Talking Old Soldiers

Elton on solo piano, singing the imagined conversation of a couple of Civil War (I'm assuming, given the Old West theme of Tumbleweed, but it's not specific) veterans, in his best Ray Charles voice.

It's meant to engender sympathy for the speakers, perhaps even to deliver a subtle anti-war message as well. It certainly is a bleak set of verses:

Yeah that's right, you can see me here most every night
You'll always see me staring at the walls and at the lights
Funny I remember oh it's years ago I'd say
I'd stand at that bar with my friends who've passed away
And drink three times the beer that I can drink today
Yes I know how it feels to grow old

But the decision to perform it in solo piano, I believe, works against it- rendering it static and dull and blunting the impact. It's not a favorite track of mine from this album, sorry to say.


Lyrics and a sample

Son of Your Father

I'll catch the tramline in the morning
With your leave Van Bushell said
He had further heard the cock crow
As he stumbled out the shed

Then blind Joseph came towards him
With a shotgun in his arms
He said you'll pay me twenty dollars
Before you leave my farm

And that's the crux of the conflict in this Western story-song.

Van Bushell, some sort of ne'er-do-well, is trying to abuse hook-handed, blind Joseph's hospitality by skipping out on the debt he owes him; Joseph isn't having any of it, and backs up his claim with a shotgun. Van Bushell appeals to his sense of family and charity, in the chorus:

You're the son of your father
Try a little bit harder
Do for me as he would do for you
With blood and water bricks and mortar
He built for you a home
You're the son of your father
So treat me as your own

This seems to work, as Joseph lowers his rifle and empties out the shells. Problem is, VB is a jerk and screws up when he says in passing:

He said now hey blind man that is fine
But I sure can't waste my time
So move aside and let me go my way
I've got a train to ride

Joseph doesn't take kindly to this, and the tale doesn't have a happy ending.

Bernie kinda fumble-mouths the moral with some odd syntax in the summup, but it doesn't matter- it's a neat little vignette and it's catchy too, as Elton sets it in a typically Band-like arrangement, with lots of Ian Duck harmonica, chorus-style backing vocals and some honking horns buried in the mix.

I've always thought it was one of the best songs on the album.

Ballad of a Well-Known Gun

L-R: Henry McCarty aka William "Billy the Kid" Bonney, John Wesley Hardin, and Wild Bill Hickock.

Bernie's telling Old West yarns again on this, Tumbleweed Connection's lead cut. The singer is a gunfighter who is wanted by the law- for what, it isn't specified although a "starving family" is mentioned in the chorus- and gets busted by the Pinkertons as he gets off a stagecoach. Apparently tired of being on the lam, he resigns himself to his fate.

Musicwise, Elton sets this in the default Tumbleweed Band/Dylan country-rock style, with chickenscratch guitar licks leading off and cowbell providing percussion throughout. This track is also another example of the really nice backing vocals he had on his early albums, featuring some of the best session singers of the day- and the back-and-forth between Elton and them as they repeat the chorus on the fadeout is very catchy.

I've always thought this was one of the best cuts on the album, even though lyrically it could have been sharper; lines like "I tapped my feet in dumb surprise" (say what now?) and "I couldn't have faced your desert sand/Old burning brown backed beast" (who the what the where?) kinda clunk it up a bit in my opinion, although Elton sings them convincingly.

Country Comfort

In which Bernie opens up the Farmer's Almanac to give us a laundry list of the charms of the agrarian lifestyle, with lines such as these:

Now the old fat goose is flying cross the sticks
The hedgehog's done in clay between the bricks
And the rocking chair's creaking on the porch
Across the valley moves the herdsman with his torch

I remember hearing this as a teenager, and wondering who the hell would cook a hedgehog, and why, and how cooking him between bricks is possible. Perhaps "done" means sculpted or something, who knows. But I digress.

In keeping with the general vibe of the Tumbleweed album, the backing is purely Band-style rustic all the way, with Ian Duck's harmonica providing a lot of color.

Rod Stewart covered this song on his then-contemporary album Gasoline Alley; his version was very good but didn't surpass the original.

Love Song

Here's another rarity in the Elton catalogue: a cover.

"Love Song" is unusual in that it wasn't written by Bernie and Elton, but by session vocalist (and original cast member of Jesus Christ Superstar) Lesley Duncan, who managed to parlay the favor into a record deal. She went on to record a handful of albums on Columbia, and later MCA, none of which were huge successes but are well regarded in many circles.

"Love Song" is pretty much as advertised lyrically; as so many songwriters would have us believe, from Paul McCartney (who is fixated on this very subject) on, "love" is the answer to all life's problems and to give love is an ultimate goal. A little idealistic and naive, but hey, it was just four years after the Summer of Love and she was far from the only one pushing this hippie philosophy.

Accompaniment is serene and austere, just acoustic guitar faded in from the beginning and faded out on the outro with Elton singing the lead and Lesley providing outstanding harmony on the second and fourth verses. It's a beguiling melody, but perhaps because of its plainness doesn't really stand out when placed with the other songs on that side of Tumbleweed.

Elton continued to work with Duncan throughout the 70's, even as late as 1976.

Unless I've overlooked something, always a possibility, this was the only non-Taupin song that Elton released on one of his "classic" albums until his infamous 1979 disco-fever cover of Chuck Berry's "Johnny B. Goode". Of course, there was his 1975 Beatle cover "Lucy in the Sky with Diamonds" and John Lennon's "One Day (at a Time)", but neither were released on an album proper, although "Lucy" was included on the second Greatest Hits LP.

