50 Years On

By Harvey Kubernik © 2020

I was an avid reader of Melody Maker since 1964. I first became aware of Elton John’s Empty Sky DJM record label first LP in June of 1969. I ordered it as an English import from Lewin Record Paradise on Hollywood

Photo Courtesy UMe

Blvd.

His piano playing, voice and some numbers were impressive but the album only hinted at his greatness. [It was later released in 1975 on the MCA Records label in the US].

The next year in Melody Maker there was a review from deputy editor writer Richard Williams about Elton’s second long player simply titled Elton John in the April 25, 1970 issue.  

The astute scribe wrote, “It’s nice to see Cat Stevens and Elton John providing the British answer to Neil Young, and Van Morrison. And make no mistake Elton is up in that class.

“This is his second album, and is considerably meatier and more substantial than the first. He and Bernie Taupin craft superb songs, strong in every department (words, music, moods), and Paul Buckmaster’s sumptuous arrangements. Gus Dudgeon’s brilliant production lifts the result almost beyond words. If Elton has a fault, it’s that he sometimes sounds rather too much like Feliciano in the way he turns and ornaments phrases, but once you get past that it’s beauty all the way.

“A truly great record.”

I really dug Jose Feliciano’s vocal delivery on his hit RCA recordings besides the dazzling arrangements and re-workings of “Light My Fire” and “California Dreamin’.”

After reading Williams’ endorsement, I immediately ordered the Elton John UK import LP from Lewin Record Paradise on Hollywood Blvd.

The disc was cut at Trident Studios which had a 16-track machine, Sound Techniques boards plus a Bechstein piano. UNI/MCA label Vice-President and visionary A&R man Russ Regan secured the item for North American territories.

I met talent scout Regan in September 1967 at the Whisky a Go Go one evening when his label act, Hugh Masekela was cutting a live album for UNI in the famed venue. I was well under age 18, looked 12, but Elmer Valentine and Mario Maglieri at the club graciously allowed me to enter their temple of sound and sit in the balcony.

I later ran into Russ in the summer of 1970 on Hollywood Blvd. at C.C. Brown’s ice cream parlor. We ordered two hot fudge sundaes in tin bowls.

Russ started talking about Elton John. I knew the name. He just beamed, and exclaimed, “You are gonna hear this guy on the AM and FM radio dial!” Regan also added, “Three Dog Night has already covered his tunes ‘Lady Samantha’ and ‘Your Song’”

I didn’t quite know how important or vital that accomplishment actually meant at the time.

Regan has played a major role in the careers of the biggest names in the music business, including the Beach Boys, Neil Diamond, Elton John, Barry White, Olivia Newton-John, and the Alan Parsons Project-all of whom credit Regan as a major force behind their success.

In my 2014 book, Turn Up The Radio! Rock, Pop, and Roll in Los Angeles 1956-1972,  Regan talked at length about his discovery of Elton John and guiding his career in the US during the first part of the seventies.

“UNI Records was on 8255 Sunset Boulevard.

“Lenny Hodes was a song-plugger for Dick James Music. I knew of Dick James—he was the Beatles’ publisher—but had never met him. Lenny bought me this [Empty Sky] record and said, ‘DJM [Dick James Music] has a licensing deal with Larry Uttal of Bell Records, and they passed. I’ve shopped this everywhere, and it’s been turned down by five record companies. They think he sounds like Jose Feliciano.’”

Songwriter Roger Greenaway also praised Elton John to Regan at the Continental Hyatt Hotel at that breakfast supporting Regan’s impulsive decision to seriously consider signing Elton John to the UNI label.

“I took it, and around six o’clock that night, I put it on,” recalled Regan. “It was the Empty Sky album. ‘Oh my God,’ I thought, ‘this guy is good. What the hell is the problem?’ I loved his voice and the songs. ‘Skyline Pigeon’ and stuff like that. ‘Lady Samantha’ was in there. I called Lenny and said, ‘I like this artist. What’s the deal?’ He said, ‘If you like him, Russ, you got him for nothing.’ So I said, ‘I want him, and I want to sign him.’

“He calls me the next day and says, ‘I just talked to Dick James, and we have a deal. But Dick wants you to buy another act along with this kid. We’re giving you Elton John for nothing, and Dick wants $10,000 for a band called Argosy; I replied, “because you guys are so nice to give me Elton John for nothin’, I’ll buy this other master for $10,000.’

