Elton John Rock's Captain Fantastic

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During those months, Elton spotted an ad in a trade paper, placed by a record-company executive who asked artists and composers to send samples of their work by mail. The executive matched some music written by Elton with lyrics Taupin had sent in. He introduced them, but then decided not to hire the team he had created.

No matter. Elton and Bernie recognized at once that each could do what the other could not. They bought a bunk bed and rented digs together in Islington, a grimy section of North London, where they perfected remarkably friction-free methods of collaborating. "It's so simple," says Taupin. "Bernie writes lyrics. Bernie gives lyrics to Elton. Elton writes a song. And plays it back to Bernie. It sounds cold, but it's not." It takes Bernie only an hour to write the words and Elton about half that time to set them to music. Though they may throw away, they never revise.

While others climb, reaching dizzy

heights, The world's in front of me in black

and white, I'm on the bottom line, I'm on the

bottom line.

So it must have seemed to Elton and Bernie. Their system just was not working. Recalls DJM Record Executive Dick James, who became their patron: "They had no sense of what was commercial and were terrible at writing for other people." It was James who made the key observation in their young lives, namely that "no one could sing Elton's songs like he could." So he gave them £20 a week, plus a little more to replace his presumptive star's ripped jeans, and sent him forth to conquer first Scotland, then the world.

As the lyrics of Captain Fantastic make clear, the "long and lonely climb" seemed to stretch before Elton forever. Actually, only 36 months lay between his first meeting with Bernie and an August 1970 date at the Troubadour club in Los Angeles, where he won a tough record-industry audience with his showmanship. Says MCA Records President John Maitland: "It was one of the most spectacular openings for an unknown artist I've ever seen."

Saved in time, thank God my music's still alive.

The rescue referred to in that lyric occurred a couple of years before superstardom descended on Elton John, and the disaster he was saved from was marriage to a 6-ft. 2-in. girl named Linda. He had been smitten by her when she came to a Christmas Eve bash he was playing with the Baldry band. Terribly insecure then (and now) around women, he may have been encouraged to unwonted boldness by the fact that her escort on that occasion was a midget. In any event, by the following summer she was sharing a pad with Elton and Bernie. Elton was miserably going ahead with plans to marry her, despite the fact that "she hated my music. Everything I'd write she'd put down. Her favorite record was actually Buddy Greco singing The Lady Is a Tramp."

It was not exactly a match made in heaven. Still, when the pair broke up shortly before the wedding day, Elton was benefit. "I tried to commit suicide. It was a very Woody Allen type suicide. I turned on the gas and left all the windows open." He has remained "wary of up-front women getting to know me." There have been very few women in the Elton entourage since.