Also, there’s the quote from Lou Reed: “Just because I wrote it doesn’t mean I know what it’s about.” That’s so true! If you listen to “Sorry Seems to Be the Hardest Word” or “Don’t Go Breaking My Heart,” it’s not hard to figure out what those songs are about. It’s more fun to have people figure what a song is about for themselves. Did you do that to preserve the imagination of the listener? Neither you nor Elton wrote a lot about the songwriting process in your books. I know for sure that he was in Toronto and I was in Barbados - not the other way around - when he called me and said, “I’ve got this melody, and I need a sort of Marvin Gaye–Tammi Terrell duet lyric thing.” I was hammered by then, so I stuck my head in an ice bucket and in ten minutes came up with the lyric for “Don’t Go Breaking My Heart.” Maybe it’s not “Sad Eyed Lady of the Lowlands,” but it paid off in spades! There were just a few things as far as where things happened. In reading Elton’s book, did you have different memories of the way things happened than what he presented? But my book couldn’t be about Elton because out of a possible 100 percent, we see each other maybe 15 percent of the year. In fact, in some ways, I think we’re closer now because we understand each other. That’s not to say that we didn’t remain as close. At the same time, I don’t think people realize that, from the time we first came to the States in 1970, me and Elton took off on different paths.
But that’s publishers for you! And, ultimately, they’re correct because his life and mine are so locked up in each other that even when I’m on my own, he’s ever present. In your book, you write relatively little about Elton, though his name appears before yours in the subtitle (“Life, Music, Elton & Me”). It’s got some good stuff on it: “Cage the Songbird,” “Idol.” But I think it probably could have been a single album. I said I made some poor choices in what I wrote about.” Some of the songs are too depressing. That’s one of my favorite albums!” I said, “I didn’t say I didn’t like it. But I didn’t know you didn’t like Blue Moves. Not really from him, but after Elton read my book, he said, “It’s absolutely brilliant. Some things in it really made me laugh out loud, like the description of R&B musician Billy Stewart stopping to pee by the side of the highway. I didn’t really go to Elton for any advice on my book either.ĭid you learn anything from Elton’s book that you didn’t know about him, or vice versa? “I’m much more at ease with a smaller world and a simpler life.”Įlton published his memoir, Me, four years ago. Did you consult with him on that?Īctually, no, but I really enjoyed it. “It wouldn’t matter if I was Elon Musk,” Taupin said as we sat in his tranquil backyard. In contrast to the castlelike abodes that John commands around the world, Taupin’s house is a lovely but - by his considerable means - modest Spanish ranch-style home. Many more arose in the long conversation I had with Taupin recently at his home located three hours north of Los Angeles, in a verdant valley above Santa Barbara. But if you’re patient, there are plenty of tasty revelations along the way. Like Dylan, Taupin’s isn’t big on detailing a song’s meaning or inspiration. “It’s a book of incidents, happenstance, and kismet,” Taupin says, likening the result to another leapfrogging music memoir, Chronicles, by Bob Dylan. True to its title, it isn’t a conventional blow-by-blow life chronology but instead a wild array of colorful anecdotes and drunken adventures. Scattershot has its own fascinating parameters. Though he took a stab at writing his own story in 1988 ( A Cradle of Halos: Sketches of a Childhood), it was only published in the U.K., and the book essentially ends before his career even begins. Though John has talked endlessly about the avalanche of events that ensued in the years since, Taupin has less often done so - and certainly never with the specificity and flair he has in his new memoir, Scattershot (out September 12).
When John told the label he could write music but not lyrics, he was handed an envelope with poems blindly submitted by Taupin. The two famously found one another other by fluke in 1967 after they each answered an ad in New Music Express from Liberty Records looking for fresh talent. Their rare way of writing - with each working separately, often in different parts of the world, before conferring on small tweaks to set everything in perfect sync - has created one of the most enduring and profitable relationships in pop history. His lyrics tell stories - often eccentric ones - and John makes them sing. He has given them their plots, characters, settings, attitudes, even their worldviews. For more than 50 years, Bernie Taupin has given Elton John’s indelible melodies far more than their words.
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