The 1975 album Elton John called “impossible” to top
Anyone who likes the idea of glamorous pop stars should get a good look at what Elton John was doing back in the 1970s.
Even though he was one of the greatest composers of his time, you should realise that someone being able to dominate the field isn’t usually going to happen in this day and age unless they are a legacy artist or their name is Taylor Swift. But as much as John liked the idea of making the best songs that he could, anyone would have grown tired of being at the top for way too long.
There were too many opportunities for him to fall if he kept making one hit after another, but there was no one there to stop him, either. He and Bernie Taupin simply loved the idea of working together, and even though a lot of their records did result in some more adventurous songs, it wasn’t all that weird for one of their tunes to become a staple of their catalogue, even if it was well past single-length.
Goodbye Yellow Brick Road was the kind of album that would have been considered pretentious because of how long it was, but John was in a good enough place where he could actually sustain that kind of attention. He was making tunes so good that they hardly fit on one album, and even when they ended up making ‘Philadelphia Freedom’, John was still putting in every single ounce of energy that he did in his prime.
But nothing was going to be as close to John’s heart as Captain Fantastic and the Brown Dirt Cowboy. He had spent the first half of his career writing songs that were about anything that came into Taupin’s head, but this was like a love letter to their friendship. The whole album told the story of their rise to fame, and John figured that there was no way that he was ever going to top what he had done.
Then again, the idea of playing the whole album live probably wasn’t the best idea when he first started taking to the road. The album release party was still one of the most star-studded nights of his life, but even if no one knew a single song that he was playing, that didn’t seem to slow him down for a second. He had the momentum of a rocket ship, so when Rock of the Westies came out, John was almost relieved.
‘Island Girl’ was still a modest hit, but John felt that there was no point in him trying to make an album with the same size and scope as his predecessor, saying, “It was a time when we could do no wrong. But I was sensible enough to know that somebody else was going to have their day in the sun. I loved records and studied them and was totally engrossed in music, so I knew that would happen. I was prepared for when ‘I Feel like a Bullet (in the Gun of Robert Ford)’ off Rock of the Westies didn’t make the Top 10. But it was a relief in a way. It’s impossible to sustain that kind of success.”
As it turns out, though, all John needed to do was keep switching up his styles and he would still be fine. There were so many more colours for him to play with, and while he did end up gracing the charts yet again when making The Lion King soundtrack or ‘I’m Still Standing’, the best parts of his career usually came when he was making the singer-songwriter albums that he had always loved listening to.
So while Captain Fantastic does represent the closing of that chapter of John’s career, he wasn’t unhappy to see it fall by the wayside. In fact, he was happy enough knowing that there was a whole lot more waiting for him once he actually decided to take his foot off the gas for the first time since his debut.
