Her performance defies simple description - if you don’t know by now just what it means to hear both Aretha Franklin’s voice and her piano at peak emotion, there’s a big hole somewhere in your life - so let’s take a little breathing room and give Chuck Rainey and Cornell Dupree their due for a heartbeat-realigning bassline and a resonant minimalist Harrisonian guitar solo, respectively, and thank the Lord for the Sweet Inspirations singing backup while we’re at it. In his performance, it was already close enough to a gospel song Aretha just confirmed it in the most spectacular way, adding a parenthetical to the title that became boldface in the music. A cut from John’s self-titled second LP and his first single to get within squinting distance of the charts (#92 Billboard Hot 100), “Border Song” took Taupin’s mood of disillusioned loneliness and expanded it into a plea for tolerance with the Elton-penned final verse. But in 1970, as his singles were only just beginning to earn any traction on any charts anywhere, the John/Taupin partnership earned one of the greatest privileges any song could earn from the world of soul: a cover by Aretha Franklin. Aretha Franklin, “Border Song (Holy Moses)” (1970)Įlton’s had a decent amount of R&B crossover in his career - “Bennie And The Jets” famously hit #15 on Billboard’s R&B chart in 1974 and got him on Soul Train. A lot of other musicians found, filtered, or honed their voices through them - here are ten of those best moments, including a track each from Revamp and Restoration, the two Elton John tribute albums released today. John and Taupin - Brits fascinated with the idea of popular song as a window into America that they could still see their reflections in - careened between glam and country, hard rock and easy listening, sentimental and sardonic, like few of their peers, and if every hit of theirs found different inroads into examining their own sympathies and frustrations and shameless joys, it all still feels like genuine facets of the same two people. Still, there’s plenty of reasons besides some supposed diminishing returns to linger on the music that came from those first eight albums they put out in the ’70s. The music that the team of Elton John and Bernie Taupin wrote and released after that initial creative barrage remains a bit uneven - Too Low For Zero is as close as they got to recapturing that early ’70s onrush, and that was 35 years ago, though the low-key comeback they staged starting with 2001’s Songs From The West Coast restored a lot of that old feeling. That body of work sounds, even now, like a repositioning of rock-after-psychedelia as a showbiz artform that challenged the po-faced auteurism of the singer-songwriter era shouting “no seriously listen to this Madman Across The Water album, it’s astounding.” And then maybe one of his songs’ll plunk into your forebrain - something from The Lion King? A hit you heard redone on Glee or American Idol? And then more will pour in, and it might, hopefully, finally click: that initial rush of music he made during the first wave of his career with Bernie Taupin, from roughly 1970’s sophomore breakthrough Elton John to 1975’s Captain Fantastic And The Brown Dirt Cowboy, is almost obscenely riddled with greatness. Oh, right, another Boomer from the classic rock canon’s hanging it up, how’s about that. Maybe your first thought on Elton John’s announced retirement tour was something along the lines of a shrug.
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