In 1975, I nearly cashed in my entire savings--one of those $5.00 cardboard quarter holders from the local bank--to join Elton John's fan club. (My mother talked me out of it, bless her soul.) The first album I had bought was "Goodbye Yellow Brick Road", with snow shoveling money for the then-exorbitant price of $5.98, price code EE at Woolworth's. Everyone I knew had the "Elton John Greatest Hits" album memorized, as nearly every song was a top 10 hit. His past four albums had been #1 hits; damn few artists have dominated the music world the way Elton John did in the mid-70's.

So it was no surprise in May, 1975 when "Captain Fantastic and the Brown Dirt Cowboy" went to #1 the day it was released, as did its follow-up later that year, "Rock of the Westies". It was a strange time in the music business. The occasional album would "ship" #1, meaning record companies were anticipating a huge success and simply flooding stores with the album. The frightening thing about those Elton John albums: they shipped #1 and stayed there for weeks.

I bought "Captain Fantastic and the Brown Dirt Cowboy" because of its cover: Alan Aldridge's imaginatively illustrated fantasy world of Elton John and his lyricist Bernie Taupin. It didn't hurt that there was a naked woman on the back cover, with a bird's head. And an owl with tits. And a brass pot with a turntable head taking a shit. The inside packaging was elaborate: a lyric book with more of those bizarre Aldridge illustrations, and a scrapbook of photos and mementos from their early days.

I hadn't known it, but I had bought Elton John's best album, a heartfelt look back at when he had first met Bernie Taupin and their struggles leading up to his first album, 1969's "Empty Sky", which was by no means a success. Elton was a keyboard player in Bluesology, the backing band for British blues singer Long John Baldry, and trying unsuccessfully to start a solo career. Via a newspaper ad searching for material for a new label, Liberty Records, one of the label executives gave Elton the name of Bernie Taupin, who had sent in his poems, thinking they would make a good match. They corresponded for a few months, met, immediately felt a bond, and began their songwriting partnership that showed no immediate signs of what would come.

The Brown Dirt Cowboy

"Captain Fantastic and the Brown Dirt Cowboy" feels like both of them looking back from the top of the music world, a place that must have been non-stop insanity, and recognizing that it wouldn't last forever. And that the world they had lived in before "Empty Sky" was filled with a naïve yearning for stardom that seemed like another lifetime. In essence, it's the old story of innocence lost and the need to find their way back.

As with every Elton John album, there is filler. His classic albums of the 70's were such a mix of styles that one got the impression he simply took Taupin's lyrics, ran with the mood and recorded whatever came out. As he had broad tastes, a true fan's knowledge of pop music and a knack for writing unforgettable melodies, this method often worked brilliantly but back-fired just as much. Being on a grueling two-albums-per-year pace meant many lesser songs next to the classics.

"Bitter Fingers" isn't a bad song but doesn't reach the level of the "Captain Fantastic"'s high points. "Tell Me When the Whistle Blows" is one of Elton's lackluster stabs at funk, which when not working on hits like "Philadelphia Freedom" came off like Steve Martin and Dan Ackroyd's "Two Wild and Crazy Guys" routine. "(Gotta Get a) Meal Ticket" is the kind of bland rock song that made "Saturday Night's Alright for Fighting" sound like the masterpiece it is. "Better Off Dead" feels a bit slight and doesn't say much lyrically. "Writing" is a sweet little song, but hampered by a dated electric piano arrangement and uncharacteristically weak guitar work by Davey Johnstone.

What's left is Elton John at his best, in a string of five ballads that reach emotional depths only hinted at in previous songs. Their songwriting method was Taupin first writing the lyrics, and John shaping the music to the words. While Taupin has taken a fair amount of critical heat for his lyrics, it is amazing to note that John would rarely ask him to change a word, as the lyrics perfectly fit into verse/chorus structure. With the assignment of recalling their early days, Taupin came up with lyrics that were more impressionistic and personal than anything he had done before.

The album presents a range of emotions that gives most men, myself included, a hard time: platonic love between men. Usually this feeling is masked with macho bluster, be it the façade of sports or the revelry of a "guys' night out" in a bar. As men, we spend an enormous amount of time playfully belittling each other, which is generally our way of saying how much we enjoy each other's company. It's a comparatively rare circumstance where men will simply and unabashedly express direct feelings of love or gratitude towards each other.

Possibly the best example of this in a pop song comes with "Someone Saved My Life Tonight." The song works on so many levels, the main one, of course, being as a well-constructed pop song. I hadn't realized it until Elton pointed it out in a recent MOJO interview, but this song is his stylistic tribute to Brian Wilson and isn't far removed from "Surf's Up" in terms of its serene feel. He never got enough credit or made much of a mark with other recording artists, but producer Gus Dudgeon shines on this album and especially this song.

The CD version doesn't have it, but in the record's lyric book is a picture of a blonde-haired man with a beard in a fedora with the caption, "With thanks to LJB." The man is Long John Baldry, a blues singer in England in the 1960's who played with dozens of recording artists who went on to greater glories, two of which were Elton John and Rod Stewart. (Both men returned the favor after becoming superstars by producing one side each of his 1971 album "It Ain't Easy", featuring the minor hit single and lost classic, "Don't Try to Lay No Boogie Woogie on the King of Rock 'n' Roll.")

"Someone Saved My Life Tonight" paints a depressing picture of late-night drunks and a man caught in a bad relationship, "just a pawn outplayed by dominating queen." Apparently in the late 60's, Elton almost married a woman whom no one in his life liked. Whatever the reality of the situation was, it came down to Long John Baldry taking him aside one night in a club and talking him out of marrying her. As a result, Elton went home, turned on the gas and put his head in the oven. I'm not sure if the line "sitting like a princess perched in her electric chair" is about Elton or his fiancée, but it works either way. His attempt failed, and the last verse of the song describes his parents "coming in the morning with a truck to take me home."

