Throwing Yellow Bricks Through Emerald Houses

In the decades most expansive musical year - full to the brim with essential debuts, definitive releases, and in some cases swan songs - one album stood above the rest in 1973 and still does fifty years later: Elton John’s seventeen-song masterpiece Goodbye Yellow Brick Road.

It was the words of [arguably] the greatest rock critic to do it, Lester Bangs wrote “Every great piece of art has two faces: one towards its own time and one toward the future. One toward eternity.” I think many albums have accomplished this feat, but none quite as well as Goodbye Yellow Brick Road exemplifies these two faces. The album works on the delicate balance of living in the past yet never becoming trapped by it. It sounds fresh, its theming and importance to art still current despite its age. If it was the album's accomplishment in 1973 to prove Elton John as one of the most important artists of the twentieth century, its accomplishment now is to make sure the status of Elton John and Bernie Taupin is forever solidified in music history as two of the greatest to ever do it. It once was a piece that held a mirror to the society that was seen, now stands proudly on the opposite side, with one still in hand. The cover of Elton walking towards the idealized society, into a world where films and music are a backdrop of protection, exemplifies the album then and now.

We are entering a world that is lyricist Bernie Taupin’s ode to nostalgia. Bernie has created a career off of this feeling, this longing for pasts that sometimes weren’t even his. I mean, he wrote Skyline Pigeon at 19, he was writing pieces as complex as The Greatest Discovery at 15. His work is all in homage to those who have inspired him, his whole career a mod podge of genres and topics. With Goodbye Yellow Brick Road he stuck to a theme, albeit a loose one. The album is dipping with nostalgia from every corner, each side introducing a new kind it feels.

Goodbye Yellow Brick Road is my favorite album. I truly do believe it to be a masterpiece over all else released up to this point [and most likely after, sorry to the future of music but I am firmly in alliance with Goodbye Yellow Brick Road], and I stand by it being the magnum opus of Elton John [my favorite artist]. As it seems, I’m so clearly biased it seems as though the opening of this piece is just a bypass of that bias, but it’s not and here’s why: Goodbye Yellow Brick Road is the definitive album for all of music due to its reliance on the past.

Side one consists of three songs: Funeral for a Friend/Love Lies Bleeding, Candle in the Wind, and Bennie and the Jets.

The six minute instrumental epic that starts the album was written by Elton, composing the music he’d idealistically like to play at his funeral. In the first, non-verbal minutes of the album we are already greeted by the idea of the past being celebrated, in this case the music of a funeral that celebrates a friend. Love Lies Bleeding is the second half of the song, a piece penned about a relationship that is fizzling due to a musician's life on the road. Bernie wrote it about his marriage, the tear between his dream and his love. My guitar couldn’t hold you so I split the band / love lies bleeding in my hands is the line that immediately follows I was playing rock and roll and you were just a fan. There’s a certain air of the past that chills you throughout the song, how the composer wishes that he could return to the days of having love and his music in harmony, but accepting those are just bygone days.

A romantic ballad about the passing of Marilyn Monroe is what follows the ten-minute opener. The song is a thoughtful piece about the woman behind the icon, and not given the credit it rightfully deserves for humanizing the pain Norma Jean Baker went through in the spotlight. I would’ve liked to known you / But I was just a kid / Your candle burned out long before your legend ever did is an autobiographical line of Bernie’s, similar to that of Goodbye Norma Jean / From the young man in the twenty-second row / Who sees you as something more than sexual / More than just our Maryiln Monroe. The song was penned to show the horrors of fame that were just beginning to reveal themselves to Bernie in their full scale, a fear he spoke about many times, both musically and through other avenues. He saw the path of most of the superstars, and could only do what he knew how to warn about it: write. Bernie was able to remain more unscathed by success than Elton, be that due to his position off stage or his view into his potential future we may not know, but this song taps into these fears. It tugs on heartstrings of those who loved Marilyn like him, using nostalgia once more to mask his deeper meaning within his words of the correlation between success and tragedy.

