Before the age of political correctness, they used to say that behind every successful man was a special woman. While this is true for me, I don’t think it was intended to apply to expanding one’s taste in music.
Shortly before I got married, a colleague asked me to describe my future wife in three words. Almost instantaneously, I responded: Beautiful, smart, and mild. While mild might not be a term normally associated with spouses, fans of William Shakespeare’s Much Ado About Nothing or Kenneth Branagh’s charmingly brilliant 1993 film version might remember the famous soliloquy about the qualities lifelong bachelor Benedick sought in a woman. After claiming that no woman in his life has moved him the way Claudio had been by Hero since they arrived in Messina, he proceeds to claim, “till all graces be in one woman, one woman shall not come in my grace. Rich she shall be, that’s certain; wise, or I’ll none; virtuous, or I’ll never cheapen her; fair, or I’ll never look on her; mild, or come not near me; noble, or not I for an angel; of good discourse, an excellent musician, and her hair shall be of what color it please God.” In my wife at least, mildness and a generally imperturbable, calm nature should not be mistaken for a lack of will or persistence. Beneath her easy exterior, there is a core of steel on matters big and small. Beyond the strength of our relationship and the joy we have found in one another over the years both married and unmarried, it’s no exaggeration to say my life would be very different were it not for her quiet persistence. We wouldn’t live in a house we both love in an area we adore if she didn’t take it upon herself to begin looking at houses long before I was ready to leave our townhouse in Garfield, checking out at least twenty across western Jersey while I might have visited four. The house wouldn’t have a new kitchen, patio, firepit, and fenced-in area off the sunroom if she didn’t take charge. I’d have no proper leather reading chair, known as a Churchill chair to be precise, next to an original sitting of President Ulysses S. Grant if she didn’t track them down somehow and procure them. From where, I have no idea, except the chair, she drove over two hours to pick up and somehow managed to force it up three flights of stairs at the old townhouse before we were married. We wouldn’t have a second dog, a sweet whippet from China named Carlitos, if she didn’t start pushing the issue. For that matter, we wouldn’t have our beloved, three legged greyhound Rosie if she didn’t start “just looking” at dogs during the pandemic. The list could go on, but today’s about one of the seemingly smaller things that she pursued with no less persistence. Namely, legendary singer, songwriter, and piano man, Elton John, but first a little background.
For whatever reason, Sir Elton has always rubbed me the wrong way. A child of 80’s metal, whose most formative experiences were Ronnie James Dio and Queensryche with a smattering of Rush, I gravitated towards classic rock in my college years embracing many of the artists one might consider in the same group as Sir Elton, from Billy Joel to Bruce Springsteen while never having much love for the Rocket Man himself. To be sure, I liked a few songs (oddly enough, “Still Standing” was among them) and respected his talent, but not much else. My wife on the other hand grew up as an Elton John fan, practically from day one since her older brother started purchasing his first albums, and in this she would not be denied. From the time she gifted me my first iPod somewhere around 2010, she began pestering me to add some Elton to the library, bringing it up every so often in her quiet way despite my protestations, and though it took well over ten years, I finally relented. In this I can be exceedingly stubborn for reasons hard to explain, save that Sir Elton was banned along with the Rolling Stones. For the Stones, I had a proximal cause: A terrible concert at Giant Stadium when I was in college, and I have never liked them since. Sir Elton was a bit more nebulous of a reason, though it turned out to be a completely invalid one. As I have described it in another context, there’s a beauty to being wrong about something, to learning that what you’re quite convinced you’re right about turns out to be an error or a mistake on your part. There’s both the immediate thing wherein you misjudged and the broader context of what else you might have misjudged. I was reminded of this last Friday night as we completed our regular, no specific plans for that evening ritual. For me, it begins with some beers by the pool and some writing accompanied by music loud enough the neighbors all know it’s Friday, before actually getting in the pool to enjoy the late afternoon sun, then firing up the grill. As it was warming up, Sir Elton’s forgotten classic “Hercules,” from the 1972 album Honky Chateau, started blasting, the opening guitar melody giving way to the full band, as the speaker confesses to having “a busted wing and a hornet sting like an out of tune guitar.” Though far from the most famous track in his pantheon, the song neatly encapsulates the unique combination of emotional grounding and flights of fancy that lyricist Bernie Taupin perfected throughout their long, almost unrivaled in success partnership. The speaker might seem like he’s talking about himself in a whimsical manner, but what’s really on his mind is a woman who has another man, Hercules, by her side and the goddess of the moon, Diana in her eyes. From there, he eulogizes his life before he met the unnamed woman, noting that some “like the Chinese life, some men kneel and pray,” but personally, he always preferred women and wine, and he “always liked it that way, always liked it that way,” until he saw her, of course. Now, he spends his time obsessing over her relationship with Hercules:
