There's a moment in “Elton John: It's Never Too Late,” a powerful and moving documentary about the life and career of Elton John, that depicts him, in a very revealing way, at the height of his fame in the 1970s.
It’s a clip from a TV interview, in which Elton explains how he writes a song. The clip must be from 1971, and Elton, who still looks like a little kid, with rectangular glasses and a messy mane of hair, sits at an upright piano and pulls out a stack of lyrics—pages all handwritten by his colleague Bernie Taupin. Elton wants to show us his process, so he talks about a song he’s just written, called “Tiny Dancer,” and finds the lyrics. He explains how he scanned them and realized, when he saw the word “ballerina,” that it should be a slow-tempo song. He explains how he sort of improvised the chords. As he starts singing along, he reveals how he used Taupin’s lyrics as a guide. It usually takes him about 20 minutes to half an hour to write a song.
What’s fascinating, besides the way Elton John explains all this without realizing that “Tiny Dancer” will strike the chord it does, is that his approach is so casual that it seems effortless. He’s writing a song, but he’s really saying that the song just happened. This speaks to the enigma of Elton John’s genius, as well as to the way pop music works, especially how it worked at the time.
I don't mean that everything was just “throwaway.” The great albums of the 1970s—Elton John's and many others (Steely Dan, Led Zeppelin, ABBA, Queen, etc.)—were masterpieces of composition and studio craftsmanship. But Elton John, the greatest pop figure of his era, was among the greatest artists of his time. creative The King of Pop had a unique career, because he was always innovating in ways he never planned. His songs flowed from him like they were breathing.
In the late 1960s, he was a shy, handsome young British man who lived to sing and play piano, and for a time wrote songs for stars like Tom Jones and Lulu. His partnership with Taupin was the definition of serendipity: answering an ad in the New Musical Express magazine, he went to the offices of Liberty Records and met the A&R manager, who handed him a sealed envelope containing Taupin’s lyrics.
Their first album together, Empty Sky (1969), was a flop. But for their second, Elton John (1970), Elton sought out a producer for what he thought was his best song (David Bowie's “Space Oddity”), and that producer was Gus Dudgeon, who in the 1970s was to Elton what George Martin was to the Beatles. Dudgeon hired string arranger Paul Buckmaster and decided to record the album live, with Elton singing with the orchestra—a technique that harked back to Phil Spector. The result was that early, irritating version of Elton's voice.
But none of that could have prepared anyone for what happened when Elton played his legendary three-night show at the Troubadour in Los Angeles, a club that held just 250 people, on three hot August nights in 1970. The documentary includes footage from that legendary gig, which I’ve never seen before. Elton is bearded, he looks different than he’s ever looked before or since, and he looks transcendent. You can see why the heavy industry crowd was so impressed. (Later, in 2022, we see Elton visit the Troubadour again, standing in the empty club and unable to believe how small it is. And neither can we. He’s basically just… roadblock.)
But none of this prepared anyone, not even Elton, for what he became onstage: a man who played the piano, stood up, and lifted his legs in the air behind him. It might have been one thing if he had been a natural gymnast, like Mick Jagger or Pink, but onstage Elton was a contradiction: a fashionista, dressed in the kind of clothes no one had ever seen before, wearing a set of goggles, and strutting around the stage with the gusto of Freddie Mercury—but Elton, as the first to say, was lithe and unrhythmic. He was more like an awkward kid performing in tights and feathers in his bedroom.
When I started reading Elton John: It's Never Too Late, I admit I had a bit of a bias. I felt like I'd heard the Elton John story, or at least the part where he became a cocaine and alcoholic, became the world's biggest but miserable star, let it all drag on for countless years, and was finally saved by sobriety and love… I felt like Elton had told this story so many times that I didn't need to hear it again.
But Never Too Late, co-directed by RJ Cutler (The September Issue, Billie Eilish: The World’s a Little Blurry) and David Furnish, Elton’s husband, puts what has become the myth of Elton’s fast-paced, hard-fought life of fame into a highly detailed, archival account of the period. So watching it means something again. We witness the dizzying scale of Elton’s stardom, the sweet ecstasy of his music, along with the anxiety and emptiness he felt, all captured in hundreds of evocative photographs and film footage, as well as extended excerpts from a taped interview Elton gave for his memoirs decades ago. It all feels new again.
Cutler and Furnish made a very smart decision to focus on Elton’s hottest days as an artist (1970-75), which culminated in the night he performed at Dodger Stadium in Los Angeles in front of 110,000 people. His charm quickly faded after that. I remember buying the “Blue Moves” album in 1976, and even though I kept playing “Sorry Seems to Be the Hardest Word,” I could feel Elton’s passion seeping through. He wrote a number of good songs in the years that followed, but they were never the same.
The film cuts back and forth between those crazy creative years at the top of the mountain and Elton in 2022, during the final leg of his Farewell Yellow Brick Road tour, culminating in his return to Dodger Stadium for his final American concert. It may all sound a bit tidied up, but the portrait of Sir Elton today – the amazingly kind man he is, and the family life he has found – is revealing and moving. He and David Furnish have two sons, Zachary and Elijah, and you can see that he is an incredibly warm and loving father.
This reborn family man is so dedicated that he can talk about the 1970s with disdain. “Work was the only thing in my life at that point,” he says, as if a million 27-year-olds would say the same, as if his job—writing and performing such sublime songs as “Your Song,” “Amorena,” “Philadelphia Freedom,” “Someone Saved My Life Tonight,” “Saturday Night’s Alright for Fighting,” and “Grey Seal” (if you haven’t heard it, you can’t imagine that’s what it was like). He should These works (listen to the original 1969 version) were more of a “work” than Beethoven composing his symphonies. Elton really should have been more tolerant of his younger self.
Of course, all the bad feelings were intertwined with what was then known as his hidden sexuality. It’s unusual to hear in the film the original recording of the 1976 Rolling Stone interview with Elton, in which he revealed his bisexuality (and his loneliness). At the time, there was some public ridicule of the “bisexuality” part—the fact that Elton didn’t simply say he was gay. But when you listen to the interview, and put it in the context of what stars were revealing (or not revealing) at the time, its heroism remains. Looking back now, Elton says it set him free. It was the first step in letting go of his demons. The second, which didn’t happen for another 14 years, was his quitting alcohol (in 1990).
There’s a gripe I sometimes have about music documentaries, and I really felt it this time. Some subjects demand to be explored by critical voices—cultural listeners who can tell us what it all means. In the 1970s, Elton John was such a musical giant that we needed to hear a discussion of the chemistry in his music, what was new about it, how it worked, how it changed the art form. The same was true, in a slightly less significant way, of Elton’s exaggerated style, with everything he expressed on stage. (In retrospect, there were probably more than 100,000 people at the time.) outside With that kind of added color and insight, “Elton John: It’s Never Too Late” could have been a great film rather than just a very good one. However, it’s a film that does justice to Elton John and what he brought to the world: a joy that no other pop musician has surpassed.
