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Goodbye Yellow Brick Rd
__________________________________________________
To download this album via iTunes, click here:
To buy this album from Amazon.com, click here: Goodbye Yellow Brick Road
__________________________________________________
Elton John
Goodbye Yellow Brick Road
Rocket Records
314-528 159-2
__________________________________________________
1. Funeral For A Friend
(Love Lies Bleeding) 11:08
ELTON – Piano
DEE – Bass and Backing Vocals
DAVEY – Electric Guitar and Backing Vocals
NIGEL – Drums and Backing Vocals
DAVID HENTSCHEL – A.R.P. Synthesizer
2. Candle In The Wind 3:50
ELTON – Piano
DEE – Bass and Backing Vocals
DAVEY – Electric Guitar and Backing Vocals
NIGEL – Drums and Backing Vocals
3. Bennie And The Jets 5:23
ELTON – Piano
DEE – Bass
DAVEY – Acoustic and Electric Guitars
NIGEL – Drums
4. Goodbye Yellow Brick Road 3:14
ELTON – Piano
DEE – Bass and Backing Vocals
DAVEY – Leslie Guitar and Backing Vocals
NIGEL – Drums and Backing Vocals
DEL NEWMAN – Orchestral Arrangement
5. This Song Has No Title 2:23
ELTON – Farfisa Organ, Electric Piano, Mellotron and Piano
6. Grey Seal 3:58
ELTON – Piano, Mellotron and Electric Piano
DEE – Bass
DAVEY – Electric Guitar
NIGEL – Drums and Congas
7. Jamaica Jerk-Off 3:39
ELTON – Organs
DEE – Bass
DAVEY – Electric Guitars
NIGEL – Drums
PRINCE RHINO – Vocal Interjections
(Written by Reggae Dwight and Toots Taupin)
8. I’ve Seen That Movie Too 5:59
ELTON – Piano
DEE – Bass
DAVEY – Acoustic and Electric Guitars
NIGEL – Drums
DEL NEWMAN – Orchestral Arrangement
9. Sweet Painted Lady 3:52
ELTON – Piano
DEE – Bass
DAVEY – Acoustic Guitar
NIGEL – Drums and Tambourine
DEL NEWMAN – Orchestral Arrangement
10. The Ballad Of Danny Bailey (1909 - 34) 4:24
ELTON – Piano
DEE – Bass and Backing Vocals
DAVEY – Electric Guitar and Backing Vocals
NIGEL – Drums and Backing Vocals
DEL NEWMAN – Orchestral Arrangement
11. Dirty Little Girl 5:01
ELTON – Leslie Piano and Mellotron
DEE – Bass
DAVEY –Electric Guitar
NIGEL – Drums
12. All The Girls Love Alice 5:08
ELTON – Piano
DEE – Bass
DAVEY – Electric Guitar
NIGEL – Drums
DAVID HENTSCHEL – A.R.P. Synthesizer
RAY COOPER – Tambourine
KIKI DEE – Backing Vocals
13. Your Sister Can’t Twist
(But She Can Rock ‘N’ Roll) 2:42
ELTON – Piano and Farfisa Organ
DEE – Bass and Backing Vocals
DAVEY – Electric and Slide Guitars and Backing Vocals
NIGEL – Drums and Backing Vocals
14. Saturday Night’s Alright For Fighting 4:54
ELTON – Piano
DEE – Bass
DAVEY – Electric Guitars
NIGEL – Drums
15. Roy Rogers 4:08
ELTON – Piano
DEE – Bass
DAVEY – Acoustic and Steel Guitars
NIGEL – Drums
DEL NEWMAN – Orchestral Arrangement
16. Social Disease 3:44
ELTON – Piano
DEE – Bass
DAVEY – Electric Guitar and Banjo
NIGEL – Drums
LEROY GOMEZ – Saxophone
17. Harmony 2:45
ELTON – Piano
DEE – Bass and Backing Vocals
DAVEY – Acoustic Guitar and Backing Vocals
NIGEL – Drums and Backing Vocals
DEL NEWMAN – Orchestral Arrangement
Lyrics by BERNIE TAUPIN
Produced by GUS DUDGEON
Orchestral Arrangements by DEL NEWMAN
Engineered by DAVID HENTSCHEL
Recorded at Strawberry Studios, France
(Assistant Engineer ANDY SCOTT)
Remixed at Trident Studios, London
(Assistant Engineer PETER KELSEY)
