“It changed my life”: The song that caused Elton John to freak out
The novelist Graham Greene once wrote: “There is always one moment in childhood when the door opens and lets the future in.” For many of us, that Promethean juncture, where the surface of the world unzips and reveals a sense of depth and identity beneath, occurred thanks to good old rock ‘n’ roll—the religion of the 21st century with plenty of gods to choose from. Elton John was no different.
For the devout young musician, there was also one notable disciple of the genre, spreading the good word: John Peel. Elton was a committed listener of his show, tuning in to see how the latest developments in music were unfurling. One day, he spun a new type of hit that slapped the maestro and his lyricist, Bernie Taupin, around the chops. The song was ‘The Weight’ by Canadian-American folk legends The Band.
“John Peel played the Music from Big Pink on his show, and I was a religious follower of John Peel in those days,” he revealed on Tracks of My Years. “He played all the great new music, and Bernie and I freaked out when we heard it. We’d never heard anything like this before. It was Americana done in a very soulful, funky, kind of laid-back way.”
The song blended genres, all tied together by a heavyweight hook, and it had a sense of gospel-like freedom that felt like the feeling a dog must get when it pops its head out of a car window. The punch of inspiration was instant for Elton and his bald penman. “(The) next day we went up to Music Land in London and bought the import, and it changed my life again like Elvis Presley changed my life originally,” he said of ‘The Weight’.
“This music changed my life because of the way the songs were written, the lyrics, the musicianship, it was a huge influence on things like Tumbleweed Connection and Madman,” he added. From thereon, it encouraged Elton to be more unencumbered with his music—to defy any self-imposed expectations of genre or mood.
The Band’s effort might seem biblical, but it is largely autobiographical, drawing on the characters that they had met on their travels, encapsulating old, weird America. For years, before they emerged into the spotlight themselves, they had been the best backing band journeymen in the business. This role pulled them into every type of gin join in North America, and they picked up every sound of the continent as they rove around.
Was it pop? Was it folk? Was it good old rock ‘n’ roll? Taupin and Elton couldn’t put their finger on it—that only added to its emotive appeal.
Now, Elton and Taupin were buoyed to do just the same: to take their own experiences and embellish them with the drama of pop—to render heartache, friendship and astronauts ecstatic. It’s also evident that they took a lot musically from it, too.
As Taupin said of late 1970’s Tumbleweed Connection: “Everybody thinks that I was influenced by Americana and by seeing America first hand, but we wrote and recorded the album before we’d even been to the States”. Peel had given them a figurative tour before they set foot on a plane. The peerless masterpiece of ‘The Weight’ had been enough to show them how to do it just a few months earlier.
