Captain Fantastic and the Brown Dirt Cowboy

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Captain Fantastic is, in many ways, a highly symbolic note on which to end John and Taupin’s “classic” period. It’s less a concept album than a song cycle based on John and Taupin’s early partnership and career — essentially from the moment of their first meeting to the recording of Empty Sky, which served as a prologue to their meteoric rise. Bernie Taupin and Elton have a rare telepathy,” he wrote, “and if Captain Fantastic dealt with their failure to cope with failure, the new one is about struggling with success: ‘You couldn’t tell me I was wrong/You couldn’t tell me anything,’ sings Elton on ‘I Must Have Lost It On The Wind. It wasn’t Elton John’s idea to create a “sequel” to Captain Fantastic And The Brown Dirt Cowboy, the chart-busting 1975 album inspired by his early days with songwriting partner Bernie Taupin.

Percussionist Ray Cooper remained in the fold, but his bandmates were dispensed with on the eve of the record’s release. I'll admit I haven't given this album a ton of listens, but I just don't love it compared with other Elton John albums of the era. Rock of the Westies, released just half a year after Captain Fantastic, was nowhere near as good (even if it also premiere at the top of the charts). Elton’s first greatest hits collection, released in November, became a prodigious success, soaring to what is now estimated at 24 million worldwide sales.Plus, it must be reckoned, there has been a lot of water under the bridge since his high-water mark in the mid-’70s. Flippers (4), Popbumpers (3), Slingshots (2), Star rollovers (8), Standuptargets (2), 5-bank droptargets (1), Right outlane detour gate. Greg initially stated that only ten playfields were produced like this in a pilot run, not to appear on production games, but when the production game with serial number 1087 was identified as having a signed playfield, it caused him to wonder if a larger quantity of, say, 100 was actually made, to have appeared on production games. The lyrics and accompanying photo booklet are infused with a specific sense of place and time that would otherwise be rare in John's music. It’s worth noting that similar contemporaneous bad patches from peers such as David Bowie, Neil Young and Bob Dylan did no such damage to their respective perceptions.

Once committed to the idea, the onus was on Taupin to create the narrative, and he knew it had to begin with the pair’s momentous first transatlantic crossing, which led to Elton’s famous American debut at The Troubadour. The first disc contains the album in entirety as well as “Philadelphia Freedom” and John’s cover of “Lucy in the Sky with Diamonds”.

Captain Fantastic is an incredible achievement, one final burst of potency before the decline that followed. There’s an almost eschatological feel to these verses, a sense of foreboding that carries with it the ominous hint of change. John, Taupin and the band laboured harder and longer on the album than perhaps any previous record they'd ever done to that point. Unlike his American counterparts (many of them neither as talented nor as popular), he hasn’t soured on success. It’s an album that gets under your skin almost subliminally, less a collection of songs than an album of memories propelled by honest, ingratiating emotion to magnificent heights.

Not indulgently, nor sentimentally, but with calm clarity about where they had come from – back to the famous 1967 meeting when both answered an advertisement placed in New Musical Express by Liberty Records’ Ray Williams.The Early Production game pictured here has serial number 1088 and has green star rollover inserts on its playfield. As I mentioned, he just can’t hit the high notes on tracks like “Tower of Babylon”— and those of us who hold the original recordings dearly cannot help but wince at his plainly diminished capacity. The X-rated version is often referred to as the "no stars" version even though all of the backglasses in the production run did contain a certain number of peripheral decorative stars anyway. That credit has to go to Elton’s manager [of the time], Merck Mercuriadis, he was the one that came up with the idea.

Both albums are highly personal, autobiographical statements from artists who had both taken great pains to hold their songwriting personas at arms’ length from their personal lives. This was the last album until 1983's Too Low for Zero that Elton John and his classic band would play on together.We did have songs such as 'Someone Saved My Life Tonight,' which is one of the best songs that Bernie and I have ever written together, but whether a song like that could be a single these days, since it's [more than] six minutes long, is questionable. Another noticeable change in the formula is how Captain Fantastic lacks, at least comparatively, the overt commercial sound of the traditional pop record. He was one of only two other names to appear in the tight-knit team that made The Captain And The Kid, along with percussionist John Mahon (that’s if you don’t count Elton’s dog Arthur, who made a cameo appearance barking at the end of “Just Like Noah’s Ark”). The album is an autobiographical account of the early musical careers of Elton John (Captain Fantastic) and his long-term lyricist Bernie Taupin (the Brown Dirt Cowboy). Between them, they pulled from every major songwriting school of the 20th century, with a special emphasis on the music of America, from Woodie Guthrie to Elvis Presley.