The Doc the Original King of Pop Deserves

There’s a moment in “Elton John: Never Too Late,” a robustly satisfying and emotional documentary about the life and career of Elton John, that captures him, in a most revealing way, in his ’70s heyday.

It’s a clip from a television interview, in which Elton is explaining how he writes a song. The clip must be from 1971, and Elton, still looking like a puppy child, with rectangle-framed glasses and plenty of shaggy hair, sits at an upright piano and brings out a sheaf of lyrics — pages all written in longhand by his collaborator, Bernie Taupin. Elton wants to show us his method, so he talks about a song he just wrote, called “Tiny Dancer,” and finds the lyrics to it. He explains how he scanned through them and realized, when he saw the word “ballerina,” that it would have to be a slow-tempo song. He demonstrates how he kind of improvised the chords. And as he starts to sing along with them, he reveals how he let Taupin’s lyrics be the guide. It usually took him about 20 minutes to half an hour to write a song.

What strikes us, apart from the way Elton explains all this with no awareness that “Tiny Dancer” will ever strike the chord that it did, is that his method is so casual it seems literally effortless. He’s composing a song, but he’s really saying that the song just kind of…happened. And that speaks to the mystery of Elton John’s genius, as well as to the way pop music works, and especially to how it worked back then.

I’m not suggesting that everything was just “tossed off.” The great albums of the ’70s — Elton’s and those of many others (Steely Dan, Led Zeppelin, ABBA, Queen, you name it) — were marvels of composition and recording-studio craft. But Elton John, the grandest pop figure of his time, the original king of pop, had an extremely idiosyncratic career, because he was always breaking ground in ways that he never planned to. His songs poured out of him almost as if he had breathed them.  

In the late ’60s, he was a shy handsome young British man who lived to sing and play the piano, and for a while he penned songs for the likes of Tom Jones and Lulu. His partnership with Taupin was the definition of serendipity: Answering an ad in New Musical Express, he went into the offices of Liberty Records and met the A&R manager, who handed him an unopened envelope of Taupin’s lyrics.

The pair’s first album together, “Empty Sky” (1969), didn’t really go anywhere. But for their second album, “Elton John” (1970), Elton sought out the producer of what he thought was the best song going (David Bowie’s “Space Oddity”), and that was Gus Dudgeon, who would become to 1970s Elton what George Martin was to the Beatles. Dudgeon brought in the string arranger Paul Buckmaster and decided to record the album live, with Elton singing along with the orchestra — a technique that looks back to what Phil Spector did. The result was that early haunting version of the Elton sound.

Yet none of that could have prepared anyone for what happened when Elton performed his fabled three-night stint at the Troubadour in Los Angeles, a club that accommodated all of 250 people, on three hot August nights in 1970. The documentary includes footage of that legendary gig, which I’ve never seen before. Elton is bearded, looking different than he’s ever looked before or after, and he sounds transcendent. You can see why the audience of industry heavies was spellbound. (Later, in 2022, we see Elton revisit the Troubadour, and standing in the empty club he can’t believe how small it looks, and neither can we. It’s basically just…a bar.)

And none of that could have prepared anyone, even Elton himself, for what he then became onstage: a man who would play the piano, standing up, and shoot his legs behind him straight up into the air. It would be one thing if he were a naturally gymnastic performer, like Mick Jagger or Pink, but Elton, onstage, was a contradiction: a glam geek, clad in outfits no one had seen the likes of before, wearing his array of goggle glasses, strutting around onstage with the fervor of Freddie Mercury — but Elton, as he’s the first to say, had a doughy physique, and didn’t have rhythmic moves. He was like the ultimate awkward kid performing in spandex and feather boas in his bedroom.

Going into “Elton John: Never Too Late,” I’ll confess that I had a bit of a prejudice. I felt as if I’d heard the Elton John story, or at least the part where he becomes a running-on-empty cokehead and alcoholic, and is the biggest star in the world but miserable, and lets this all drag on for too many years to count, and is finally rescued by sobriety and love…I felt like Elton has told this story so often that I never needed to hear it again.

But “Never Too Late,” co-directed by R.J. Cutler (“The September Issue,” “Billie Eilish: The World’s a Little Blurry”) and David Furnish, who is Elton’s husband, sets what has become Elton’s living-fast-and-bottoming-out agony-of-fame mythology in the context of a highly detailed and archivally rich account of that period. So watching it, it means something again. We experience the staggering magnitude of stardom Elton achieved, the candy rapture of his music, right along with the anxiety and hollowness he was feeling, all of which comes across in hundreds of telling photographs and snippets of film footage, as well as extended excerpts from a taped interview that Elton did for a memoir decades ago. It all becomes fresh again.

Cutler and Furnish made the very smart decision to focus on Elton’s hottest glory days as an artist (1970-1975), culminating in the night in ’75 that he performed at Dodger Stadium in Los Angeles before 110,000 people. His special magic did a quick fade after that. I remember buying the album “Blue Moves,” in 1976, and though I kept playing “Sorry Seems to Be the Hardest Word,” I could just feel how Elton’s passion had leaked away. He composed a number of good songs in the years after that, but it would never be the same.

The film jumps back and forth between a chronicle of those insanely creative top-of-the-mountain glam years and Elton in 2022, during the last leg of his Farewell Yellow Brick Road tour, which culminates in his return to Dodger Stadium for his final concert in America. It may all sound a bit tidy, but the portrait of Sir Elton today — the astonishingly gracious gentleman he is, the family life he found — is revealing and moving. He and David Furnish have two sons, Zachary and Elijah, and you can see that he’s an incredibly warm and loving dad.

So devoted a figure is the born-again-Elton-as-family-man that he can speak of the ’70s days dismissively. He’ll say, “The only thing in my life at that point was work,” as if there aren’t a million 27-year-olds who might say the same thing, and as if his work — writing and performing songs as sublime as “Your Song” and “Amoreena” and “Philadelphia Freedom” and “Someone Saved My Life Tonight” and “Saturday Night’s Alright for Fighting” and “Grey Seal” (if you’ve never heard it, you must listen to the original 1969 version) — were merely “work” any more than Beethoven composing his symphonies was. Elton should really cut his younger self some slack.

Of course, the bad feelings are all tangled up with what was then his hidden sexuality. And it’s extraordinary, in the film, to hear the original tape recording of the 1976 Rolling Stone interview in which Elton revealed his bisexuality (and his loneliness). At the time, there was some public scoffing at the “bi” part — at the fact that Elton didn’t simply say he was gay. But when you hear the interview, and place it within what stars were revealing (or not) back then, its heroism stands tall. Looking back, Elton now says that it liberated him. It was the first step in his letting go of his demons. The second step, which didn’t happen for another 14 years, was his getting sober (in 1990).

There’s a complaint I sometimes have about music docs, and I really felt it this time. Some subjects all but demand to be explored by critical voices — cultural temperature takers who can tell us what it all means. In the ’70s, Elton John was such a giant of a musician that we needed to hear a discussion of the alchemy of his music, what was new about it, how it worked, how it changed the art form. The same is true, in a slightly less important way, about Elton’s over-the-top style, with everything he was expressing onstage. (In hindsight, he may have been the most out closeted queer person in the planet’s history.) With that kind of added color and insight, “Elton John: Never Too Late” could have been great instead of merely very good. That said, it’s a movie that does justice to Elton John and to what he brought into the world: a joy no other pop musician ever topped.