Burn Down the Mission

Another Old West fantasy from Taupin, from the point of view of a poor dirt farmer who decides to lead an uprising against the rich man that lives nearby in prosperity while he, his family, and neighbors starve.

Even though it isn't about him, for some reason when I hear this song I always think of Thomas Hart Benton's famous mural painting (below)



which featured Civil War-era Abolitionist John Brown (and yes, I first saw it on a Kansas album), a quite appropriate image for the lyrical content, methinks.

It gets a multi-textured arrangement; with Paul Buckmaster scoring, the early verses are sung to quiet piano and muted drums/bass/acoustic guitar setting, and Buckmaster's strings rise and fall subtly in the background. But when Elton gets to the chorus and the verses which lead up to it, the orchestra builds, brass enters the picture, the tempo accelerates, and the sense of urgency comes full bore. Then, it dies down again for one more verse in which the singer states his case and leads us to think that perhaps he's not exactly all there, if all the insurrection talk wasn't convincing enough:

Deep in the woods the squirrels are out today
My wife cried when they came to take me away
But what more could I do just to keep her warm
Than burn burn burn burn down the mission walls

The music speeds up again, and crashes through until the fadeout ending, with Elton banging furiously on the piano. Great performance and arrangement, and unlike "My Father's Gun", despite its length it doesn't descend into numbing repetition.

Randy Newman covered similar territory in his song "Let's Burn Down the Cornfield", and perhaps it was an influence but I'm dubious- if it was, it was a small one. Newman's protagonist is subtle and creepy, but Bernie and Elton's has let desperation turn him into a Type-A nutcase.

"Mission" was a concert staple for a long time after, and remains a favorite among Elton fans of all ages.

Where To Now, St. Peter?

Another song written from the point of view of a young man in a conflict, probably Revolutionary War (with the line "It took a sweet young foreign gun"), who has been fatally shot, and is now musing on facing death and what lies beyond.

Saint Peter at the Gates of Heaven, the Holy Trinity above, artist unknown

 Unlike the majority of the Tumbleweed album, this one veers into pop (possibly Hollies? Small Faces? Early Bowie, even? Remember what a music geek EJ has always been) territory rather than Band/Dylan/Country Stones- appropriate, I guess, for its otherworldly concerns. The melody plays off of John's tumbling opening piano figure, and is really one of the few uptempo tracks on the album. It's also one of the most hooky/catchy as well; I suppose only the concern at the time of flooding the market with Elton product (By the time of Connection he had seen three albums released, with the live 11-17-70 and the Friends soundtrack in the pipeline) stopped the powers that be from releasing it as a single.

My Father's Gun

A Civil War tale from Bernie, in keeping with the themes of Tumbleweed Connection.

A young man inherits his deceased father's firearm, and makes ready to go fight in the War Between the States. In the third verse, he imagines an idyllic life for him and his family when the South wins. Oops! But seriously, that does give the song a bit more of a poignant edge.

Elton provides another Band-style accompaniment, but it's a bit overlong; in trying to achieve some sort of emotional buildup by repeating the chorus over and over at the end as the strings and horns build a la "Hey Jude", he just fosters restlessness, in this listener anyway.

Come Down in Time

The singer sits alone on a Summer night, and frets about whether or not he's been stood up by a lady who invited him for a rendezvous. Simple song.

But what makes this track exceptional is the accompaniment, featuring oboe by Karl Jenkins, harp by Skaila Kanga, and the ubiquitous strings of Paul Buckmaster, along with upright bass and acoustic guitar, giving it an almost Pentanglish sound and evoking the mood beautifully.

It's a quiet jewel in the Elton John canon.

Amoreena

The influence of the Band- hugely popular in the late '60s and early '70s, especially among other musicians- on the sound of early Elton can't be overestimated. Fold in the pop-smarts of the Beatles and the vibe of other singer-songwriter types like Nilsson and Randy Newman and there you have the pre-Honky Chateau albums' sound in a nutshell.

"Amoreena" is an obscure side two track from Tumbleweed Connection, Elton's third US release and a record which, if not a concept album in execution, is certainly so in theme as Taupin works his preoccupation with the American Old West, the Civil War, and the rural, agrarian lifestyle on practically every cut. He lays on every Mother Earth metaphor you can imagine as he describes the titular inamorata, painting a picture of bucolic lust with lines such as

I can see you sitting eating apples in the evening
The fruit juice flowing slowly, slowly, slowly
Down the bronze of your body

It's sometimes a tad heavy-handed, as Taupin could often be (and believe me, this will be discussed a lot more the farther I go with this blog), but he avoids any really clumsy couplets and is quite successful in this case.

Musically, this is Band lite all the way, performed at a "Night They Drove Old Dixie Down" mid-tempo pace. It's also a really early appearance on record by the more-famous Elton John Band rhythm section of Dee Murray on bass and Nigel Olsson on drums, with Caleb Quaye on guitar instead of Davey Johnstone. John sings this in appropriately lower-register lasciviousness, influenced by Van Morrison, he said later. There aren't any solos to speak of, relying on tempo shifts for any dramatics.

It's a nice enough tune, but not an especially memorable one, and seems to be pretty much forgotten these days except by those who listened as much to the Connection LP in their formative years as your humble scribe did.

Edit: Reader "Charlie" reminds me that this song was used, somewhat incongruously, by director Sidney Lumet in the opening credits for the Al Pacino bank standoff film Dog Day Afternoon. You can go here to see it on YouTube.