Reg Dwight's Piano Goes Pop

by Tim Joseph

October 1984

Liner notes for the CD

As you will have realised, the CD you are holding features Elton John singing 20 cover versions of chart hits from 1969 and 1970. It was the era of the budget-priced chart-buster album: the months hit singles would be re-recorded by session musicians to match the originals as closely as possible ("can you tell the difference between these and the originals"!) Top Of The Pops is the series which you're most likely to remember (each volume bedecked with a scantily-clad female similar to the one featured here), but many other companies ran similar series throughout the '60s and '70s, selling surprisingly large numbers of copies in Woolworths, high street supermarkets and other outlets. Using cover versions meant the albums could be made cheaply, and for the buyer, a good collection of hit songs could be had for much less than the price of buying the actual singles.

In fact, people tend to underestimate exactly how many copies the top titles (mainly Hallmark/Pickwick's Top Of The Pops and MFP's Hot Hits series) did sell. At least one Top Of The Pops cover gleefully reprints a copy of the BBC's Top 1O chart, showing their last volume perched at No. 1, above the likes of the Floyd's Meddle, T. Rex's Electric Warrior, Lennon's Imagine, Carole King's Tapestry and Elton's mate Rod Stewart's Every Picture Tells A Story. In fact these cover albums were only allowed into the charts for a short period in 1971 before some sort of snobbery or pressure from the "real" music industry - mainly over the interlopers' "unfair" budget price - caused their swift removal, and a chart fatwa on such LPs from then on.

Although sales of these albums would seem to have reached a peak around the period of 1971-73, the trend had started several years before, although it was confined at first to EPs. Many people will still have one of the Top Six EPs from the mid '60s about the house. (The one exception to this was Top Six's (only?) cover-version LP, Beatlemania which made an isolated appearance in the Top 20 LP charts).

With the rise of the long-player, the cover artist labels were quick to move into this area, and the success of the "cover version" albums was only stopped by the arrival of labels such as K-Tel and Arcade (both of whom reached No. 1 in Summer 1972 with their first releases) who licensed the original versions from record companies and made a killing in the process. It wasn't a new idea: series such as Motown Chartbusters had regularly made the Top 5, but this was the first time labels had regularly rounded up actual chart singles so soon after they had been hits. And once you could buy a compilation of the latest sounds by the real artists, although admittedly at twice the price of the covers, it was still cheaper than purchasing the singles individually and you were less likely to suffer derision at the hands of your friends.

Ironically, the success of the Phase 2 K-Tel brigade was itself killed off when record companies realised they'd make more money by doing such compilations themselves, most notably with the Now That's What I Call Music series. What is surprising is that it took the majors 10 years to cotton on to the fact. K-Tel et al were forced to move further towards single-artist or specialised-genre compilations.

The phenomenal success of the old cover-versions albums in the late '60s is reflected in the fact that dozens still survive, at least those issued by the bigger labels. You can go to any charity shop and pick them up for 50p apiece - or less: in fact it would almost seem a legal requirement for every Oxfam shop to carry at least three in their racks (alongside the obligatory Partridge Family album), many still with their former owners names lovingly etched across the cover in biro, and the words "good" or "crap" assigned to each song.

You're therefore probably slightly embarrassed to be seen with this CD: don't be. If your name is Reg Dwight or Elton John, you shouldn't be embarrassed either; the music on this disc is all first class. The snobbery attached to those "cover version" LPs is quite unnecessary. The records never claimed to be more than a cheap collection of "today's top sounds" to give the average pop fan 12 recent hit tunes for the price of 1 or 2 singles. Seems fair enough to me. (Remember, these were the days long before the more anal-retentive aspects of artist-orientated record collecting. Believe it or not, most people used to buy records because they liked the songs!)

I believe there are two reasons for the snobbery surrounding to the genre (OK, three: some of those sleeves were pretty grim), both of which are misplaced: Firstly, the fact that the records were recorded and released cheaply leads people to assume that the results must have been horrendous. Not necessarily so: even though the records were cheap, the performances were not. The playing was always (well, mainly!) exemplary: the Top Of The Pops albums used to boast on their back covers that the tracks were recorded by "the cream of today's session musicians" in top studios (although the players were of course never individually credited), and this was perfectly true. As American Elton John fan John F. Higgins wrote, "The resulting records, no doubt made available in the budget bins of retail outlets across the land pretty much as soon as the vinyl had cooled enough to ship, made no mention of the musicians involved. To be blunt, the album covers were void of detail to the point where consumers were led to believe they were getting the original versions when they put the platter on their hi-fi. But instead they got a different kind of talent. A kind that comes from those skilled in the art of RE-creation."

