Elton John: The Bitch at Peace
Elton John sits at a giant red piano left over from his Vegas days, wearing the same brownish Adidas tracksuit I saw him in two days earlier. Today is a Sunday rehearsal at the Wiltern Theatre in Los Angeles for the debut show behind his 32nd album, Wonderful Crazy Night, and he is jawing with his crew about his vocals. They don’t seem to be getting the sound to his liking, so he sings to them in an unrhymed couplet: “You’ll know when my tits/Goes up your ass.”
Everyone laughs, and then Elton breaks into a few bars from Oklahoma! before dropping down to his bass range and crooning lines not from the Rodgers and Hammerstein original: “Why do all the queers come from Tulsa?/Why do all the fairies live in Oklahoma?/I think I’ll move there next to you!”
The crew and the band are now giggling, including guitarist Davey Johnstone and drummer Nigel Olsson, who have been playing with Elton for more than 40 years. They work through the playful title track from Night. There’s some talk with Johnstone as to whether they can get away with six new songs, versus five. Someone tells Elton that the show is going to be 90 minutes long. He shakes his head.
“Let’s do two hours,” he says. Elton reasons that if he’s going to make the crowd sit through half a dozen new ones, he must give a hearty dollop of the hits. The band gets back to work, but before long Elton stops. It’s NFL playoff season.
“Does anyone know the Packers-Redskins score?”
Someone reports the score, but Elton barely listens. He’s more of a Patriots fan, because of his friendship with team owner Robert Kraft from their work with Elton’s AIDS foundation. During a tea break, Elton says he called Kraft on the field minutes after the Patriots’ last-minute interception of Seahawks quarterback Russell Wilson gave them their Super Bowl victory last year. “He told me, ‘I thought we had lost,'” says Elton. I say that Wilson told me in a Rolling Stone interview that God had let him know it was all part of his plan as he walked to the sideline after the game.
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