April 14 – Elton’s Alias Band Was As Big As Him

A song about a fictitious super band vaulted a real-life superstar to the top this week in 1974. “Bennie and the Jets” by Elton John got to #1 on Billboard, his second song to do so in the U.S. It also got to #1 in Canada simultaneously, making it his fourth chart-topper there.

It was the third single of his great double-album Goodbye Yellow Brick Road... but it almost wasn’t. Elton didn’t like the song all that much, and didn’t think it was “single” material. MCA disagreed, in North America at least. “The American record company kept pushing me to release ‘Bennie and the Jets’ as a single and I fought them tooth and nail. It’s such an odd song,” he wrote in his memoir. We’re glad they did. When a Windsor, Ontario radio station started playing it heavily early in ’74, it was wildly popular, and what’s more, soon got to #1 across the river in Detroit. If a blue-collar Canadian city and the home of Motown both loved the song, the label knew they had a hit on their hands. Not only did the song top sales charts, it also got into the top 20 on what was called the “Black Music” chart, traditionally dominated by Motown artists, and got Elton invited onto Soul Train. As such, he was only the third White artist to appear on it (trivia answer- Canada’s Gino Vannelli and a rock guitarist called Dennis Coffey were the pair who preceded him.) In his native Britain however, it was considered the B-side to the single “Candle in the Wind,” which hit #11, but of course would be extraordinarily popular when re-recorded in 1997 as a tribute to Lady Diana.

The song lyrics were created by Bernie Taupin, about a rock band he saw in his mind as looking rather like the backing musicians on Robert Palmer videos of the ’80s… look alike, emotionless females. He said it was a “satire on the music industry of the ’70s… the greed and the glitz.” He thought it rather “Orwellian.” Guitarist Davey Johnstone said it was “one of the oddest songs we ever recorded. We just sat back and said ‘this is really odd.’” when it was recorded, producer Gus Dudgeon thought it still was just a bit lacking. So he came up with the idea of making the studio track “live”, and added some reverb to it and went back to concert tapes from Elton shows, from which he drew the applause and whistling you hear on the single.Within two years the single alone had sold 2.8 million copies in the States, making it double platinum … one of four of his that sold to at least that level in the ’70s alone. It also helped Goodbye Yellow Brick Road go 8X platinum and eventually sell 30 million copies worldwide, and of course, remains one of the signature tunes for Elton to this day.