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It took Elton John only one week to become a superstar, in the music industry in Los Angeles. After his nightclub debut at the Troubadour in Los Angeles, Bill Graham, the influential owner of the Fillmore East in New York City, called John to offer him the largest amount ($5,000) ever paid to a new act at the rock ballroom.
UNI, Elton’s American record label held a Los Angeles press conference for the singer in a dark Universal City screening room. When John and his group were seated, he could not be seen, though we were able to hear his replies through a microphone set up. We could not however hear any of the questions from the assembled journalists.
“Who are you here for?” One young man questioned another behind me. “Nobody,” he answered “me, too,” the other replied. I wasn’t surprised. Along with a small number of the Hollywood pop press, UNI chose to invite high school and college campus newspaper reporters and the result was naturally a press conference fiasco. Many had managed to get in merely to have a closer look at this new star!
It was an embarrassing scene, quite unexpected. In fact, for an artist of John’s stature, however brief that position had been. Even though many questions were irrelevant and others were repeated several times, John seemed unthreatened and answered each with concern and seriousness.
During the course of the “conference,” John did contribute the following comments, “American audiences are much warmer than English audiences. English audiences are more reserved. In England you really have to prove yourself to an audience. Here you go out on a stage and you feel as if they’re on your side to start with. The English audiences have been kind to us, they’re just a little bit more reserved.”
“Bernie (Taupin, his lyricist) and I are sort of like brothers. We’ve known each other for quite a while and we know each other inside out. Even though we are complete opposites, I usually know what he’s getting at in a song. So it doesn’t matter if I don’t feel the same way, I can sing this song and mean it.”
Elton John at The Troubadour, August 25, 1970.
“(The success) amazes me! I can’t believe it. In England it has happened gradually, by word-of-mouth. But here-I still haven’t taken it all in. I still can’t believe it. It’s really fantastic, but it’s still too quick to think about.”
“Leon Russell is my favorite artists. He’s my idol. He’s the person I look up to most.”
“When people say I sound like Joe Cocker they must be deaf. They’ve also said I sound a lot like Feliciano, maybe it’s the dark glasses.”
“I’ve been knocked for doing rave-up-type numbers on stage: but it’s spontaneous, I just enjoy what I’m singing and I give it everything I’ve got. If I’m not exhausted when I come offstage, I don’t feel like I’ve done a good show.”
“I’ve had to turn people down when they’ve said ‘please write a song for me.’ I can’t sit down and write that way. Writing is a natural thing and I write a song when I feel like it. For ‘Your Song,’ Bernie was very hung up on somebody at the time and it just happened.”
“The procedure we follow in writing songs is that Bernie gives me the lyrics and I put them on top of the piano. Then when the mood strikes me, I sit down and write. He’s really good. I can’t write lyrics, and he can’t keep time. We don’t collaborate at all. I know people don’t believe it, but it’s true.”
“Music is music whether it’s the Archie’s or Led Zeppelin. I don’t think there’s any division in music or that there should be. Someone will put this group down or that one, but it’s all music. It’s a thing in England to put down Ten Years After every week. It’s ridiculous.”
“Our songs go through different feelings, depending on the mood were in. This album is happy, down home. It’s just how we write songs. Our next album is much simpler. What I’m striving for is simplicity in lyrics and simplicity in music.”
“George Harrison’s new album just floors me! It astonishes me how he has suddenly emerged as a fantastic writer, probably better than Lennon McCartney!”
At this point in the already hectic conference, UNI executives interrupted John to say that he had to be photographed with some of the record company executives. So as they paraded towards the front of the screening room to be photographed, I made my way out.
From the Archives of Monkee Spectacular #15, July 1968 One of the most depressing Monkees in your city-walking on your very own stomping grounds is that they’ll probably never even know that little old you exists. They’ll know you’re out there but how will they know that the you they see is really YOU, and […]
I so much wanted to attend what may be the last show of The Monkees when they came to ‘my town’ on June 1, 2018. I mean, I was at their press preview party at Screen Gems the week before the show aired and on the Last Train to Clarksville promo train ride and appearance […]
From the Tiger Beat Archives, February 1968 by Ann Moses Editor’s note: When I read through this piece, the thing that struck me was that by 1968, I had been covering The Monkees for 18 months and we were getting to the “challenging” stage of something new to write. It just seemed logical, that rather […]
My husband asked me a question the other night and my answer was a revelation to me. In my memoir, I talk about my first apartment (the one across the street from Davy Jones!) and share my coming-of-age story. I didn’t share the after-story which is very telling about my role as Feature Editor and […]
How much pain and trouble can one person in during the day? Mrs. Doris Williams, Barry’s mother, describes a pair of heartbreaks that Barry had to endure… All in the span of 24 hours! The day would’ve been a typical one for us, except that this particular morning the entire Williams family was aware that […]
It seems as though every person I meet has their own personal Elvis story. For some it was seeing him for the first time on TV or hearing him for the first time on the radio, for others it was the first day of a love affair with a man few of them would meet. […]
by Ann Moses, New Musical Express, 7 November 1970 OUTSIDE THEIR back window, the lights from the steel mill flashed as the molten metal poured into the waiting molds, while the incinerators belched out more black soot. It was snowing. The combination of soot and snow made the air a thick grey haze. Inside, things […]
So, how does an 19-year-old girl, still in Junior College, end up backstage with the Rolling Stones at the Cow Palace tagging along with her friends from Jefferson Airplane? Long story short, I had met a guy from Canada, we became friends, he was friends with Signe Anderson Ettlin, also from Canada, she was the […]
Here are four years (IN ORDER, FIRST TO LAST) of Bobby on the cover of Tiger Beat. He first graced the cover in January 1969 and his last cover was January 1972. Bonus cover: Published November 1971: Tiger Beat Presents Getting Together with BOBBY.
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