The first Elton John melody I heard was “Your Song.”
That was my first year in high school, in late 1970 or early 1971. The song’s opening keyboard riff came over the car radio as my sister drove us to our aunt’s house west of Pensacola.
I was gripped by the newness of its sound, its unusual reliance on the piano in an era of electric guitars, and lyrics that were both upbeat and haunting at the same time. It was the first in a series of songs that made Elton John’s music the soundtrack of my high school and early college years.
Today I choked up when I first watched the new Christmas TV commercial featuring “Your Song.” It was just released by the British department store chain John Lewis & Partners in time for the 2018 holiday season. And it was all over social media today.
I hate television, so few commercials grab my attention. But this one did. Its mashup of the artist singing his first big single from various performances held over 50 years sent me back in time again. There I was, back inside the constellation of memories from 1970 to 1976 — my transition years into adulthood, when Elton John became one of the most recognizable voices on American popular radio.
As my high-school years progressed, Elton John sang many more enigmatic stories. In my sophomore year, there was the tale of a man named “Levon,” who was born a pauper to a pawn and wore his war wound like a crown. Elton John crooned about an L.A. Lady — a “Tiny Dancer” — as all of us teenagers sang a chorus about counting headlights on the highway.
The equally upbeat but equally haunting story of “Daniel” played at every high-school social event in the fall of my junior year. And all of us students wondered about the scars that would not heal, the eyes that had died, and the unexplained nighttime flight to some pretty place in Spain.
In my senior year, the song “Goodbye Yellow Brick Road” sounded very much like a reluctant farewell to childhood by someone not yet ready to leave it. But it soon was followed by the faux-live recording of “Bennie & the Jets” with its lilting bravado and whistling-in-the-dark lyrics: “We shall survive, let us take ourselves along.”
Elton John’s songs were the landmarks of a vanishing childhood. Those recordings still play in my memory, burned there by long hours listening to vinyl discs in the Seventies.
When I chanced upon the new Elton John Christmas commercial on Facebook today, it plucked those memories back to life — and did it in a way that took my breath away.
Oh, how it feels so real. — So real that I had to wipe away a tear as I sat at my office desk, listening.
Photos courtesy of Wikimedia Commons
Robert Craig Waters 