Coordinated by STEVE BROWN
Outside Cover Illustration by IAN BECK
Inside Cover Illustrations by DAVID LARKHAM & MICHAEL ROSS, except “Harmony” & “Saturday Night”, illustrated by DAVID SCUTT
Art Direction by DAVID LARKHAM & MICHAEL ROSS with thanks to DAVID COSTA
__________________________________________________
All titles written by Elton John and Bernie Taupin
All titles published by Dick James Music Ltd. (PRS) controlled in the U.S. and Canada by Songs of PolyGram International, Inc. (BMI)
__________________________________________________
‘Goodbye Yellow Brick Road’ was Elton John’s first double album, although it was not apparently originally planned as such; the recording sessions, which again took place at the Chateau d’Hierouville in France, were so productive and the results so impressive that even Elton himself, who was concerned that his fans might find the price of a double LP a bit steep, was finally convinced that releasing it in this form was the right thing to do. Even then, several extra tracks were recorded during, or very soon after, the album sessions, and these are included as bonus items on the remastered reissue of ‘Don’t Shoot Me, I’m Only The Piano Player’. ‘Jack Rabbit’ and ‘Whenever You’re Ready (We’ll Go Steady Again)’ were released with the ‘Saturday Night’s Alright For Fighting’ single, and ‘Screw You’ was the flipside of the ‘Goodbye Yellow Brick Road’ single (although it was retitled ‘Young Man Blues’ for delicate American palates).
Both ‘Honky Chateau’ and ‘Don’t Shoot Me, I’m Only The Piano Player’ had been recorded at the Chateau d’Hierouville, and the original plan for ‘Yellow Brick Road’ had been to record in an even more exotic location. As Elton recalled in the booklet which accompanied the ‘To Be Continued…’ boxed set: “I said ‘The Rolling Stones have just done ‘Goat’s Head Soup’ in Jamaica, let’s go there’. We arrived, I think, the day after the George Foreman-Joe Frazier fight, and the place was swarming with people. I was afraid to go out of the (hotel) room, because it was pretty funky in downtown Kingston, and most of those songs were written in two or three days in my hotel room on an electric piano. When we actually got into the studio, the only thing recorded was a really frantic version of ‘Saturday Night’s Alright For Fighting’; it sounded like it had been recorded on the worst transistor radio. We had so many problems with the studio…” Bernie Taupin confirmed: “If I remember rightly, the studio was surrounded by barbed wire and there were guys with machine guns”, and Elton continued: “After the playback, we panicked. We’d come all the way here at great expense – what are we going to do? Go back to The Chateau. The album itself was recorded in about 15 days. The Chateau wasn’t the most technically wonderful studio, but there was something magical about it. We used to record three, four, five tracks a day. ‘Saturday Night’s Alright For Fighting’ was the weirdest one. The only way we could record it in the end was for the band to play it and then I put the piano in and sang afterwards. The first time I’d ever recorded standing up, singing and leaping around the studio, going crazy. It was also hard because it’s not a typical piano number”.
