The most flamboyant performer since Liberace, Elton John has fashioned arguably the greatest career in the history of popular music. Since the songwriter first charted with the ballad "Your Song" in 1970, not a year has passed without one of his tunes cracking Bilboard's Top 40. Elvis Presley may have burned brighter faster with 10 Number 1 singles in 1956-57, but John's five Number 1 singles (to go with three at Number 2, two at Number 4 and one Number 6) from 1972-75 made him to the 70s what Presley had been to the 50s, and the Beatles to the 60s. In 1971 he became the first act since the Beatles to have four albums in the American Top 10 simultaneously, and beginning with 1972's "Honky Chateau", he released seven consecutive Number 1 albums. Some industry calculations estimate that his music once accounted for as much as three percent of annual sales worldwide. While drug and alcohol abuse dulled the hit-making apparatus throughout the 80s, the celebrated singer, composer and piano player remained a formidable live draw, appearing in elaborate stage shows wearing outrageous costumes and amiably absurd eyewear. Since emerging clean and sober from rehab, he has widened the scope of his music to become a mainstay of both Broadway and animated musical features and was knighted by Queen Elizabeth II in 1998.
Born Reginald Dwight in Pinner, Middlesex, England, the middle-class son of a doting mother and a remote, often absent father, John proved a piano prodigy at an early age, demonstrating the uncanny ability to listen to records (from Haydn to Little Richard) and play them by ear long before his feet could reach the pedals. "He had the chords and everything," his mother told Vanity Fair (November 1997). "He just had the gift." What he did not have was a corresponding verbal skill, so that when he auditioned for Liberty Records in 1967 with his solo cabaret act, the scouts liked his performance but not his material. One of the scouts put him in touch with Bernie Taupin, an aspiring songwriter who was a wordsmith without a shred of musical ability, and the pair clicked, creating one of the great songwriting teams of all time. Taupin provided the lyrics, and without changing a word, and rarely consulting the lyricist, John would fit his tune to the words almost effortlessly. His working method remains the same to this day. He seldom spends more than an hour writing a song, and he never thinks about what he's going to write until he goes into the studio to record.
John and Taupin took their songs to music publisher Dick James, who hired them as house writers to crank out primarily easy listening tunes, but they would not hit their stride until they started to write more rock-oriented fare. The first John-Taupin song recorded by John was 1968's "I've Been Loving You", and he released his first album, "Empty Sky" (1969) in England, though its failure to sell there relegated it to a 1975 US release. His second album ("Elton John" 1970) established a winning mix of gospel-chorded rockers and achingly sincere ballads (i.e., "Your Song") and became the template for subsequent successful releases. He enjoyed his first Number 1 single with "Crocodile Rock" (1972), and many of his 70s hits like "Daniel", "Goodbye Yellow Brick Road", "Bennie and the Jets" and "Don't Let the Sun Go Down on Me" are now full-fledged classics. That profitable decade, which witnessed 15 of his 16 US-released albums go gold, also saw him collaborate with John Lennon, first on Lennon's "Whatever Gets You Through the Night", and later on his own cover of the Beatles' "Lucy in the Sky with Diamonds" (both 1974). Lennon's last stage appearance came that year with John at NYC's Madison Square Garden on Thanksgiving Day.
Short, pudgy and balding, John never really fit the image of the pop star, but his flair for showmanship more than compensated for his lack of sex appeal. "Elton John" hadn't even been released in this country when he walked onstage to make his live US debut at West Hollywood's Troubador nightclub on August 25, 1970, but the raves that greeted his performance were overwhelming. The Los Angeles Times gushed, "Rejoice. Rock music ... has a new star. he's Elton John ... whose debut ... was, in almost every way, magnificent. His music is so staggeringly original ... [his] songs so varied in texture that his work defies classification ... He's going to be one of rock's biggest and most important stars." In the 80s he reached a kind of commercial stardom that dwarfed his art. He was this character from the tabloids, known for his outlandish stage incarnations, but he also brought down one tabloid, THE SUN, for printing lies, winning a huge libel settlement and a front page apology. Still colorful, though he may not wear an Eiffel Tower on his head or dress up as an Edwardian dowager trailing enormous feathered boas, he has simply survived to become in the words of veteran The New York Times critic Stephen Holden "the longest-lasting solo rock star there is".
John earned his first feature credit in collaboration with arranger Paul Buckmaster and lyricist Taupin on "Friends" (1971), a syrupy English melodrama about a pair of French teens in love. Though John publicly repudiated it, the soundtrack became a hit. He later turned up as an actor-singer playing the Pinball Wizard in "Tommy" (1975), Ken Russell's memorably excessive film version of The Who's rock opera. He has appeared in several concert films and documentaries like "To Russia... With Elton" (1979, which detailed his groundbreaking tour of the Soviet Union), "Eric Clapton and His Rolling Hotel" (1980), and "Imagine: John Lennon" (1988); and his songs have graced numerous films including "Days of Thunder" (1990), "My Own Private Idaho" (1991), "Four Weddings and a Funeral" (1994) and "The Muse" (1999). He formed his own production company Rocket Pictures in the 90s and made his debut as an executive producer of "Women Talking Dirty" (1999), in addition to writing original music for it. He was also the subject of the documentary "Elton John: Tantrums and Tiaras" (filmed by his lover David Furnish), which aired on Cinemax in 1997, not to mention appearing as himself in "Spice World" (1998).
Now openly homosexual, John cautiously came out of the closet in 1976 with the announcement he was "bisexual", and his experiments in that vein resulted in a short-lived marriage to a German sound engineer during the 80s. The proliferation of AIDS during that decade helped propel him (in a spirit of denial) more deeply into his downward spiral of addiction, and he did not become actively involved in AIDS work until after befriending ailing teenager Ryan White near the end of the decade. He went into rehab shortly after performing at White's funeral and beginning with 1992's "The One" has donated all profits from his singles to fight the disease. He founded The Elton John AIDS Foundation in 1992 to fund direct care services and prevention programs and it quickly became one of the world's largest privately-run nonprofit AIDS organizations. Deeply touched by the assassination of John Lennon in 1980, he again experienced tremendous loss with the tragic deaths of his friends designer Gianni Versace and Diana, Princess of Wales in 1997. Equipped with new lyrics by Taupin, he performed a special version of their "Candle in the Wind" as a tribute to Diana and donated all proceeds from its sale (which surpassed Bing Crosby's "White Christmas" as the best-selling single of all time) to charities patronized by the princess.
Though he continues to write with Taupin, John embarked on another significant collaboration with lyricist Tim Rice in the 1990s, enjoying one of his greatest triumphs with what at first would seem an unlikely project for an aging pop star. The pair provided five songs for the Disney animated smash "The Lion King" (1994), and the soundtrack sold over 7 million copies and garnered three out of five Oscar nominations for Best Original Song, winning the statuette for the somewhat sappy "Can You Feel the Love Tonight?". Following the unprecedented success of Disney's "instant classic", which also earned the pair a Grammy, the studio asked John and Rice to take a crack at adapting Verdi's opera "Aida" to the stage. "Elaborate Lives: The Legend of Aida" premiered in Atlanta in 1998, but by then they had already tasted their first stage success with the 1997 Broadway production of "The Lion King", for which the team wrote new songs and snagged a Tony nomination for Best Original Score. For their second animated extravaganza, DreamWorks' "The Road to El Dorado" (2000), John and Rice switched their attention to South America at the time of the Incas. It opened a week after a revised version of "Elaborate Lives", now simply called "Aida" debuted on Broadway.