Elton Is Everywhere, Elton Is Everything
One day in 1975, when I was four years old, both of my teenage sisters came rushing breathlessly into the house, each clutching a poster of the rock star who was dominating pretty much the entire cultural landscape at the time; Elton John. They were so excited I was afraid they might spontaneously combust. The sheer bubbling-over exuberance of my sisters’ enthusiasm was a thing that both took me by surprise and thrilled me. It was contagious. What was it about this guy with the glittery outfits and oversized glasses that made them feel that way? Whatever it might be, I wanted in. I mean, at four you don’t necessarily need a good reason to jump up and down in place while squealing, but if you can get one, all the better.
I’d seen him on television singing “Lucy In the Sky With Diamonds”, a giant radio hit earlier in the year. The song itself was easy enough for a child to latch onto; a visionary, dreamlike thing, redolent of Wizard of Oz, so full of colors and strange sensations, the verses a flowing, languid travelogue that bursts suddenly upward like fireworks into a shouted, stratospheric chorus. Someone helpfully explained to me that the song had originally been written and performed by The Beatles, the same group who had come up with “Octopus’s Garden”, which I had loved so long ago, when I was three. That’s pretty interesting, I must’ve thought, if I thought about it at all.
During Elton’s tv performance he wore one of those signature silvery outfits, occupying the center of the screen, glasses glittering, while in a bit of special effects trickery a group of tiny colorful Elton heads danced around him in a circular pattern. This was a typically seventies touch, fitting for a track that contained, as Rob Sheffield memorably described it in his book Dreaming The Beatles, “the world’s cokiest xylophone solo”. Those floating heads, in conjunction with the day-glo dreaminess of the song, became the stuff my dreams were made of.
Next came a family trip to see the movie adaptation of the Who’s Tommy, in which Elton had a brief but dizzyingly colorful turn as the Pinball Wizard. His rendition of the song was exciting enough, all power chords and flashy piano trills, but it was the visuals that really clinched the deal. The requisite giant glasses and glitter were as ever in place, but he also wore a multicolored knit hat with a giant pinball on top, along with white pants trailing tightly down to a set of ridiculous giant brown boots, yellow laces tied in orderly rows. The boots were so large Elton had to wear stilts in order to fit into them. Oh, and the pinball machine he was playing doubled as a piano.
The whole scene is an overdose of seventies spectacle, garish and excessive. And it blew my tiny four-year-old mind.
Elton John, one-man excitement generator, had pushed impressionable young me into a new realm of sensory overload, where anything less than some combination of color, lights, catchy refrains, and an overarching sense of absurd wonder seemed insufficient. It was an infection of mind and body, almost ghostly.
I wanted to wear the boots, and I wanted to be in the crowd cheering Elton on, and I wanted to be in the pinball machine, being bounced around by the flashing lights and crazy colors. I wanted to be inside the song, vibrating, stretching to fit inside the power chords and piano flourishes.
I wanted to be the flashpoint, the aftershock, the signal and the noise.
Wouldn’t you?
Look at those boots!