Side one closes with Bennie and the Jets, a song about an imaginary pop group. You could take Bernie’s made up piece at face value, an album about the past so he would add a modern song just to spice it up, or you could think about Bernie and realize he’s about as subtle as a clown car when actually being listened to. The song is most likely a piece that would call attention to a ‘Beatlemania’-like response to music without calling upon real bands and artists. You’re gonna hear electric music / Solid walls of sound in reference to Dylan going electric and Spector’s ‘Wall of Sound’, Maybe they’re blinded / But Bennie makes them ageless about the timelessness of music coming of the 1960s in which many of the record buying public at the time had grown up on, You Know I read it in a magazine a blunt call towards how music journalism and it’s obsession with glam was taking over all that was. Bernie is pretty smart, you learn. Even a piece as simple as Bennie could warrant a whole analysis in and of itself of its cultural meaning.

Side two gets a bit more out there: we have the title track, This Song has No Title, Grey Seal, Jamaica Jerk-Off, and I’ve Seen that Movie Too.

Goodbye Yellow Brick Road is my favorite song of all time, so this one will be long. Bernie’s original reasoning behind writing the song was him longing to go back to familiarity that he had his whole life before fame came into the picture. I should have stayed on the farm / I should have listened to my old man is the first line in the song that isn’t the narrator asking a rhetorical question to the disembodied evil he speaks too. This is also the most transparent Bernie gets on the album about his disapproval of fame and what he thinks it’ll do to him if he goes far enough into its trappings. The song is a running reference to The Wizard of Oz, using it as a motif of longing for home in a strange and otherworldly situation. By the second verse Bernie drops the fantasy a bit, What do you think you’ll do then? / I bet they’ll shoot down your plane / It’ll take you a couple of vodka and tonics to set you on your feet again. There’s a grit to these lines, references of death and alcohol skewing away from the fantasy Bernie is referencing. Maybe you’ll get a replacement / There’s plenty like me to be found is often attributed to be about Elton not wanting to give up fame the way Bernie wanted to. Whilst Bernie loved being a writer and working with Elton, he got disillusioned by the practice once it became bigger than just the two of them. What marked the beginning of them to the world is what marked the end for Bernie at the time, and he translated this pain towards his work. The song uses as many indirect references to its plot it can without being direct, the Oz-motif and never fully divulging into what exactly happened to that plane being the most obvious. The reference to alcohol being the only way to make the road easier to travel isn't so subtle, but it's masked by the composer. The song was composed and sung without as much angst on Elton’s side, he added a melancholic nature to the song, opening the possibility of the song marking the escape as a positive thing as opposed to a negative thing. That’s the beauty of it, it can mean whatever it needs to to whoever needs it. Elton and Bernie took the song in two different directions, and still made a cohesive piece that speaks to the complexity of human emotions and the trappings of the past that keep us connected. A song about what Bernie viewed as the end, something he filled with more allusions than any other piece on the record, was a song that Elton took and made an uplifting piece about freeing yourself from whatever it is that binds you. Accidentally they showed the human experience, and made something pretty damn great out of it.

This Song Has No Title is a lighter piece than its predecessor, the carrying theme being that of wanting to drop youth to experience life to fullest, Tune me into the wild side of life / I’m an innocent child, sharp as a knife. Bernie still knifes the listener with realism though, tracing a line between growing up and understanding that the real world is a place full of deceit and that to light coloured candles in dark dreary mines is to shed the innocence that has protected you most of your life. My favorite line in the song is found in the second verse: If I was an artist who paints with his eyes / I’d study my subject and silently cry / Cry for the darkness to come down on me / For confusion to carry on turning the wheel, which seems to be a subtle jab at the idea the best art is made by the people in the most pain, the tortured artist trope. Bernie writes on the trope again, expanding on it more in 1984’s Sad Songs (Say So Much). This could also be in reference to Pablo Picasso’s death earlier that year, how his best work was of his Blue period, one marked by his depression. It's ironic though, as looking over the piece Bernie is the exact artist he writes of: tortured. He's tortured by fame, by his inability to escape, by near everything. This album wouldn't exist if Bernie wasn't in the least bit tortured by fame or past.