Secondly (perhaps more importantly here) was the simple fact that the artists weren't the originals. "Can you tell the difference?" asked Music For Pleasure's Hot Hits LPs with an implicit boastfulness.

Well, yes, you generally could, but 24 years after the event does that really matter? (There are, of course, people who will swear by White Plains' version of My Baby Loves Lovin'; the same people who could not actually name the identity of that band's lead singer and who have forgotten that White Plains themselves were a session group put together much in the same way as the derided "cover version".)

That the covers could be good is amply illustrated by the contents of this CD. Quite simply, these Elton John recordings are magnificent (and of course he wipes whats-his-name from White Plains completely out of the water). Yet their existence has largely been swept under the carpet. Elton himself has rarely referred to them in detail and his major biographies hurry through the story in a paragraph or two, generally with a perceptible shudder.

This is as much a shame as it is misplaced. Put it this way, if Elton John had released this collection as an official DJM "tribute to 1970" album in (say) 1973, it would no doubt have been derided. And yet what difference would there have been between that record and Pinups, a much-lauded Number One album by David Bowie (incidentally no stranger to these cover albums himself) which featured some of the worst TOTP-like covers of Pink Floyd and Who classics (amongst others) you could ever (not) wish to hear? When I first heard these Elton John recordings, two things surprised me. Firstly, although it has long been rumoured that Elton appeared on these cover LPs, no one has ever gathered them together before. Many people perhaps thought they didn't exist, or if they did, it was merely a couple of songs. What amazed me is just how obvious Elton's vocal presence is: on all 20 tracks, it really couldn't be anybody else. It's therefore surprising that nobody picked up on it at the height of his fame in the early-to-mid 1970s. Perhaps nobody ever bothered to play their old Hits 1970 albums after 1971!

Secondly, if the aim of these tracks was to sound as close to the original single as possible, it could actually be argued that Elton failed totally in his job! Despite the fact that he is meant to be a great mimic (Philip Norman in his biography Elton recounts a story of his incredibly accurate impersonation of The Bee Gees' Robin Gibb on a cover of Saved By The Bell), every track here sounds like nobody other than Elton John himself. For which, twenty years (or more) on, we have reason to be grateful, because throughout this disc Elton puts on the kind of performance one might have thought he would reserve for his own recordings. Quite simply, on several of the tracks Elton rips the original to shreds.

Before we go on, it may be worth clearing up two related myths. You note I call him Elton rather than Reg as on our somewhat jokey sleeve. Despite the title of this CD, the tracks were indeed recorded by Elton John rather than Reg Dwight. He'd taken on the professional name in 1968 after leaving his former band Bluesology, and upon signing with Dick James Music ("Elton" came from Bluesology's sax player Elton Dean, "John" from their singer Long John Baldry).

Tied in with this is the long-held assumption that these tracks must have been recorded (along with those by Bowie and - supposedly - Rod Stewart) in the days when they were all young unknowns, struggling for that elusive first contract. In Elton's case, it has always been implied that these recordings must date from between his releases with Bluesology (1965-1967) and his first minor breakthrough with the Lady Samantha! single (January 1969). Not so. Elton had almost released an album of covers on Decca Records as part of a four-piece combo (featuring various DJM luminaries) called The Bread And Beer Band back in June 1969. Test pressings exist of the LP, which includes the likes of Mellow Yellow, If I Were A Carpenter and Needles & Pins, but the record's release was cancelled at the last minute. (A single released in February featuring The Dick Barton Theme had flopped spectacularly).

But take a look again at the list of tracks featured on this CD (along with original artists, chart position and date of hit): all but one actually date from 1970:

By the time of the final recordings here (around August 1970 if we assume that these versions were recorded about a month after the original single became a hit), Elton John had been a solo recording artist for almost 2 years. His second single Lady Samantha, although not a hit, had received around 120 radio plays, many favourable reviews and respectable sales.

