The Sunday Round-Up: 3rd-9th August (Elton John, Howlin' Wolf, and Stevie Wonder)

‘I just love that song so much. Of all the songs I've written, that's the best song,’1 admitted Elton John of ‘Tiny Dancer’, a track that wasn’t much of a hit at the time of its release but caught a second wind nearly thirty years later when it was used in an iconic scene from Cameron Crowe’s Almost Famous.

‘I didn't really pay that much attention to that song until it was brought back by that movie, which I'm forever grateful to Cameron for,’2 Elton continued.

‘Tiny Dancer’ was written in 1970. As with the majority of Elton’s songs, the lyrics came first…

As John’s lyricist, Bernie Taupin, recalled with Rolling Stone, ‘We came to California in the fall of 1970 and it seemed like sunshine just radiated from the populace […] I guess I was trying to capture the spirit of that time, encapsulated by the women we met, especially at the clothes stores and restaurants and bars all up and down the Sunset Strip. They were these free spirits, sexy, all hip-huggers and lacy blouses, very ethereal the way they moved […] They were just so different from what I’d been used to in England. They had this thing about embroidering your clothes. They wanted to sew patches on your jeans.’3

One of the L.A. ladies who Taupin and Elton came across in California was Maxine Feibelman. It is she who Elton attributes the song’s subject to. ‘There’s one here I did just the other day called ‘Tiny Dancer,’ which is about Bernie’s girlfriend,’4 Elton told a British arts television series in 1971.

‘I knew it was about me,’ Feibelman told the New York Post. ‘I had been into ballet as a little girl and sewed patches on Elton’s jackets and jeans.’5

‘Tiny Dancer’ lyrics written, and put among lyrics for many other potential Taupin-John hits, Elton would sift through them to find the writing that would trigger his imagination.

‘I looked through all them and this is the one I fancied doing, mainly because I knew Bernie would like me to do this one,’6 explained Elton.

With the ‘Tiny Dancer’ lyric sheet and a piano in front of him, Elton began playing block chords and working on his vocal phrasing. Speaking with the camera crew, he explained ‘I mean, you look at it and the words ‘Blue-jean baby, LA lady, seamstress for the band/Pretty-eyed, pirate smile, you’ll marry a music man’. ‘Ballerina…’ as soon as you get to the word ballerina you know it’s not going to be fast, it’s got to be kind of gentle and quite slow.’

‘The way it’s written here,’ continues Elton, pointing at the lyric sheet, ‘is a verse, a middle eight and a chorus, then another verse, and I just ran it through and put two verses together, then a middle eight then a chorus and then back to the verse sort of thing. It happens very quickly. It sounds long but it sort of starts off… [Elton plays ‘Tiny Dancer’]’7

‘Tiny Dancer’ was included as the opening track on Elton’s fourth studio album, Madman Across the Water (1971), produced by Gus Dudgeon. It was an album that mixed the orchestral with American country instruments like the pedal steel guitar.

B.J. Cole, who played pedal steel guitar on ‘Tiny Dancer’, spoke to Eltonjohn.com about his recollections of the recording sessions at Trident Studios in London:

‘[Steve Brown, Elton John’s music coordinator and producer of Elton’s debut album] rang me around four in the afternoon and said, ‘Can you come in this evening? Around 10pm.’ So I packed up my Emmons Pedal Steel, imported from America, and off I went! The song wasn’t fully arranged when I got there. I said hello to Elton, Gus, Robin, Paul Buckmaster and everyone (I knew all the band, except Davey, from DJM)…set up around 10 or 11 o’clock. And between getting there and finishing around 6 in the morning, we were actually banging the arrangement together – all of us. It’s one of the longest and most complex arrangements he’s ever done, and that’s because we spent about six hours working on it. Paul was mainly there to take notes for writing the string arrangement, some of which came off the pedal steel part.’8

Describing his approach to weaving string arrangements into songs like ‘Tiny Dancer’, Paul Buckmaster said ‘Our approach at that time was to work for the songs; the song came first above all else; any consideration of the singer — apart from obviously working to make the song sound as good as possible — was secondary. The principle was: The song comes first! That was our approach to the art of recording music back then. We treated each song as an individual personality and character.’9

It was Buckmaster, Elton’s long-time arranger, who recommended Gus Dudgeon for the job of producing back in 1970.