Grey Seal was written by Elton and Bernie in 1970, and is mostly a nonsensical piece. At the time of the song's writing, the species was endangered, soon to be a relic of the past, tying the song into the theming of the album. On the big screen they showed us the sun / But not as bright as the real one / Never quite the same as the real one is another bitter line directed towards fantasy, showcasing the resentment felt by the lies they were told about how life “really was”.

The next song is just… so out of place in the album. I have next to nothing to add or say about it despite how it references popular 1960s dances in Latin cultures. You could also add a tid-bit about it being a knock off Ob-La-Di, Ob-La-Da, calling back to the inspiration drawn by many 60s acts from Latin and African cultures. The album was originally supposed to be recorded in Jamaica, as Elton was eager to lift what The Rolling Stones had done for their ‘73 album Goats Head Soup, so in a way it could fall as another homage to Elton and Bernie’s influences, and their influences’ influences.

I’ve Seen That Movie Too is an interesting piece. The working titles of Goodbye Yellow Brick Road were Vodka and Tonics and Silent Movies, Talking Pictures, both leaning into two of the albums themes more than its chosen name, this song leaning more into the second, obviously. The song is about heartbreak, the idea being that of it is not being surprising for someone who understands the all the tired lines they're being fed. The song also acts as a sister song to the title track, the song carrying similar ideas of leaving behind a life you were sucked into by false promises, yet comes across a lot more aggressive than the other. The ones who are acting surprised / Saying love is just a four-letter word is a reference for a song that Bob Dylan penned in 1964 for Joan Baez, a song with a similar lyrical meaning as the one here. The song has a dramatic composition, like the score of an Old Hollywood film, adding emphasis towards Bernie’s references to the same pieces. Nostalgia is powerful, that’s the idea of the album, yet it seems perfectly summed up in this song: the idea that it can save you from the same pain it can trap you in.

The irony here is that Bernie isn’t trapped by nostalgia. Halfway through the album you can sense this, even if his writing often almost feels like his release from these ideas, that if doesn’t write he will get stuck in the glue trap many often do. Similar to he who lives within Goodbye Yellow Brick Road and I’ve Seen That Movie Too, Bernie doesn’t allow the past to be his future. He traces it back to understand how and what will happen, learning from those who never did, letting nosiliga work with as opposed to against him. His work frames the past, it doesn’t live there. This album is his best showcase of his understanding, something that has yet to leave his work.

The next set of songs is Sweet Painted Lady, The Ballad of Danny Bailey, Dirty Little Girl, and All the Girls Love Alice.

I genuinely believe Sweet Painted Lady is one of the greatest songs ever written, even if I don’t think it even hits the top five best written on this album [a testament to this album and the two behind it]. It’s beautiful, a peaceful sounding song about… sailors and prostitution. The song is from the perspective of a man who thinks he does women in this line of work a service by sleeping with them and getting them off the road for a night, though you can see the cultural awareness of Bernie seeping through the lines, the pre-chorus being that of My sweet painted lady / The one with no name / Many have used her / And many still do, followed by the chorus of Seems it's always been the same / Getting paid for being laid / Guess that’s the name of the game. It’s sympathetic towards these women, taking inspiration from two famous women of English song: Lady Madonna and Maggie Mae. Lady Madonna is the protagonist of Paul McCartney’s landmark 1968 Beatles composition of the same name, a song that explores a week in the life of the titular woman whose only means of paying to stay alive for her children is through prostitution. The song was unlike anything quite before it, taking the taboo topics of both the neglectful state that becomes a single mother by society and that of prostitution as a means to “make ends meet”, something echoed by Bernie here whilst he pays tribute to the Liverpuddian folk song entitled Maggie Mae. Maggie has more well known references amongst English singer-songwriters of the 1970s, be that her retelling by The Beatles on Let it Be in 1970, or the name lift of her for Rod Stewart’s mega breakthrough song of the same name [though he did change the spelling: Mae became the more well known May] in 1971, but it’s here she’s morphed into a backdrop. The folktale of Maggie Mae is she was a prostitute who, after she slept with them, would steal from unsuspecting sailors who would port in Liverpool [this is where the cleverness of the name comes for Stewart, if you actually listen to his lyric]. Bernie took the prostitution, sailors, and stealing plot from the tale, twisting the story into a modern yet timeless story of how women are consistently and almost exclusively stuck as being seen as objects for clueless mens’ affection. The fact that Bernie could write such a beautiful story of prostitution is beyond me, but the harvest of his musical crop is some of his best.