He had already released his first two albums, Empty Sky and Elton John, the second of which had reached no. 11 in the charts. That album featured both his US Top 92 hit Border Song (which also formed Elton's debut on "Top Of The Pops" - the TV programme, not the LP series!) and his first UK hit, Your Song, (although the latter was not released until January 1971, after the release of his third LP, Tumbleweed Connection. In fact, THAT album had itself already been recorded back in March 1970).

Here's a quick look at his discography to date (recording dates are given in brackets):

• 3/68 I've Been Loving You (December 1967)
• 1/69 Lady Samantha (December 1968)
• 6/69 EMPTY SKY (LP) (December 68 - April 1969)
• 3/70 Border Song (January 1970)
• 4/70 ELTON JOHN (LP) (January 1970)
• 4/70 From Denver To LA (US only - theme from film "The Games") (1969)
• 6/70 Rock 'N' Roll Madonna (January 1970)
• 10/70 TUMBLEWEED CONNECTION (LP) (March 1970)
• 1/71 Your Song (January 1970)

A pretty weighty canon, even for that period. Furthermore, by the end of August 1970, he had recorded and broadcast no less than 8 BBC sessions, plus an 30-minute early "In Concert" broadcast, which can hardly have failed to broaden audience awareness. So all in all, although Elton was indeed still "up-and-coming", he was hardly unknown.

So why on earth did this almost-famous pop star on the brink of international stardom (less than one month away from an enormous American breakthrough with his legendary concerts at LA's Troubadour Club) continue with his day job, so to speak? Only Elton himself can answer that one, although a couple of reasons spring to mind.

The first, quite simple: money. Well, possibly. Despite the success of the Elton John LP, Elton was not on a particularly lucrative contract with DJM, especially as the latter party had spent much money on studio time and promotion for Elton over the previous 18 months. (In fact, the DJM label was set up specifically to release the Empty Sky LP.) As Philip Norman put it: "Times being tougher than tough, Elton could not afford to turn down any kind of freelance session-work. During late 1969 his talent for mimicry earned him at least as much as did his true persona. As a Motown prodigy, a crewcut surfer, a Mississippi swamp rocker, even an English footballer with the vocal range of a tired moose, he was utterly convincing."

DJM had Elton on a weekly retainer of £l5 a week for his services, which included recording demos of other peoples songs for the company. (Poor Bernie Taupin as mere lyricist only received £l0!). Mind you, paying the rent was no problem: for the past two years, both Elton and Bernie were living and writing in the comfort of Elton's Mum's place in Northwood Hills.

Most biographers also point out the enormous growth rate and subsequent cost of the EJ record collection at this time. In fact, he even got a job at London's Musicland record shop, not only to pay for his habit but also just to be near to all that vinyl! Even would be superstars need pocket money, it appears.

Even so, the fees for these sessions was not likely to be enormous (remember the budgets for each album would be pretty limited, that for the artwork non-existent) and they hardly seem worth the risk of total loss of artistic credibility that Elton could have suffered by continuing with these sessions.

Secondly, for the first three years of his "proper' music biz career Elton John was a confirmed studioholic. Although he failed his legendary audition for Liberty Records in June 1967, he had caught the attention of A & R man Ray Williams, who also had connections with publishers Dick James Music. Having been introduced to Taupin by Williams, Elton started recording demos of their material both at Regent Sound Studios and DJM's own facilities.

Before long, Elton had virtually monopolised DJM's studio almost to the exclusion of everybody else. It was actually this which led to him signing to DJM: when Dick James found out about the situation, he demanded to hear the tapes, liked them and signed John and Taupin up as writers and Elton as a demo musician. For a couple of years, Elton did virtually nothing but record, the products of which can be divided into five groups. Firstly, he and Taupin continued to turn out "commercial" songs by the score, most of which were demoed in the hope of their being covered by other artists. The pair did succeed in getting several songs covered by the likes of Dukes Noblemen (7/68), Guy Darrell (8/68 and 10/69), Ayshea (2/69), Plastic Penny (2/69), Lulu (one of her final six songs chosen for that year's Eurovision Song Contest) (3/69), Spooky Tooth (9/69), Orange Bicycle (1/70), Toe Fat (2/70) and Edward Woodward (4/70), although none were commercially successful.

