The song Elton John refused to play piano on
In the 1970s, Elton John’s life changed. At the start of the decade, he was a piano player doing rounds of jazz bars and pubs, trying to make a name for himself. By the end, he was a global star. But with that kind of swift rise, there inevitably comes a mental battle. So, by 1977, John simply didn’t want to play the piano anymore.
With every year of the 1970s, things got crazier and crazier for Elton John. It started out with his first albums, where each one of his earliest releases brought him closer to the sound that would make his name. He was merging classic honky tonk piano with pop and rock and roll, slowly but surely crafting a sound that would prove incredibly successful.
That proof came in quickly as, from 1972, his album Honky Chateau was the start of a seven-album back-to-back run of number ones. As each new record was released to huge sales and acclaim, his star only seemed to rise and rise, quickly making him one of the UK’s favourite acts.
He was booked and busy as suddenly he was no longer playing in pubs, but was playing big shows around the world. As well as being constantly in the studio during this incredibly prolific period, he was building on his reputation with a tireless schedule of concerts and appearances.
Booming fame like that is hard enough to handle, but pair it with worsening drug addiction and alcoholism, and it’s a recipe for disaster. While John’s career was on the up, so was his substance abuse. “This is how bleak it was: I’d stay up, I’d smoke joints, I’d drink a bottle of Johnnie Walker and then I’d stay up for three days and then I’d go to sleep for a day and half, get up, and because I was so hungry, because I hadn’t eaten anything, I’d binge and have like three bacon sandwiches, a pot of ice cream and then I’d throw it up, because I became bulimic and then go and do the whole thing all over again,” he said in 2020, providing an insight into the private hell he was living in amidst his blossoming public glory.
“When I look back I shudder at the behavior and what I was doing to myself,” he said. He must have been absolutely exhausted, so it makes total sense that by the end of the decade, the musician wanted a break.
While still working in the studio, producer Thom Bell noticed John’s exhaustion when they began working together in 1977. “When I first met Elton, he said, ‘Look man, I’m tired. I want you to do everything… I want you to write, I want you to play. You just tell me when to sing,’” he recalled. When they were working on the track ‘Mama Can’t Buy You Love’, John didn’t want to play the piano.
For once in his career, he didn’t want to do anything other than what he was told, happy to hand full control over to someone else just so he could get a moment of rest.
