What Do We Really Know About Elton John?

What do we really know about Elton John?

- Bill Wyman

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.