Love Lies Bleeding: Elton John’s Goodbye Yellow Brick Road at 50
Looking back on the pinnacle of Reginald Dwight’s recording career
There are two kinds of people in the world – people who think Goodbye Yellow Brick Road is still the pinnacle of Elton John’s musical career, and people who are wrong.
Admittedly, my perception in the matter is colored by personal experience. Goodbye Yellow Brick Road was the first album I ever purchased with my own money, at age ten – for doing chores at home and on trips to my mom’s office, where, in the summer, I was occasionally able to help the company receptionist by trundling mail from desk to desk. She’d also give me a different sort of musical reward that I didn’t fully appreciate at the time – an early album from REO Speedwagon, who were managed by her dad (or uncle, it’s a little fuzzy 50 years on).
But I digress.
Like most people at the time, I wanted to get Goodbye Yellow Brick Road because I’d heard songs like “Bennie and the Jets” on Top 40 radio – and those songs still hold up. But when I got it home and peeled off that shrink wrap to slap it on our cheap “stereo,” I was stunned — stunned to find that the four sides were laden with songs that were even better, more memorable, more interesting than anything that was in heavy rotation at the time.
VIDEO: Elton John “Bennie and the Jets”
For me, it started within 30 seconds of placing side one on the turntable and hearing the slow build of “Funeral for a Friend” start to, well, build. The intricate-yet-spare opening piano chords, played alone in a vacuum, were mournful and riveting, like nothing I’d heard on a pop album to that point. Intriguingly, the song was recorded completely out of earshot of Elton and the rest of his band – by engineer David Hentschel, who took matters into his own hands in London, hours away from the sessions. Davey Johnstone would later tell EltonJohn.com, “I remember the very first moment we heard it we were all kind of looking at each other going, ‘Well, do you like it? I dunno, what do you think?’ It was one of those, you know? And then the second time through, it was, ‘Ohhh, yeah…this is great!'”
In part, the song was an assertion of autonomy on behalf of an artist who wanted the world to know that he could do it his way without interference. As it developed, it also became clear that it was a wordless chronicle of healing from a collapsed relationship, a reclamation of personal power that grew with each passing layer of sound. By the time it gave way to “Love Lies Bleeding,” the second part of the 11-minute medley, John had emerged, wounded but intent on survival – even willing to extend an olive branch of sorts with the lines “ou’re a bluebird on a telegraph line, I hope you’re happy now/While if the wind of change comes down your way girl/You’ll make it back somehow.”
11 minutes later, as the song fades, it’s clear that we’ve witnessed the arrival of Elton John: Superstar. Not so much because of the outsize impact the album would have on the charts, but because of the sheer scope of the project, and the degree of autonomy Elton was given in wending out a collection of 17 songs, some instantly contagious, some outright perplexing. He took that inch and extended to a mile with the packaging, which wasn’t outlandishly lavish, but was awash in illustrative visuals that added another layer of distinctiveness.
Those visuals also signaled another side of Elton John – notably the friend-of-Dorothy ruby slippers he sported on the cover. Elton hadn’t, of course, come out yet, and he hadn’t quite embraced the Little Richard-meets-Rip Taylor costumery that would mark most of his later years, but he was certainly sending out smoke signals. Those signals were further wafted by the treacly, yet undeniably beautiful Marilyn Monroe tribute “Candle in the Wind” – a song that would come to be one of his most durable. Oddly, Bernie Taupin, who wrote the lyrics, seemed to demur about the iconic representation in a 2014 Rolling Stone interview, saying “I wrote ‘Candle in the Wind’ about Marilyn Monroe, but she was just a metaphor for fame and dying young, and people sort of overdoing the indulgence, and those that do die young. The song could easily have been about Montgomery Clift or James Dean or even Jim Morrison.”
VIDEO: Elton John “Candle in the Wind”
Things are a lot less nebulous on the far-less-ubiquitous “All the Girls Love Alice,” a sly and rollicking ditty that Elton delivers with a mixture of empathy and voyeuristic interest. It’d be hard to find an alternate explanation of images like “two dykes down in Soho” or the come-hither storyline about how
“All the young girls love Alice/Tender young Alice, they say/If I give you my number/Will you promise to call me?/Wait till my husband’s away.” The vibe is bolstered by some of Elton’s most energetic playing – a romping style that has more than a touch of burlesque in it.
