elton john vevy

Elton John no Brasil em 1978

JORNAL O DIA FEVEREIRO 1978
Com menos 10 centímetros de altura que o pedido, mas louro, bonito, jovem e "disponível por 24 horas por dia", o guarda costas contratado pela ODEON para acompanhar o músico Elton John não conseguiu sozinho conter cerca de cem fãs que foram recepcioná-lo ontem no aeroporto internacional do Rio. Aos gritos os fãs, na maioria meninas de 16 e 17 anos que traziam discos na esperança de serem autografados saíram frustrados, pois nem sequer conseguiram ver direito o rosto de seu ídolo do rock.

De brinco de brilhante na orelha direita, boné, óculos dessa vez discretos, camisa de fecho-eclair transversal, calça de malha preta e botas de verniz azul-marinho, Elton John teve que sair da alfândega cercado por seis policiais e vários seguranças que foram protegê-lo dos abraços das meninas. Estas, no jogo do empurra-empurra levaram e deram várias cotoveladas e esbarrões. Ao entrar no Galaxie marrom que o levou para o Hotel LEME PALACE, Elton recebeu, em vez de gritos e suspiros, uma grande vaia.

DESCANSAR

Elton John, que na verdade se chama Reginald Kenneth Dwight, 30 anos, segundo ele veio ao Rio para passar 10 dias, com dez pessoas integrantes de sua gravadora a Rocket Records. Vindo de Paris, pelo Concorde às 16h10min Elton não imaginava que iria encontrar fãs no aeroporto, pensando que ninguém sabia de sua chegada, segundo informou representante de sua gravadora.

A Odeon, que representa a A.M. Records americana, gravadora de Elton John, decorou a suíte presidencial do Hotel Leme Palace com flores e frutas tropicais e escreveu com 20 discos, nas duas camas de solteiro no quarto suíte as iniciais do cantor. Além disso, instalou um equipamento de som e discos de cantores brasileiros, a pedido de Elton, que disse estar muito interessado em conhecer a música brasileira.

UMA VISITA

Peter Frampton, que desmarcou a entrevista que ia dar a imprensa, alegando estar "doente de calor", na verdade um simples resfriado, apareceu no hotel às 18hs para visitar seu amigo musico.

Elton John, cujo sucesso mais recente no Brasil foi o compacto "Don´t Go Breaking My Hearth" - vendeu em 1977 cerca de 500 mil cópias - anunciou em Londres que não iria mais se apresentar em shows.Já não grava a 01 ano e revelou que agora iria se dedicar ao futebol, esporte que gosta a muito tempo, sendo inclusive presidente de um clube na Inglaterra.

Com vários convites para coquetéis e jantares, além de ter em mãos todos os ingressos dos bailes do carnaval carioca, Elton mandou informar que só tem certeza de comparecer ao desfile das grandes escolas de samba "O resto vai depender de como eu estiver no dia". Ele mandou desmentir a noticia dada nos jornais de que iria comparecer vestido de baiana ao Baile dos Enxutos, no Teatro São José, amanhã.

COMPOSITOR

Chega hoje ao Rio o compositor norte americano Mitch Leigh, que fez "O HOMEM DE LA MANCHA" e atualmente está terminando a montagem de uma comédia musical baseada no romance brasileiro "Dona Flor e seus dois Maridos". A peça vai estrear na Broadway, em data ainda não determinada, e seus coreógrafos também virão ao Brasil para passar o carnaval na Bahia e, assim, "sentir melhor o ambiente".
Já estão no Rio para o carnaval os artistas Rod Stewart, Peter Frampton, Alain Delon, Elton John, Peter Allen e o produtor de cinema Robert Stigwood, de "Jesus Cristo Superstar" Além deles, está prevista também a chegada do cantor Neil Sedaka.

Só quem atende ao telefone da suíte do Leme Palace Hotel, em que Elton John está hospedado é o guarda costas, Alex, que acompanha o músico 24 horas do dia. Ele lamenta não poder satisfazer o repórter, que pede para conversar com elton John, e explica:
"Não é que ele não queira dar entrevistas, mas Elton John me pediu muito para não ser incomodado".

