Spencer Davis rejected Elton John in 1967 because he auditioned “wearing a milkman’s outift”
It’s hard to imagine someone with such a bold and confident style as Elton John ever having struggled for the public’s attention, but during the late 1960s, he was still just plain old Reginald Dwight, searching for his big break.
You can’t just waltz into the public eye, and even if it might seem to you like you’ve got everything figured out, that isn’t necessarily going to be what grabs others. John’s golden period of chart success began to arrive towards the mid-1970s, and from there, there was little to no looking back to the days when he was struggling to find his place in the music industry.
Given that glam didn’t really exist in the late ‘60s, which would end up being the style that he was predominantly known for, his own work was more just straightforward piano-led rock music with strong links to rootsier flavours when he first began in the music industry, and as many people born in the 1940s did, he had an infatuation with the rock and roll of people like Jerry Lee Lewis and Bill Haley when that became a cultural phenomenon during his teenage years.
However, early on in his career, he wasn’t just writing his own material and was desperately searching for a band to be part of, one that seemingly aligned with his own artistic ambitions at the time. Taking himself around the houses and auditioning for many groups without success, it never seemed as though he was going to get his big break.
One group that he attempted to join the ranks of was the Spencer Davis Group, who had previously been fronted by Steve Winwood and were experiencing decent amounts of success in the UK with hits like ‘Gimme Some Lovin’’ and ‘Keep on Running’.
Unfortunately for John, the audition, as one might be able to gather from the fact that he didn’t spend any time with the group, didn’t go well, and as Spencer Davis himself later recalled, he was a complete mismatch for what they were looking for in a direct replacement for Winwood. Winwood had been touted as something of a prodigious young talent, and what John offered didn’t quite cut it.
“We didn’t quite invade as a complete unit,” Davis said of their attempt to conquer America in late 1966 to 1967, going on to explain that unity would have helped their case a lot more. “When we recorded ‘Gimme Some Lovin’’, the band was already splitting. Steve was going into Traffic with Dave Mason.”
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Davis continued, recalling how John was far from being the answer to all of their sudden issues, with them eventually travelling across the Atlantic with another vocalist. “We ended up going to New York in 1967 with a new singer, Eddie Hardin,” he said. “Elton John had shown up as Reggie Dwight for the audition, wearing a milkman’s outfit, and we didn’t think that was cool.”
Fortunately, around the same time, John responded to an advertisement in NME where he would end up finding his long-time collaborator and lyricist, Bernie Taupin, and as if completely undeterred by his rejection from the Spencer Davis Group, John would end up poaching both Dee Murray and Nigel Olsson to form his own backing band. The Spencer Davis Group, on the other hand, barely made it to the end of the decade, and their brief moment in the spotlight is all they have to show for it.
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