“Then, before I could put out Empty Sky, the advance of the Elton John album came to me in the mail. That’s when I shut the record label down for a couple of hours [and] brought [in] the employees, sales and marketing, A&R, everybody—thirty people sitting on the floor of my office. I looked up to the sky and said, ‘Thank you, God.’

“Bernie Taupin’s lyrics, if you analyze them, were incredible. He was way ahead of everybody. For a 21 year old kid at the time he was amazingly talented.

“Paul Buckmaster the arranger. The arranger is important. Sometimes you have to play the song to a skeleton without any meat on it. The arranger comes along and puts the meat on the skeleton. It all comes together. An arranger takes a song for what it is and builds something around it and gives it life and dynamics.”

In 2014 I interviewed Paul Buckmaster for my book on Leonard Cohen, Everybody Knows. Paul worked on Cohen’s Songs of Love and Hate.

“My background was completely classical from a tot.  I received a scholarship to the Royal College of Music and graduated in 1967.  My cello professor then called and I was invited to tour with the Bee Gees’ backing orchestra.

“I was an outside client of Trident Studios in London, sometimes coming in as an arranger or an arranger/producer, sometimes playing on sessions on cello or as a keyboardist, or all of it as production work.

“I had been doing a lot of pop work. I had already done ‘Space Oddity’ with David Bowie in 1969, and then a couple of albums with Elton John, his debut US LP, and Tumbleweed Connection and the Friends soundtrack. The movie score. It was not just strings and horns. I was responsible for arranging the rhythm section on the Elton John album and most of Tumbleweed Connection, and most of Madman Across The Water.

“The Trident Studio in Soho was as an anechoic as it could get. When you shut the heavy doors of the studio your ears compressed. It was so dead in there. Every surface was totally absorbent. Not one reflective surface. Even the Steinway piano had a ‘car cover.’ And the studio floor was as dead as a doornail. And the sound which was great was a combination of the studio and the genius engineer, Robin [Geoffrey] Cable. He was a brilliant engineer. He was the guy who made drums sound as if they were bitchen’ It was saturation tape. What was there was a proper echo chamber and a [EMT] plate. That was the only reverb that existed there.”

“I met Gus Dudgeon while preparing some arrangements for a female vocalist,” Buckmaster later stressed in a 2014 lecture at the UCLA Herb Alpert School of Music SONGWRITERS ON SONGWRITING: Killer Hooks, Essential Songs & Songwriters of the Rock Era class taught by Professor David Leaf.

“It wasn’t an audition for her so much as for me.  Tony Visconti hired me to work on [David Bowie’s] ‘Space Oddity.’ I was obsessed with Kubrick’s 2001. I saw it at least a dozen times and really tried to bring that quality from the movie’s score, which featured Richard Strauss and in particular, Gyorgi Ligeti.  Unfortunately, that cheesy mellotron swamped my strings and you can’t really hear my work.

“On November 3, 1969, I went to see Miles Davis at Ronnie Scott’s. I had befriended Tony Hall who was a great friend of Miles and we were his guests.

“During a set break, I’m tapped on the shoulder by Steve Brown, a music industry figure who introduces me to a fellow artist who he is representing Mr. Elton John. Elton asked if I would be willing to do some arranging on his new album.

“I listened to some demos really loved them but don’t ask me why and       suggested that Gus Dudgeon would be the perfect producer for this project.  Steve and Elton agreed wholeheartedly.

“Gus and I spent three days in his office, breaking down every song. I wrote the rhythm section parts as well as the orchestrations-and we recorded and mixed the whole thing in seven days.  We were given total carte blanche.  Elton and Steve expected us to be thoroughly professional and we were.

“One example:  On ‘Sixty Years On,’ I decided to replace Elton’s piano part with a harp, because that’s what the song told me to do.  I’m always in service of the song, nothing else.  ‘Take Me to The Pilot’ features my rhythm charts; I even wrote out the drum fills which were played beautifully.  I’m really a frustrated funk drummer who missed his calling.”

On November 7, 2017 when Buckmaster died at 71, Elton John on his twitter account posted, “RIP Paul Buckmaster. So heartbroken. He helped make me the artist I am. A revolutionary arranger who took my songs and made them roar.”

“Danny Hutton of Three Dog Night used to tout Elton in 1969, and earlier [he] was my driver,” record producer and songwriter Kim Fowley informed me in a 2014 interview.

