To wit, it’s a concept album about John and Taupin during their starvation years before the release of Empty Sky, and as such put stringent thematic constraints on Bernie’s flights of sheer fancy. “(Gotta Get a) Meal Ticket” is the only tune on which Elton snarls like he sniffs pots of glue and looks forward to putting the boot in come Saturday night and that’s a shame, because despite the widespread perception of Elton as the epitome of pop wussitude, in reality he’s a real Killer Queen, the guy who once wrote off Jerry Lee Lewis with the words, “I could kill more fucking people with one finger than he did when I saw him.” Although I sincerely doubt he’d have said that to the Killer’s face.īut Captain Fantastic suffers from a far more serious flaw. Part of the problem is the hard rock quotient is low. Come 1975 EJ was unstoppable, and it didn’t really matter much that Captain Fantastic was not as good an album as its predecessors Goodbye Yellow Brick Road and Caribou, or for that matter its successor, 1975’s Rock of the Westies. But whereas Herr Glitter was a strictly English pop sensation, Elton was a worldwide entertainment phenomenon, and filling arenas in the Land of Opportunity across the pond, which he was celebrating in songs like “Philadelphia Freedom.”Ĭaptain Fantastic and the Brown Dirt Cowboy was the high-water mark of Elton’s meteoric rise to fame, and this despite the fact that it spawned only one hit single. When asked about the cover of the LP the human toon would say only, “Took me six years to crochet that.” Which just goes to show that Elton, who once leaped on stage during an Iggy Pop show in a gorilla suit and almost got beat up for his troubles, is a real wild card.Īnyway, the point I’m trying to make here is that Elton’s was Glam’s ultimate nebbish remake/ remodel unless you count Gary Glitter, who basically trundled himself up like a plump Christmas turkey in aluminum foil. You can send it to Engelbert Humperdinck, and if he doesn’t like it, you can give it to Lulu as a demo.”īut if you thought Elton was simply couldn’t get any more Glam along came 1975’s Captain Fantastic and the Brown Dirt Cowboy, on the cover of which Sir Pudgealot looks like A CARTOON OF A CARTOON, and is even riding a bucking piano like John Travolta in Urban Cowboy across a lurid background thronged with inexplicable beasties straight out of Hieronymus Bosch. And just look at those trousers! They come up to his nipples!Īnd when it comes to fabulous how can you beat “Don’t Let the Sun Go Down on Me,” which Elton almost didn’t include on the album because, well, let’s let Elton tell it: “That’s a load of crap. Until 1973, in fact, when Sir Elton abandoned the tortured singer-songwriter look (see the cover of 1972’s tres funky Honky Chateau) to reinvent himself as a glorious glam cartoon on the cover of double-LP masterpiece Goodbye Yellow Brick Road.Īt which point there was no looking back on the cover of 1974’s Caribou he’s still a cartoon, but he’s A CARTOON IN REAL LIFE, right down to the tiger fur jacket (unzipped to reveal one very sexy chest pelt) and a pair of pink glasses of the sort I would later wear to disguise the fact that I was perpetually stoned. It took Elton John’s fabulousness a while to catch up to him. Elton John Captain Fantastic and the Brown Dirt Cowboy (1975)
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