Elton Is Everywhere, Elton Is Everything

One day in 1975, when I was four years old, both of my teenage sisters came rushing breathlessly into the house, each clutching a poster of the rock star who was dominating pretty much the entire cultural landscape at the time; Elton John. They were so excited I was afraid they might spontaneously combust. The sheer bubbling-over exuberance of my sisters’ enthusiasm was a thing that both took me by surprise and thrilled me. It was contagious. What was it about this guy with the glittery outfits and oversized glasses that made them feel that way? Whatever it might be, I wanted in. I mean, at four you don’t necessarily need a good reason to jump up and down in place while squealing, but if you can get one, all the better. 

I’d seen him on television singing “Lucy In the Sky With Diamonds”, a giant radio hit earlier in the year. The song itself was easy enough for a child to latch onto; a visionary, dreamlike thing, redolent of Wizard of Oz, so full of colors and strange sensations, the verses a flowing, languid travelogue that bursts suddenly upward like fireworks into a shouted, stratospheric chorus. Someone helpfully explained to me that the song had originally been written and performed by The Beatles, the same group who had come up with “Octopus’s Garden”, which I had loved so long ago, when I was three. That’s pretty interesting, I must’ve thought, if I thought about it at all.

During Elton’s tv performance he wore one of those signature silvery outfits, occupying the center of the screen, glasses glittering, while in a bit of special effects trickery a group of tiny colorful Elton heads danced around him in a circular pattern. This was a typically seventies touch, fitting for a track that contained, as Rob Sheffield memorably described it in his book Dreaming The Beatles, “the world’s cokiest xylophone solo”. Those floating heads, in conjunction with the day-glo dreaminess of the song, became the stuff my dreams were made of. 

Next came a family trip to see the movie adaptation of the Who’s Tommy, in which Elton had a brief but dizzyingly colorful turn as the Pinball Wizard. His rendition of the song was exciting enough, all power chords and flashy piano trills, but it was the visuals that really clinched the deal. The requisite giant glasses and glitter were as ever in place, but he also wore a multicolored knit hat with a giant pinball on top, along with white pants trailing tightly down to a set of ridiculous giant brown boots, yellow laces tied in orderly rows. The boots were so large Elton had to wear stilts in order to fit into them. Oh, and the pinball machine he was playing doubled as a piano.

The whole scene is an overdose of seventies spectacle, garish and excessive. And it blew my tiny four-year-old mind.

Elton John, one-man excitement generator, had pushed impressionable young me into a new realm of sensory overload, where anything less than some combination of color, lights, catchy refrains, and an overarching sense of absurd wonder seemed insufficient. It was an infection of mind and body, almost ghostly. 

I wanted to wear the boots, and I wanted to be in the crowd cheering Elton on, and I wanted to be in the pinball machine, being bounced around by the flashing lights and crazy colors. I wanted to be inside the song, vibrating, stretching to fit inside the power chords and piano flourishes. 

I wanted to be the flashpoint, the aftershock, the signal and the noise. 

Wouldn’t you? 

Look at those boots!

More Songs About Dirt Roads And Rain

I was an indoor kid. I liked comic books and television and whatever sounds happened to be emanating from the radio. This doesn’t mean I didn’t like being outdoors at all - far from it. Our backyard was ripe ground for exploration. Me being a very small person at the time, that yard seemed to go on forever, green all around, like a couple of damn football fields. Of course it was actually only a patch of grass, maybe a couple dozen square feet. Whatever. The imagination distorts things, and I say let it. At least when it comes to things as relatively inconsequential as backyards. I mean, don’t push it.

My family used to go fishing sometimes. That’s an odd memory to consider now, given that several decades later I am still very much an indoor kid, with an aversion to anything that bites, anything that is slimy, and any situation in which I might have to walk around in wet clothes for any length of time. But when I was a kid, I loved these fishing trips. It meant dirt roads and strange vegetation, weird rocks and insects and animals. Those hordes of cattails popping up out of the ground seemed so exotic to my young imagination. Compared to the household plants my mom kept around they seemed like some kind of hallucinatory vision.