“I recorded him for Challenge and Invictor Records. I did a record by the Alpines with Danny Hutton. We co-wrote it and produced it and Ray Pohlman arranged.  His mother was my landlady. Danny was, and is, cool. He told me about Elton being this great artist before I went to Europe for a music festival.

Photo Courtesy UMe

“In the late summer of 1970, I was living in Sweden. I was at an outdoor music festival and onstage with P.J. Proby. We followed the Move. Elton was there and playing piano with Blue Mink at the time. They followed us. Elton said to me, ‘I remember you when you were on Tops of the Pops, singing [a re-recording of Napoleon XIV’s] ‘They’re Coming to Take Me Away, Ha-Haa!’

“I was on that 1966 TV show in England, with Los Bravos and the Small Faces. I told Elton, at that 1970 festival in Sweden, ‘Pay attention to Danny Hutton when you come to town. He will steer you through L.A., and you will survive because of him.’

“I wished him luck. That was a Saturday night, and on the following Monday he left for Hollywood.

“Before his Troubadour shows, Elton did come up to Danny’s house in Laurel Canyon.”

The pianist and singer Elton John landed in Los Angeles in late August 1970, along with drummer Nigel Olsson and bassist Dee Murray. John’s songwriting partner Bernie Taupin was also there.

Before meeting Russ Regan, Elton immediately visited Danny Hutton at his home.

In Canyon of Dreams The Magic and the Music of Laurel Canyon, my 2009 book, Danny Hutton discussed his initial encounter with Elton John, aka Reg Dwight.

“I first met him in 1969 in England when I was looking for songs for Three Dog Night. So I phoned Dick James Music and Reg Dwight came up to my room and had some demos, which I still have. Reg or Elton, I really liked him. He was so sweet and sincere.

“I invited him to a small club where we are doing a show. The bouncer came up and said ‘Did you invite somebody because I don’t have him on the list.’ He’d come with Bernie Taupin. They were downstairs in the bar and I went down and he was humming something. I said, ‘You’re a great singer.’ And Elton said, ‘Nah. I’m a songwriter, not a singer.’ Maybe he was working me,” suggested Danny.

“Later on I couldn’t get him on the list for our show at the Marquee Club so we brought him in as our roadie. Reg knew my resume. We were a hot, hot band.

“I heard ‘Lady Samantha’ and brought it to the group. Our producer, Gabriel Mekler, had all three of us sing it and had Chuck [Negron] do the lead vocal. I liked the song. We also did ‘Your Song.’ And then I got a 3-page handwritten letter from Elton thanking me for helping him and Bernie out.

“Elton then phoned from London and said ‘I’m coming to town. He arrived and the first place I took him to eat was Billy James’ Black Rabbit Inn. Then I brought him up to the house. I phoned Van Dyke Parks to come up. And Elton played the piano at my home on Lookout Mountain,” Hutton fondly recalls.

Russ Regan asked UNI/MCA label mate Neil Diamond to introduce Elton for his first performance at The Troubadour. Diamond had earlier heard about John from David Rosner who was working for Dick James Music.

The following day while Elton John was preparing for his game-changing opening at the Troubadour, Regan was running a record company and just couldn’t attend his sound check at the club.

“And then the next day there was Elton’s sound check at the Troubadour and I was so busy at the label I couldn’t make it,” lamented Russ. “Rick Frio was working for me at MCA and I sent him. After the sound check, Rick calls me and says, ‘Russ, you’re not gonna believe it. We got one here. We got one!’”

Regan then went beyond the call of duty, and as Elton John’s advocate, telephoned everybody in his personal rolodex and invited them to the 300-seat Troubadour in West Hollywood on August 25, 1970, the first evening of a historic six-night engagement where John opened for David Ackles.

Russ was ringside for Elton’s launch, along with Danny Hutton,  Ray Williams, Neil Diamond, Quincy Jones, Henry Mancini, Chris Darrow, Micky Dolenz, Graham Nash, David Crosby, Randy Newman, Van Dyke Parks, T-Bone Burnett, Nancy Retchin, Linda Ronstadt, John’s booking agent Jerry Heller at the Chartwell Agency, members of Bread, Roger Greenaway, art director David Larkham, photographers Ed Caraeff and Kurt Ingham, Jacoba Atlas of Circus magazine, the Beach Boys’ Mike Love, publicist Norman Winter of Totem Pole, GO! magazine columnist Rodney Bingenheimer, John Gibson of The Hollywood Reporter, and pop music critic Robert Hilburn from the Los Angeles Times, who subsequently penned the enthusiastic August 27, 1970 review with the headline “Elton John New Rock Talent,” positioning the star to the regional and national entertainment media.