‘Saturday Night’s Alright’ was the first track from these sessions to become a hit single, and it was an immediate success, peaking in the UK Top 10 and the US Top 20, which was unusual – Elton’s many successes during the 1970s were generally greater in America than in Britain, but one reason for this non-conformity might have been that the song was very English, and reflected Bernie Taupin’s teenage years in Lincolnshire. He is quoted in Philip Norman’s ‘Elton – The Definitive Biography’ as saying: “I’d started to feel I was writing too much about American culture and American things. ‘Saturday Night’ was my first attempt to write a rock‘n’roll song that was totally English”. Its Englishness was obviously mainly relating to the lyrics, but musically, it also sounds a little like The Rolling Stones, and has become a firm favourite as an onstage rave-up. The second single from the album, its title track, was also a UK Top 10 hit, and was played almost to death on American radio to the point where it just failed to become Elton’s second US Number One single of the year (after ‘Crocodile Rock’ from the ‘Don’t Shoot Me, I’m Only The Piano Player’ album), although it sold a million copies to earn Elton his second gold single. Obviously using the familiar imagery of the classic Judy Garland movie ‘The Wizard Of Oz’, the song was as much a lament as a celebration: by this time, Bernie Taupin had experienced the high life of which he had dreamed and seemingly found it less satisfactory than he had expected. This track remains a milestone in Elton’s career, complimented by Del Newman’s perfectly appropriate orchestral arrangement.
Neither of these major hits opened the album; the first track, ‘Funeral For A Friend’, was a striking instrumental, with engineer David Hentschel playing the synthesizer and Davey Johnstone’s guitar also prominent. There seem to be Wagnerian influences on this track similar to those which affected Jim Steinman when he was writing ‘Bat Out Of Hell’ a year or two later, and it is interesting to note that Davey Johnstone later played in Meatloaf’s backing band… After the lengthy instrumental, the second part of the 11 minute plus track is ‘Love Lies Bleeding’, a song apparently reflecting the end of a romance. Even stronger in commercial terms was the track which followed, ‘Candle In The Wind’, apparently a sensitive tribute to Marilyn Monroe. In the booklet with the ‘To Be Continued…’ boxed set, Elton suggests that it has replaced ‘Your Song’ as the most popular John/Taupin composition, although it was not one of the songs covered in the all-star ‘Two Rooms’ tribute project. The reason for this may be that it had been a hit for Elton twice – first in 1974, when it was a substantial UK hit, and again in 1987/8, when it was excerpted from the ‘Live In Australia’ album and reached the Top 10 on both sides of the Atlantic. Also in the ‘To Be Continued…’ booklet, Bernie Taupin reflected: “The ‘Candle In The Wind’ thing with Marilyn Monroe was blown out of proportion because it turned everyone into thinking I was this Marilyn fanatic, but it wasn’t necessarily a homage to her, it was more about misunderstanding, and I’ve said that song could have been about James Dean” (presumably rather than Norma Jean). It could also apply to erstwhile Fairport Convention vocalist Sandy Denny, who covered the song on one of her solo albums, before dying equally tragically in her early thirties in 1978.
If ‘Candle In The Wind’ was a notably compassionate song, ‘Bennie And The Jets’, which followed it on the ‘Yellow Brick Road’ album was pure fantasy – but it topped the US singles chart. A jerky rhythm accompanied the story of a fictional female rock star in a mohair suit and with “electric boots”. This was not released as the main side of a UK single until 1976, after Elton had left DJM Records, although it had been the flipside of ‘Candle In The Wind’ in 1973. In the US, where ‘Bennie And The Jets’ was frequently played on R&B radio, it was released instead of ‘Candle In The Wind’, and justified the faith shown in it by becoming Elton’s third million seller and his second gold single in six months. In the ‘To Be Continued…’ booklet, Elton confessed: “To this day, I don’t see that as a hit record. We decided to put it out because it was the Number One black record in Detroit. Being R&B lovers and big black music fans, that got to our ego; it was our first record that ever got in the R&B charts”.
Four major singles, but there was plenty more: the enigmatic ‘This Song Has No Title’ (by Elton on various keyboards without any other musicians) appears to be in the style of great American singer/songwriters like David Ackles or Randy Newman, while ‘Grey Seal’ seems rather reminiscent of Jimmy Webb’s work (although neither song is plagiaristic). Elton said: “‘Grey Seal’ is another (lyric I don’t really understand). Actually, it’s one of my favourite songs. Bernie hates that lyric, but I like it because of the mixture of music and lyrics which is kind of Procal Harum-ish absurd, like a Dali painting”. ‘Jamaica Jerk-Off’ is an amusing reggae pastiche which credits Reggae Dwight and Toots Taupin (Toots Hibbert & The Maytals were a notable reggae act of the 1970s), and ‘Your Sister Can’t Dance (But She Can Rock & Roll)’ was possibly yet another song which influenced Jim Steinman, this time when he wrote ‘Paradise By The Dashboard Light’, another track on Meat Loaf’s ‘Bat Out Of Hell’ album. There are many other notable songs on this album, but surprisingly, the only song from here included on the ‘Two Rooms’ tribute album was ‘Saturday Night’s Alright For Fighting’, which was covered by The Who, whose vocalist, Roger Daltrey, said that it was an obvious choice for his group to record.