Some facts behind the song: It's not clear as to when Elton John discovered his homosexuality. Apparently he had a longstanding affair with his manager, John Reid, but show business being what it is, this was kept silent, so much so that Elton claiming bisexuality in a 1976 Rolling Stone interview was headline news, if not shocking. This was an ongoing issue in his public life, even to the point of marrying a woman in 1984, but he now seems comfortably homosexual.

On the other hand, Long John Baldry was flamboyantly "out of the closet" long before the term meant anything. He was an unrepentant gay man who played all the stereotypes to the hilt and no doubt influenced performers of the 70's in this manner. At 6' 7" with a penchant for wearing high-heel boots, white suits and fedoras, he was hard to ignore and even harder to intimidate.

Oh, to be a fly on the wall the night they had that legendary talk. Did Long John simply point out to Elton that he would be marrying the wrong person? Or did he point out a few things to Elton about his sexuality that he may not have been fully aware of? Only they know for sure, but the result, whether it was sexual confusion and/or a broken engagement, was a suicide attempt.

Even this is not a cut-and-dried issue. Taupin recently pointed out that Elton, drama queen that he is, may have tried to commit suicide, but in a manner that was more for show than the real thing. He did turn the gas on and put his head in the oven. After opening a window in his apartment and putting a pillow on the open oven door.

This is clearly hindsight casting humor over what was a traumatic incident in both their lives, as his mother coming with a truck to take him and his possessions home was very real, as was the broken engagement. It's odd to note, though, that the song's title is not referring to anyone pulling him out of the oven, semi-conscious and gasping, but to Long John Baldry talking him out of the marriage. Thanks to one of Elton's most sublime melodies, the song captures that muted feeling of escaping a horrible situation and finding nothing in its place, but understanding that nothing is better.

The rest of the album isn't quite that dramatic. Recalling his early folk-influenced sound, "Captain Fantastic and the Brown Dirt Cowboy" illustrates Taupin coming from the hinterlands of England to start his songwriting partnership with John. The picture is of two nobodies, a brown dirt cowboy (what this means, I don't want to know) and a boy so nondescript he's "just someone his mother might know," finding each other and striking out on their own. Musically, the mandolins and wistful melody underline just how innocent they were as it began.

This innocence crumbles on the next song, "Tower of Babel," a loose description of the amorality they quickly encountered in the music business. John gives the song a suitably foreboding melody, painting Babylon as an alluring place of "ivory young towers", one that drew he and Taupin in, but was filled with "dealers in the basement" and "call girls under the table." The ultimate feeling in the song is one of self pity. Taupin asks "where were all your shoulders when we cried," implying that he and John were no less emotionally bereft than all the hustlers they encountered, and that "Jesus don't save the guys in the Tower of Babel," of which they are two more.

"We All Fall in Love Sometimes" is one of the strangest love songs ever recorded. Both Taupin and John have stated they were never lovers, with Taupin being heterosexual. John also admitted that he had thought of Taupin in this light, but recognized that he simply wasn't homosexual and accepted their relationship as songwriting partners and kindred souls. This song does not cast them as lovers, but lines such as "starlight filled the evening" and "something happened/it's so strange this feeling" could be interpreted as being from a romantic love song.

I don't think they were consciously playing with John's image, which, because of his over-the-top stage presence, had quickly picked up homosexual overtones. Such aspects of an artist's persona were not unusual in the days of glam rock. If anything, the song seems to be about the intense feeling they had combining their talents, which formed a bond they knew was profound. The song gets a bit sappy, but it sounds like a rock of stability compared to John's insipid 90's recordings.

"We All Fall in Love Sometimes" segues into the grand finale, "Curtains." Taupin simply remembers an awkward early song that never quite made it, comparing it to a scarecrow standing in a fallow, destitute field. Yet it's John's sweeping melody that makes clear what that forgotten scarecrow means to them: the start of a dream they made real. The dream was part rock-star fantasy and more recognition of how neither would have made it on his own. The song fades out slowly like "Hey Jude" and makes the most of a strong electric guitar riff by Davey Johnstone.

More than anything, "Captain Fantastic and the Brown Dirt Cowboy" was a mutual thank-you note from one man to another, as real as if it was sent between brothers. In late 1976, Elton John put out "Blue Moves", a murky double album that sounds like exactly what it is: a divorce of John's and Taupin's musical partnership. They found each other again after a few years of acrimony, still work together occasionally and remain friends.

Even without the sexual implications, which don't really play into this album as most are in hindsight, "Captain Fantastic" is that rarity: a genuinely complex album that can be taken on the level of pure pop fluff. It is far more than that, and because it had only one minor hit single (as opposed to the two or three top 10 hits each album had leading up to it), time seems to have forgotten it. The big single later that year, "Island Girl" from "Rock of the Westies", was more in line with John's bouncy pop image and far more palatable than a ballad about a suicide attempt.

"Captain Fantastic and the Brown Dirt Cowboy" has much in common with "The Wizard of Oz", a theme they had touched on briefly in the song "Goodbye Yellow Brick Road." It transforms John's and Taupin's early days into a romantically-told fable that mirrored their reality. And not just that, it captures the technicolor dream of Judy Garland singing "Somewhere Over the Rainbow" in her black-and-white world. "Captain Fantastic" is that dream, and two men recognizing that the yellow brick road led back to where they had started.