The album so good it makes Elton John depressed
While Elton John was at his absolute best in the 1970s, where he released 12 studio albums and rose to stratospheric levels of pop stardom, it wasn’t just his recorded output that deserved to be celebrated.
Given how his work straddled pop rock, glam and occasional forays into prog territory, this not only made for some spectacular high-concept records, but a spellbinding live show, which saw him embark on legendary world tours that seemingly never ended until his prolonged retirement that stretched over the course of five years. He may now have called time on touring as of 2023, but that doesn’t take away from how legendary his performances were during the peak of his career.
Despite his greatest work coming out in the mid-1970s, with albums like Goodbye Yellow Brick Road and Captain Fantastic and the Brown Dirt Cowboy being the most stunning releases in his catalogue, it was a few years before this illustrious period that he arguably produced some of his greatest performances. One live performance from this early era in particular documents a high point that John believed he’d never be able to surpass in terms of quality, and the high bar that he set for himself with this show even gets him down at times.
While his self-titled 1970 album has never been the best-performing record of his career, with ‘Your Song’ being the only single from it to have entered the charts in the UK, it’s still an important historic document of how the singer developed his sound and became the icon he’s regarded as today. However, when it came to touring in support of the record, John opted to change things up significantly from how the songs sounded on the record, which culminated in him delivering one of the most breathtaking performances of his career.
The 17-11-70 live album, referred to as 11-17-70 in the US, wasn’t even recorded in front of an audience, but instead happened as part of a broadcast on WABC-FM in New York, and John hadn’t previously intended for there to be a live album of this recording. Despite this, the six songs that feature on the record, taken from a full set of 13 songs, proved to be so stunning that they needed to be compiled and preserved for a wider audience to hear.
Speaking in a 1990 interview, John reflected on the record and how it proved to be one of his strongest sets. “Some of the playing on 17-11-70 is quite incredible,” he proclaimed. “I get depressed sometimes when I hear it because I don’t know if I can ever play as well as that again. That three piece band – Nigel [Olsson, drums] and Dee [Murray, bass] and myself – we did different versions than the Elton John record, and the response, we could not believe it. We were like kids in heaven.”
While John would go on to play other famous concerts in his life, performing at famed venues such as Madison Square Garden, Wembley Stadium and Sydney Entertainment Centre, it’s still this early radio broadcast that touches him the most, and it demonstrates just how ready he was at this point to ascend to stardom.
