Captain Fantastic by Tom Doyle

Author:Tom Doyle
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Random House Publishing Group
Published: 2017-03-20T16:00:00+00:00

Elton venturing further and further out there with the ludicrously extravagant costumes while on tour in Australia in 1974.

HE WAS WANDERING past a table at the back of the studio when he noticed there was a line of white powder on top of it. Elton was still so inexperienced when it came to drugs, he really wasn’t sure it was what he suspected it might be. He asked John Reid, “What on earth is that?” Reid told him it was cocaine. Elton figured he might as well take a little sniff.

He had started drinking more because it loosened him up, made him feel safer, more secure. Everyone else was taking drugs, and to his mind, he was the outsider. He didn’t smoke, so he couldn’t share with them even a puff on a joint. He was sick of missing out on all the action.

That first line of coke broke down all of his remaining barriers. It made him chatty chatty chatty. He could really start communicating now.

It felt slightly dangerous, too, and he was sick of being a goody-goody.

More important, Elton thought the fact that he could now snort away with the others made him finally accepted by them. All of a sudden, he was in with the in crowd. He was part of the Class A crew. He’d finally arrived.

“I did get into drugs ’cause I wanted to join the gang,” he admits. “My band were doing drugs so far ahead. I was so naive.”

It was January 1974 and Elton and the others were high—and getting higher still—in the Colorado Rockies at the remote studio location of the Caribou Ranch. Back in the first week of September ’73, when he’d been playing nearby at the Coliseum in Denver, he’d gone up to the ranch to check out the studio, which its owner, Jim Guercio, producer of the band Chicago, had opened the year before. Elton liked some of the records that had already been made there: the heavy blues and alien talk-box vocal sounds of Joe Walsh’s “Rocky Mountain Way” (from his vividly titled 1973 album The Smoker You Drink, the Player You Get), the head-nod groove of Rick Derringer’s “Rock and Roll, Hoochie Koo.”

Caribou was tough to get to, which was one of its main attractions. From Denver, you drove the thirty-five miles to Boulder in the foothills of the Rockies. Then you took the Boulder Canyon road, slowly ascending almost three thousand feet on the winding route to Nederland. Nine miles on, you passed through the gates of the ranch, set within four thousand acres of mountain land, motoring along another two and a half miles of driveway before you finally reached its doors.

The setup was rustic but lush, with a series of cabins dotted around the building that housed the studio. But life on the ranch, particularly in winter, often caused an extreme climate shock to visiting bands, when the snow was two feet deep and sixty-mile-an-hour winds were whipping it around. Recreation for the hardy might involve scooting around on a convoy of snowmobiles.

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