Released - October 1970
Genre - Rock
Producer - Gus Dudgeon
Selected Personnel - Elton John (Vocals/Piano/Keyboards); Caleb Quaye (Guitar); Roger Pope (Drums); Herbie Flowers (Bass); Dee Murray (Bass); Nigel Olsson (Drums); Brian Dee (Organ); Lesley Duncan (Guitar/Vocals); Dusty Springfield (Backing Vocals); Paul Buckmaster (Conductor)
Standout Track - Talking Old Soldiers
After achieving moderate success with the hit single "Your Song" and proving his worth as a great songwriting talent for the future, Elton John felt justified enough to flesh out his vision a little and work on something more ambitious and more conceptual than his self-titled second album. The result was Tumbleweed Connection, released later the same year and it's his first great masterpiece, despite being doomed to be heard by practically no-one. With an artist whose career has spanned so many decades and spawned so many hit songs, an obscure early album with no hits is always going to be unjustly neglected by most casual listeners, and it's a terrible shame because this is incredible stuff. I owe my awareness of it (and perhaps my awareness of most of Elton John's work besides his greatest hits) to my brother, who was the big music-lover in my family during my teenage years until I went all overkill on it in 2007 and overtook him. His own interests had led him to Tumbleweed Connection, and he'd played me "Talking Old Soldiers." I must have been about thirteen or so, and I was absolutely transfixed. I didn't feel like I'd ever heard anything quite so arresting, so tragically world-weary, so spine-chillingly brilliant. I made it my mission to find this album in its entirety as soon as possible and, this being before the days of ordering something on the internet, it meant my entire family ended up with a constant mandate to scour CD shops for this obscure classic until we could find it. It was the first Elton John studio album I'd heard, and has always held a very special place in my heart ever since.
In general, it's a very different entity to the sparse piano ballads of Elton John earlier the same year, and really shows how quickly he'd chosen to revamp his approach. While everything here is still very much built around Elton's own piano playing, there's a much greater sense here of a band playing together to create a full sound, and things are also fleshed out even further with more brass and woodwind and string parts than before. The bluesy guitar riff that opens "Ballad Of A Well-Known Gun" sets the tone - it's a brilliant upbeat rocker, very much built around the full band sound and showcasing the new conceptual angle John and Taupin were going down. Whether it was a mutual obsession or a direction dictated by a particular one of them, both Taupin's lyrics and John's musical arrangements show a far greater obsession with Americana than before. Though the songs on Elton John had gospel-tinged influences, here pretty much everything comes back to traditional American sounds and themes, from the out-and-out country twang of "Country Comfort" (complete with obligatory slide guitar and fiddle) to the blues rock of "Ballad Of A Well-Known Gun" or the rousing gospel of "My Father's Gun," and all these traditional styles are reflected in Taupin's lyrics of farms, soldiers, guns, outlaws and so on. It's a curious affectation, and one that could so easily have gone terribly wrong (British artists had been aping American rock & roll styles for years, but to do it so self-consciously and deliberately seemed like courting disaster), but it's masterfully done and only on the slightly forced clichés of "Country Comfort" does it feel like it might have been pushed too far.
Tumbleweed Connection sees the disparate members of what would become Elton John's core backing band for many years begin to come together, with drummer Nigel Olsson and organist Dee Murray joining guitarist Caleb Quaye from the previous album. Olsson would still be playing on Elton John's albums as late as 2006, while the other two would be sticking around for a long while. Elton John has always been somebody who's been able to appreciate the importance of the musicians he surrounds himself with, and it's the dynamic of that core band that's helped lend distinction to his music for years. In terms of the songs, the aforementioned "Talking Old Soldiers" is the obvious standout - it's a slow, maudlin ballad of a veteran soldier talking in a bar about the friends he's lost in conflict, arranged for nothing other than Elton's voice and piano. It's a hackneyed subject area, but treated with such absolute sincerity and musical perfection that it stands head and shoulders above the rest on offer, though pretty much everything here is a classic. Elton's duet with Lesley Duncan on "Love Song" (Duncan was a backing singer on his previous album, and wrote the song herself) is a haunting and ghostly thing and "Son Of Your Father" is a raucous party tune distinguished by a frenzied harmonica part throughout. "Amoreena" is the closest thing to a traditional pop song here, but still very much in the vein of traditional American music.
Tumbleweed Connection is one of the very finest examples of just how brilliant and diverse Elton John can be to be held up against those who accuse him of being no more than an entertaining pop musician, but sadly it's doomed to never be heard by the naysaers due to its obscurity. If you've ever heard an Elton John song you've enjoyed, do yourself a favour and track this album down in order to get a fuller appreciation of just what the man can do. Having found a band he could really work with, he would continue pushing himself in new directions to flex his creative muscles and by the next year he would have one-upped himself again.
Track Listing:
All songs written by Elton John and Bernie Taupin except where noted.
1. Ballad Of A Well-Known Gun
2. Come Down In Time
3. Country Comfort
4. Son Of Your Father
5. My Father's Gun
6. Where To Now St. Peter?
7. Love Song (Lesley Duncan)
8. Amoreena
9. Talking Old Soldiers
10. Burn Down The Mission
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