‘Goodbye Yellow Brick Road’ topped the UK LP chart at the end of 1973, during a residency of 21 months, while it topped the US chart for two months of its almost two years in the ‘Billboard’ Top 200, and was a major achievement both artistically and commercially. It almost certainly qualifies for a multiple platinum award, but is only listed as gold because platinum awards were not introduced until 1976, three years after it was released
John Tobler, 1995
__________________________________________________
All the tapes used to create these new masters are the original mixes. However, due to the fact that many of the tapes are at least 25 years old, they have “softened up” to varying degrees. So, the sound has been passed through the most up to date digital processing equipment, at 20 Bit Resolution; namely The Sadie Digital System and Prism Super Noise Sharper. The effect is purely to “enhance” rather than “colour” the sound.
As the original producer, I would have used this equipment at the time, had it been available for mastering. The very nature of analog recordings being transferred to vinyl demanded major compromises. With the benefits of digital sound these constraints are removed, and the recordings can be heard much closer to the reproduction we had originally intended.
Gus Dudgeon
______________________________________________________________
314-528 159-2 © 1995 This Record Company Ltd. Printed in U.S.A.
Rocket Records, Manufactured and Marketed by Island Records, Inc.
825 Eighth Ave., NY, NY 10019
(P) 1973 This Record Company Ltd. © 1995 This Record Company Ltd.
All rights reserved. Printed in the U.S.A
Warning: Unauthorized reproduction of this recording is prohibited by Federal law and subject to criminal prosecution.
To download this album via iTunes, click here:
To buy this album from Amazon.com, click here: Goodbye Yellow Brick Road
__________________________________________________
Elton John
Goodbye Yellow Brick Road
Rocket Records
314-528 159-2
__________________________________________________
1. Funeral For A Friend
(Love Lies Bleeding) 11:08
ELTON – Piano
DEE – Bass and Backing Vocals
DAVEY – Electric Guitar and Backing Vocals
NIGEL – Drums and Backing Vocals
DAVID HENTSCHEL – A.R.P. Synthesizer
2. Candle In The Wind 3:50
ELTON – Piano
DEE – Bass and Backing Vocals
DAVEY – Electric Guitar and Backing Vocals
NIGEL – Drums and Backing Vocals
3. Bennie And The Jets 5:23
ELTON – Piano
DEE – Bass
DAVEY – Acoustic and Electric Guitars
NIGEL – Drums
4. Goodbye Yellow Brick Road 3:14
ELTON – Piano
DEE – Bass and Backing Vocals
DAVEY – Leslie Guitar and Backing Vocals
NIGEL – Drums and Backing Vocals
DEL NEWMAN – Orchestral Arrangement
5. This Song Has No Title 2:23
ELTON – Farfisa Organ, Electric Piano, Mellotron and Piano
6. Grey Seal 3:58
ELTON – Piano, Mellotron and Electric Piano
DEE – Bass
DAVEY – Electric Guitar
NIGEL – Drums and Congas
7. Jamaica Jerk-Off 3:39
ELTON – Organs
DEE – Bass
DAVEY – Electric Guitars
NIGEL – Drums
PRINCE RHINO – Vocal Interjections
(Written by Reggae Dwight and Toots Taupin)
8. I’ve Seen That Movie Too 5:59
ELTON – Piano
DEE – Bass
DAVEY – Acoustic and Electric Guitars
