Elton John - Goodbye Yellow Brick Road

Released - October 1973

Genre - Rock

Producer - Gus Dudgeon

Selected Personnel - Elton John (Vocals/Piano/Organ/Keyboards); Davey Johnstone (Guitar); Dee Murray (Bass); Nigel Olsson (Drums); Ray Cooper (Percussion); Del Newman (Orchestral Arrangements); Kiki Dee (Backing Vocals)

Standout Track - Bennie And The Jets

People who say they outright don't like Elton John haven't heard this album all the way through. I'm prepared to stand by that. The brand of lightweight pop the man would come to epitomise in the late 70s and 80s may not be to everyone's tastes, but I simply find it impossible to fathom that anybody could give Goodbye Yellow Brick Road a proper listen and still claim that there is absolutely nothing on it they enjoy. It is almost peerless. Strangely, it wasn't actually the first full Elton John album I ever encountered - that accolade goes to Tumbleweed Connection - but it is undoubtedly the perfect place to start for people uncertain of where to go. That said, a huge proportion of its contents will already be overtly familiar to even the casual Elton fan, and certainly was to me. I spent my entire childhood listening to Elton John's greatest hits and first encountered this classic while on holiday in Spain back in 2005, by which time my awareness of Elton's work had expanded to include Tumbleweed Connection and Madman Across The Water, and my musical education had started to accelerate. No longer of the simple mindset that greatest hits compilations were all that one really needed to bother with, I was astounded by the more obscure material I found on Goodbye Yellow Brick Road, and when I came back to it again at uni while delving more completely into the rest of his discography, its excellence was hammered home all the harder.

Musically and stylistically, a lot had changed for Elton John since 1972's Honky Chateau. The simple singer-songwriter stylings that had defined him from his debut all the way up to that album became a thing of the past, at least for the foreseeable future. Things had gradually begun shifting towards more of a full-band focus than being grounded solely on Elton at his piano, while musical styles were shifting from simple piano ballads to catchy, up-tempo pop and rock songs. In that vein, Elton released 1973's Don't Shoot Me I'm Only The Piano Player, very much a transitional album that sees him giving his first stab at writing a pop album. While it has some strong moments ("Teacher I Need You" is a great pop song, and the classic "Crocodile Rock" is endlessly catchy, and shockingly different to the heartfelt folk rock of his earlier work), it also struggled to convince in many places, and it's a big surprise now that a record recorded so soon after something that saw Elton struggling so hard to deliver something really brilliant should be as effortlessly wonderful as this. The style remains, by and large, similar to that on Don't Shoot Me... - catchy pop-rock with the odd ballad, generally grounded by Elton's vocals and piano but always giving ample room for his band to flex their muscles and share the limelight. But the songwriting itself has come on by miles - this is the greatest collection of unforgettable melodies that Elton would ever assemble, and the lyrics are almost certainly Taupin's finest. As ever, they favour poetic imagery over earnest, heartfelt storytelling or introspection, but generally centre on a kind of fond nostalgia for forgotten American culture. Essentially, it follows on from Taupin's Americana obsession from Tumbleweed Connection but updates it - whereas before he wrote about prairies and outlaws and a long-dead American romance, here he wrote of drive-in movies and rock and roll and a vision of America still within living memory and still close enough to stir genuine nostalgia in listeners.

The album was never intended to be a double album, but gradually the amount of quality material the duo amassed became too much to cull down to a single record's worth. While the final track listing does still contain some unnecessary filler (particularly the bland reggae track "Jamaica Jerk-Off" or the country-influenced "Roy Rogers"), there's still much more than a single LP's worth of brilliant stuff here, so the gradual expansion of the album to double length is something every Elton John fan can be very thankful of. Things start off as grandiose and bombastic as you might expect from the glamourous, fantastical cover-image, as the funereal synths intone the opening of "Funeral For A Friend," supposedly composed by Elton as he tried to imagine the kind of music he'd want at his funeral. It's a stately, majestic piano instrumental that gradually builds in intensity before exploding into the sheer monster of a rock song that is "Love Lies Bleeding," an unrelenting classic that most albums would struggle to match the quality of after starting so strong. As a full-length suite of pieces, "Funeral For A Friend/Love Lies Bleeding" almost flirts with prog rock grandiosity in places and in one of his greatest unknown triumphs. I saw Elton live at Wembley last year and it was to my tremendous delight and disbelief that he opened with a full performance of the suite, an experience which only hammered home its brilliance all the more.

