FEATURE:
I’m Going to Be a Teenage Idol
Elton John’s Don't Shoot Me I'm Only the Piano Player at Fifty
__________
ON 22nd January…
IN THIS PHOTO: Elton John in 1973/PHOTO CREDIT: Getty Images
it will be fifty years since Elton John’s sixth studio album, Don't Shoot Me I'm Only the Piano Player, was released. It was a fertile period for Elton John. In 1972, he released the terrific Honky Château. The 1973 Don't Shoot Me I'm Only the Piano Player arrived, and John followed that with Goodbye Yellow Brick Road in October. Three wonderful albums in the space of two years is pretty impressive! Whereas some might say Don't Shoot Me I'm Only the Piano Player is the weakest of the three albums, it is still a wonderful release, and it contains several of Elton John’s best-known tracks. With Daniel and Crocodile Rock at either end of the album, Don't Shoot Me I'm Only the Piano Player has a consistency. It might not hit as hared and be as enduring as Goodbye Yellow Brick Road, but Don't Shoot Me I'm Only the Piano Player documents a remarkably talented songwriter during a golden period. Alongside Bernie Taupin, this wonderful album came into the world. Don't Shoot Me I'm Only the Piano Player was John’s second straight number one album in the U.S. and first number one album in the U.K. The lead single, Crocodile Rock, gave John his number one single in the U.S. and Canada. I think that Don't Shoot Me I'm Only the Piano Player definitely should be thought of as one of Elton John’s best ten albums. It was a huge breakthrough and a big commercial success in the U.S. and U.K. It definitely turned him from a fantastic songwriter into an icon and superstar.
I will come to a couple of positive reviews for an album that, fifty years after its release, still sounds absolutely fantastic and full of wonder. Udiscovermusic.com provided some background and story to an album that arrived at a very busy time for Elton John. It is amazing that John had any energy or inspiration left following such a busy few years previously. The fact Don't Shoot Me I'm Only the Piano Player spent so long at number one in the U.K. proves it resonated and connected with so many people. The songwriting from Elton John and Bernie Taupin is stunning throughout:
“It was the embodiment of a hard-earned victory. By the turn of 1973, Elton John had been releasing albums for several years, not to mention all the dues he had paid in obscurity as a touring and session musician from the mid-60s onwards. At times, even after his breakthrough across the Atlantic, he had felt like giving up. But finally, his sixth studio album, Don’t Shoot Me I’m Only The Piano Player, gave him a No.1 album in his own country.
Indeed, leaving aside his 1974 greatest hits collection, Don’t Shoot Me… is still the Elton John album that has spent longer at No.1 in the UK than any other. As the follow-up to Honky Château, it became his second in a row to top the charts in America. With his almost indecently prolific productivity of the day, the new album was released just eight months after its predecessor, in January 1973, and contained two more songs that would soon join his catalogue of major hits.
After the completion of Honky Château, but before it was even released, John and his band, with Dee Murray and Nigel Olsson newly augmented by Johnstone, headed out on another American tour. This kept them on the road throughout April and into mid-May, and soon afterwards they headed back, with producer Gus Dudgeon, to the Chateau D’Hérouville, the location in which Team Elton had worked so happily on the last album.
Once again, the castle proved to be a much-needed bolthole and creative haven in which Bernie Taupin would often write lyrics in his room, bring them down to breakfast and see Elton add melodies with equal mastery, sometimes having them ready to record that same day. A dozen or so songs were composed and committed to tape in this way inside just four days.
Key album tracks included “Teacher I Need You,” which became an FM radio favourite in the US; the down-home stomper “Elderberry Wine”; and “Have Mercy On The Criminal,” which Elton revived for his 1987 album Live In Australia With The Melbourne Symphony Orchestra. To emphasise the tightness of the core quartet, they played almost everything on the record, with engineer Ken Scott adding the memorable ARP synthesiser to “Daniel” and orchestrator Paul Buckmaster on hand for two more numbers.
The album spent its first six weeks at the top of the UK charts, from February 10, before giving way to Alice Cooper’s Billion Dollar Babies. It went on to spend 11 weeks in the Top 10 and 29 in the Top 40. Within weeks of “Crocodile Rock,” Don’t Shoot Me I’m Only The Piano Player had offered up a second bona fide sales and airplay smash in the form of the touching ballad “Daniel”.
