The Elton John song he was embarrassed became popular: “I wish the bloody thing would piss off”
No artist is safe from a little bit of burnout. It’s impossible to expect someone in the greatest artistic mindset to make one masterpiece after another, and trying to abuse that inspiration is when rock stars either tear themselves apart or release some of the dumber entries in their catalogue. Elton John certainly wasn’t immune to it, either, but he could feel the burnout from himself years during his prime when he released the song ‘Philadelphia Freedom’.
Then again, having one’s face on the charts all the time is usually anyone’s dream starting out. It’s bad enough trying to force your way onto the hit parade, but once there’s a single that crosses that threshold, any artist is going to make sure that they either follow the formula or come up with something equally as good to top it.
And considering his upbringing as a lover of all music, John would never be playing ‘Your Song’ re-runs for the rest of his career. He came from the school of singer-songwriters like James Taylor and Carole King, so every track seemed like another adventure whenever he got ahold of one of Bernie Taupin’s lyrics.
By the time the late 1970s rolled around, though, it seemed that anything with John’s name on it went directly into the charts without much trouble. Even his attempt at a double album, which is always known to be messy, with Goodbye Yellow Brick Road is one of the most essential pieces of his career because of how much quality material is on it, like ‘Candle in the Wind’ and ‘Roy Rogers’.
When ‘Philadelphia Freedom’ dropped, though, it did start to look a little ridiculous. John had been so omnipresent on the charts all on his own with Captain Fantastic and the Brown Dirt Cowboy, and even after working magic with ‘Don’t Go Breaking My Heart’ with Kiki Dee, a tune dedicated to a tennis team seeing airtime next to legends was a bit of a stretch.
Despite being one of the biggest singles in the country, John remembered this classic as the moment he saw his career getting a little bit out of hand, recalling, “In America, I’ve got ‘Philadelphia Freedom’ going up the charts again. I wish the bloody thing would piss off. I can see why people get sick and tired of me. In America, I get sick and tired of hearing myself on AM radio. It’s embarrassing.”
But that fear of getting overexposed did come back to bite him. As the decade drew to a close, albums like Victim of Love made for the most pedestrian tunes that John would ever write, which is really saying something for a man who goes out of his way to become a standout in almost everything he did.
It’s hard to really put down a track like ‘Philadelphia Freedom’. Yes, the fact that it was written as a favour to Billie Jean King and somehow landed on the charts was a bit of a strange story, but as long as John still had the tune to back it up, it was hardly a problem listening to him work his magic all over again.
