Within the Nineteen Sixties, when Elton John was a back-up musician for British blues singer Long John Baldry, he was briefly engaged to a lady.
In a latest memoir, Elton’s close friend and longtime lyricist, Bernie Taupin, describes this as a time of confusion for the singer that culminated in a potentially tragic incident.
Taupin, who looked as if it would recognize that Elton was gay years before Elton did, writes in “Scattershot: Life, Music, Elton, and Me” (Hachette) that Elton became friends with a young
woman named Linda Woodrow, and that he by some means got here to see it as greater than only a friendship.
“At a time when he was unsure of his own sexual orientation and easy methods to distribute his pent-up love, it was extraordinary to observe him approach a conventional heterosexual dance,” Taupin writes. “I really don’t think he knew what hit him and was just swept up within the accepted normality of all of it.”
But Elton couldn’t hide the reality of his own sexuality from himself for long.
“All of it modified with an intervention after Elton, in a staged cry for help, opened all of the windows, stuck his head within the gas oven, and awaited a dramatic response,” writes Taupin.
“Perhaps as a consequence of the unorthodox nature of the attempt, gas on low and an embroidered pillow to rest his head on, sympathy was not forthcoming. Obviously not the response he craved, I laughed out loud while [Linda Woodrow] merely looked down at him, rolled her eyes, and walked out.”
Later that night, Taupin and Elton met up with Baldry, a gay man who delivered what Taupin calls “the gay equivalent of the Gettysburg Address.”
Elton’s 1975 hit “Someone Saved My Life Tonight” presented a fictionalized version of this evening, which resulted in Elton making himself a single man the next day.
While Taupin provides insight within the book on his close friendship and remarkably successful collaboration with Elton John, which produced over 50 Top 40 hits, he also uses this book to advance his own celebrity bona fides, making it clear that he partied as hard as any rock star.
Taupin was a founding member of the Hollywood Vampires, a notorious celebrity drinking club founded within the Nineteen Seventies by Alice Cooper that also included Mickey Dolenz, Ringo Starr, Harry Nilsson, Keith Moon, and, during his infamous lost weekend in LA, John Lennon.
Taupin’s LA home was party central for this crew and others, with seemingly all of hard-partying Los Angeles making an appearance.
“I’d thrown out Chevy Chase for being a complete d–k, and watched Timothy Leary spend the most effective a part of a night talking to my jukebox,” writes Taupin.
“On one occasion, the wonderful English actor John Hurt stood on my coffee table reciting the ‘gravedigger scene’ from ‘Hamlet’ using a snow globe as Yorick’s skull.”
On the time, Taupin was a prodigious consumer of Jose Cuervo tequila.
While he has no memory of this himself, Ringo — who would turn as much as his house with Moon to wreak havoc at any hour of the day or night — later recalled how Taupin grew “despondent” after hearing a rumor the brand can be discontinued.
“Ringo claims he turned up at my house a number of days later to seek out my hallway stacked from floor to ceiling with several dozen cases of the stuff,” Taupin writes. “In a panic, I’d called every local liquor store and purchased all the excess stock I could find.”
The rumor turned out to be false.
Taupin also became “joined on the hip” with Alice Cooper, especially after collaborating with him on “From The Inside,” Cooper’s 1978 concept album about his stay in a sanitarium to get better from alcoholism.
But Taupin confesses here that after his old drinking buddy cleaned up, Taupin caused his next addiction.
“When he returned from rehab clean and sober, I inadvertently introduced him to [cocaine],” writes Taupin. “The addictive personality in Alice took to it like a duck to water, and even though it was in minor quantities at first, the damage was done.”
Cooper turned Taupin on to freebasing soon after, and the depth of the addiction led to a short lived fracture of their friendship. (Cooper got clean together with his wife’s help, and has now been drug-free for many years.)
Taupin also recalls how, in 1974, Elton sang and played piano on Lennon’s single, “Whatever Gets You Through The Night,” and bet the Beatle legend that the song would hit #1.