That song, while more serious in tone, has a lot in common with the hits – and lasting concert staples “Bennie and the Jets” and “Saturday Night’s Alright For Fighting.” There had never been this much of a sense that this was a band, rather than a titular star and his employees (which was never really the case). The interplay was raucous and potent, Davey Johnstone’s guitar tussling with Elton’s piano to determine who would be king of the hill, ultimately deciding to share the apex with both muscle and agility. While the former seems like something of a hagiography of Elton himself, the latter is pure party – which might have a lot to do with the surroundings that spawned the songs.
Things didn’t start out so smoothly. On the advice of engineer Gus Dudgeon, they started the sessions for GYBR at in Kingston, Jamaica, a decision that was soon shown to be ill-advised. “The first sign we got that something might be a bit wrong was when the guy who ran the studio, we heard him say, ‘Carlton, get the microphone!’” Johnstone recalled in a 2001 VH1 Classic Albums TV documentary. “We went, ‘Oh, fuck! Get the microphone?’ We used 20 mics on the drums even in those days. It was like, ‘Oh, we’re in deep shit here.’”
“There was no gear in the studio,” Olsson confirmed. “Gus was kind of looking around: ‘Well, we need some 414s and 57s…’ ‘Don’t worry, mun, they come tomorrow.’ Well, tomorrow never came.”
The news wasn’t all bad, though. The incident spawned the jovial faux-reggae throwaway “Jamaica Jerk-Off” – which gives the set its lightest moment – and encouraged them to seek out more hospitable surroundings, which they found at the campus of Château d’Hérouville, in the Oise valley just outside Paris, where Elton had also recorded Honky Château. The comfort zone effect worked wonders.
Elton told Classic Albums that, after the move, “It wasn’t hard, it wasn’t an effort. It was a pleasure. It was just like a little family. It was great. We were living together as a family, and we could hear the songs being created. The way we’d write at the château, we had an area at breakfast where a little electric piano was set up and a little drum kit. So, the band would learn it as I was writing it and then we’d go over and record it.”
The album’s title cuts a number of ways. If one simply listens to the title cut – a tearjerker of the first degree if there ever was one, we see the protagonist as a Dorothy-like innocent who’s been disillusioned by the bright lights and big city and is eager to get back to having his hands on his plow. But dig deeper and we find that Elton is playing both sides of the game – he’s also the man behind the curtain.
But in many ways, the innocence is very real: Elton had yet to gravitate towards the excesses that would temporarily derail his career in later years, sticking to rich food and French wine. As he’d tell Rolling Stone in 2014, “I didn’t even know what a joint was when I made Goodbye Yellow Brick Road. That all changed when I made the next record, but in 1973 I was very naïve. And the naiveté is the most pleasant thing about this record, probably.”
That laid-back – but not too late back – vibe was a big part of the recording process, the singer said in the same interview, in which he recalled “During a typical day the band would come down, there’d be instruments around the breakfast table, Bernie would be writing at the typewriter, I’d be sitting at the electric piano, and as the band came down for breakfast, I would write the song, they would pick up their instruments and play it.”
As a result, the sessions moved remarkably quickly for an artist of John’s stature. He says the entire process took “about 18 days,” largely a byproduct of Elton spending the entire time in the studio with his real band, rather than a hodgepodge of familiar faces and session dudes..
The collection also finds Elton and his band broadening their palette in unexpected ways, wading into the murkier waters of honky-tonk – a nice break from the champagne wishes of much of his previous catalog – on “Social Disease.” The singer, who went on to chronicle more glamorous excesses later on, comes off as a sort of Brit Bukowski on the rollicking tune, smirking about doing the nasty with a no-doubt-less-than-desirable landlady for a rent break, then coming to terms with the situation by admitting “I just get ugly and older….” The lagniappe of “I get juiced on Mateus and just hang loose” is kind of a period reference, but for those of a certain age, the degeneracy is certainly relatable. For younger readers, Mateus was Boone’s Farm for the soccer mom set – widely available at convenience stores and cheap enough that you knew the vintage was “Thursday.”
Goodbye Yellow Brick Road lingered in the charts for so long – 111 weeks to be precise – that the label pulled the plug on its singles campaign, blocking the intended release of one last one, the album-closing “Harmony.” That song, which still resonates 50 years on, ends GYBR in an odd manner, with its “hello, baby, hello” hook – just the opposite of the farewell that opens the album. It also points to the enduring nature of the entire album, which was confirmed on Elton’s supposed “retirement” tour, during which he sauntered off into a background of Goodbye Yellow Brick Road’s cover, walking into the distance, a job well done. Maybe Elton agrees that this is his pinnacle after all, too.
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