The Yellow Brick Road to Pepperland

I first heard Elton John's Goodbye Yellow Brick Road album on 8-track tape at a cousin's, sometime in 1974. I was talking to her while she cleaned up her room, and she asked me if I liked EJ. I said I didn't think I'd ever heard him. So, she stuck in one tape (it was a two cartridge set) and handed me the other, so I could look at the pictures on it.

The title track played first. It gave me goose-bumps, as it sent shivers down the back of my neck. It was magic – the instrumentation, the arrangement, the melody, his voice, the backing vocals. I was instantly hooked.

I got the GBYBR album for Christmas that year. Wow! I can't believe I didn't wear it out from playing it so much. The variety of styles was astounding, yet there was a cohesiveness to it all. It seemed as though I discovered something new with every listen.

Then, the following February, my mother took me to Gibson's department store, to let me pick out an EJ album for my birthday gift. And after much gut-wrenching deliberation, I finally decided on the Don't Shoot Me, I'm Only the Piano Player album.

But, then...

On the way to the check out I glanced to my left, towards a rack of albums, and my attention was immediately arrested by four mop-topped faces staring at me. A flood of thoughts tumbled over one another as they raced to get into my mind: First, I thought, "Hey, they look pretty cool"; then I noticed the title, The Early Beatles – which immediately brought to mind a friend's The Chipmunks Sing The Beatles album that we used to listen to over and over as kids; then I noticed the song titles listed just under the album's title, and recognized several of the songs as having been on that Chipmunks album; and I remembered how much we loved those songs, and how we had always wondered what the real versions of the songs sounded like (slowing the LP down to 16 RPMs didn't help [kids, ask your parents]). All these thoughts came upon me in a flash.

I stopped dead in my tracks. I walked (I could walk then) over to the album and picked it up. Here indeed was an unexpected dilemma.

Seeing that I had stopped, my mother asked me what was wrong, and I told her the story of the Chipmunks album (probably assuming, as most teenagers do, that she wouldn't or couldn't understand).

I was truly torn. I knew I wanted the EJ album. And yet I knew I wanted – almost felt I was supposed to have – the Beatles album (even though I had no real idea what they sounded like).

Then, in one of those mystical moments of parental magnanimity, I heard my mother say, "Well,...since it's your birthday,...I guess we could get you both of them."

Suddenly, the horns of my dilemma had become horns of plenty. If the heavens had opened, and angels had started singing, I would not have been surprised. As we left the store, my feet didn't touch the ground (it's a wonder I didn't bump my head on the top of the doorway).

Playing The Early Beatles album gave me the same shivers down the back of the neck chills that GBYBR had (their voices, their harmonies, the melodies, the sense of urgency). To borrow a quote from C.S. Lewis, "I knew that I had crossed a great frontier." I would never be the same.

The music of EJ and The Beatles changed my life in a remarkable way. The desire to write songs was awakened by them. And what's amazing is that the feelings stirred by their music has never gone away. I still get the same rush when I hear great music. And I still get the same joyful/agonized thrill, when writing songs, that I got when I first started out.

Elton John and The Beatles awakened my desire to write songs (it turned out that lyrics were my strong suit, while music composition was my brother Robby's). However, it was the music of The Moody Blues (mainly their core 7 albums) that seemed to free me up to write the kind of lyrics I would eventually pen. But that's another post....