As Dudgeon recalls, ‘The fellow who had produced the first Elton album [Empty Sky], Steve Brown, said to Elton, “It was great to produce your first album, but I’m not really a producer. I think if we’re going to move this thing on, we really ought to be looking for a professional producer to take on the next album.” I think it was admirable that he had the balls to say that. So they started looking around, and one of the songs they kept talking about was “Space Oddity.” Steve, Elton and Bernie thought the orchestral arrangements on it were really good. So they rang Paul Buckmaster and said they’d be really interested in me working with Elton John. So, Bucker rang me and said, “Do you know of Elton John?” I said, “Yes. He’s got this great record out called ‘Lady Samantha.’ It’s not a hit, but it’s getting a lot of play.” He said, “Well, if he offers you a job, I suggest you take it. I think it would be well worth doing it. He’s obviously a good writer.”’10

Dudgeon went on to produce ten Elton John studio albums until 1978’s A Single Man, which was produced by Elton himself and Clive Franks.

Discussing the use of American instrumentation on Madman Across the Water, Dudgeon said ‘If the record had been made in America with American musicians, it would have turned out very, very different. The difference was that we were using English guys who loved American playing as I did.’11

‘I play like an English pedal steel player who is reinterpreting an American instrument,’ said Cole. ‘I take the same role as they do. Elton is passionate about American music. And I am passionate about American music…and an American instrument! And that is the thing that has created my career. […] The [‘Tiny Dancer’] session all worked out so well. I think I was in a state of shock after it. Everyone was very jolly. But I had no idea what a big thing it was going to be until I saw ‘Almost Famous’ and they’re all singing it on the bus.’12

A final word, then, to Almost Famous director, Cameron Crowe: ‘it’s a movie about loving music, and music is what brings them back together again [… ‘Tiny Dancer’] wasn’t an established hit, but it really captured the time so well. To his credit, Elton John saw the movie and said, “This is so cool. I’ve always loved ‘Tiny Dancer.’ This means a lot to me.” And he gave us credit for years when he played the song. “This is because of the movie Almost Famous.” Nobody does that. But he does. He really does. He’s so great.’13

Check out some more stories behind classic Elton John songs in this week’s Further Listening post…

The New York Times called him ‘arguably the greatest artist the blues ever produced.’14

Howlin’ Wolf, otherwise known as Chester Arthur Burnett, recorded his first hit, ‘How Many More Years’, in July 1951 at the Memphis Record Service, later called the Sun Studio with Sam Phillips as producer.

‘The first major breakthrough Sam made was with Howlin’ Wolf,’ said record producer and guitarist, T Bone Burnett. ‘That’s when he started bringing the bass and drums up loud. Back in those days the bass and drums were background instruments; it was all about the horns and the piano, the melody instruments, and Sam brought the rhythm section right up front, and that became rock’n’roll. That was a big shift. In some ways, “How Many More Years” by Wolf would be the first rock’n’roll song because that has the guitar lick that became the central guitar lick in rock’n’roll, and that’s the first time we heard that played on a distorted guitar. It was an old big band lick, turned into something completely fresh.’15

That foundational guitar lick was performed by pioneering blues giant, Willie Johnson. Ike Turner played the piano; Willie Steele was on drums, and Howlin’ Wolf sang and played the harmonica.

In an interview with Fresh Air, Sam Phillips’ biographer, Peter Guralnick, described Phillips’ first recording sessions with Howlin’ Wolf and the band… ‘The first time Sam invited Wolf into the studio he tried to make it as low-key as possible. He didn't want to put any pressure on him. He didn't want Wolf to feel that he was making a command performance or that some little white guy was trying to twist him in some direction. When Wolf came with the guitarist Willie Johnson and the drummer Willie Steel - and Sam said he was so overwhelmed, he was just so overcome by the sound of the music […] I mean, he prided himself on everything to do with recording and he said he was out there in the studio moving the mics around. But really he wasn't doing anything. He was just completely mesmerized by the sound of Howlin' Wolf's voice.’16

As for Phillips himself, he said the following of ‘The Wolf’: ‘He was so individual in the things that he did. He had, number one, a voice that was so distinctive that there is - nobody could mistake it for anybody else. That intrigued me. He was so absolutely untrained in so many ways, but at the same time it was so honest that it was just - it brought about a certain passion just by listening to him sing.’17