Parece que o músico veio mesmo ao Rio para descansar, como anunciou. Ontem ele foi dormir às 2hs, depois de jantar no restaurante Maria Teresa Weiss. Acordou às 13hs, pediu café da manhã e saiu para a praia de São Conrado, retornando às 16hs para dormir no hotel. Ele recusou o convite feito pela Odeon para passear de barco na Bahia de Guanabara e não quis ir à DUCHA FRIA, um grito de carnaval promovido por Carlos Niemeyer, nos jardins do clube Marimbas.

Antonio Ducan, gerente internacional da Odeon, disse que Elton John estava muito cansado, pois gravara dois dias seguidos, sem dormir e depois viera para o Rio. Para hoje estão novamente anunciados sua presença em um evento: o coquetel oferecido por Alfredo Machado. Mas Alex, a postos na suíte, cuja diária é de Cr$ 2.995,00 não quis confirmar se o musico vai ou não na festa. Limitou-se a dizer que ele estava muito cansado.

Elton John, depois de barrado na porta do Copacabana Palace foi para o Baile do Pão de Açúcar, Concha Verde.

Irritadíssimo disse que nunca mais voltaria ao Brasil.

Elton foi influeciado pelos discos de bossa nova e pela MPB. Seu álbum A SINGLE MAN teve reflexo dessa viagem pelo estilo de canções como SHOOTING STAR.

TRECHO DE RECORTE, SEM FOTOS: 

Deve pertencer ao Copacabana Palace o recorde brasileiro de expulsão de artistas estrangeiros.

Depois do episódio com Rod Stewart, posto pelo hotel para o olho da rua, em seguida a uma movimentada festa, a vez foi de Elton John.

O artista à frente de uma entourage náutica, todos vestidos de marinheiro, passou pela pérgola do Copa para uma cerveja antes do baile da Concha Verde. Antes que fosse feito o pedido, o grupo foi rechaçado e expulso do local pelo garçom sob a alegação de que marinheiros não eram bem vistos pela direção da casa.

Não adiantou explicar que se tratava de fantasia. O garçom foi irredutivel.

Comentário de Elton John, mais tarde, depois de superada a irritação: "Não é uma boa ser marinheiro no Brasil"

ELTON JOHN NA PORTA DO COPACABANA PALACE,

SENDO BARRADO COM SEUS AMIGOS VESTIDOS DE MARINHEIROS

O Rio teve muito mais coisas para mostrar a seus visitantes ilustres, além do baile e desfiles. Entre os intervalos das festas Elton John, Rod Stewart e Peter Frampton passearam de iate, aproveitando o sol para esconder um pouco do branco mais branco que trouxeram de seus paises.

Bernie Taupin Sings His Own Lyrics

Rock's Bernie Taupin Sings His Own Lyrics Now but He Hasn't Written Elton a Dear John

June 23, 1980

By David Sheff

I was at the top of a volcano. I was either going to be the lava that dribbles down the side, or the phoenix arising from the top. I won't say I came out totally full-feathered, but I fluttered back." The lead-winged metaphor came not from a geologist contemplating Mount St. Helens but from another kind of rock authority. For 13 years Bernie Taupin had been Elton John's lyricist and thus one-half of Britain's most celebrated songwriting team since Lennon & McCartney. But after sharing in the glory with Captain Fantastic (Bernie toured with Elton and was occasionally dragged onstage)—not to mention the profits from an incredible 100 million sales—Taupin went into an emotional tailspin. 

"We'd filled the biggest stadiums and sold the most records," he explains. "Once we started acquiring palatial mansions, the meaning went out of rock 'n' roll." Hits came so easily that he and Elton dashed off one whole album in 10 days and, says Bernie, "There was nothing to do the rest of the year. I was bored and depressed." After two straight LPs entered the Billboard charts at No. 1 (a feat unequaled), Taupin began to wonder, "Where do we go from here?" So when their 1977 Blue Moves LP hit the charts "only" at No. 3, "We thought we were finished," he reports. Bernie was 27. That proved to be his last complete LP with Elton. Meanwhile Taupin's other partnership, a five-year marriage to Maxine Fiebelman, had also broken up. "I had no straws left to grab onto," he remembers. "So I turned to the bottle."

