The one question Bob Dylan had for Elton John
Even though they were two of the biggest singer-songwriters and rock stars of the 1970s, Bob Dylan and Elton John might as well have been living on different planets during those years. John was an upstart glam rocker rubbing elbows with the entertainment industry’s elite while cranking out number-one hits. That ship had sailed for Dylan, who was creating his own offbeat world that eventually hit the road as the Rolling Thunder Revue.
In reality, there have been at least a few times when Dylan and John fell into each others’ orbits. As detailed in a recent Q+A with The Guardian, Dylan stopped John and his writing partner, Bernie Taupin, on the stairs of a New York music venue in the early 1970s and complemented the pair on their songwriting. As it turned out, one of the questions that John was there to answer came from Dylan himself.
In the spirit of his recent book, The Philosophy of Modern Song, Dylan wanted to get to the bottom of John’s major hit ‘Tiny Dancer’. Specifically, Dylan wanted to know how John arranged the verses that built up to the song’s indelible chorus.
“In the song ‘Tiny Dancer’, did you work your way up to the cathartic chorus gradually, spontaneously, or did you have it thought out from the start?” Dylan asked. For his response, John gave some insight into the process of writing that occurs between him and Taupin.
“This is a really good question,” John acknowledges upfront. “‘Tiny Dancer’ has a really long lyric, a very cinematic, California-in-the-early-70s lyric, so it had two verses and a middle eight before it even gets to the chorus, and it lent itself to a long buildup. The middle eight sets it up well, then slows down for a moment – ‘when I say softly, slowly…’ That line suggests a big chorus.”
“I don’t remember much about writing it, but I do remember trying to make it sound as California as possible,” John adds. “Writing a song like that’s a bit like having a wank, really. You want the climax to be good, but you don’t want it to be over too quickly – you want to work your way up to it. Bernie’s lyrics took so long to get to the chorus, I thought, ‘Fuck, the chorus had better be something special when it finally arrives.’ And it’s ‘here I come’, literally.”
Check out ‘Tiny Dancer’ down below.
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