The singer Elton John said the world would never see again
Elton John belongs in almost a higher class of musician than almost anyone else in the pop charts.
Sure, the music scene has gone in a much different direction ever since he and Bernie Taupin started making music, but a lot of the best parts of his songs were about trying to show the world strange chords that the pop world might never have given a chance to otherwise. But even if he was a one-of-a-kind pop star, the only reason he got there was seeing what the other legends before him could do when they had the spotlight on them.
It’s no big secret that John was smitten with rock and roll when he first heard Elvis Presley, but a lot of the greatest musicians of his time had a lot more to offer than a bunch of killer stage moves over rock and roll songs. He did have his own flamboyant side, but he was an admirer of what people like The Beatles and The Rolling Stones had been doing when they started venturing outside the realm of traditional rock.
And let’s not forget the singer-songwriter scene, either. John and Taupin were both massive fans of people like James Taylor and Laura Nyro, and when they first started painting their masterpieces, you can actually hear the more earnest storytellers that they always were underneath all of the sequinned outfits and outrageous glasses that he wore onstage. Their brand of rock was meant to push the genre forward, but all of it fell under the same banner at the end of the day.
Because as much as people like to differentiate between subgenres every time they listen to music, there was a lot more in common with what the singer-songwriters were doing and the blues singers that started rock and roll in the first place. Muddy Waters and BB King were known to speak their minds in their songs, so it wasn’t necessarily that hard to draw a direct line from them to Chuck Berry to The Beatles and then every other big-name songwriter that came afterwards.
But even in the age when the blues was the biggest genre in the world, Nina Simone was a completely different animal. No one could have imagined someone having that much soul whenever they sang, and even when she wasn’t making the greatest belting tunes in the world, you could hear the raw passion and musical theory behind a lot of her songs, especially when she started to go outside the realm of blues and bring in the sophisticated side of jazz whenever she played.
John was lucky enough to see Simone while she was still alive, but even when he was watching that kind of brilliance before him, he quickly realised that this was the kind of music that no one else could have made, saying, “We were going to do a George Harrison tribute, and Nina had done a great version of ‘Here Comes the Sun.’ I said, ‘I don’t care how much of a handful she might be, if we get her we’ll never see the likes of it again.’ She may have done one or two shows after that one, but I knew when I saw her that night she wouldn’t be performing much again.”
And for someone that wasn’t in their prime like Simone was that night, she could still deliver every single song like it was the last thing she would ever sing. That kind of passion can’t really be taught in school, and even if Simone had a lot of musical training after her time spent in New York, the greatest lesson anyone can learn from her is that it was important to be yourself every single time you got up on that stage.
And when you listen to her voice, she has that same kind of magnetism that everyone from Aretha Franklin to Freddie Mercury to Janis Joplin seemed to have whenever they got up onstage. Not everything needed to be absolutely perfect every single time they stepped up to the microphone, but once they wrapped their voices around a particular song, you knew that no one was ever going to sing it like they could ever again.