Bernard John Taupin is a cowboy, dawning the moniker of The Brown Dirt Cowboy during the late 70s [and picking it up again in 2006 when he became The Kid once more], and just generally being English songwritings resident cowboy historian. You had the entire Tumbleweed Connection album in 1970, an album that listens like the soundtrack to the best western never made, or 1975’s heartbreaking I Feel Like A Bullet (In the Gun of Robert Ford), or even 1973’s very own Texan Love Song. Combine all those, along with his questionable insistence on wearing chaps and you have Lincolnshire’s best cowboy-wannabe. Danny Bailey is a made up character, one seemingly out of one of the movies that would be referenced by the narrator of I’ve Seen That Movie Too, but draws a close resemblance to that of John Dillenger. Danny’s story holds a mirror to Bernie’s fears of fame and fortune, following the story of a guy whose hunger for notoriety got him a bullet through the heart in a motel lobby. Killed him in anger, a force he couldn't handle / Helped pull the trigger that cut short his life. While relying on the childlike wonder brought upon by hearing cowboy stories, Bernie tells a story that still mirrors the story of fame for many. In a similar vein to I'm Gonna Be A Teenage Idol, the main character is someone who ruins their life with little care due to the fact they see notoriety as better than anonymity. Born and raised a proper / I guess life just bugged him / He found faith in danger / A lifestyle he lived by / A running gun youngster at a sad lonely age. I don’t find Bernie’s use of cowboys here to be just to satisfy his own obsession, either. Often rock and roll stars were labeled as outlaws, the cowboys of the modern day in 1973. Blew in and out of towns, insatiable appetite for havoc and alcohol, a habit of shooting themselves with their own words.

Dirty Little Girl was my absolute least favorite Elton John song for a very long time, despite this being my favorite album of all time. I found the degrading lyrics to be so horrific I would actively pick the needle up to skip to the next song, as anything was better than suffering through hearing Someone grab that bitch by the ears / Rub her down / Scrub her down / Turn her inside out, naturally. Well, turns out so many others are so much worse that this one starts to look like a hymn in comparison. Looking at this song now, you have a clear romp on a Jagger/Richards composition. Degradation of women, dehumanization and blame, and all without mentioning the heavy guitar that starts off the song, that Honky Tonk Women-esque drum sound, and who could ever not see right through the loud, faux twangy sound Elton adds to his voice. Being more well versed in Stones music now, I can’t help but enjoy how faithful this song is to making fun of the band. It also, at least to me, helps put into perspective just how disgusting the music of The Stones and other bands of the time could be towards women, almost like Bernie knew placing lyrics like that in Elton’s mouth would make it more jarring as, ‘hey, why is sweet, soft-spoken Elton threatening to harm women?’ It showcases more than anything to me now just how powerful nosetalgia can be to some, that they can ignore the harm the lyrical content can have on others due to growing up on it.

Elton John history lesson: Elton didn’t have his first number one hit in his native England until 1976 [Don’t Go Breaking My Heart with Kiki Dee; His first solo number one was 1989’s Sacrifice]. Another history lesson is that homosexuality was declassified as a mental illness on the 15th of December 1973, roughly two months after the release of this album. Where am I even going with this? Two places. One: Elton was a hit in America, and Two: the declassification was done after the release of All the Girls Love Alice, so let’s talk about that. All the Girls Love Alice is a piece about a sixteen year old lesbian prostitute that gets murdered on the subway, and shockingly didn’t get Elton and Bernie banned for, well, everything about it. The song discusses the gay nightlife of England in the early 70s, something that had begun to peak its head more during the late 60s with the popularization of counterculture at the time, and Bernie even alludes to the desensitization of predatory lyrics by listeners by playing on one of The Beatles’ most infamous creepy contenders in the category She was just seventeen / You know what I mean [do we?] with the line What would you expect from a chick who's just sixteen? [good play by Bernard!], but neither of those are even the most layered reference to the past in the song. That I would give to the weight behind the sophomore line With a double-barrel name in the back of her brain / And a simple case of ‘Mummy doesn’t love me’ blues. “Double-barrel” is what is now coined as a hyphenated last name, oftentimes in the past used to make sure that if a woman came from an aristocratic families name wouldn’t be lost to time. The change from ‘double-barrel’ to hyphenated can most likely be attributed to making the choice seem more feminist in nature [keeping a womans last name] as opposed to coming from a history of weak chins. The song takes the role of explaining how Alices value, since birth, was determined by the wealth of man she married, but she doesn’t subscribe to that to well. This song speaks to the past in a different way that anything else on the album, showing how Alice ended up dead in an attempt to leave the trappings of her own.

