Did You Hear What He Said?!
Bernie Taupin should be very happy he met Elton John.
I would classify myself as an Elton John fan, at least of his peak period in the 1970s, when he was cranking out Top Forty hits like so many piano and orchestra-fortified sausages. But let me tell you—I’m awful picky about which particular songs I’m willing to listen to, and it has next to nothing to do with Elton himself. He had considerable strengths as a rock & roll piano player and wrote captivating melodies.
That circled, yellow part of this sadly naked and peeled man is called a “hamstring.” I tore my hamstring when I was playing touch football over thirty years ago now, and I have never played a game of touch football again.
Once your hamstring goes and you start hopping around on one foot like Roberto Benigni, you very quickly decide to retire from amateur football. So it’s fitting that “hamstring” is also a verb defined as “to restrict the efficiency or effectiveness of.”
This is Bernie Taupin. Bernie Taupin is Elton John’s hamstring.
Outside of arguably Jim “Sidewalk Crouches at Her Feet Like a Dog That Begs for Something Sweet / Like an Actor Out on Loan, a Dog Without a Bone” Morrison, Taupin may be the least adept wildly successful lyricist in rock music history. Had Morrison not died in a Paris bathtub in his 27th laughably pretentious year, I might be writing an entire piece about both of them.
But Bernie kept on chooglin’ long after Morrison was gone, so he gets the sole honor. It just goes to show that if you stick with it, people are bound to take notice.
Here’s an amazing fact—Elton John and Bernie Taupin have never written a song in the same room together! Surely, this is a bonus, as it allows Elton to do his thing unencumbered by Taupin’s wavering taste. Bernie writes the lyrics, then sends them to Elton, who pounds out often extremely catchy music to accompany them.
But my God. There are so many indefensible similes, ungainly images, half-assed thoughts, and wonky metaphors in Taupin’s lyrics, it’s a miracle the songs survive on any level at all. It drives me absolutely crazy.
Yes, millions of people bought the records, and the guys responsible for them have loads of money, but millions of people buy all kinds of crap, and guys get rich!
What does that prove?! Have you eaten a Swanson’s chicken pot pie lately?
Where to start with the worst of Bernie Taupin? How about...
“Your Song”: “If I was a sculptor, but then again, no.” Why bother even saying it?! He could just as readily have said, “If I juggled chainsaws, but then again, no” and you’d get the same result. Taupin is actually telling you what he’s decided to leave out of the song. (Later on, the protagonist forgets if the things he does are green or if they’re blue. Unlike you and me, he color-codes the things he does. It doesn’t help much, though, if you can’t remember your own filing system).
“Rocket Man”: “Mars ain’t the kind of place to raise your kids; in fact it’s cold as hell. And there’s no one there to raise them if you did.” Yes. It’s very cold on Mars. That’s why the rocket man is wearing a spacesuit. That and the complete lack of oxygen. This guy’s kid wouldn’t exactly be running around on a Martian playground in a Thomas the Tank Engine t-shirt and a pair of shorts. And why doesn’t he raise his own fucking kids? Is this really a song about how hard it is to find good help on Mars??!!
“Goodbye Yellow Brick Road”: “You can’t plant me in your penthouse. I’m goin’ back to my plow. Back to the howling old owl in the woods, huntin’ the horny-back toad.” So this good ol’ boy who yearns for his favorite plow somehow landed a socialite lover who has a penthouse. That’s quite a trajectory right there. And it’s one thing to miss an owl, but is it really necessary to specify that it’s hunting a horny-back toad?? Why so particular? Is it not grotesque enough for this guy’s angry farewell to an out-of-his-league girlfriend to reference an owl eating a conventional toad?! Could you imagine actually saying this to somebody you’re breaking up with? She’s the one who’s winning here! Go plant some corn, creep.
“The Bitch is Back”: “Eat meat on Friday, that’s all right. I even like steak on Saturday night. I can bitch the best at your social do’s. I get high in the evenings sniffing pots of glue.” Unless they’re old-school practicing Catholics or vegetarians, millions of people eat meat on Friday. That’s supposed to be a sign of snotty rebellion?? And eating a steak on Saturday night means even less than that! Why not mention the nice baked potato the Bitch eats with it? Hell, he can even stick it to the man by adding some sour cream. And a glue pot is a double boiler that’s used to heat glue for arts and crafts projects. Wouldn’t it be far less costly and time-consuming to get high on a little tube of airplane glue, like the Ramones? If this guy’s sniffing a glue pot, he’s got a real problem.
“Grow Some Funk of Your Own”: “Grow some funk of your own, amigo. Grow some funk of your own. We no like to with the gringo fight, but there might be a death in Mexico tonight.” Really? Some guy tries to pick up a girl in Mexico and he’s about to get his ass kicked by...I don’t know...Speedy Gonzalez? This was twenty-seven years after “The Treasure of the Sierra Madre.” Hell, it was even five years after they dumped the Frito Bandito! Why not send him to Harlem and have Al Jolson pull a blade on him while singing “My Mammy?”
