Bernie Taupin and Elton John are one of the all-time great songwriting duos. Now Taupin shares the story of his life, loves, career, and, yes, Elton.
and embarked on a lifelong musical partnership, most of lyricist Taupin’s best-known works fit neatly on a single sheet of paper.
“I started writing it somewhat as an experiment,” Taupin says on a recent call from his home in the Santa Ynez Valley some 30 miles northwest of Santa Barbara. “I think it makes sense at this point in my life, the culmination of everything, you know,” Taupin says. “I mean, I’m sure I’m going to end up doing a few more things, but I think that the bulk of my history is behind me.”The legend of Elton and Bernie is well known. At 17, Taupin saw an ad in a music newspaper seeking songwriters at a record label and left his home in rural Lincolnshire for London, where John, 20, had responded to the same notice.
So what did he really want to write about? Let’s start with the lure of the American West and arriving in the wonderland of L.A. in 1970.Taupin writes that, as a child, he’d play games set in the mythic past of England, romantic tales of Old Europe that his well-educated mother and grandfather would tell him.
“The people that Marty Robbins was singing about on his album ‘Gunfighter Ballads and Trail Songs,’ those were the real deal,” he says. “The dust and the grit came through the vinyl grooves and captured my imagination. “The little details are sometimes more fascinating than the big picture, which is recounted time and time again,” Taupin says. “I tried to talk about the slightly smaller world and the real things that happened, as opposed to the major things that happened.“All my contemporaries that came here roughly at the same time, they’d seen all that on television, whether it was ’77 Sunset Strip’ or one of those detective television series based in L.A.,” Taupin says.
“Clearly though, in this travelogue, one character stands out,” Taupin writes. “He’s the most colorful, constant, and omnipresent.”“I wrote the truth,” Taupin says when asked how he balanced the disparate elements of his life – riding the rocket of success with John, living his own life, too – in the book.
“It would be pretty weird if we didn’t,” Taupin says of the different paths the two have followed. “We’re not going to buy houses next to each other like the Beatles in ‘Help.’ It would be ridiculous.”
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