The musician Elton John crowned as one of the best in the business: “Most extraordinary”
Not everyone really knew what they had on their hands when Elton John became one of the biggest artists in the world.
He looked the part of a glam-rock superstar whenever he made one of his records, but his style wasn’t supposed to encroach on David Bowie’s or Marc Bolan’s territory whenever he performed. He was most interested in making the same singer-songwriter tunes he always loved, but he understood how to play the pop game better than most whenever he found the right song.
There are precious few people who could manage to accomplish a fraction of what John did with Bernie Taupin by his side, but a lot of that was thanks to him knowing what pop music was supposed to sound like. No one would have imagined that a throwback song about the 1950s era of rock and roll would have worked in the 1970s, but ‘Crocodile Rock’ is still one of John’s best songs and was an albatross around his neck every time he played it live. Still, having a few hit songs that were a little bit irritating wasn’t exactly the worst problem to have.
But John didn’t ever want to stop cranking out the hits. Everyone else would have grown desensitised to playing the same batch of songs over and over again, but John couldn’t really be stopped whenever he played. He lived and breathed music, and a lot of his knowledge of the charts came from him studying them like a hawk years before he had his first back in the late 1960s.
He was infatuated with keeping up with every single he ever heard, but nothing could have prepared him for what the British invasion sounded like. The world seemed to stand still the first time The Beatles came over to America, and while Beatlemania was already in full swing by the time the Fab Four made their way across the pond, John could still see that some bands were punching well above their weight class.
The Beatles and The Stones were going to be the two biggest acts coming out of that genre, but there were so many more people willing to take chances. The Animals were helping to invent folk rock when they did their rendition of ‘House of the Rising Sun’, and when you listen to what the Dave Clark Five were doing, they were almost inventing what became known as hard rock years before it happened.
Clark may not have gone down in history like the biggest names in the genre, but John felt that no one understood what being a pop star meant better than Clark did, saying, “I think of him as one of the giants of the music business. He (Dave) is an absolute stone-cold genius. Dave Clark is the most extraordinary man in the music business. He owned all those early masters (tapes). He had complete control of his destiny.”
And it’s not like John was alone in thinking that, either. ‘Glad All Over’ might hold some more weight when it comes on the oldies stations every now and again but if you listen to the kind of stars that came out afterwards, people like Eddie Van Halen were enthralled when they heard the Dave Clark Five for the first time and heard that you didn’t need to have the best voice or even the most sophisticated songs to be one of the greatest artists in the world.
What mattered was the presentation of everything, and even if Clark had a more throaty rasp than what everyone else was doing, that wasn’t about to stop him from trying his hand at becoming a legend. He knew what it took to become a star and how to find a way to turn into the biggest name in music, blowing the doors wide open for everyone from John to Rod Stewart to carve out their own spot in history.
Never Miss A Tale
The Far Out Classic Rock Newsletter
All the latest Classic Rock content from the independent voice of culture.
Straight to your inbox.