Reporters from TIME and Newsweek were in attendance and hailed Elton John’s new stardom. Leon Russell, Denny Cordell, Blackie Dammett, Gordon Lightfoot, and Brian Wilson came other nights.  I subsequently saw Elton at the Troubadour.

“I’m at The Troubadour opening,” reflected Hutton. “I’m with Brian Wilson and Van Dyke Parks, and Randy Newman came over to the table and said, ‘Hey, thank you for putting my kid through college with ‘Mama Told Me Not to Come.’”

“Danny Hutton brought Elton up to my house in Bel-Air in 1970,” Brian Wilson told me in an interview for his 2007 Pet Sounds tour program.

“Three Dog Night earlier did ‘Your Song,’ still my favorite of Elton’s, and he had just played The Troubadour. I heard he was nervous to meet me when they rang the intercom system. I was nervous to see him! So I answered the buzzer and sang ‘It’s a little bit funny’ from ‘Your Song’ to them before they came up.”

“I was there at Elton John’s first show at the Troub,” recollected Micky Dolenz in a 2016 interview with Gary Strobl and I.

“[My wife] Samantha and I were invited over to a party at a little, oh, that’s a great little story. So we hear about this new kid in town, Elton John from England and he’s getting a buzz, and he’s doing a show at the Troub. It’s his first show. Samantha and I were there and we knew his L.A. record company rep, I can’t remember the guy’s name, got a little house in Hollywood and invited us to the after party.

“It was quite a crowd of the typical Hollywood at the time. Elton John, of course, was not well known at the time. Well, Samantha had gone to England recently to see family, I guess, and had come back with cool clothes for me from Carnaby Street, or wherever, new, hip, cool London fashion. And one of the things was a T-shirt, an Andy Warhol T-shirt with all the Marilyn Monroe. He did that poster or a painting of Marilyn Monroe in all different colors. Well, I guess somebody got the rights to do that as a T-shirt. So it was a very cool T-shirt of that Andy Warhol, I guess it was multiple Marilyn images. And I wore that T-shirt. We see the show.

“I remember Elton only had three pieces with him at the time. Then we go and we drive over to the after party. We walk in and everybody’s ‘Hello, hello, hello.’ And I remember actually quite clearly walking into the kitchen, and this is like a really kind of typical three-room Hollywood, stucco little house on Fairfax Ave.. And I remember walking around saying hi to everybody and I walked in the kitchen and there’s Elton John. He turns around. He has on the same T-shirt. And he looks at me and he goes, ‘Oh, fuck!’ (laughing) Like two women showing up with the same dress.

“I didn’t give a shit. I laughed. I was like, ‘Oh, wow, man, cool shirt!’ But I think he was really, he was like, must have been so pissed off. Samantha laughed. That was fun.”

“This Elton at The Troubadour was something euphoric. I was on a high for three days,” emphasized Russ Regan. “I couldn’t believe I was so lucky to have an artist like Elton John. It wasn’t a feeling like when Brian [Wilson] would play me his singles before [‘Good Vibrations’] they were released. It was beyond that.”

“In September 1971 I went to see Elton play at the Greek Theatre,” Danny Hutton happily reminisced. “After the show, he’s kind of short with me and I’m a little bummed out and I’m with a guy from grammar school. I went home and there’s all these cars parked near my place. I get in to my garage and ‘Surprise!’ Elton threw me a surprise party at my house. Cass [Elliot] is there. She was a sweetheart and never had attitude. It was very cool. So Elton John did not forget me.”

I saw Elton John at his June 21 1975 UK Wembley stadium concert with the Eagles and Beach Boys where he unveiled Captain Fantastic and the Brown Dirt Cowboy.  I also caught Elton’s October 25, 1975 Dodger Stadium show in Los Angeles.

During 1975 while writing for Melody Maker Elton and I chatted inside Cherokee Studios on Fairfax Avenue at the Rocket Records release party of Neil Sedaka’s The Hungry Years.

Later, as MCA Records West Coast Director of A&R during 1977-1978, I briefly worked with Elton on a few products.  We discussed Tamla-Motown, Billy Stewart, Jackie Wilson, the Chi-Lites, Laura Nyro and the Hollies.  Elton confirmed he played piano on their 1969 recording session for “He Ain’t Heavy, He’s My Brother,” a tune Tony Hicks of the band found on Denmark Street.