NIGEL – Drums
DEL NEWMAN – Orchestral Arrangement
9. Sweet Painted Lady 3:52
ELTON – Piano
DEE – Bass
DAVEY – Acoustic Guitar
NIGEL – Drums and Tambourine
DEL NEWMAN – Orchestral Arrangement
10. The Ballad Of Danny Bailey (1909 - 34) 4:24
ELTON – Piano
DEE – Bass and Backing Vocals
DAVEY – Electric Guitar and Backing Vocals
NIGEL – Drums and Backing Vocals
DEL NEWMAN – Orchestral Arrangement
11. Dirty Little Girl 5:01
ELTON – Leslie Piano and Mellotron
DEE – Bass
DAVEY –Electric Guitar
NIGEL – Drums
12. All The Girls Love Alice 5:08
ELTON – Piano
DEE – Bass
DAVEY – Electric Guitar
NIGEL – Drums
DAVID HENTSCHEL – A.R.P. Synthesizer
RAY COOPER – Tambourine
KIKI DEE – Backing Vocals
13. Your Sister Can’t Twist
(But She Can Rock ‘N’ Roll) 2:42
ELTON – Piano and Farfisa Organ
DEE – Bass and Backing Vocals
DAVEY – Electric and Slide Guitars and Backing Vocals
NIGEL – Drums and Backing Vocals
14. Saturday Night’s Alright For Fighting 4:54
ELTON – Piano
DEE – Bass
DAVEY – Electric Guitars
NIGEL – Drums
15. Roy Rogers 4:08
ELTON – Piano
DEE – Bass
DAVEY – Acoustic and Steel Guitars
NIGEL – Drums
DEL NEWMAN – Orchestral Arrangement
16. Social Disease 3:44
ELTON – Piano
DEE – Bass
DAVEY – Electric Guitar and Banjo
NIGEL – Drums
LEROY GOMEZ – Saxophone
17. Harmony 2:45
ELTON – Piano
DEE – Bass and Backing Vocals
DAVEY – Acoustic Guitar and Backing Vocals
NIGEL – Drums and Backing Vocals
DEL NEWMAN – Orchestral Arrangement
Lyrics by BERNIE TAUPIN
Produced by GUS DUDGEON
Orchestral Arrangements by DEL NEWMAN
Engineered by DAVID HENTSCHEL
Recorded at Strawberry Studios, France
(Assistant Engineer ANDY SCOTT)
Remixed at Trident Studios, London
(Assistant Engineer PETER KELSEY)
Coordinated by STEVE BROWN
Outside Cover Illustration by IAN BECK
Inside Cover Illustrations by DAVID LARKHAM & MICHAEL ROSS, except “Harmony” & “Saturday Night”, illustrated by DAVID SCUTT
Art Direction by DAVID LARKHAM & MICHAEL ROSS with thanks to DAVID COSTA
__________________________________________________
All titles written by Elton John and Bernie Taupin
All titles published by Dick James Music Ltd. (PRS) controlled in the U.S. and Canada by Songs of PolyGram International, Inc. (BMI)
__________________________________________________
‘Goodbye Yellow Brick Road’ was Elton John’s first double album, although it was not apparently originally planned as such; the recording sessions, which again took place at the Chateau d’Hierouville in France, were so productive and the results so impressive that even Elton himself, who was concerned that his fans might find the price of a double LP a bit steep, was finally convinced that releasing it in this form was the right thing to do. Even then, several extra tracks were recorded during, or very soon after, the album sessions, and these are included as bonus items on the remastered reissue of ‘Don’t Shoot Me, I’m Only The Piano Player’. ‘Jack Rabbit’ and ‘Whenever You’re Ready (We’ll Go Steady Again)’ were released with the ‘Saturday Night’s Alright For Fighting’ single, and ‘Screw You’ was the flipside of the ‘Goodbye Yellow Brick Road’ single (although it was retitled ‘Young Man Blues’ for delicate American palates).