When this happened, Lennon had to look on stage with Elton at Madison Square Garden.
Taupin notes that Lennon, who hadn’t performed live in years, was so nervous that he was throwing up before the show, and may very well be seen physically shaking together with his guitar in hand.
“I’m standing next to him within the wings, able to propel him physically onto the stage should he book out and attempt a runner,” Taupin writes.
“As Elton begins his introduction, John begins to plead. ‘You will have to come back out with me.’”
Taupin himself only being comfortable behind the scenes, he replied, “And do what?”
With Taupin offering no help, Lennon took the stage to thunderous applause for what would develop into his last-ever live performance.
Taupin reconnected with Lennon in LA the next 12 months.
He vaguely recalls an evening when the pair sequestered themselves in On The Rox, a (then)-secret celebrity hideaway upstairs from The Roxy.
“Messrs. Lennon and Taupin are settling right into a nice cozy corner when up the steps and thru the velvet curtains saunters Bob Marley, trailing in his wake the Wailers and what appears to be half the population of Kingston,” Taupin writes.
“It’s a surreal scene kicked up a notch when Marley reaches into his shoulder bag and produces a spliff the scale of a baby’s arm. John and I soon found ourselves encircled by a fierce tsunami of wicked-ass ganga. John checked out me, and I checked out John, but no words were forthcoming, our vocal cords on pause, our tongues in limbo.”
A number of days later, the pair met as much as attend a celebration at the house of Dean Martin’s ex-wife, Jeanne Martin.
At one point, The Beach Boys’ Brian Wilson sat beside Taupin, imploring him to make an introduction to Lennon.
Wilson and Lennon spoke, after which Lennon and Taupin were off to a unique section of the home.
So Taupin was disturbed when Wilson approached him again just a number of minutes later and excitedly asked again if he could meet Lennon, a request the star obliged as if for the primary time.
This was repeated 4 times.
The anecdote would go away a depressing taste apart from Taupin noting that over thirty years later, he hung out in a recording studio with Wilson because the Beach Boy “stacked a twenty-part harmony on our 2010 song ‘When Love is Dying’ with as little effort because it takes to blow smoke.”
“What did he ask for in return? ‘A very big hamburger.’ Yes, genius unquestionably,” Taupin writes.
Taupin’s celebrity friendships weren’t limited to the music world.
Spending time with tennis legend Billie Jean King, Taupin notes that she had “attempted to show me from a scrawny rock ’n’ roll miscreant into an agile and bronzed athlete,” and that this was “the one time Billie Jean King has ever failed at anything.”
Taupin recalls hanging out at a well-liked Recent York drag bar called the Gilded Grape one night with Queen singer Freddie Mercury and King.
The three spent the night calmly sipping champagne until two drag queens got right into a fistfight that ended up on their table.
“Sequins scattered, wigs went flying, and mascara and tears ran in rivulets,” Taupin writes. “While I used to be mildly amused, Freddie was positively ecstatic, entering into the spirit of things by egging them on with a gleeful commentary of camp encouragement.”
This lasted until the table suddenly collapsed, at which point the 2 fighters stood, embraced as if it had never happened, and went about their night.
Within the midst of those celebrity tales, Taupin is just not shy about calling out those he was lower than impressed with.
Turning his feelings on original “Saturday Night Live” solid members right into a theme, he writes that he once punched John Belushi “out cold” for insulting his girlfriend, an event that impressed Belushi so deeply that the TV star called the subsequent day to apologize.
And despite deep friendships with Ringo Starr and Keith Moon, his drummer love dried up for Led Zeppelin icon John Bonham, an “aggressive drunk” who, even within the bad behavior business of rock and roll on the time, Taupin said crossed the road between juvenile poor taste and habitual cruelty.
“Together with the band’s manager, Peter Grant, a very horrible man, the 2 made for a pair of ogreish bullies who could suck the air out of a room with their intimidating presence,” Taupin writes. “Years later, Bonham was so despicably brutish to a pricey friend of mine that cutting him any slack has never been forthcoming.”
