112. Elton John, "Goodbye Yellow Brick Road"

 


OK I guess.  I don't really have any strong feelings for or against this abum.  It's like the VW Jetta or the Rocky Road of albums to me - fine, but I'd never pick it first.  

Also part of the problem is that all the hits are mostly frontloaded onto the first disc of this double album, making the second half kind of a drag, at least to me.  So the album starts off like this:

"Funeral for a Friend / Love Lies Bleeding"

"Candle in the Wind"

"Bennie and the Jets"

All big hits!  "Funeral/Love" is like 11 minutes long and operatic in scope.  It's a wild choice to start an album, since it takes a long fucking time to warm up and get going, but, incredibly, radio stations would play the whole thing.  "Candle" I did not know at all until it got repurposed as a Princess Diana tribute song in the late 90s.  It's treacly as hell but I actually don't mind it.  "Bennie and the Jets" is about a fictional band, and lyricist Bernie Taupin has said that it's a satire of the music scene of the late 70s:

Hey kids, shake it loose together
The spotlight's hitting something
That's been known to change the weather
We'll kill the fatted calf tonight so stick around
You're gonna hear electric music, solid walls of sound
Say, Candy and Ronnie, have you seen them yet?
Ooh, but they're so spaced out
B-B-B-Bennie and the Jets
Oh, but they're weird and they're wonderful
Oh, Bennie, she's really keen

One curious entry is track seven, "Jamaica Jerk-Off," which has kind of a faux white person reggae beat and is just kind of embarrassing all around.  It leads into "I've Seen That Movie Too," which is basically a torch song.  Again, it's fine.

The other hit on the back half is "Saturday Night's Alright (For Fighting)," maybe my favorite Elton John song, driven by a stabbing guitar sound.  It's one of the few pure rock songs on the album, and it's really a great glam-rock turn.  

I've always thought the John-Taupin relationship was an interesting one, since Taupin wrote almost all of John's lyrics and you don't see that much (the other example that comes immediately to mind, of course, is Robert Hunter and the Grateful Dead).  I also just don't find his lyrics so life-changing that they deserve their own lyricist, you know?  I mean, from the last track, "Harmony":

Harmony and me, we're pretty good company
Looking for an island in our boat upon the sea
Harmony, gee, I really love you and I wanna love you forever
And dream of never, never, never leaving harmony

I mean, sure, it's fine, but it's not like so beautiful that it takes a specialist or anything.  Maybe Elton John is functionally illiterate or something but I don't see why you have to outsource lyrics for this stuff.  Anyway.

Is this album in my personal Top 500? Nah.

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