Both ‘Honky Chateau’ and ‘Don’t Shoot Me, I’m Only The Piano Player’ had been recorded at the Chateau d’Hierouville, and the original plan for ‘Yellow Brick Road’ had been to record in an even more exotic location. As Elton recalled in the booklet which accompanied the ‘To Be Continued…’ boxed set: “I said ‘The Rolling Stones have just done ‘Goat’s Head Soup’ in Jamaica, let’s go there’. We arrived, I think, the day after the George Foreman-Joe Frazier fight, and the place was swarming with people. I was afraid to go out of the (hotel) room, because it was pretty funky in downtown Kingston, and most of those songs were written in two or three days in my hotel room on an electric piano. When we actually got into the studio, the only thing recorded was a really frantic version of ‘Saturday Night’s Alright For Fighting’; it sounded like it had been recorded on the worst transistor radio. We had so many problems with the studio…” Bernie Taupin confirmed: “If I remember rightly, the studio was surrounded by barbed wire and there were guys with machine guns”, and Elton continued: “After the playback, we panicked. We’d come all the way here at great expense – what are we going to do? Go back to The Chateau. The album itself was recorded in about 15 days. The Chateau wasn’t the most technically wonderful studio, but there was something magical about it. We used to record three, four, five tracks a day. ‘Saturday Night’s Alright For Fighting’ was the weirdest one. The only way we could record it in the end was for the band to play it and then I put the piano in and sang afterwards. The first time I’d ever recorded standing up, singing and leaping around the studio, going crazy. It was also hard because it’s not a typical piano number”.
‘Saturday Night’s Alright’ was the first track from these sessions to become a hit single, and it was an immediate success, peaking in the UK Top 10 and the US Top 20, which was unusual – Elton’s many successes during the 1970s were generally greater in America than in Britain, but one reason for this non-conformity might have been that the song was very English, and reflected Bernie Taupin’s teenage years in Lincolnshire. He is quoted in Philip Norman’s ‘Elton – The Definitive Biography’ as saying: “I’d started to feel I was writing too much about American culture and American things. ‘Saturday Night’ was my first attempt to write a rock‘n’roll song that was totally English”. Its Englishness was obviously mainly relating to the lyrics, but musically, it also sounds a little like The Rolling Stones, and has become a firm favourite as an onstage rave-up. The second single from the album, its title track, was also a UK Top 10 hit, and was played almost to death on American radio to the point where it just failed to become Elton’s second US Number One single of the year (after ‘Crocodile Rock’ from the ‘Don’t Shoot Me, I’m Only The Piano Player’ album), although it sold a million copies to earn Elton his second gold single. Obviously using the familiar imagery of the classic Judy Garland movie ‘The Wizard Of Oz’, the song was as much a lament as a celebration: by this time, Bernie Taupin had experienced the high life of which he had dreamed and seemingly found it less satisfactory than he had expected. This track remains a milestone in Elton’s career, complimented by Del Newman’s perfectly appropriate orchestral arrangement.
Neither of these major hits opened the album; the first track, ‘Funeral For A Friend’, was a striking instrumental, with engineer David Hentschel playing the synthesizer and Davey Johnstone’s guitar also prominent. There seem to be Wagnerian influences on this track similar to those which affected Jim Steinman when he was writing ‘Bat Out Of Hell’ a year or two later, and it is interesting to note that Davey Johnstone later played in Meatloaf’s backing band… After the lengthy instrumental, the second part of the 11 minute plus track is ‘Love Lies Bleeding’, a song apparently reflecting the end of a romance. Even stronger in commercial terms was the track which followed, ‘Candle In The Wind’, apparently a sensitive tribute to Marilyn Monroe. In the booklet with the ‘To Be Continued…’ boxed set, Elton suggests that it has replaced ‘Your Song’ as the most popular John/Taupin composition, although it was not one of the songs covered in the all-star ‘Two Rooms’ tribute project. The reason for this may be that it had been a hit for Elton twice – first in 1974, when it was a substantial UK hit, and again in 1987/8, when it was excerpted from the ‘Live In Australia’ album and reached the Top 10 on both sides of the Atlantic. Also in the ‘To Be Continued…’ booklet, Bernie Taupin reflected: “The ‘Candle In The Wind’ thing with Marilyn Monroe was blown out of proportion because it turned everyone into thinking I was this Marilyn fanatic, but it wasn’t necessarily a homage to her, it was more about misunderstanding, and I’ve said that song could have been about James Dean” (presumably rather than Norma Jean). It could also apply to erstwhile Fairport Convention vocalist Sandy Denny, who covered the song on one of her solo albums, before dying equally tragically in her early thirties in 1978.
