Say what you will about the Donald Duck costumes and his
lame MTV-era hits, but Elton John was one of the very best pop hit machines of
the seventies. Not everything has aged well for various reasons (“Crocodile
Rock”, “Don’t Let the Sun Go Down on Me”, and “Candle in the Wind” come to
mind), but blockbusters such as “Rocket Man”, “Someone Saved My Life
Tonight”, “Levon”, and “Goodbye Yellow Brick Road”, and a net-full of album
tracks such as “Where to Now St. Peter”, “Blues for My Baby and Me”, “Harmony”,
and “Madman Across the Water”, rate among the best pop released in the first
half of the decade. So the fact that Keith Hayward’s Elton John from Tin Pan Alley to the Yellow Brick Road focuses
almost exclusively on this period isn’t too much of an issue in itself. In
fact, this book is actually a sequel to one that detailed the pre-stardom phase
of Reg’s career. As Hayward suggests in his introduction, you won’t exactly be
lost if you read volume two without reading volume one first, but a few
important aspects—most notably John’s relationship with lyricist Bernie
Taupin—will remain a bit hazy.
Nevertheless, we still get a fairly clear idea of who this
unlikely superstar is just from these scant 200 pages. Elton John was a guy who
used outrageous antics and attire to fight through his shyness and uncertainty
about what kind of career he should pursue. While Hayward’s preface kind of
frames his book as a tale of the music business in the seventies with John as
the main reference point, this really is more of a biography than that, though
certain limitations keep it from being definitive and may account for why
Hayward chose to not represent his book as a biography. The people he
interviewed often steer this story, and because they aren’t always the most
integral characters in the core Elton John story, they sometimes steer it down
tangential roads. For example, we get a lot more about the casting of Tina
Turner in Tommy— a movie in which Elton
John plays a very minor role— than is probably necessary because Hayward happened
to interview the movie’s producer, Beryl Virtue. It’s an interesting story—I
certainly cannot call any part of From
Tin Pan Alley to the Yellow Brick Road anything less than interesting—but
it is off-topic, and since this is a pretty short book, that is an issue worth
mentioning. Discussions of John’s work and play with John Lennon, Rod Stewart, Kiki
Dee, and Brian Wilson manage to fold other stars into the story without leaving
out its main man.
