About 30 or so years after it was released, the edge on some of the songs in Goodbye Yellow Brick Road is still sharp.
Essentially a set of abrasive, telling observations about life on the twistedly decadent and hedonistic fringes of the wealthy social set, the album inhabits that murky space quite convincingly. Probably, the backbone of it all, the line that sums it all up, is ’’plenty like me to be found; mongrels, who aint got a penny, sniffin for tidbits like you on the ground’’, from the title track.
To start right at the beginning, ’Funeral For A Friend (Love Lies Bleeding)’painfully chronicles a person really struggling to come to terms with the harrowing loss of a friend. The music is a powerful vehicle for the pain, the main piano riff distilling out of an opening instrumental passage laden with pall-like gloom, ending with some really harrowing psychedelia.
’’Candle in the Wind’’, easily Elton’s most celebrated song, appears in its original avatar on this album. This original version is the sum total of the song, with all later incarnations far inferior to it.
The album then plunges straight into the hedonistic and fetishistic fringe of the not-so-innocent pleasures of the wealthy set - ’’Bennie and The Jets’’, ’’Jamaica Jerkoff’’, ’’Sweet Painted Lady’’, ’’Dirty Little Girl’’, ’’All the Girls Love Alice’’ (a sorry tale of lesbianism), ’’Your Sister Cant Twist (But She Can Rock’n’Roll), ’’Social Disease’’ (one of the strongest songs on the album, about a really dirty layabout who makes a living pleasuring some not-so-rich people) and ’’Saturday Night’s All Right For Fighting’’. The stale aura of really kinky socialite fetishes, with hangovers covered with their fluid excesses, hangs over these songs like a fetid, pervasive air.
The title track, said to be the most requested song on the album, expresses quite strongly, the urge of a social layabout to return to some smattering of dignity. It was the title which attracted me to the album, it must be said. Probably is one of Elton’s most representative songs ever.
’’Grey Seal’’ and ’’This Song Has No Title’’ are examples of rock philosophising, attempting to inject an intellectual twist into proceedings. It works, for a while, on ’’Grey Seal’’, but sounds more than a bit spurious on ’’This Song Has No Title’’.
The other songs on the album are quite mainstream, without being exceptional - ’’I’ve Seen That Movie Too’’, ’’Roy Rogers’’ and ’’Harmony’’, of which ’’Roy Rogers’’, a sort of send-up of the Wild West for the 70’s kind of thing, works well. ’’The Ballad of Danny Bailey’’ is sombre and unexceptional.
Elton’s piano is always strong, and the rock-ish twist to most of these songs is unmistakable; however, the musicianship, while very apt to this kind of rock-ish material and accomplished enough, is not of a path-breaking standard. The material, musically, wavers between rock-ish riffs and mainstream; not too ’same’ or predictable enough to settle comfortably into mainstream AOR or MOR, but not too ’rocked’ to cross over into mainstream ’rock’.
However, all things considered, the talents of Elton John the musician and Bernie Taupin the lyricist collaborate quite strongly into these 17 bonafide SONGS - there is a good deal of bonafide songwriting involved, even if not of the epic quality; and the songwriting very efficiently captures the tawdry world that it inhabits.
I would recommend the album as one of Elton’s strongest and most representative efforts; and for so-called ’rock’ fans to understand how many a ’pop’ artist like Elton, in fact, writes and performs material that is inflected with good doses of rock’n’roll. Fans of so-called ’rock’ tend to think that the material must be sufficiently hard to be called ’rock’....if you listen to most of the songs on Goodbye Yellow Brick Road, you would see that the album is in fact a rock album, since most of the musical motifs essentially use ’rock’ movements.
The album is not easily available in music stores in Bangalore, for whatever reason; I managed to buy it in a bookstore that stocked some Polygram cassettes!! I don’t see too many copies around at the leading music stores - even Elton’s much publicized visit to India did not spark much interest in this album.