Understand, I’m not even thinking all that hard about this. There are scores of other instances where Taupin’s clunky-chunky thing appears just long enough to generate a quick, “Jesus. That was terrible.”
I could go on forever, and you may well be hoping I’ll stop. But tough luck, because I’m about to confront Taupin’s utterly inexplicable contribution to a song I otherwise really enjoy listening to. I just make myself listen past the lyrics, the way you look past eye floaters.
That would be 1971’s “Levon.”
If you haven’t heard “Levon” for a while, listen right now. Note the dramatic strings, which were arranged by a guy named Paul Buckmaster.
That’s a great performance and a masterful arrangement; it’s a truly exceptional listen on a good set of headphones. I was surprised when Buckmaster died in 2017 and more wasn’t made of his passing. He deserved a lot of credit for so memorably bolstering the sound of Elton John’s initial hits. Those strings are a signature aspect of the tunes, along with Elton pummeling a piano.
But let’s talk about those lyrics, shall we? “Levon” is almost certainly the most consistently ridiculous pile of high-falutin’ gibberish Taupin has ever generated, and that’s saying something.
Let me synopsize the story for you. Forgive me if I don’t get this exactly right. It’s rather hard to decode:
A baby was born, and his parents named him Levon “in tradition with the family plan,” which, I assume, is Taupin’s tortured-syntax way of conveying he’s not the first male in the family to be named Levon. For God knows what reason, we’re also told that Levon’s father is named…um…Alvin Tostig. This comes totally out of nowhere. And with Elton singing like he’s got mashed potatoes in his cheeks—he did that sometimes—it’s all but impossible to understand what he says.
Okay.
Levon was wounded in the war, and it makes him feel special, but Taupin’s not really worried about that. Levon’s got a business to run! In fact, he can usually be found in a garage out on the highway, where he sits counting his money. Apparently, Levon, even with all that dough, refuses to hire an accountant or rent a decent office.
Levon was born on a Christmas Day when the New York Times decided to announce—on Christ’s birthday, no less—that God was dead! Bad career move, New York Times! I bet that went over well.
Levon named his child Jesus, just because he likes the name. Don’t go reading any special meaning into it, because there isn’t any.
Or, if you will: If he were a savior, but then again, no.
Levon has Jesus sit on the porch all day and fill balloons with helium. That’s right, Levon makes all that money he’s so busy counting by hand in his inconveniently located garage through the sale of helium balloons that are inflated by his child.
I’m tempted to say they must be amazing balloons if he’s gotten that rich off of them, but between turning Jesus into a solo assembly line worker and still doing his own accounting, Levon obviously has very little overhead. I couldn’t tell you, though, if this eccentric business model is in tradition with the family plan.
Jesus hates Levon, which is fully understandable given the child labor thing. His not altogether feasible escape plan is to hold onto a balloon and fly to Venus, undoubtedly because Taupin noticed “Jesus” and “Venus” almost rhyme. In fact, Jesus hates his dad so much, he wants to do this specifically while Levon slowly dies. Holy shit. That’s a bad relationship right there!
And that’s it.
I hope you weren’t expecting anything resembling a coherent wrap-up. Given the rest of the lyrics, why would you?
If you think about it, Jesus is already closer to Venus than he knows. Not a thing that goes on in the song seems like it’s happening here on earth. (Further points deducted for getting Levon Helm mixed up in all of this. Bernie and Elton were big fans of the Band, so they co-opted the drummer’s name. Helm—who, unfortunately for Taupin, spoke English as a first language—volunteered at the time that he hated the song).
Now, does Bernie Taupin always write awkwardly?
No, not always. Just usually. “Come Down in Time” is a moody little love song that he somehow manages to not debase, and Goodbye Yellow Brick Road contains several tunes—“Love Lies Bleeding,” “I’ve Seen That Movie, Too,” and “Harmony” spring to mind—that feature coherent, often dramatic lyrics. And “Benny and the Jets” is great fun, even though the concept of a rock band killing a fatted calf during a stage performance is classically Taupin-gross.
But these victories just point up how often Taupin, at the peak of his success, sounded like he wrangled the first thing that entered his mind onto a page and left it there for Elton to save with his piano. If ever a person should have been told that writing is rewriting, it’s Bernie Taupin.
Again, though, just like Levon, he’s rich. Since that’s the only barometer most people are capable of applying to pretty much anything at all nowadays, that means he wins. But you know that random Elton John song that just started playing when I hit shuffle?
There’s a good chance I’ll be skipping that one. Thanks anyway.
Oh. Just a little addendum, both to further make my point and because I like the word “addendum”...
Taupin hasn’t written anywhere near as many songs with other musicians as he has with Elton John, but one of them is Starship’s “We Built This City,” which is scientifically proven—they used test tubes and everything—to be the single most godawful piece of would-be anthemic crap ever recorded in the entire history of popular music.
Gee. I wonder how that happened!
Knee deep in the hoopla
I love Paul at his bitchiest and I share these thoughts completely