Secondly, as well as the "commercial" direction forced upon them by DJM, the pair were also writing and recording songs of a more personalised style, which in the end led to Elton's own recording contract. As we have already seen, by mid 1970 he had already released two LPs and four singles; this material barely scraped the barrel of the mountain of recordings made. Philip Norman recounts that by the time of Empty Sky, at least a hundred finished "masters" had been recorded as well as innumerable demos. (32 of these tracks recently appeared on a 2-volume CD entitled The Dick James Demos.) Thirdly, part of Elton's task at DJM was also to record demos of other people's songs. A remarkable tape from July 1970 has recently appeared on bootleg of Elton and Linda Peters (later Thompson) recording a full LP demo of songs by Nick Drake and John Martyn arranged by Drake's producer, Joe Boyd. Again, there must be many more of these recordings lying in DJM's vaults.

Fourthly, Elton appeared as a session musician, on both piano and/or vocals, on many other records. Notable chart successes included backing vocals on Tom Jones' Delilah (No. 2, 2/68) and Daughter Of Darkness (No. 5, 4/70), plus piano on The Barron Knights' An Olympic Record (No. 35, 10/68), Family Dogg's A Way Of Life (No. 6, 5/69); The Hollies' He Ain't Heavy, He's My Brother (No. 3, 9/69) and The Scaffold's Gin Gan Goolie (No. 38, l0/ 69).

Finally, there were the "anonymous cover versions" as found on this CD. Elton must have felt a certain sense of irony as he recorded at least a couple of the cover versions on this disc. He will certainly have had no trouble reproducing the piano lines on the cover of The Hollies' I Can't Tell The Bottom From The Top, as he'd actually played on the original single in the first place! While it's not confirmed that he played on the Brotherhood Of Man's United We Stand single (although he did do the original demo), he definitely appeared with them as part of the backing chorus on their "Top Of The Pops" TV spot. And with his former associations with Rogers Cook and Greenaway (who were amongst the first to encourage him in his career), he may well have featured on Blue Mink's original Good Morning Freedom as well.

Quite simply, Elton John found his vocation in the studio and in one way or another recorded more tracks in three years than most acts manage in a whole career. Recording is simply "what Elton did" for a living. A few extra cover versions taking three hours from start to finish was all in a day's work, and hardly a big deal.

There is a third (and possibly most likely) reason for Elton's continuing presence in the cover versions world: he simply enjoyed doing it. Basically, Elton loved (and still does love) his job. He had found his life's work, and lapped up anything that came his way. His vocals on these sessions would seem to prove this theory, and as he had no other direct responsibility for the success of the project, why shouldn't he have enjoyed himself? He'd always wanted to be a singer, and surely this was a (relatively) lucrative way of practising one's chops in various styles. Let's be honest: there is no way he would have carried on doing these sessions at this stage in his career if he hadn't actively wanted to, simply because they were fun.

The sessions were run on a tight budget, but despite having the pressure of exactly reproducing a hit record in three hours, several ex-sessioneers have described the sessions as relaxed and fun to do. One gets the idea that while the sessioneers did a professional job, and probably took a certain amount of pride in their achievements, they did not take the projects entirely seriously, able to put the recording behind them after the three hours were up. This is backed up by an interview with the late David Byron, Uriah Heep's vocalist, who also spent his early days on these cover version sessions. "It was just a once the month thing," he told Paul Gambachini in 1976. "They made twelve cover versions (in a session). I think I started late '67. At that time there was a guy called Peter Lee Sterling did all the lead vocals, who is now Daniel Boone, and there was some argument after about a year and Peter left and we started doing it at Pye… and a bunch of singers came down one day to do backing vocals, Perry Ford was one of them, Russ Stone who'd just had a hit record (We Do It, rpm ed), and people like that, and Elton John. We just developed a rough sort of friendship on this once or twice a month basis, we all sort of got together and did all the vocals. I generally did all the lead vocals, and then he (Elton) and Perry and used to do all the backing vocals, and occasionally he did a lead vocals. He didn't think he could sing to save his life, but I thought he was alright."

In the biography The Many Lives Of Elton John, Elton's friend Lesley Duncan recalls that "if a big ensemble was needed for any sessions, Reg would be there. He had a zany sense of humor, and we all laughed a lot."

Conversely, Philip Norman's description of events not only places far too much seriousness on the recordings, but is also completely inaccurate:

"We find [Elton] in another low-rent studio, trying to forget he is Elton John or ever possessed style or material of his own. Shutting his eyes like a heritic under torture, he swallows his natural voice and pulls down the shutter in his throat. From his grimacing lips there emerges a thin, reedy note, filled with the tremulous angst of a pullet about to have its neck wrung. All present agree it to be horrendously like Robin Gibb of The Bee Gees."