I can’t dig it, the way she teases
That old tough man routine up her sleeve
Living and loving, kissing and hugging
Living and loving with a cat named Hercules
A cat named Hercules
Like many another song in the apparently immortal genre where a man pines for a woman he can’t have (Springsteen appears to have an entire song catalog devoted to it, here and here), it’s unclear if he’s even met her. In the next verse, the speaker claims “it hurts like hell to see my gal Messing with a muscle boy, No superman gonna ruin my plans, Playing with my toys,” but there’s no real reason to believe him when he shares no details of an actual relationship or any time they have spent together. Instead, he compares himself to others once again, this time a “Rich man sweating in a sauna bath” and a “Poor boy scrubbing in a tub” before bizarrely claiming that he stays “gritty up to [his] ears, Washing in a bucket of mud, Washing in a bucket of mud.” While I can’t begin to imagine what that might mean on a literal level, it strikes me as both an image of a man who likes to get knee deep in the muck and a more comedic reference to Mr. Taupin’s country upbringing. Unlike Reginald Kenneth Dwight, Sir Elton’s real name, who was born in a London borough in 1947, Mr. Taupin was from a farm in the country, Flatters House, located between the village of Anwick and the town of Sleaford, born a couple of years later. The fish out of water theme of a farm boy in the city was referenced periodically in their work, perhaps most famously in “Goodbye Yellow Brick Road” where the speaker claims he’s “never going back to my plough.” Whether that’s the case here we cannot know for sure as the song ends by repeating itself, with the speaker continuing on about a “cat named Hercules.” Interestingly, as Mr. Taupin may have been poking fun at his own country ways, he also appears to be poking fun at Sir Elton himself. In 1971, Elton John decided that Hercules was his middle name and became Elton Hercules John, making the song teasingly self-referential. Is Mr. Taupin suggesting that his songwriting partner was some kind of stud who stole his girl at some point? One might say it’s doubly ironic considering Sir Elton is gay and prefers men to women.
While the pair might be known for whimsy, they were more than capable of something much closer to tragedy. “Indian Sunset,” another forgotten classic released a year earlier in 1971 on Madman Across the Water, serves as an excellent example, where Sir Elton and Mr. Taupin imagine themselves a young Indian brave, an Iroquois, when the settlers came and either killed them or forced them west. The music is more stately and epic, mournful and plaintive, as a young warrior awakes in the evening “With the smell of wood smoke clinging Like a gentle cobweb hanging Upon a painted tepee,” gathers his war lance and his woman and goes to see the chieftain, but the elder has no good news to share. Their warlord’s dead, left to the “buzzards and the soldiers’ guns.” This prompts him to reflect upon his life, learning to read smoke signals, the sound of the drums since he was an infant, hurling the tomahawk, and riding a “painted pony wild To run the gauntlet of the Sioux To make a chieftain’s daughter mine.” It seems he thought these days would last forever, but “now you ask that I should watch The red man’s race be slowly crushed What kind of words are these to hear From Yellow Dog, whom a white man fears?” Rather than seeing his family killed, the brave leaves his home, only to find himself wandering in search of the yellow moon and “the fathers of our sons Where the red sun sinks in the hills of gold And the healing waters run.” Alas there is no solace to be found when he learns that “Geronimo was dead, He’d been laying down his weapons When they filled him full of lead.” After the news of another mighty warrior gone, he can no longer find a reason to continue his quest, not in a land that was once his, but is now lonely and quiet, and he realizes, tragically, the yellow sun only exists beyond this life. He hears soldiers coming, slings his bow, and:
…the red sun sinks at last
Into the hills of gold
And peace to this young warrior
Comes with a bullet hole
Though both songs boast evocative lyrics with a rare ability to capture details in a few simple words, and both benefit from Sir Elton’s uncanny musicianship, the pair have next to nothing in common, representing the extremes of emotion Sir Elton and Mr. Taupin were capable of even in this early stage of their career. I certainly could’ve chosen two of their more popular songs for this post, everything from the aforementioned “Goodbye Yellow Brick Road” to “Tiny Dancer,” made even more famous when Phoebe thought it was “Tony Danza” on Friends, with worm-ear “Candle in the Wind” in between, but I knew all those songs, practically by heart if I let myself sing along, before my wife’s persistence pushed me to dig deeper. As this post is as much about my lovely wife as a new appreciation for music, a gentle ode to the will of steel beneath her beautiful, mild exterior, it was far more appropriate to select songs I wouldn’t know without her, that I only know and love thanks to her, beautiful, smart, and mild as she remains and will so forever in my eyes and heart. Before the age of political correctness, they used to say that behind every successful man was a special woman. While this is true for me, I don’t think it was intended to apply to expanding one’s taste in music.
Confessions of a Conservative Atheist 