Someone Once Told Elton John He Would Never Be A Pop Star
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Hi, it's Terry Gross here with a special bonus episode. It's the season of giving, and in that spirit, we thought we'd give all our podcast listeners something extra. Bonus episodes like this one, curated selections from our archive, are usually only available for our Fresh Air Plus supporters. Today, we're giving everyone a chance to hear it. If you're already a Fresh Air Plus supporter, thank you so much for your ongoing support of our show and of NPR. But if you haven't signed up for Plus yet, we hope you will. You'll get weekly bonus episodes and sponsor-free listening for every episode of our podcast. And you'll be supporting the NPR shows you listen to, including Fresh Air. You can find out more at plus.npr.org. Now to the show.
Today we have two interviews I recorded with Elton John. After a career of more than 50 years of extravagance and extraordinary popularity, Elton John finished his farewell tour last year. But he performed at Lincoln Center in October of this year at the premiere of the documentary Elton John, Never Too Late. That documentary just started streaming on Disney+. Elton John's music spans genres and generations, from Rocketman to the soundtrack for Disney's animated feature The Lion King. In 2019, he executive produced a biopic of his own life called Rocketman. It was a box office hit and won John and his longtime collaborator, lyricist Bernie Taupin, the Academy Award for Best Original Song. I spoke with Elton John twice on Fresh Air.
We listened to excerpts from both interviews, starting with the more recent one recorded in 2019 when he'd just written his memoir titled Me. We talked about an early lesson John learned about handling stardom, his difficult childhood, how he became addicted to shopping and collecting, and his early musical influences. So the book has a very candid description of your life. Before we get into some of the candid details that you write about in the book, you were in the band early in your career as the keyboard player in Long John Baldry's band. The band was called Bluesology. You tell this really funny story at the beginning of the book where he had just had a big hit. So now he was famous and, you know, young women were coming to the concert and kind of like really getting getting excited and screaming. And he says on mic, he says, why don't you say what he said?
Well, he said, they were grabbing the microphone. He said, if you break my microphone, you'll pay me 50 pounds. And I'm going, oh, John, that's not the way to handle this situation.
What did that teach you about stardom and how to handle it?
Not how to handle it.
Not how to handle it.
Because I got to this point where after Rocketman came out, which was my first really big hit, about two years into my career after your song. I got screaming girls at some of my shows. And I just thought that was rather funny because I wasn't David Bowie and I wasn't Rod Stewart and I wasn't Mark Bolan and I wasn't Mick Jagger. But I was at the piano and I got screaming girls. Luckily, they couldn't reach my microphone because I was playing the piano. You accepted it and you loved it and you just went along with it. I think John didn't know how to cope with it. He just really didn't know how to cope. For all his life, he'd been playing in clubs, playing the blues, and suddenly girls, young girls were screaming at him.
And I just think, you know, he just never knew how to handle that.
Of course, also with you, when you had young girls screaming at you and everything like you were gay, they didn't know that.
No. Well, he was gay, too.
And he was gay, too. Exactly.
Yeah.
That's right. That's right. So what was it like for you knowing you were gay, knowing they didn't realize you were gay and they were probably having all these like sexual fantasies about you? Yeah.
Well, I didn't worry about it. It's like, well, I'm not interested and you're not. You're interested, but I'm not. But it was very sweet and they were very – I've still got a lot of – most of my audience is a lot of women as well, a lot of girls and a lot of females. And I'm very grateful for that.
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