What do we really know about Elton John?
There's an incident from early on in Elton John’s career that reminds us how peculiar it has been. The year was 1970. At the time, John was a pudgy, morose 22-year-old, a nobody on the English music scene who’d been able to record an album, Empty Sky, that had gone nowhere. His second album, self-titled, came out that spring. The first single from it, “Border Song,” was a flop. His label dug out a non-album track, “Rock and Roll Madonna,” as the second single. It was ignored. The label went back to the album, poked around some more, and made a third try, with a song called “Take Me to the Pilot.”
It wasn’t a hit.
By this time, John had finished a third album, Tumbleweed Connection, which was released that October. But then late in the year some radio DJs began to play the B-side of the “Pilot” single, which wasn’t a typical practice at the time. The B-side was a forlorn-sounding piano-based track. The first words of the song went, “It’s a little bit funny / This feeling inside …”
A few months later, in early 1971, “Your Song” was a top-ten hit in both the U.S. and the U.K., and is a standard today. Isn’t it weird that no one—no label execs, marketers, or journos—thought it was a single back then, or even notable? For some reason, even experienced music industry people at the time couldn’t “hear” the song.
この記事は New York magazine の October 29, 2018 版に掲載されています。
7 日間の Magzter GOLD 無料トライアルを開始して、何千もの厳選されたプレミアム ストーリー、9,000 以上の雑誌や新聞にアクセスしてください。
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この記事は New York magazine の October 29, 2018 版に掲載されています。
7 日間の Magzter GOLD 無料トライアルを開始して、何千もの厳選されたプレミアム ストーリー、9,000 以上の雑誌や新聞にアクセスしてください。
すでに購読者です? サインイン
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