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.
Bu hikaye New York magazine dergisinin October 29, 2018 sayısından alınmıştır.
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Bu hikaye New York magazine dergisinin October 29, 2018 sayısından alınmıştır.
Start your 7-day Magzter GOLD free trial to access thousands of curated premium stories, and 9,000+ magazines and newspapers.
Already a subscriber? Giriş Yap
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