The one singer Elton John couldn’t stand being around: “A disturbing person”
Being on the level of superstar that Elton John has been over the years usually means coming across a few unsavoury characters now and then.
Some of the best musicians in the world are the ones who genuinely have a passion for all things music whenever they perform, but when you look at the top of the charts, there are bound to be a few people who were as concerned about their popularity as they were with whether or not they were making good songs. John may have had the good fortune of having his fair share of classics, but he felt that a few people made him sick to be around them more than a few times.
Then again, it’s not like John has been an absolute angel behind the scenes. He has mentioned more than a few times how he could be absolutely cutthroat when things weren’t going his way, and if you go back to when he was in the studio cutting ‘Don’t Let the Sun Go Down on Me’, he wasn’t above throwing a hissy fit if it meant that he didn’t have to play along with a tune that he didn’t think worked.
But even when he approached the top of the rock and roll world, the fact that he could find some famous friends was any other music fan’s dream come true. Anyone would have only dreamed of being able to hang out with John Lennon or eventually go to parties and talk with Brian Wilson and Bob Dylan, but John always had his guard up when he realised one of his heroes wasn’t all that they were cracked up to be.
He had already learned that lesson far too harshly when he first saw what Elvis Presley had turned himself into by the time John was coming up. The pianist absolutely adored ‘The King’ when he first started hashing away on his tunes, but when you look at the way that he carried himself towards the final years of his life, Presley seemed like a frail husk of what he used to be when John got to see him.
And while Presley was the original frontman who made every single mistake you can think of, Michael Jackson wasn’t much better, either. He was already one of the biggest names in popular music ever since The Beatles, and while John was more than willing to work with ‘the King of Pop’ in any capacity, seeing him slowly start to get more and more isolated from everyone else wasn’t going to do him any good.
Jackson had become far too big for anyone to handle properly, and John wasn’t shy about having a terrible time when watching him fall away during his final years, saying, “He was genuinely mentally ill, a disturbing person to be around. It was incredibly sad, but he was someone you couldn’t help: he was just gone, off in a world of his own, surrounded by people who only told him what he wanted to hear.”
That might seem a bit callous, but a lot of that was coming from John seeing the kind of person that Jackson had been when he was a child. He had gone through a hard upbringing before becoming one of the biggest stars in the world, and when there are that many people who are trying to give you everything that you want, there’s a good chance that anyone would have got themselves into a load of trouble the same way that Jackson did.
So while John was more than a little bit perturbed about his experience with Jackson, it at least came from a place of love half the time. He realised that he was hurting himself big-time whenever he cut himself off from everyone else, and seeing him fall down that rabbit hole wasn’t something that the pianist was all that interested in sticking around for.