I am going to wrap up with a couple of reviews. This is what Rolling Stone said in their review from March 1973. I was not alive then, but I can only imagine how exciting it must have been to see this young artist grow and release these incredible albums that would stand the test of time! I think that Don't Shoot Me I'm Only the Piano Player is a masterpiece that is going to be celebrated and talked about decades from now:
“VISUALLY, MUSICALLY, AND in every other way, Don’t Shoot Me I’m Only the Piano Player is an engaging entertainment and a nice step forward in phase two of Elton John’s career, the phase that began with Honky Chateau. The essence of Elton’s personality, on record and in performance, has always been innocent exuberance, a quality intrinsic in most of the best rock ‘n’ roll of the Fifties and early Sixties. Elton’s only major problem after the success of his first album was finding the right direction for his talent, and until Honky the path chosen led up a blind alley. In Madman Across the Water, which closed phase one, Gus Dudgeon’s overly lavish production and Bernie Taupin’s often impenetrable lyrics ultimately created a barrier between Elton and his audience that severely endangered his star status. Honky Chateau was a sensational, unexpected comeback, as much a triumph of Dudgeon and Taupin’s versatile professionalism as of Elton’s musicality.
Happily, Don’t Shoot Me I’m Only the Piano Player is as good, if not better than its predecessor. The heart of the album is a sequence of American movie fantasies whose chief aim is to delight. Though there is implicit social commentary in several songs, notably “Have Mercy on the Criminal” and “Texan Love Song,” it is set forth as stereotypical movie fare, meant only to vary the emotive tension between episodes. In general, the most effective songs are the simplest excursions in fantasy-nostalgia. Typical is the irresistibly catchy and corny hit, “Crocodile Rock.” More successfully than any recent single it recaptures the spirit of late-Fifties rock ‘n’ roll, parodying styles (“At The Hop” and “Runaway”) with such affectionate high spirits that the song emerges as a genuinely fresh artifact of the Seventies. Elton’s tune and Taupin’s lyric are ideally wedded. The song has a conventional verse-chorus structure and an overall diction that is casual and idiomatic without straining for precision: “I remember when rock was young/Me and Susie had so much fun/Holding hands and skimming stones/Had an old gold Chevy and a place of my own.” Teenage fantasy, more explicit and without hindsight, is also the theme of “Teacher I Need You” and “I’m Going to Be a Teenage Idol,” both of which have the same off-the-cuff buoyancy as “Crocodile Rock” and the same playful attitude toward a semi-mythic past. In “Have Mercy on the Criminal,” the inventive eclecticism of John-Taupin is especially striking with its interposition of guitar figuration from “Layla” and a typically spacious orchestral arrangement by Paul Buckmaster.
The album’s most moving cut, however, is the opener, “Daniel.” A gem of technical virtuosity, it has Elton doubling on electric piano and “flute” mellotron and Ken Scott on synthesizer, together making as deft use of the new electronic instrumentation as I’ve heard. Elton’s melody and vocal are unusually tender and expressive, and Taupin’s lyric, in which he recalls watching a plane carrying away his older brother, is exceptionally lovely:
Daniel is traveling tonight on a plane
I can see the red tail lights heading for Spain
Oh and I can see Daniel waving goodbye
God it looks like Daniel, must be the clouds in my eyes
… Oh Daniel my brother
You are older than me
Do you still feel the pain
Of the scars that won’t heal?
Your eyes have died, but you see more than I
Daniel you’re a star in the face of the sky.
If Honky Chateau established Elton John as a leading contender for the bantamweight championship of rock & roll, Don’t Shoot Me I’m Only the Piano Player should hand him the title”.
I will end with a very interesting review from The Vinyl Distinct from 2018. Released on 22nd January, 1973 in the U.K. and four days later in the U.S., I have been spending a lot of time with Don't Shoot Me I'm Only the Piano Player recently in preparation. I am sure Elton John will share something on social media on the fiftieth anniversary of one of his best and most important albums:
“As Elton John bids a bittersweet adieu to playing live with his 2018 Farewell Yellow Brick Road Tour, let us all reflect for a moment on what he has given us. Speaking just for myself, he gave me everything; Elton John was the idol of my unfortunately well-mannered youth, and his were the albums I lost myself in when the world was too much with me.
Not for nothing did my friends start calling me Elton.
And I wasn’t alone. It’s hard to imagine now, but during the mid-seventies the unprepossessing (short, plump, balding) English piano rocker was King, boss, God, and bigger than anybody.
Forget McCartney, Lennon, Frampton even; Sir Elton conquered the world (seven consecutive No. 1 U.S. albums, a heap of hit singles) and he did it his way. To listen to his songs now (and I’m including the big hit singles) is to realize how weird, wonderful, and utterly idiosyncratic they are.