MAXINE

His bender lasted two months before a shaken Taupin "mellowed out and dried out" in Acapulco. He also swore off music: "I figured that rock 'n' roll had destroyed me." Instead, he tried acting, appearing on ABC's Hardy Boys, of all things. Then Alice Cooper, who had just gotten over his own drinking problem, convinced Bernie to help write another album—From the Inside—about alcoholism. In the process, Bernie discovered, "I'd always been part of someone else. But there were ideas I wanted to do all by myself." The result, released in April, is his first record doubling as a performer, He Who Rides the Tiger. "Nobody is more surprised than Elton," chuckles Bernie. "With him, I was afraid to say, 'It should sound like this,' because that was his job. But this time music that had been in me came out."

TAUPIN AND TONI RUSSO

It may even turn out that John needs Taupin's lyrics more than the other way around. While Bernie was working on Tiger, Elton's career floundered. Hence, a year ago, Elton asked him to write the lyrics to eight new songs, three of which are on his upcoming LP 21 at 33. "I'll write songs for Elton as long as he breathes and wants me," pledges Bernie.

Still, the once-inseparable pair is divided by geography and interest. While John lives in England to be near his beloved soccer club, Bernie, an L.A. Dodgers freak, plans to become a U.S. citizen. Then there's the matter of sexual preference. The two of them had once been rumored to be an item, a notion that Bernie now says "amuses" him. "I've loved women and I always will," he declares. "We're so opposite in that respect, it's funny." For the past two years he has lived with model Toni Russo. He's also still friends with his ex-wife, though he reports, "She's very happy with my bassist."

Taupin grew up in England's potato-farming district of Lincolnshire, where his father was a cattle stockman and his mother raised three kids. Thanks to a school system he sardonically calls "a garbage disposal," Taupin ended up working in a printing plant "right out of David Copperfield." Then he switched to a farm, "carting huge mountains of dead chickens to furnaces, and shoveling them in. It was like Dante's Inferno." But when he had to work on Christmas Day, he told his boss to "stuff it." A London newspaper ad for a songwriter caught Bernie's eye and, though only 16, "I thought I could fake it, and I didn't want to go back to the farm and have 12 kids." He wound up meeting Elton, three years his senior, and together they took a basement apartment in "the Watts of London." "We were really scraping," Bernie recalls, until Elton decided to sing. Their first LP produced the hit Lady Samantha, and their second launched Border Song and Your Song.

Over the next decade Taupin and John traveled their Yellow Brick Road, trashing hotel rooms (Bernie once fired a .45 magnum at John Wayne on a TV set), dumping Ajax into a friend's meal and once throwing a dog out a window. "If it has anything to do with rock 'n' roll," Bernie says brazenly, "I've done it." Cocaine? "There's no way I'm going to put it down; it's part of the lifestyle." Now, though, Taupin thinks the punks lack imagination. "It takes flair to drive a car into a swimming pool," he cracks.

Bernie is comparatively housebroken in his eight-room, Spanish-style place in the Hollywood Hills. It boasts six TV sets, "so I don't miss anything," and his sybaritic bedroom has twice been the backdrop for Playboy centerfolds. The walls are decorated with satanic art ("The occult fascinates me"), and a glass case holds Marilyn Monroe's dressmaking form from Some Like It Hot—a gift from Elton.

Taupin restricts his drinking now to Mouton-Cadet wine, but loves rich food. "All the health nuts I know look pale and drawn," he insists. He lifts weights, but jokes, "The times I was abusing myself, I had more energy." Bernie and Toni hang out in San Fernando Valley drive-in theaters or dine with chums like Cheryl Ladd, Rod and Alana Stewart and Peter Frampton. He dresses casually, except for a gold hoop in his right ear, which he pierced with an icepick at 16. "In a group I'm a total ham," he says. "But I can be very rude to people I don't like."