A quick listen to any of the tracks on this CD will confirm that at no time did Elton John forget who he was; as I said before, his own individual style is stamped on every track. And I imagine that he was quite proud of his Robin Gibb impersonation!

It is known that Elton played piano on several of these sessions as well as providing vocals, although of course this is harder to identify. Several tracks would seem to feature his distinctive style, of which it has been said to have been more than heavily influenced by Leon Russell, at his peak with Joe Cocker's Mad Dogs And Englishmen around this time. (Elton has been quoted as saying Russell was like a god to him at one time, and when he was seen in the audience at an Elton John show later, Elton was very worried about his performance. The two did later meet up, and to Elton's relief Russell was very approving indeed). It would seem more than likely that if he was booked as vocalist, he will also have been the featured keyboard player.

Whether Elton actually liked any of the songs featured on this disc (the Stevie Wonder was a cert and the two CCR tracks seem likely), it didn't stop him from putting in a spirited performance on each. Either way, the public liked them: only three songs on this CD (surprisingly including Stevie Wonder's Signed, Sealed Delivered) had failed to reach the UK Top 10.

The tracks here appeared on a variety of labels, from the well-known Music For Pleasure, Hallmark and Marble Arch to the more obscure North East London independent labels Deacon, Boulevard and Avenue. Marble Arch was Pye's budget label: it has been suggested that Boulevard and Avenue were also part of the Pye Group (the road imagery would seem to confirm this!) which is possibly why tracks moved from label to label. (In case you're wondering where Deacon fits into that scheme, it could have been named after the Deacon Industrial Estate in the same northeast London area where the other labels were based!) The tracks were recorded by several companies, many independent, and mostly done at Pye Studios, one of Britain's top studios of the time (again, Philip Norman is wrong to call the studio "low-rent"). Recordings would then be licensed out several times to different labels, sometimes with a different lead or backing vocal, but all using the same backing track. Signed, Sealed Delivered is known to have appeared on at least six albums!

Even Elton himself probably can't tell you how many tracks he appeared on during this period. Collectors have located about 7 tracks not on this CD featuring him on lead vocals, but there are many more where he appears as backing vocalist and possibly pianist. Quotes from Elton himself on the recordings are thin on the ground, but - talking to Paul Gambachini - he did mention them in an interview in 1976. "I really enjoyed doing them, they were really very well made records, in fact some of them I think the backing tracks were excellent, and David Byron, he used to do most of the singing on these, and Dana Gillespie used to do more of the girl ones, and I was occasionally allowed to do one or two… I did Signed, Sealed Delivered...". However, nobody has yet turned up a copy of the Norman-mentioned Saved By The Bell Bee Gees' cover, which Elton claimed he recorded for a Dutch company. He even demonstrated to Paul Gambachini how he did this. Holding his neck to make his vocal chords swell - hey presto, after six takes a perfect Robin Gibb! (Saved By The Bell was no. 1 in Holland at the time, hence the request for it to be covered).

Meanwhile, Piano Plays Pop is a vitally important CD, conversely made up from recordings that in themselves (especially at the time) couldn't be less important. As John F Higgins says, "By picking up this item and reading the cover, you already know more about the contents than the people who originally purchased these tracks did twenty odd years ago. You know that the singer of these songs is Elton John." It is a serious release of recordings from a genre that couldn't have been less serious. It is certainly the first of its kind, and therefore a law unto itself. You can make of it what you will (Quite what Oxfam may make of hoards of collectors descending on their shops snapping these old albums up is another matter!).

You don't need the originals of these tracks to enjoy the disc to the full, although it makes it kind of fun if you do remember them (can YOU tell the difference?!). But away from the originals, Piano Plays Pop stands up in its own right, both musically and as a pretty definitive roundup of an interesting footnote in the history of Britain's biggest superstar. I don't suppose he'll lose any sleep over it. He certainly has nothing to be ashamed of.

Tim Joseph
October 1994

Additional sources:

• Philip Norman: "Elton" (Hutchinson, 1991)
• Susan Crimp & Patricia Burstein: "The Many Lives Of Elton John" (Hale, 1992)
• Alan Finch/Chris Charlesworth: "Only The Piano Player: An Illustrated Discography" (Omnibus, 1983)
• John Higgins: feature writer for East End Lights.

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