Take Me to the Pilot

With its stop-and-start piano intro, chunka-chunka wah-wah guitars, passionate Leon Russell-style vocal and gliding Buckmaster string arrangment, "Pilot" is the album's most prominent rocker and a favorite of Elton fans, especially among the songs on the Elton John LP.

Because it's such a head-nodding rock song, I think a lot of people are able to ignore the lyrics, which find Bernie sending lyrics-readers scurrying to their dictionaries with lines like

Like a coin in your mint
I am dented and I'm spent with high treason

and head-scratching with lines like

Through a glass eye your throne
Is the one danger zone

But it's all right- Taupin was still working out his writing voice, trying to make what seems to be a standard woo-pitching song more interesting- and a good beat can often make the most questionable lyric content palatable.

This was released as the second single from Elton John in 1970, with a little ditty called "Your Song" as its flip. DJs preferred the B-side, and thus was history made.

Border Song

One element which was ubiquitous in Elton's early songs, and one which practically vanished with the 1972 move to a more contemporary, electric guitar-driven sound was en masse chorus backing vocals, and this track was the first in which he (or perhaps Paul Buckmaster) used them. Subsequent tracks like "My Father's Gun" and "All the Nasties" may have employed this sound in order to perhaps duplicate the relative success of this song, which was Elton's first US hit, troubling the lower reaches of the top 100.

And the choir was appropriate, because the arrangement, which has choir, piano and strings prominent and guitar-bass-drums not so much, strives to create a gospel-music feel in service to Bernie's lyrics, which mix homesickness:

I'm going back to the border
Where my affairs, my affairs ain't abused

with the desire for racial tolerance and a plea for brotherhood:

Holy Moses let us live in peace
Let us strive to find a way to make all hatred cease
There's a man over there what's his colour I don't care
He's my brother let us live in peace

Which was becoming a common sentiment, and rightly so, in the post-1968 pop music landscape. This remains a popular track with a lot of people, and was included on his first Greatest Hits LP as well.

The King Must Die

The Merriam-Webster online dictionary defines the word "ostler" thusly:

Main Entry: hos·tler
Variant(s): also os·tler
Function: noun
Etymology: Middle English, innkeeper, hostler, from Anglo-French hosteler, from hostel
Date: 14th century

1: one who takes care of horses or mules
2: one who moves locomotives in and out of a roundhouse; also : one who services locomotives

I cite this because when I reflect on this, Elton John's closing track, I remember looking the word up in the dictionary because I had never heard of it before. How about that- pop music as educational tool! It also shows how hard Bernie must have hit the ol' thesaurus in those days, trying to find a) alternate ways of phrasing things; and b) a voice with which to express himself. Fortunately, he decided fairly early on that the pretentious road was not the one for him, and he managed to mostly avoid it for the rest of his writing career. I also have to wonder how much an influence Progressive Rock was on him at this time; the lyrics for this song strike me as perhaps an earnest, but clumsy, attempt to simulate the inspired wordplay of King Crimson's Peter Sinfield, via such efforts as "Epitaph". Elton had tried out for the slot of lead vocalist of the post-Greg Lake incarnation of Crimson; perhaps some other cross-pollination occurred, assuming Bernie was around and acquainted with the KC lyricist. Who knows.

"King"'s actual subject matter is not very clear; music press speculation at the time posited that it was an attack on Richard Nixon, but Bernie shot that theory down. It seems to be a meditation on being made humble by self-awareness or external forces, perhaps aimed at any number of targets: self, politicians, hard to say.

Elton sings this all in oh-so-serious serious fashion, playing piano backed with Paul Buckmaster strings and horns. The arrangement works, but flirts with self-parody and it's telling that the Elton/Bernie team pretty much abandoned this approach within the next couple of years.

The Cage

Six years before Warren Zevon, here's Elton "A-hoo"-ing in between verses in this rattletrap rocker, and Bernie provides another lyric (probably inspired by the lean years not too distant) about general feelings of powerlessness and imprisonment rather than any specific event.

As congas, wah-wah guitar, soul horns, and Elton's ever-present pounding piano accompany, John spits out lines like these:


Well I walk while they talk about virtue
Just raised on my back legs and snarled
Watched you kiss your old daddy with passion
And tell dirty jokes as he died

There's an odd synth break in the middle eight; while it's completely out of kilter with the rest of the sound of the song it doesn't overstay its welcome. Not quite the best song on the album, but it does serve as a bit of a palate-cleanser for the gothic profundities of the next track "The King Must Die".

I Need You to Turn To

It's odd that this track is sequenced directly after opener "Your Song"; this stately waltz is every bit as much of a valentine as its predecessor, similar in tone although it can be seen as a bit more romantic in a traditional sense, which is to say less off-the-cuff and formal and scanning more like poetry by Keats or Shelley, perhaps.