Professionally, Taupin admits, "I'm lazy, but I don't want people to think I've gone under." So he's done two screenplays, just co-wrote Cher's next single, Julie, and is planning his first solo concert tour at age 30. "Once you've got rock 'n' roll in your blood, you can never get it out," reckons Taupin. "I do have a slightly insane side, and when I feel that flame going out, I immediately ignite it again. I never want to lose the craziness." 

Elton John A new and different Man

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For more than a year all the news from Elton John had been pretty alarming. He'd given up live performing, exclusive heterosexuality and more recently, jeepers, his $50,000 collection of peepers. But now comes the flip side. Elton's into the latest soft contact lenses, which—like his recent hair-transplant surgery—hearteningly suggests that vanity still spices his life. Just possibly, his announced retirement from the stage isn't forever, what with new musical "tangents" forthcoming on record. Certainly his sex life isn't suffering. "I mean not once a day," flinches the 30-year-old Captain Fantastic. "Say three times a week [pause] at least. And more female than male."

All that may not sound like the sort of life-style to warm a mum's heart, but Elton's mother applauds him for coming "out of the cupboard." Sure, Sheila Farebrother, 52, admits to "mixed feelings," but she adds, "I would never interfere. If he chooses a life with another man, that doesn't worry me. I just want him to be happy." What does worry her about Elton—despite a fortune, wardrobe and popularity rivaling his royal neighbor down the road in Windsor Castle—is that he seems to be "an unhappy person." The difficulty, she says, is his "loneliness and isolation, the wall around him." She's referring not to the electrified gates or guard dogs but the hangers-on, "the people preventing him from establishing good relationships."

Elton has faced up at least partly to those perils. Even before Presley's death he had fretted that "I don't want to end up my life like Elvis, I want to be active and involved with people, and that means going outside." He realizes that "you must have people around you who will bring you down to earth." His mother is the main person, if not always with immediate effect. "I'm not the settling-down type," Elton keeps telling her. "I'm afraid of someone getting to the real bottom of me, because I don't know what's there myself. When people get too close, I shut them off."

"Yet deep, deep down," his mum insists, "I know that he would love to get married and have a family." Elton agrees with her, at least, that his publicized bisexuality is no obstacle. "The sort of woman I'd marry would understand that anyway." He notes, of course, that his last serious relationship was also his first. Elton was then 21 and remembers, "We'd made the cake and bought the furniture." The person was female (a 6'2" blonde) and the experience inspired him to write Someone Saved My Life Tonight. Their breakup "frightened me off sex for a good year or two," he admits and led to a suicide attempt ("It was a very Woody Allen-type suicide—I turned on the gas and left all the windows open"). A more recent companion was a 17-year-old schoolgirl, but Elton's dream type, he sighs, is "the vastly experienced, older woman who knows everything about the world. I know six or seven, but they're all happily married. Something psychological there," he laughs.

Oedipal, maybe? The girl who married dear old Dad "is the most wonderful woman I've ever met," says her only son, Reginald Kenneth Dwight by name, whom she championed in a household where his RAF squadron leader dad didn't like the boy. "Stanley," his ex-wife reports, "wanted a daughter," and Elton, she remembers, grew up "a bundle of nerves." The Dwights split when Reg was 14 (she has since married an interior decorator, Frederick Farebrother), and Elton is still estranged from Dad. The only fatherly legacy left is an exciting memory of sharing sixpence standing-room perches on the stadium embankment to cheer the Watford Hornets soccer club.

Elton still faithfully follows the Hornets' games, sometimes chartering a helicopter to away matches. But now he occupies the midfield box, as befits the team's chairman and 51 percent owner. Neither mere figurehead nor flamboyant Ted Turner-type meddler, Elton is the model ball club executive, pouring his treasure into rebuilding, without kibitzing the coach's field strategy. Chairman John makes the 40-minute drive to the practice field three or four mornings a week and at games manfully puts up with loutish hecklers from opposing teams who call him "faggot" and worse. "I'm not that, anyway," he snaps. "A faggot is an English sausage."