What follows is a trio of songs familiar to every Elton John fan - "Candle In The Wind" has been spoiled by the ubiquity and overly saccharine nature of its 1997 update to honour the tragic death of Princess Diana, but when one listens to the original, which was a tribute to Marilyn Monroe lamenting how she was never granted the right to a private life but was always beset by press intrusion, one is reminded what a touchingly simple ballad it is. "Bennie And The Jets," by contrast, is simply one of Elton's greatest rock songs, and perhaps the very first song of his I fell in love with, despite mishearing most of the lyrics (I have vivid memories of being about six and wondering aloud to my mum what "electric boobs" and "a pack of zyinos" were), and another highlight of that live performance I saw last year. It's built around a simple, glam rock stomp that keeps the pulse of the entire song as Elton's piano and synth solos and improvisations become increasingly erratic and jazzy and wildly frenetic around it. Finally, "Goodbye Yellow Brick Road" itself is perhaps the finest, most memorable and evocative tune Elton ever penned, and a melody that's impossible to forget once heard - a beautifully simple and introspective song and not a million miles away from the kind of thing he did before his transition into a popstar.

After a brief lull, "I've Seen That Movie Too," a wonderfully dark and angry piece of Broadway-style cinematic drama set to stirring strings and featuring a wonderfully weird and distorted guitar solo from Davey Johnstone kicks off another run of unforgettably brilliant songs nestled in the middle of the double album. "Sweet Painted Lady" is a beautifully breezy and lazy song that makes you forget that it's telling the story of a prostitute, and "The Ballad Of Danny Bailey (1909-34)" is another glorious slice of heavy-handed drama. Then there's too songs that no self-respecting true rock fan can ever dislike no matter how much they feel they may hate Elton John. "Dirty Little Girl" is a swaggering beast of a song, with all the requisite misogyny of any rock classic, but just about able to get away with it by virtue of its gloriously brash tune and Elton's committed vocal performance. While Johnstone gets a chance to shine on "Dirty Little Girl," it's the awesome riff to "All The Girls Love Alice," a song about a schoolgirl experimenting with her homosexuality, that really proves his ability as a guitarist in his own right as well as playing second fiddle to Elton. It's certainly the greatest guitar moment in Elton's entire discography (although the riff on "Saturday Night's Alright For Fighting" later on in the record comes close), and comes close to stealing the show on the album as a whole.

One could go on and on about the individual moments that act as highlights on Goodbye Yellow Brick Road, but it's no substitute for just surrendering to it and marvelling at just how diverse and brilliant Elton John and his gang of collaborators were at this point. The album runs the spectrum of pop and rock and indulges in a wide range of styles, almost never putting a foot wrong (that ill-advised reggae take-off being the only genuinely uninspired moment) and proving that, while a lot of great music had been made in his early years, the man's transformation from folk singer-songwriter and balladeer to global popstar was an inspired one, and one he was more than capable of delivering on. To this day, it remains the peak of Elton John's career. He would continue making great music all the way up to this day (with frequent peaks and troughs in quality, of course), but even the highest of those peaks would never capture the brilliance and the innovation of this classic. It quickly became his best-selling album, a title it retains to this day, and cemented his place as one of the brightest lights in pop music. The albums that followed it would continue to develop Elton as an artist and continue to be both highly entertaining and to show a breadth of imagination and innovation, and it wasn't until later in the 70s that things began to falter for him. But for the time being, Elton John was untouchable and, alongside Bowie, became one of the biggest ane most important figures in pop music at the time.

Track Listing:

All songs written by Elton John and Bernie Taupin.

1. Funeral For A Friend/Love Lies Bleeding

2. Candle In The Wind

3. Bennie And The Jets

4. Goodbye Yellow Brick Road

5. This Song Has No Title

6. Grey Seal

7. Jamaica Jerk-Off

8. I've Seen That Movie Too

9. Sweet Painted Lady

10. The Ballad Of Danny Bailey (1909-34)

11. Dirty Little Girl

12. All The Girls Love Alice

13. Your Sister Can't Twist (But She Can Rock & Roll)

14. Saturday Night's Alright For Fighting

15. Roy Rogers

16. Social Disease

17. Harmony