That '70s Showman

I didn’t watch the Grammys – didn’t even know they had been on until I saw headlines the next morning saying who’d won. But I’ve already declared myself culturally out of touch, so that shouldn’t come as too much of a shock. Just another line for the obelisk.

But here’s this Lady Gaga again, somebody I hadn’t even heard of before a couple of months ago. And she’s singing a duet with Elton John, so I couldn’t resist finding the video (which I admit that I watched with the sound off). The production number seems like others of recent vintage that I’ve caught sight of, featuring a lot of people doing aerobics. And there’s LG, as dressed to kill as EJ ever was. Murder by flamboyance.

Younger readers may find this hard to believe, but before his Captain Fantastic persona, before he began performing in silly costumes, Elton John was a top-caliber rocker with no such pretensions. The proof of the pudding is his album 11-17-70 (17-11-70 in the UK release) capturing a radio concert from that date of (gulp) nearly forty years ago. With just piano, bass, and drums, it’s a hard, lean set kicking off with “Bad Side of the Moon”; and by the time he wraps up with an 18-minute medley building on “Burn Down the Mission,” you feel as exhausted as he must’ve been.

According to the Wikipedia entry, he cut his hand at some point during the set, and by the end of the show his keyboard was covered with blood. It also notes that EJ said in several interviews that he considered it his best live performance. The CD expands on the original LP’s edit of the concert with one additional track, but there had been a bootleg of the whole hour – wish I had it, and wonder why they couldn’t’ve put the whole thing on the CD.

Sir Elton is undeniably a showman, and it’s obvious that his choice of on-stage apparel was never intended to compensate for any diminishment in talent. (From what I’ve read, he did it to compensate instead for a repressed childhood.) But it’s refreshing to listen to this early performance, not only for its raw energy but also to know that it wasn’t being delivered by a man dressed as Donald Duck.