The 1973 album Elton John said was absolutely “disgusting”
Elton John has never been short on superlatives when talking about his favourite musicians in the world.
There’s not a day that goes by that he doesn’t marvel when someone is able to make something more beautiful than he has ever heard, and he is forever grateful for the lessons that he has learned working with everyone from John Lennon to Stevie Wonder to Leon Russell. But even though he loved to talk up his favourite artists, it wasn’t that hard to see him go far in the other direction if he felt someone was underperforming.
Because if you fall on his bad side, John can be downright cutthroat. There are a few bridges that he has burned in his past that would have been catastrophic for any other artist, but John had no problem saying that he didn’t care for anything that Madonna was doing or calling some of his fellow arena rockers cowards and fakes for daring to lip sync along to whatever backing track they were using. In his prime, you didn’t need to rely on backing tracks, but even when he was selling out stadiums, John had a keen ear for when people were slipping.
And while it’s one thing for musicians not to give people their money’s worth, it’s extra disappointing when it happens to someone that you love so dearly. It’s bad enough that John ended up getting into a fight with Billy Joel later on in his career, but when he was first listening to the best soul singers of his generation, he felt that what Dusty Springfield was being subjected to during her later years was inexcusable.
Springfield had one of the most impressive soul voices in the world, and Dusty in Memphis was a clear sign that she should have been able to do whatever the hell she wanted, but that’s not where the money was. She needed to keep reinventing herself so the labels would be happy, and when John listened to the album Cameo for the first time, he practically heard his heart breaking through the speakers when he heard what she was being forced to do.
This was practically a spit in the face to her talent as far as he was concerned, and he wasn’t happy seeing her squander all that potential, saying at the time, “It’s very sad when someone who is that good, a very good singer of songs, dynamite onstage . . . She’s capable of much better, and it really frustrates me, and it must frustrate her more. Her new album is disgusting, it has no balls to it, Dusty needs something with balls.”
While anyone else would have been considered a snot-nosed kid who didn’t know what he was talking about, it’s not like it took a brain surgeon to figure out what was wrong. A lot of what John was doing was calling out the kind of trend chasing that people get caught up in when working in the music industry, but it’s not like he didn’t fall victim to whatever new sound was popular at any given time, either.
He has said on numerous occasions that the album Victim of Love was a big mistake, and while Leather Jackets does have the spectre of the 1980s looming all over it, John felt that there was no redeemable value in it at all. He got into the business to make music from his heart, and considering where he’s ended up, he seemed to learn all the lessons that someone like Springfield needed to learn as well.
No one needed to tell him what did and didn’t sound good as long as he was happy with his songs, and when looking at the collaboration albums that he’s made, the piano icon has settled into his role as one of the finest melodists of his genre. He could collaborate with the odd pop star when he wanted to, but it was now all in service to making the greatest songs that he knew how to make.