The album ends with these five songs: Your Sister Can’t Twist (But She Can Rock ‘n’ Roll), Saturday Nights Alright (For Fighting), Roy Rogers, Social Disease, and Harmony.

Your Sister Can’t Twist is just about as old school rock and roll as it can get, relying on 50s tropes popularized by the likes of Chuck Berry, Elvis Presley, and Little Richard. The song leans into its genre, similarly to how Candle in the Wind leans into its 50s trappings, and true to form Bernie is candy-coating the death of the glory days. Throw away your records ‘cause the blues is dead / Let me take you honey where the scene is fire / And tonight, I learned for certain that the blues expired is the sum of Bernie’s message that Elton cleverly embedded in a whirlwind of rock ‘n’ roll's greatest hits. By 1973, the blues as they had been known was dying out. Rock ‘n’ Roll started in the 1950s due to the influence of all the great blues players [Robert Johnson, Lead Belly, Bessie Smith, Ma Rainey, the list is incredible], and it was that 50s rock and roll that helped 60s rock take off. By ‘73 however, it seemed as though the blues were done in popular music. The 60s-second generation blues artists were shambles: The Stones were still a blues band, but now buried under pounds of glitter, Jeff Beck couldn’t keep a band together long enough to ever popularized the genre as he once had [and was about to become the jazz fusion artist he was born to become, anyways], and even a band as obscure as Faces could be [one that was once said had the possibility to rival The Stones as England’s best blues band] was beginning to fracture under the massive weight of egos and divided loyalties, for all intents and purposes: the blues had died. Candy-coated nostalgia that once realized leaves a bitter taste, a Bernie Taupin classic.

Saturday Night is one of the few songs on the album that relies heavily on Bernie’s past for inspiration. The song was taken from nights when he was in his early teens, going around and witnessing barroom fights. The song is actually mostly lighthearted, seemingly a memory ramped up to a rock song, thrown in with lyrics about workism and its connection to alcoholism, and of course the revolt of the youth. It is a John and Taupin song after all, they really can’t just give you no food for thought, it would be a travesty to leave your head empty when you had two people with so much to say. Also worth the point to mention this yet another song that taps into the nostalgic sounds of bands such as The Who, early Led Zeppelin, so on and so forth, as well as bit of the 50s-esque instrumentation utilized on Your Sister Can’t Twist, and has Elton’s now patent Mick Jagger screams towards the end.

As discussed, Elton was always in the midst of a cowboy, so for a double album of songs all about reminiscing it could only make sense at the very least two were western set stories.

Roy Rogers is based on the western TV star of the same name, the story of escapism via television. Bernie has always used the term ‘cinematic’ to describe the Goodbye Yellow Brick Road album, consistent through the album being that of media of yesteryear. I’d liven the pace if I could / Oh, I’d rather have ham in my sandwich than cheese / But complaining wouldn’t do me no good following through what the title track started. The similarities, other than both sharing a name of famous media in Bernie’s past, are that of escapism. Goodbye Yellow Brick Road is about looking for an escape, Roy is about using television to accomplish that. The song feels like a dream, whilst maybe never living this exact experience its universal, showcasing the comfort of the known in the face of the unknown. There's also many references to growing up, how sometimes being forced to is what makes nostalgia all the more powerful: You just seem older than yesterday / And you're waiting for tomorrow to call ; Comic book characters never grow old / Evergreen heroes whose stories we're told. Bernie understands human complexity better than most writers would ever dream, and this is a great showcase of his talent in that field.

