, which led to many times when John would write a song within the span of a few minutes while the rest of the band was eating lunch during the recording of Goodbye Yellow Brick Road.
When someone gets into a holding pattern, the ensuing grind of album-tour-rinse-repeat is going to get to be too much. Despite John medicating himself with cocaine half the time during his insane run, there were still some pieces that were left by the wayside, including the album Here and There in 1976.
Then again, no one was surprised to see John put out this kind of record. The 1970s were the golden age of the live record, and even though he had 11-17-1970 under his belt, having him release live versions of some of his greatest hits like ‘Bennie and the Jets’ and ‘Take Me To The Pilot’ was the first time fans got to hear him working off an audience on record. But as far as John was concerned, this was another stumbling block in his career.
Compared to the landmark live albums from the era like Frampton Comes Alive, John felt that Here and There was made for entirely cynical reasons, saying, “I hated [it]–it wasn’t that the music on it was bad, but it was made up of old recordings from 1972 and 1974, and it seemed to exist only in order to make money. And that was it.”
While it’s hard to blame the record company for wanting to make more money, it’s no surprise that John would eventually want out of his contract for the next album, going on to make more extravagant records like Blue Moves. Although he wouldn’t hit a brick wall until Victim of Love in 1979, the fact that Here and There managed to sell was a firm indicator of how omnipresent he had become in pop culture.
Most people knew and loved half the songs on the record before it had even come out, but listening to a live version was too much of a problem for them. After all, the live version of ‘Candle In the Wind’ from the 1990s would give the song a second wind, so hearing John in his element onstage wasn’t that far off from an album take for most fans.
