The one song Elton John thought he could only screw up: “He got pissed”
Elton John was never someone who worried about a legacy in music. He was a working musician in every sense of the word, and that meant only being as good as the last record you made. It may have been a lot easier for him to phone it in as he got older, but considering everyone he has worked with, he has been as interesting to watch now as he was when he was pumping out Goodbye Yellow Brick Road back in the day.
That doesn’t mean he looks or sounds exactly the same. It’s a shame that he has departed from the road to raise his kids and live a quiet life, but since he spent his days as a session player, it’s not out of the ordinary to see him working on records for some of the most disparate artists imaginable. John’s sound might be distinct, but the piano is a universal instrument, and he has used it to cross genre boundaries no one thought were possible.
Just look at the kind of pedigree he has as a session player. Some people make sense like working with Leon Russell on a joint album together, but considering that he provided the piano interlude on Kanye West’s My Beautiful Dark Twisted Fantasy is insane since he was working with Alice in Chains a few years prior helping to bring their album Black Gives Way to Blue to a close.
Those two shouldn’t be remotely in the same league, but John was as much a musical chameleon as his glam-rock counterpart, David Bowie. He was always interested in seeing where music was heading, and while he has shared his praise for people like Chappell Roan in the past, it’s always nice to see him get outside of his comfort zone and play with bands like Queens of the Stone Age.
Josh Homme’s stoner-rock juggernauts were already known for making some of the gnarliest rock and roll imaginable, but fellow bandmate Troy Van Leeuwnen remembered John coming into the sessions for …Like Clockwork thinking that he was ruining their song, saying, “He got pissed at one point because he didn’t think he was learning the song fast enough, but we were like, ‘Dude, you’re really good!’. “In the end, it went so well that it gave us hope. That was all we needed to keep us going.”
But listening to the final version, it’s not like John’s part leaps out of the mix. While he may have wanted to intentionally bury himself in the mix compared to everything else, his backing vocals are coming in a lot more clearly than his piano, which is probably better playing off of Homme’s vocals.
Then again, it’s not shocking seeing someone like John become so frustrated with his work. He had studied the intricacies of piano, and when anyone has an idea in the studio that they can’t get down on paper, it can be like pulling teeth when they find themselves stuck. But it wasn’t like John was looking to break out any of his drama queen moments when working on the record.
The piano itself might not be as beautiful as anything that John played on before, but was anyone really expecting that? Queens of the Stone Age was always about finding beauty in some of the stranger moments on a record, and some of Homme’s best moments have come from deliberately messing something up when mixing everything.
He wanted to do what served the song, and for the rest of the band, hearing him break down over getting the right part gave them an unintended education. Because as much as they might slave over certain parts, even people you think are the greatest musicians in the world are in the same boat.
