Captain Fantastic and the Brown Dirt Cowboy

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It’s slightly surprising that Captain Fantastic was such a success, considering the fact that it’s a highly personal, vaguely allegorical concept album filled with depressing, angry songs. It's hard to say if Elton John envisioned Captain Fantastic and the Brown Dirt Cowboy to be his definitive artistic statement from Day 1, but what is certain is that Elton intended for it to be a step above other records he had made in recent years.

The lyrics and accompanying photo booklet are infused with a specific sense of place and time that would otherwise be rare in John's music. Elton John himself never seems pretentious but Bernie Taupin’s lyrics often do — sometimes pretentious in a clever sort of way, but pretentious nonetheless. Few people who have achieved his popularity have succeeded in maintaining his standards for performance and professionalism. It was partly inspired by Elton’s ill-advised engagement to his early girlfriend Linda Woodrow, and the subsequent cry for help of his half-hearted suicide attempt in 1968.Similarly, he always sounds like he’s singing up a storm, but his voice glosses over the material, reducing most things to an uninteresting sameness. Captain Fantastic was the first album to ever premiere at number one on the Billboard album charts, a feat thought impossible in those pre-Soundscan days. It was also, significantly, the last great album of John’s early career, and some would probably say his last great album, period.

Working together for the next year they mostly floundered, their efforts focused in the psychedelic folk genre as well as a more stately pop mode (as Taupin once said: “We were writing Englebert Humperdink-style ballads, and we hated them”). Greg Kmiec tells us that Christensen had sneaked their signatures there but when Bally management heard about it and saw it, they made Christensen remove the signatures. It’s less a concept album than a song cycle based on John and Taupin’s early partnership and career — essentially from the moment of their first meeting to the recording of Empty Sky, which served as a prologue to their meteoric rise.Captain Fantastic is, in many ways, a highly symbolic note on which to end John and Taupin’s “classic” period. Nieman explained to us that he and Christensen wanted the correction to be as minimal as possible because they knew they had "a monster hit" on their hands. Davey Johnstone and Nigel Olsson appear by courtesy of The Rocket Record Company, Nigel Olsson also by courtesy of Drumork Productions.

He was one of only two other names to appear in the tight-knit team that made The Captain And The Kid, along with percussionist John Mahon (that’s if you don’t count Elton’s dog Arthur, who made a cameo appearance barking at the end of “Just Like Noah’s Ark”). Just checked my iPod, where I have over 32,000 saved songs, and I only bothered to keep four of this album's ten tracks. A US chart-topper for ten weeks, it was certified 17-times platinum by the RIAA for its American sales in 2016, and is comfortably his biggest-selling album of all. Naturally Taupin’s weaknesses come to the fore on this concept album about the song-writing team’s scuffling days. Elton’s first greatest hits collection, released in November, became a prodigious success, soaring to what is now estimated at 24 million worldwide sales.Captain Fantastic and the Brown Dirt Cowboy, released in 1975, was the culmination of six years’ feverish exertion. a b "500 Greatest Albums of All Time Rolling Stone's definitive list of the 500 greatest albums of all time". And for all his productivity and enthusiasm, he remains a largely passive figure, the creator of music that one can get comfortable with but which is never challenging or threatening. It described young Reg’s “raised and regimented” upbringing that we see in Rocketman, “just someone his mother might know. The original package also contained a DVD featuring an interview with him and Taupin and a track-by-track commentary, plus a second booklet of “Scraps” featuring many unseen photos from their entire creative span.

By no means is this a set-up for a revolutionary album, one that transforms pop music forever, but it does present itself as a rather strange bird in the Elton John catalog. The b-sides for both singles are included, including a cover of John Lennon’s “One Day at a Time”— hardly a revelation, and hardly a rarity either, considering the track’s inclusion on the To Be Continued… box. The album reached number 1 in its first week of release on the US Billboard 200, the first ever album to do so, reportedly selling 1.Greg initially stated that only ten playfields were produced like this in a pilot run, not to appear on production games, but when the production game with serial number 1087 was identified as having a signed playfield, it caused him to wonder if a larger quantity of, say, 100 was actually made, to have appeared on production games. A deluxe 30th anniversary edition CD was released September 2005, containing the complete album and adding "House of Cards", the original B-side to the 7" single of " Someone Saved My Life Tonight", which had previously only appeared on CD on the 1992 Rare Masters collection. The attractive package, and a compelling array of quintessential 70s pop-rock imagery, helped take Captain Fantastic And The Brown Dirt Cowboy straight to the top of the US chart. Flippers (4), Popbumpers (3), Slingshots (2), Star rollovers (8), Standuptargets (2), 5-bank droptargets (1), Right outlane detour gate.