The 1982 album Elton John wanted nothing to do with: “I absolutely didn’t want to”
There aren’t many pieces of rock and roll history that Elton John hasn’t been able to master.
He was never the greatest lyricist of all time or anything, but with Bernie Taupin as his partner in crime, there are hardly any tunes in his catalogue that could sound any more perfect than they already are. Not many bands can claim to have a catalogue that’s that sturdy, but even when he was ascending into the role of all-time legend, John felt that there were some albums that took too big a toll on his heart to actually finish in good faith.
Then again, that’s saying a lot when you look at the kind of tunes that he has made over the years. John was never afraid to make the most emotionally gripping songs of his career, and even though anyone else would have been too overcome with emotion to perform the rewrite of ‘Candle in the Wind’ at Princess Diana’s funeral, the fact that he approached everything with the utmost grace is really a testament to the kind of professional he has always been.
But sometimes the tunes aren’t really the problem; it’s the real people behind them. There are so many tunes that John has found too emotional to bring to the stage ever again, but that only comes from someone who has lost an important part of their life every time they perform. And while John wouldn’t have known how to approach his own grief, there was no way that he was going to be able to properly manage the tunes that he had received when working with John Lennon.
The former Beatle had been a great friend to John ever since they started working together on Walls and Bridges, and even if John himself wasn’t comparing himself to The Beatles in any way, he was one of the few who seemed to know the person behind the mask to a certain degree. So when he was murdered in the middle of New York in 1980, John and the rest of the world went into a state of shock.
No one can really tell how to react to something that violent happening to one of the Fab Four, but Yoko Ono wasn’t ready to bring her husband’s story to a close. She knew that there was more that he had to say after Double Fantasy, and while she wasn’t going to start adding her own style to any of his songs, the first person that she approached after Lennon’s passing was John to see if he could do anything with the tracks.
This was long before The Beatles’ Anthology was even an idea, but even though John heard what would become Milk and Honey, he knew that he just couldn’t go through the emotional ringer like that, saying, “She asked me if I would complete them, so they could be released. It was very flattering, but I absolutely didn’t want to. I thought it was too soon; the time wasn’t right. I didn’t think the time would ever be right. Just the thought of it freaked me out. Trying to work out how to finish songs John Lennon wrote – I wouldn’t be so presumptuous.”
Regardless of the reasoning behind John sitting that one out, the fact that the album sounded perfect in its raw form is the best testament to what Lennon could do. All of the pieces are nothing more than a bunch of demos that he had been working on up until his passing, and while there were a few times where it was tidied up, the fact that ‘Nobody Told Me’ was good enough to be anyone else’s single was a clear look at what had happened to Lennon over the past few years.
He was back in rare form after years away from the spotlight, but a lot of what he was doing was a lot more fleeting than any of us were willing to admit. John could have easily turned some of those tunes into rock and roll masterpieces if he wanted to, but there was no reason for him to assume the role of Paul McCartney in that situation. The legacy was just too big for him, so being able to gracefully bow out is still respectable on his part.