If ‘Candle In The Wind’ was a notably compassionate song, ‘Bennie And The Jets’, which followed it on the ‘Yellow Brick Road’ album was pure fantasy – but it topped the US singles chart. A jerky rhythm accompanied the story of a fictional female rock star in a mohair suit and with “electric boots”. This was not released as the main side of a UK single until 1976, after Elton had left DJM Records, although it had been the flipside of ‘Candle In The Wind’ in 1973. In the US, where ‘Bennie And The Jets’ was frequently played on R&B radio, it was released instead of ‘Candle In The Wind’, and justified the faith shown in it by becoming Elton’s third million seller and his second gold single in six months. In the ‘To Be Continued…’ booklet, Elton confessed: “To this day, I don’t see that as a hit record. We decided to put it out because it was the Number One black record in Detroit. Being R&B lovers and big black music fans, that got to our ego; it was our first record that ever got in the R&B charts”.
Four major singles, but there was plenty more: the enigmatic ‘This Song Has No Title’ (by Elton on various keyboards without any other musicians) appears to be in the style of great American singer/songwriters like David Ackles or Randy Newman, while ‘Grey Seal’ seems rather reminiscent of Jimmy Webb’s work (although neither song is plagiaristic). Elton said: “‘Grey Seal’ is another (lyric I don’t really understand). Actually, it’s one of my favourite songs. Bernie hates that lyric, but I like it because of the mixture of music and lyrics which is kind of Procal Harum-ish absurd, like a Dali painting”. ‘Jamaica Jerk-Off’ is an amusing reggae pastiche which credits Reggae Dwight and Toots Taupin (Toots Hibbert & The Maytals were a notable reggae act of the 1970s), and ‘Your Sister Can’t Dance (But She Can Rock & Roll)’ was possibly yet another song which influenced Jim Steinman, this time when he wrote ‘Paradise By The Dashboard Light’, another track on Meat Loaf’s ‘Bat Out Of Hell’ album. There are many other notable songs on this album, but surprisingly, the only song from here included on the ‘Two Rooms’ tribute album was ‘Saturday Night’s Alright For Fighting’, which was covered by The Who, whose vocalist, Roger Daltrey, said that it was an obvious choice for his group to record.
‘Goodbye Yellow Brick Road’ topped the UK LP chart at the end of 1973, during a residency of 21 months, while it topped the US chart for two months of its almost two years in the ‘Billboard’ Top 200, and was a major achievement both artistically and commercially. It almost certainly qualifies for a multiple platinum award, but is only listed as gold because platinum awards were not introduced until 1976, three years after it was released
John Tobler, 1995
__________________________________________________
All the tapes used to create these new masters are the original mixes. However, due to the fact that many of the tapes are at least 25 years old, they have “softened up” to varying degrees. So, the sound has been passed through the most up to date digital processing equipment, at 20 Bit Resolution; namely The Sadie Digital System and Prism Super Noise Sharper. The effect is purely to “enhance” rather than “colour” the sound.
As the original producer, I would have used this equipment at the time, had it been available for mastering. The very nature of analog recordings being transferred to vinyl demanded major compromises. With the benefits of digital sound these constraints are removed, and the recordings can be heard much closer to the reproduction we had originally intended.
Gus Dudgeon
______________________________________________________________
314-528 159-2 © 1995 This Record Company Ltd. Printed in U.S.A.
Rocket Records, Manufactured and Marketed by Island Records, Inc.
825 Eighth Ave., NY, NY 10019
(P) 1973 This Record Company Ltd. © 1995 This Record Company Ltd.
All rights reserved. Printed in the U.S.A
Warning: Unauthorized reproduction of this recording is prohibited by Federal law and subject to criminal prosecution.