These fishing trips would have happened roughly in 1975, right around the time that Willie Nelson had an enormous hit with his cover of the classic Fred Rose country tune “Blue Eyes Crying In The Rain”. It’s an unassuming song, so short and spare it almost floats away. But if you put together a playlist of songs to go fishing to, it would surely be in strong consideration. Something in the lilting, lonesome sound practically begs to have a bonfire built. 

Country music wasn’t as ubiquitous in my world as one might have guessed given that I grew up within a few miles of Nashville. We listened almost exclusively to pop radio. Willie’s song crossed over to the pop charts that year, so it was all over the airwaves. Even if that hadn’t been the case I would have heard it anyway, because my father was a big Willie Nelson fan.

More broadly, my father was a fan of a particular style of folk music; one that incorporated blues and country in a way that melded them together so that the music seemed elemental, made up of dirt and dampness, humidity and grit.

One of his favorites was the self-titled debut of the folksinger Bob Frank, released on Vanguard records in 1972. Frank looked to me like a character right out of my father’s own circle of friends - scraggly facial hair, faded jeans, playing a beat-up acoustic guitar. He sang songs about getting drunk and getting stoned and spending the night in jail, the burr in his quavery southern drawl suggesting a man who sang from firsthand experience. 

If the song titles tell a good deal of the story - “Wino”, “Return to Skid Row Joe”, “Memphis Jail” - the rest is summed up by the loping, laid-back mood that the acoustic-with-harmonica sound creates. Scruffy, lightly comic in a self-deprecating way, the album evokes light breezes and weedy patches of grass. It’s back porch music; like when a sudden rain shower has soaked you to the bone and sent you scurrying for shelter. And maybe there’s a dollar bottle of rose grape wine on that back porch. 

Our little town suffered flash floods during Spring 1975 and I remember being caught in one. We were in the car and the rain came so heavy and hard that the windshield became a pure white blur. Opening the car door lightly we could see a river of water rushing by underneath. Luckily it subsided before we were completely stranded and we were able to get home. I remember the feeling in the air later that day, a kind of heaviness, elusive, like it was the end of something and the beginning of something else.

A mirage had appeared. My young brain couldn’t process it logically, so I stuffed it, fully, mysteriously intact, into the songs I’d been hearing.

In his song “Paradise” John Prine sings about traveling with his family to Muhlenberg County in Kentucky, going down the Green River (maybe the same one that CCR sang about, why not?) to see the abandoned prison and shoot bottles with pistols. With a keening fiddle and a melody that seems remembered from an echo heard long ago in a mountain grove somewhere, Prine’s song carries whoever hears it to their own long-gone childhood idyll, real or imagined.

That old-timey backwoods feeling rang in my consciousness like a railroad whistle during those days when it had been raining and everything was green and growing. Scattered gravel here and there, mosquitos buzzing over puddles.

Nostalgia’s no good, you can get drunk on it as surely as you can cheap wine. Even John Prine admits that his childhood memories are worn, and that’s before he explains that Paradise was ruined when the coal company came along and stripped the land. 

Likewise, distorted memories can do a lot of harm. We make unwarranted connections, assign motives and blame in spurious ways, often based on recollections that may or may not be completely dependable. 

Feelings are powerful, though, and so are the songs that we use to mirror and decipher and explain or expunge them. Songs have a tendency to absorb and retain feelings so that when we hear them years or decades later the feelings are as fresh and vivid as when we first experienced them. In this way, they are extremely useful. 

It’s up to us how we want to sort through our own feelings, and the simple nostalgia or cheap fantasy that a song can evoke are viable, relatively harmless options. If I wanna get that feeling of dampness and back porch breezes, it’s easy enough. That Bob Frank album contains it all in convenient song form. All the moss-covered rocks, high swaying cattails leading down to a dirt path beside a small stream that I may or may not be remembering accurately, it doesn’t matter, because it’s there, easy to access. 

It’s a feeling that I can’t get much of anywhere else, short of going camping. Please don’t make me go camping. Why bother going outdoors when you can just put on a record?