I dare you to come up with another major artist who produced hits as defiantly unorthodox as “Rocket Man” (astronaut as 9-5 drudge) “Bennie and the Jets” (electric boots glam rock) and “The Bitch Is Back” (“I get high every evening sniffin’ pots of glue”). As for the non-hits, I recommend you to “Solar Prestige a Gammon” (top shelf gibberish rock), “I Think I’m Gonna Kill Myself” (teenage angst complete with tap-dance solo), and “Social Disease” (country-and-gonorrhea anyone?).
In short, the man is one of a kind, and we may never see his likes again.
When it comes to Elton’s string of chart-topping LPs, 1973’s Don’t Shoot Me I’m Only the Piano Player tends to get lost in the shuffle. In part this is due to the fact that it’s not the best of them. But some of the blame falls on Elton and his sheer prolixity; Don’t Shoot Me came hot on the heels of 1972’s wonderful Honky Chateau and was quickly followed by 1973’s brilliant Goodbye Yellow Brick Road, and the record-buying public simply didn’t have sufficient time to appreciate its merits.
That said, it produced two hit singles; “Crocodile Rock” would become John’s first top-charting U.S. single, and “Daniel” went to number two. The former is a spritely pop lightweight that played well during the rock ’n’ roll nostalgia craze; Elton’s “la la la’s” always make me happy, and I love the way he sings “Suzie went leftist for some foreign guy.” Which he doesn’t, really. But I like the song better that way.
As for “Daniel,” it’s one of the least jingoistic songs about a vet returning home from Vietnam ever recorded, and I like the twist; Daniel doesn’t split for Spain because he’s being called a baby killer–he’s simply tired of being called a goddamn hero.
Aside from them? The album boasts a couple of my faves. The piano-driven “Teacher I Need You” is the bounciest ode to teen hormonal overdrive this side of “Hot for Teacher,” and the leer quotient is lower; Elton’s not a David Lee Roth smart ass, he’s just a normal kid, and he knows his “Errol Flynn advances” won’t do him a bit of good.
“Elderberry Wine” is a classic John-Taupin cut; the horns bring the choruses to bright life, while John gets down and dirty on the verses. Sounds mean too, right down to the “Woo!” “Blues for My Baby and Me” is John the ballad master at his best; he’s young and he’s splitting for greener pastures out west with his girl via Greyhound bus, and you can practically feel that Greyhound a-swaying as he sings her into the star-tangled Texas night.
“Midnight Creeper” is a jaunty boogie number and Elton gives it all he’s got; if there’s a nightmare he’s there, and the bitch (who knows how to use a horn section) is definitely back. On “Have Mercy on the Criminal,” on the other hand, he offers up a lesson on how not to employ a horn section; the intro sounds like the theme of a bad sixties’ cop show, and the song itself is both ham-fisted and overwrought.
Similarly, “I’m Going to Be a Teenage Idol” isn’t going to make him a teenage idol; I love the plucky vocals, and Bernie Taupin’s lyrics are great, but the melody just doesn’t cut it. If John really wants to be a “motivated supersonic king of the scene,” I suggest he find himself a catchier (and more propulsive) melody.
“Texan Love Song” is a likable hillbilly oddity that would have been right at home on the oddity-filled Goodbye Yellow Brick Road; Elton declares himself a redneck and staunch anti-communist, and sings “you long hairs are sure gonna die.” It’s a hoot. Which leaves the anthemic “High Flying Bird,” which reaches for the sky but falls short; the song goes out on a lovely grace note, but this baby’s simply not as fetching a tune as Elton was wont to churn out during his Golden Age.
I’m hoping that Elton John’s retirement from touring will spur a resurgence of interest in his albums. Me, I stuck with him through 1976’s Blue Moves before moving on to different things. But he made an indelible impression on me, Elton. For all I know it’ll be one of his songs that goes through my head on my deathbed.
I’m hoping it will be “Bennie and the Jets.” Or “Someone Saved My Life Tonight.” Yeah. I’d like that.
GRADED ON A CURVE:
B+”.
If you are a big Elton John fan or not, I think there is plenty on Don't Shoot Me I'm Only the Piano Player that will get into the heart and mind. It is a terrific album that I think is also a little underrated – as not all the reviews were understanding or overly-positive. What a remarkable year 1973 was for Elton John. Releasing two major and huge acclaimed studio albums, I feel Don't Shoot Me I'm Only the Piano Player was the start of something very special. A moment when his music fully opened up to and was embraced by the whole world. Alongside classics Daniel and Crocodile Rock are great deeper cuts like Midnight Creeper, and I’m Going to Be a Teenage Idol. Aged twenty-five when Don't Shoot Me I'm Only the Piano Player came out, it is a remarkably accomplished and assured album. Maybe John would release even better albums after 1973, but there is no denying the fact that the classic Don't Shoot Me I'm Only the Piano Player…
TOOK this genius’s music to new heights.