The fateful way Elton John met Bernie Taupin
No one person becomes the biggest star in the world overnight. Even if it seems like a new artist arrives via lightning bolt on the charts, everyone starts at the bottom of the totem pole before slowly inching their way up to the top. Elton John wouldn’t climb the music industry mountain alone, but his chance meeting with his collaborator happened almost by fate.
While John has been known to compose every piece of music he’s ever recorded, the lyrics tend to come courtesy of Bernie Taupin. When both men were still hashing out their tunes, though, they came together through a joint failure at Liberty Records.
Looking for a songwriting deal, John initially came to the audition as a working musician, only to be shown the door. Feeling that lyrics weren’t his strong suit, the man overseeing John’s audition pulled out an envelope of the thousands of submitted lyrics labelled ‘Bernie Taupin’ for John to work with.
After glancing at Taupin’s poems on the ride home, John knew he had found his soulmate to take them both to superstardom. While the dynamic may have been more suited for Broadway composers, John and Taupin’s way of songwriting became a write-to-order job most of the time. Instead of working out anything beforehand, John would be given the lyrics from Taupin and write to the words, crafting wistful melodies on songs like ‘Candle in the Wind’ and ‘Tiny Dancer’.
While the pair may have seen eye-to-eye creatively, they were never the same personality-wise. Though John was known for his outlandish persona and eye-catching outfits whenever he performed live, Taupin was known to keep to himself most of the time, always clad in his cowboy boots and looking to write something from the heart rather than flowery ‘I-love-you’ songs.
On their first collaborations, though, the label didn’t necessarily understand what John was supposed to be, leading to his debut album, Empty Sky, quickly falling off the charts. While the days of psychedelic-tinged rock were becoming a thing of the past, John’s embrace of singer-songwriter styles garnered his first hits with tracks like ‘Your Song’.
As John’s star continued to rise, though, the distance between Taupin’s lyrics and John’s stage persona yielded a strange dichotomy on tracks like ‘Goodbye Yellow Brick Road’. While John was playing the big star, Taupin looked at the concept from an abstract point of view, wondering if the idea of the “yellow brick road” of fame was really all it’s cracked up to be.
While the tones were drastically different, John was never one to shut down a great lyric, painting vivid pictures in people’s minds with just his piano and voice. Even though the instrumentation may have been similar on his early records, it’s easy to picture Taupin’s characters as real people, from the man lost out in space in ‘Rocket Man’ to the deadbeat father who is trying to get back into his children’s good graces on ‘Levon’.
Regardless of the various escapades behind the scenes, John and Taupin remained the best of friends throughout their careers, with Taupin still providing him with lyrics well into the 2000s. Even though John admitted to not knowing what Taupin’s lyrics were about all the time, it didn’t matter what the words on the page meant. It was about how those words made the listener feel when they heard them on the radio.
