The Elton John song Bernie Taupin “wouldn’t listen to”
There’s no rule to say that an artist must be creatively in love with the work they produce. For every great song that any writer will lay down in a few minutes, there will be a handful that they consider below average, coming nowhere close to measuring up to what they are truly capable of. Then again, there are also a handful of songs that Elton John and Bernie Taupin didn’t think should have seen the light of day in the first place.
Throughout the first few years of their career, John and Taupin spent time cutting their teeth writing songs for other prospective artists to sing. After spending years trying to crack the code of how to write a hit song, it wasn’t until they started writing material for themselves that they started to find their voice.
Blending in with the singer-songwriter mindset coming out of America at the time, Taupin was looking to paint graphic pictures of what the world had to offer. Across albums like Honky Chateau, Taupin was penning lyrics that played out like movie scenes in one’s mind, imagining the surreal imagery of ‘Ballad of a Well Known Gun’ or the lonesome drifter making his way through outer space on ‘Rocket Man’.
Although this was the era in which John would see his biggest hits, a handful of songs felt too goofy in retrospect. Looking through the album Don’t Shoot Me I’m Only The Piano Player, Taupin had a particular disdain for ‘Crocodile Rock’. Written as a dance craze song in the style of 1950s music, John goes all out on the chorus, playing up the inherent cheekiness of the song with a “la-la-la-la-la” hook.
When looking back on the song, Taupin would gladly listen to any other song he was involved in, telling Esquire, “[It’s] a strange dichotomy because I don’t mind having created it, but it’s not something I would listen to”. While it might not have been to Taupin’s taste, it suited the radio just fine, becoming one of John’s biggest hits up to that point, earning him the distinction of playing it with The Muppets later on.
Though the track was meant to be a playful jab at the disposable pop songs that John and Taupin had grown up with, the lyricist was just starting to come into his own. Compared to the lighthearted fare of the big hits, Taupin was about to go on a songwriting bender for the ages, making cinematic portrayals of fallen heroes and glorious love songs on tracks like ‘Candle In The Wind’ and ‘Your Song’.
As for his legacy, though, Taupin doesn’t want fans to remember ‘Crocodile Rock’ as anything meaningful, explaining to Music Connection: “I don’t want people to remember me for ‘Crocodile Rock’. I’d much rather they remember me for songs like ‘Candle In The Wind’ and ‘Empty Garden’, that convey a message. There are things like ‘Crocodile Rock’, which was fun at the time, but it was pop fluff. It was like, ‘Okay, that was fun for now, throw it away, and here’s the next one. So there’s a certain element of our music that is disposable, but I think you’ll find that in anybody’s catalogue.”