Your First Favorite Songs

What’s the first song you remember noticing? Not necessarily the first song you remember liking or disliking, just the first song that registered in your consciousness, for whatever reason. Do you feel as though that particular song says anything substantial about the person that you were, or the person that you became?

I remember hearing “Octopus’s Garden”. I must’ve been around three years old. That’s a fairly predictable first song not only for those of my generation (the one they call X, and in typical Gen X fashion I am alternately annoyed and blasé about being part of it) but subsequent generations as well. I’m betting a pretty huge percentage of people born after 1967 or so remember hearing this one or “Yellow Submarine” pretty early on in life.

Underwater Beatles songs plus childhood equals a unique kind of enchantment. I suspect it can shape the way we hear music from that point on. 

As children we are often confined to limited territory. Four walls, a few rooms. Maybe a decent-sized yard, if you're lucky. Given these physical limitations, the naturally expansive imagination of childhood can carry us great distances. At three years old I’m pretty sure I could imagine my way through several brick walls. Pretty sure you could too. But if our own willpower couldn’t give us the kickstart we needed, maybe the right song could get the job done.

I remember hearing Three Dog Night singing about being on the road to Shambala. All those tumbling rhythms and shouted gospel choruses induced a peculiar fascination in my young mind. I had no idea where Shambala was or what happened there, but it seemed pretty exotic. The song’s spiritual overtones seeped in, too, what with the promise that Shambala, or the journey to it, is going to wash away our troubles and fears. 

My only troubles at the time I heard the song amounted to a few lost or broken Tinker Toys. Fear, on the other hand, wasn’t in short supply, given the preponderance of mysterious shadows in my little world, not to mention the bewildering behavior of all those tall people. Shambala seemed like a pretty good place to escape to, wherever it might be.  

As we get older we lose trust in our own imaginations. We realize we can’t really go hang out with our octopus friends, so why bother even thinking about it? Shambala? Not even a real place, don’t try booking a trip. 

When I was in my late teens, I heard “Shambala” on the radio for the first time in years. My initial reaction was that it seemed quaint, like a childish thing I had outgrown. On reflection, and maybe on some deeper level, hearing the song again reconnected me with the sense of liberation, spiritual and physical, that so captivated my imagination when I was younger.  

It isn’t a matter of whether I liked the song or not. I’m not sure if I ever did. The point is the song established a feeling, an aura, that carried across years, a decade even, and remained intact.

Music triggers memories, it stirs feelings, it shapes resonances in ways both obvious and subtle. That might be a well-worn truism, but it’s hardly meaningless. It’s pretty meaningful, in a pretty huge way. It also might be beside the point. Music works in so many ways. 

Maybe hearing those particular songs at an early age served as a kind of guideline, prompting me to seek music that could provide a sense of escape, of flight and freedom, of an elsewhere worth visiting, if not living in.

When I was in my teens I also discovered Electric Ladyland by Jimi Hendrix. Side three contains a suite of songs that venture into underwater territory, keyed by the title “1983…(A Merman I Should Turn To Be)”. In some sense the lyrical content of these songs might be a cheesy sci-fi adventure tale, but the overall sound, the mood, is dreamlike. Hypnotic, with spiritual undercurrents, so to speak. This was definitely a territory worth exploring, at the very least an escape from the same familiar roads of small town life, from typical teenage emotional perplexities, from going to the damn mall again.   

By this time those aquatic Beatles songs had come to seem like childish things. I came to love them again later (seriously, listen to the way Octopus’s Garden sounds, it’s a marvel of sonic production) but maybe they had already served a key purpose, priming me for this Hendrix music, providing a ramp for lift-off, or a safe vessel in which to submerge.

Later I would discover Can’s Future Days and Robert Wyatt’s Rock Bottom, each similarly watery and exploratory, alternately ruminative and reaching out with an unassuming sense of wonder. 

    

The territory mapped out in this music is not merely some kind of wistful remembrance of a more innocent time, and it isn’t necessarily an imaginary paradise to escape to. Or it doesn’t have to be only those things.

In a sense, it can be a real place. A place to exist, anywhere, at any point in time, regardless of age, or the perceived limits of your own imagination. 

We can go there now.