The 1950s singer Elton John lost all respect for: “Pathetic”
Elton John always considered himself a stickler for a great song above everything else.
Even though there were moments where he could write a stinker every now and again, he wasn’t going to tolerate musicians who relied solely on their status to get hit records. He could heap praise on everyone that he loved, but he called it as he saw it every single time he heard a new record, and he wasn’t afraid of getting his hands dirty when talking about the rock and roll pioneers that came before him.
And it’s not like John couldn’t tell you what a great song sounded like by the time he became huge. He and Bernie Taupin were all about making some of the perfect marriages of lyrics and melody whenever they worked together, and even if not all of their songs came together, you could at least hear the musicianship that was on display. Because when you look at his heroes, John was at least trying to get everyone to appreciate the song at the centre of everything, just like his idols did.
You wouldn’t think it for all of the sequinned outfits that he wore, but the biggest thing that mattered to John was the singer-songwriter genre. Everyone from James Taylor to Cat Stevens to Leon Russell was the musician he gravitated towards more than anyone else, but that didn’t mean that he couldn’t still have a healthy amount of respect for the old guard of rock and roll. Little Richard and Fats Domino walked so he could run in lots of ways, but Jerry Lee Lewis seemed to exist in his own category.
Because when you look at a lot of what John was doing, there’s a lot of Lewis’s mannerisms in the way that he played. Lewis was known to be one of the first major wild men of rock and roll when he burst onto the scene with ‘Whole Lotta Shakin’ Goin On’, and when you see footage of him kicking his piano stool and his furious approach, you can see where John got a lot of his attack. In his mind, you were meant to beat the shit out of a piano, but seeing Lewis make a safe album was the moment where he felt like a piece of his childhood died.
It’s only natural for some artists to try their hand at writing slower material as they get older, but by the time that he hit on The Session, Lewis practically looked like a parody of himself. He could still write fantastic tunes when he wanted to, but hearing him get some of the greatest flavours of the day to help redo a bunch of his famous songs with a more country flavour felt like watching someone age right before John’s eyes.
Bands like Eagles may have been doing country right, but John felt that Lewis’s attempt to blend in with the new school was enough for him to swear off of him for good, saying, “[He’s] calling himself ‘The Killer.’ I could kill more people with one fucking finger than he did when I saw him. I always find rock and roll acts like that now pathetic. I mean, they invited me to play on it, which was ludicrous. What I am supposed to do, play piano for Jerry Lee Lewis? I mean the guy’s technically brilliant enough to eat me for breakfast. It’s just that he’s so lazy he won’t fucking do it.”
And it’s not like Lewis magically set the world on fire all over again. Maybe a lot of John’s words were meant to take the piss out of his friend Rod Stewart for playing on the record, but compared to all of the other love letters to yesteryear that were happening, John knew when he was watching a throwback that was bound to turn into a complete dud when it eventually came out.
Because as much as fans might like to see their heroes back in the limelight all over again, there are moments where things can go a little too haywire behind the scenes. A star-studded ensemble of musicians would have fooled anyone into thinking that the record was going to be good, but John knew that getting that many musicians together to save one album was only being done out of desperation.