On October 14, 1978, Elton gave a solo set recital for MCA record executives and staff employees in Los Angeles at the Century Plaza Hotel. It was the occasion to reveal his new A Single Man album. John was pretty loose at the gig, chided the label, and did some selections from A Single Man not usually found in his 1978 live repertoire. The rendition of “Sixty Years On” was stunning.

From 1976-1986, I would see Elton once in a while at Gaylord Indian Restaurant at 50 North La Cienega Blvd. near Beverly Hills. Gaylord became a destination spot where British transplants desperately needed their weekly Indian meal.

In 1980, Russ Regan became PolyGram Records’ General Manager of West Coast Operations. He was the music consultant on the Flashdance soundtrack that sold 14 million copies. Regan was also Music Supervisor for Breakin, A Chorus Line, This is Spinal Tap, Karate Kid, and Chariots of Fire. 

In 1986 Russ was hired as President of Motown’s Creative Division. He worked on Smokey Robinson’s successful comeback album, One Heartbeat, which went platinum and spawned two top 10 singles. Regan remained with Motown until the company was sold in 1988.

When Russ Regan passed away in May 2018 at age 89, Elton John on twitter offered this condolence. “RIP Russ Regan. Thank you for believing in me and helping launch my career.”  Elton John xx.twitter.com. Elton John (@eltonofficial) May 29, 2018.

(Harvey Kubernik is the author of 18 books, including Canyon of Dreams: The Magic and the Music of Laurel Canyon and Turn Up The Radio! Rock,  Pop and Roll in Los Angeles 1956-1972.

Sterling/Barnes and Noble in 2018 published Kubernik’s The Story of The Band From Big Pink to the Last Waltz. Kubernik is currently writing and assembling a 2021 book on Jimi Hendrix for the same publisher.

Otherworld Cottage Industries on July 30, 2020 will publish Harvey’s 500-page book Docs That Rock, Docs That Matter.  Kubernik interviews with D.A. Pennebaker, Albert Maysles, Murray Lerner, Morgan Neville, John Ridley, Michael Lindsay-Hogg, Andrew Loog Oldham, Curtis Hanson, Dick Clark, Allan Arkush, and David Leaf, among others.      

In 2020 Harvey served as Consultant on Laurel Canyon: A Place In Time documentary directed by Alison Ellwood which debuted on the EPIX/M-G-M television channel.

In July of 2017, Harvey Kubernik appeared at the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame in Cleveland, Ohio as part of their distinguished Author Series discussing his book 1967 A Complete Rock History of the Summer of Love.

Harvey and brother Kenneth Kubernik co-authored the highly regarded A Perfect Haze: The Illustrated History of the Monterey International Pop Festival, published in 2011 by Santa Monica Press.

Harvey  and Kenneth Kubernik also wrote the text and biographical portrait for legendary photographer Guy Webster’s first book of music, movie and television photos for Insight Editions; Big Shots: Rock Legends & Hollywood Icons: Through the lens of Guy Webster, published October 21, 2014, with an Introduction by Brian Wilson.

Harvey Kubernik’s The Doors Summer’s Gone was published by Otherworld Cottage Industries in February 2018.  It was nominated for the 2019 Association for Recorded Sound Collections Awards for Excellence in Historical Recorded Sound Research.

Kubernik’s writings are in several book anthologies, most notably The Rolling Stone Book of the Beats and Drinking with Bukowski. He was the project coordinator of the recording set The Jack Kerouac Collection.

His 1995 interview, Berry Gordy: A Conversation With Mr. Motown appears in The Pop, Rock & Soul Reader edited by David Brackett published in 2019 by Oxford University Press. Brackett is a Professor of Musicology in the Schulich School of Music at McGill University in Canada.  Harvey joined a distinguished lineup which includes LeRoi Jones, Johnny Otis, Ellen Willis, Nat Hentoff, Jerry Wexler, Jim Delehant, Ralph J. Gleason, Greil Marcus, and Cameron Crowe.

During 2006 Harvey Kubernik spoke at the special hearings initiated by The Library of Congress that were held in Hollywood, California, discussing archiving practices and audiotape preservation.

Kubernik has just penned a book jacket endorsement for author Michael Posner’s upcoming book on Leonard Cohen that Simon & Schuster, Canada, will be publishing this fall 2020, Leonard Cohen, Untold Stories: The Early Years).