The ending of Roy Rogers plays right into the beginning of Social Disease. This song is the most hard to align song on the whole album, an amalgamation of every confusing turn Elton and Bernie send you down. The song showcases a narrator who is a raging alcoholic but can’t find much reason to care about the fact since it has yet to kill him in one way or another. One could assume this could be another warning from Bernie about what he saw fame doing to people's heads, placing this idea in their head that if they don’t kill themself doing it then nothing is wrong. In the same vein as the story of Danny Bailey, it can be assumed the bum at the center of this song is a mockup of the stereotypical rockstar of the time. Well I dress in rags, smell a lot, and have a real good time is a describing line that could fall into the laps of so many gracing the pages of teen magazines during the song's release. As opposed to Bernie basically scoring Elton out of social circles by being his normal, direct self, he seems to hide it behind the thin veil of fiction, a veil that let Bernie say just how he felt, telling all those who it applied to that they were, in his eyes, a social disease to be around.

The albums closer is one of the duos best: Harmony. Am I the only man you ever had? / Or am I just the last surviving friend that you know? The whole point Bernie tried to pull through this album was not letting yourself get sucked in by the familiarity the past tries to loop you in by, as it’ll almost always disappoint you. He pulls from every past he possibly can to tell one thing: nostalgia is a hell of a drug to get caught up in. Bernie said in just under and hour and twenty minutes, in seventeen different ways, that if you waste your time looking towards the past you might as well pull the learning experiences it’s littered with. A lyric in Harmony sums this idea up in five words: You’re not unlucky knowing me. For all the villainization it seems is done to songs, films, poems, and even Bernie himself of the yesteryear, it seems he's more so urging one to look closer at what exactly is being memorialized in the past. In 2023’s Scattershot, Bernie writes: “There is another saying [to be inscribed on his tombstone]: ‘those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it.’, something that sums up his work pretty well. In their common ying-yang ways, Elton and Bernie tag team the ideas of nostalgia, knowingly or not is yet to be determined. Elton typically hid Bernie’s lyrics in the perfect genre for each song, proving Bernie’s point that if you take the time to look over all of the work compiled, you may learn a thing or two about how nasty the past was and how to prevent these falls again. There's a layered, intensely intricate criticism of fame and the state of rock music at the time, too things that would prove to be huge to come in Elton’s story. All of this from a shy 26 year old pianist and his 23 year old cowboy-obsessed lyricist. Better yet? None of it was probably on purpose.

One of the glories of Elton John and Bernie Taupin is that never having written in the same room, there's no communication with how exactly a song should or shouldn’t go. For Elton to receive all of these lyrics from Bernie, pen compositions behind them that perfectly showcased what the lyrics have the capacity to mean, and better yet do that seventeen times near perfectly is wild. For as long as music may go on, there will never be quite a duo who can do what Elton and Bernie have done, not only here, but for the past fifty years. To put out a piece of work like this album and not even have it be your objective best is unheard of.

There is also something of note to add here: the end of Elton’s touring journey was earlier this year, in July. The tour was entitled, almost obviously, the Farewell Yellow Brick Road tour, connecting back to this album in its fiftieth year and its theme of learning and growth from the past. That is the legacy of this album. One of them at least. Goodbye Yellow Brick Road is the album that made Elton John. Synonymous with his name, his image, and his sound, this is the album that catapulted Elton into the stratosphere of pop culture, rock and roll infamy, and the hearts of millions of people. It’s what showcased to millions of people the wordsmith that's found within Bernie Taupin, and this was only the beginning of everything for them. All thanks to an album that by all intents and purposes should not work. Its dreary lyrically content, genre hopping, the seventeen song tracklist, and criticism of just what makes us revere it today are all the exact things that do not make a hit album, at least by 1973s’ standards. The album is an enigma, very similar to all the songs and people who compile to make it.

Happy golden anniversary to the album, the strangest, saddest, yet most beautifully written warning in all of music history. It’s been a hell of a fifty years trying to figure you out and it’ll be a hell of another fifty more to maybe even scratch the surface.

Listen to Goodbye Yellow Brick Road here: