The songwriter Elton John knew was out of his league: “The best in the world”
Nothing that Elton John ever wrote really needed the showmanship behind any of it.
I mean, if he had the power to dress like one of the greatest rock and roll monarchs the world had ever seen, he was always going to go for it, but when you hear his albums, everything sounds absolutely pristine, even if you don’t see the more extravagant outfits that he wore every single time he played. He could let the music stand on its own, but a lot of that came from trial and error before everything sounded perfect.
Because even though John was a fantastic musician, a lot of his best songs usually meant getting things wrong more than a few times. He knew that he was never going to be one of the greatest lyricists in the world, and if he wanted to have a partner in crime, getting Bernie Taupin behind the lyric sheet every single time they wrote was the kind of marriage that they had always been looking for.
John didn’t always need to agree with what Taupin was talking about, but he was more than happy to put words to songs that he felt fit whatever he was singing at the time. It helped when he had something that both of them could connect with, though, and some of the best parts of their childhood were looking at the kind of fantastic images that were coming out of the American westerns they saw as kids.
They weren’t afraid to pay tribute to Roy Rogers and John Wayne on a lot of their songs, but John was also infatuated with the sound of music coming out of the States. The singer-songwriter scene was rife with fantastic singers like Laura Nyro and James Taylor, and while he and Taupin fit right in there, the entire scene wouldn’t have been complete if Bob Dylan hadn’t broken down the doors for what people could do.
Dylan wasn’t afraid of being a little rough around the edges every single time he made a record, and even if he didn’t have the best vocal performance in the world, that didn’t matter to John. He could clearly see that this was someone who was bound to become a legend, and he could only hope to get somewhere close to his level of expertise whenever he made one of his masterpieces.
He and Taupin could make a few decent songs, but John couldn’t claim to make anything close to what Dylan could do, calling him “One of the best lyricists in the world, the greatest man of letters in the history of rock music.” However, that doesn’t mean that he has always had the most practical run-ins with the songwriting genius every single time he saw him outside the studio.
The pianist was already starstruck when Dylan saw him in their early days and said that he loved the story that Taupin wrote in ‘Ballad of a Well-Known Gun,’ but when playing charades with the guy, John wasn’t afraid to say that he wasn’t exactly great at the game. Granted, this was during John’s phase of doing coke night after night, and the idea of him waking up in the morning to someone telling him that he had spent the past night throwing oranges at Dylan is one of the funnier scenes to come out of rock and roll history.
But whether or not Dylan is the most optimal party guest didn’t really matter all that much. John was far from concerned with the songs, and while John has more than a few tunes that will transcend time, he knew that people would be studying the lyrics to ‘Blowin’ In the Wind’ in 2064 the same way that he did in 1964.
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