Instrumentation is sparse, for the most part; Elton plays harpsichord, Skaila Kanga harp, and there's understated guitar present by someone named Roland Harker in the mix as well- and of course, the Buckmaster string section. The melody itself reminds me more than a bit of the carol "What Child is This" aka "Greensleeves".

It's a lovely song, a bit on the short side, but I've always liked it- it was the first track on this album to make an impression on me when I first heard it back in 1974.

The Greatest Discovery

This account of a young boy who sees his baby brother for the first time can be perceived as cloyingly saccharine or achingly sweet, depending on your disposition, I suppose. Me, I think it's charming, and boasts a few nice couplets in the lyrics, as well as some clunkers, as is so often the case with many of Bernie's early efforts. Still, as far as I'm concerned, he manages to effectively convey the childhood sense of wonder he's trying to get across.

What makes this tune memorable (for me, anyway) is, as (again) is the case with most of the songs on the eponymous LP, is the Buckmaster/John arrangement- cinematic harp, horns and strings giving way to Elton's vocal and rolling piano riff, which builds to the return of the orchestra and a crescendo at the climactic moment when the proud parents reveal that "this is your brand new brother".

I seem to recall reading in an interview that Bernie based this on an event in his childhood. Whatever the inspiration, this is an overlooked, effective track that many fans tend to have high regard for.

Sixty Years On

An ambitious Buckmaster orchestral arrangement is the highlight of another of Bernie's Tales of the Old West.

In this track, a soldier imagines a bleak future for himself at the end of his days, in which he is blind, feeble and useless- as he puts it:

And the future you're giving me holds nothing for a gun
I've no wish to be living sixty years on

Relatively speaking, instrumentation is sparse; after the opening salvo of hornet-like buzzing chamber strings, Skaila Kanga's harp is featured with the full orchestral compliment, then recedes quickly as Elton sings the verses accompanied by a Spanish-sounding guitar, adding to the Spaghetti Western-like feel of the track. Buckmaster returns in the middle section with an arrangement that is alternately staccato, swirling, and gliding, then gives way once more to the guitar with an organ and the strings in the background. He sings the final lines a capella, as if to suggest the dread the soldier has for his vision.

The next cut is the gospel-ish "Border Song", and this serves as a really nice segue into that track. One wishes Taupin had used a bit more care with his rhymes; one stanza has him rhyming the word "gun" twice, and when he writes

You know the war you fought in wasn't too much fun

it sounds more flip than I think he intended.

A lot of rock and roll musicians on both sides of the pond were strongly influenced by film scores, a lot more that I think people realize- and a track like this is certainly an small example of that.

First Episode at Hienton

Of all the tracks on the eponymous US debut, this one seems to sum up the mood of the cover the best; it sometimes puts me in mind of a foreign film by Ingmar Bergman or something like that.

Essentially, this a reminisce about a long-ago love named Valerie, who the singer apparently once wooed in a castle of some sort. A Google search for "Hienton" only turns up a bunch of references to this song, so I have to assume that it's a place Bernie's familiar with, but not well known, or he just made up the name because he liked the way it sounded. According to the Wikipedia entry for the Elton John album, this track was a leftover from the Empty Sky period, and it does feature some couplets that don't flow as smoothly as one would like, such as:

For the quadrangle sang to the sun
And the grace of our feeling
And the candle burned low as we talked of the future

But lest it seem like I enjoy picking on Bernie, I will say that the rest of the lyrics flow pretty smoothly for the most part, and are often very evocative.

Accompanied only by piano, light strings (well, light for Buckmaster anyway), and a Theramin-sounding synth, it's spare and melodically strong, if a bit melodramatic.

"Hienton" can be said to be the type of track that earned Elton his early-on "sensitive singer" tag.

No Shoe Strings on Louise

This little burst of invective at some out-of-the-singer's-league slattern doesn't exactly feature the finest example of Bernie's lyrical skills...but is totally redeemed by Elton's swaggering, Band-inspired country-blues funk arrangement. The judicious use of bongos just before the "C'mon down, c'mon down..." part sounds really great, and producer Gus Dudgeon provides some nice sonic depths with some really deep bass.

This track sounds so good you can overlook lines about "paper cans" and the like, which may pass for country slang where Taupin comes from, but just scan oddly elsewhere. It wouldn't be until much later that he would really get comfortable at writing this sort of vernacular.

Your Song

This doe-eyed ballad remains one of John's most successful and enduring songs, and for good reason; Taupin's lyric is as unpretentious as he ever got, and combined with John and Paul Buckmaster's arrangement, it gets its heartfelt valentine sentiment across directly and sweetly.

For my part, I've always liked the lilting flute that pops in and sustains a note at the point right after John sings "...that I put down in words" and "How wonderful life is..."; a small, but appropriate Buckmaster touch. His skills and sound really made a lot of John's early efforts as memorable as they were.

Introduced to a whole new generation, I think, via Baz Luhrmann's Moulin Rouge!, which worked it into the love song medley; Ewan McGregor's guileless (and vibrato-free) delivery fit the song nicely.