The man who once described himself as a "male Betty Boop" is accustomed to epithets. Elton's melodic, if muscular, middle-of-the-road music and very success have made him target practice for preening rock critics. And after six years of nonstop touring and prolific recording, Elton himself felt "there was no burning spark left. To sing Rocket Man yet again was just digging up the dregs. The thought appalled me." So two months ago Elton stunned an English crowd of 8,000, not to mention his own entourage, by announcing that this was his last gig. Stevie Wonder joined him onstage for an electrifying and emotional finale, and then Elton exited to "wipe the slate clean, to start all over again. Had I kept going as I was," he now figures, "my whole life would have passed by me by the time I was 35. What I have done is musically of no great importance next to what's been done down the centuries." But he excuses himself, saying, "You can't produce a major work between climbing off the stage and getting onto a plane. There's so much inside me that still has to come out."

Some of it may spill over into other media: an ABC TV special is shooting in March and he's also contemplating a follow-up to his big-screen debut in Tommy with a semiautobiographical film. In it he and sometime rock rival Rod Stewart would play themselves. "I don't particularly like his life-style," volunteers Elton, "but then I doubt that he likes mine." Another departure is writing some of his own lyrics, which have been consigned the last nine years to Bernie Taupin. Musically, Elton has been reverting to a sort of Soho soul sound with the Spinners' Thorn Bell taking over as his current producer. Other eventual changes may include a switch to more intimate concert halls "because you can't have a conversation with people in the bleachers." Elton doesn't deny that the punk new wave "makes me feel old, but I know I have more talent than most of them. I do believe that I could come back anytime I want to," he says. "I'm fortunate I'm only 30. There's so much time still."

"An immature 30," his mother corrects him. "I'd put him at about 23." Elton dutifully accepts that his "real need is to grow up." A few years back he said, "I didn't start enjoying life until I was 21, so I'm living through my teenage period now." He acknowledges, "I'm obsessed with getting myself back together." That means sans shrink and with stopgap "casual liaisons," though he adds, "I like pretty people but I don't have a rampant sex life. I can get off on my work just as well."

It won't trouble him if people stop making passes at a guy without diamond-framed glasses. (He is so nearsighted he can "hardly read the top line" of an eye chart.) As for his bald spot, it was caused, he says, by "messing around with my hair—pink, green, orange dyes. A hundred percent vanity" he calls the transplant, which required two 90-minute operations in Paris. "I'll just be grateful if it grows." He'll find out by March and until then keeps it under his hat—even indoors. His new image is trimmer also, thanks to a no-junk food, no-booze regimen. He once drank as much as a bottle and a half of Scotch a day and now sticks to fruit juice, Perrier water and (before soccer matches to calm his nerves) valerian-root tea. As a result he's lost 40 pounds in four months, bringing him down to 145 (over 5'8").

With his designer stepdad's guidance, Elton is redoing the seven-bedroom main house on his 37-acre Berkshire estate. Within it, the master has created a bachelor retreat with a combined bathroom-library, sauna and stereo room so that he can "disappear for a couple of days without ever coming downstairs." As for staff, Elton points out, "I'm not a duke or an earl," and he actually helps with the dusting and "Hoovering. I'm a cleanliness fanatic, and it relaxes me." On the other hand, he maintains a flotilla of 17 cars worth $750,000. "I can live very well in England," he notes pointedly, "on what I earn." Though many showbiz colleagues have fled into tax exile, he snorts: "It depends on what you want in life: whether you have a sense of values, or you're out to save a few quid."

Elton reckons he'll "always be stuck with the glasses thing and the bloody glittery image," but says, "I feel new." The world's reaction to an Elton John without fanzine flash doesn't seem to worry him. "I'm in limbo with people itching to see what I'm going to do next—and if I'll fall on my face." He used to dismiss Sinatra and Crosby "just because they were older" but has come to appreciate the reasons for their long careers. "They diversified," he explains. "They had other things to offer. I can see myself singing at 50 and 60 and hope I will always have something to contribute." The bitch, as his song goes, will surely be back.