AURAL ROBERT - Elton's Magic Year

In 1973, Elton John and Bernie Taupin capped one of pop music's most epic periods of sustained creativity by writing, recording, and releasing the 10-track single disc Don't Shoot Me I'm Only the Piano Player and the 17-track double album Goodbye Yellow Brick Road, both of which are now celebrating their 50th anniversary. As two of the strongest entries among the many classics that make 1972-73 the peak years for rock albums, both went #1 in the US and UK and arguably stand as the dual highpoints of John's recorded legacy.

- ROBERT BAIRD

At the center of both records is the unusual way Bernie Taupin and the former Reg Dwight created music. In a reversal of the usual music-first, lyrics-after method that most songwriters or songwriting teams worked, Bernie wrote the lyrics then Elton fit the music to them-often in brief, furious writing sessions. Don't Shoot Me was written and recorded in 14 days with four tracks captured on their first take. That breathless feat was surpassed when, other than "Grey Seal," which was written in 1970, Taupin wrote the lyrics to every song on Goodbye Yellow Brick Road in two weeks before Elton wrote all the music, 22 tracks of which 17 became the album, in an astonishing three days.

In the 2014 article by Andy Greene in Rolling Stone, "Elton John and Bernie Taupin Look Back at Goodbye Yellow Brick Road," they each explain how they viewed "Bennie and the Jets," from GYBR, exposing clues as to how such classic pop music could emerge from such divergent viewpoints. "I saw Bennie and the Jets as a sort of proto-sci-fi punk band," Taupin said, "fronted by an androgynous woman who looks like something out of a Helmut Newton photograph." Elton added, "When I saw the lyrics for 'Bennie and the Jets,' I knew it had to be an off-the-wall-type song, an R&B-ish kind of sound or a funky sound. The audience sounds were taken from a show we did at the Royal Festival Hall years earlier. The whole thing is very weird."