As well as putting his iconic, howlin’ voice to ‘How Many More Years’ and its A-side ‘Moanin’ at Midnight’, Howlin’ Wolf is also credited as songwriter of the two songs. Discussing his songwriting style with Chris Strachwitz, Burnett said ‘I always make up songs about the way people live and how people act amongst themselves. Ups and downs they have. Some people have ups and downs, and what caused these things. A lot of people come out and sing but they don’t never put their sweetening into it. You’ve got to tell the peoples why you’re singing this, and what causing this, and showing them what you’re singing. You’ve got to make your story clear to the peoples if you want to hand it to them. You’ve got to make a story now and make it stick. You’ve got to tell people just like it is. How things go. You’ve got to make everything, every word tailored. Every word fits.’18

In the case of ‘How Many More Years’, the song deals with a relationship breakdown…

I'm going upstairs, I'm gonna bring back down my clothes
I'm going upstairs, I'm gonna bring back down my clothes
If anybody ask about me, just tell 'em I walked outdoor

‘How Many More Years’ by Howlin’ Wolf

The song went to no.4 on the Billboard R&B charts, and remains one of the Wolf’s top 20 most streamed songs on Spotify. Representing music history in action, Willie Johnson’s electric guitar work on ‘How Many More Years’ gave us one of the first examples of distortion on a guitar as well as the first use of the power chord, as cited by Robert Palmer. It’s also, plainly, just a really great song.

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By 3rd August 1973, Stevie Wonder, at age 23, was already on his sixteenth studio album. Considered a landmark recording at Wonder’s critical and commercial peak, Innervisions is, in the words of critic John Bush, ‘a rich panoply of songs addressing drugs, spirituality, political ethics, the unnecessary perils of urban life, and what looked to be the failure of the '60s dream -- all set within a collection of charts as funky and catchy as any he'd written before.’19

It came after eleven years in show business. The man once known as Little Stevie Wonder was no longer ‘Little’ - ‘We as a people are not interested in ‘baby, baby’ songs any more, there’s more to life than that,’ said Wonder in 1972, the same year that he began recording Innervisions.

Speaking with the New York Times a couple of weeks before the album was released, Wonder revealed ‘‘Innervisions’ gives my own perspective of what's happening in my world, to my people, to all people. That's why it took me seven months to get together—I did all the lyrics —and that's why I think it is my most personal album. I don't care if it sells only five copies—this is the way I feel.’20

The album did rather better than that. To date, Innervisions has sold over 1.7 million copies, coming in at no.8 on his best-selling album list.

‘Living for the City’ is often considered to be the album’s masterpiece - ‘[it has] the most compelling - pounding, throbbing, unyielding — beat to be heard anywhere at all,’21 said Rolling Stone’s Jon Landau. Also adding to its masterpiece status is the powerful message it tells through the story of a boy born in hard time Mississippi who moves to New York City and is quickly taken advantage of…

Psst, hey, hey brother, hey come here slick
Hey you look, you look hip man
Hey, you wanna make yourself five bucks, man?
Yeah, brother
Look here, run this across the street for me right quick
Okay, run this across the street for me

‘Living for the City’ by Stevie Wonder

The song ends with the protagonist arrested and serving ten years in jail. A decade later, he leaves jail - [h]is hair is long, his feet are hard and gritty - but the vim and hope he had for life in New York City is gone. This place is cruel, nowhere could be much colder / If we don't change, the world will soon be over / Living just enough, stop giving just enough for the city, Wonder sings in the final verse.

‘I think the deepest I really got into how I feel about the way things are was in 'Living For The City.' I was able to show the hurt and the anger,’22 reflected Wonder.

As well as contributing lyrics and vocals, Wonder was also producer, composer, and player on nearly all of the instruments used on the album. Instruments Wonder played include: Fender Rhodes electric piano, harmonica, drums, Moog bass, T.O.N.T.O. synthesizer, acoustic piano, Hohner clavinet, tambourine, and congas.

As the New York Times noted in 1973, ‘Stevie identifies himself as a gang and a genius, producing, composing, arranging, singing and, on several tracks, playing all the accompanying instruments. (Yes, it is impossible, or used to be.) But Stevie Wonder, you see, wants to know more […] He is still challenging the synthesizer on its own eerie ground, and his other keyboard work grows consistently more attractive. Vocally, he remains inventive and unafraid, he sings all the things he hears: rock, folk and all forms of Black music. The sum total of these varying components is an awesome knowledge, consumed and then shared by an artist who is free enough to do both.’23

The Music History Club Archive has stories on over 200 artists and bands from the 20th and 21st centuries.

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