CURVE YOUR ENTHUSIASM (13)

By: Lynn Peril
August 7, 2023

One in a series of 25 enthusiastic posts, contributed by 25 HILOBROW friends and regulars, on the topic of reconsidered passions, reassessed hates, and reversed feelings everywhere in-between. Series edited by Adam McGovern.

ELTON JOHN’S GREATEST HITS

In the early months of 1986, I worked in a storefront on San Francisco’s Gough Street, its windows covered with brown paper, filling backlogged orders from the SF Museum of Modern Art’s Christmas catalog. A temp worker arrived to help us, bringing with him a cassette of Elton John’s Greatest Hits (1974). At the time, my musical taste ran to dark and discordant: Wire, The Birthday Party, Danielle Dax. I also loved Kate Bush’s The Dreaming, but felt guilty about it probably because “Suspended in Gaffa” made me cry (it still does). In short, I would rather have died than admit that I had owned a vinyl copy of Elton John’s Greatest Hits when it first came out. Now, I looked at this tiny, sweet man, and said something I don’t remember but will forever regret, words to the effect that Elton John sucked and my musical taste was amazing and superior. Ugh.

Flash forward to the pandemic year of 2020. During California’s lockdown, I spent a lot of time walking and listening to audiobooks. One day, I saw that Elton John’s memoir was on the list of books that were immediately available. What the hell, I thought, let’s give it a listen.

I was entranced. Elton John, it transpired, had been a rock ’n’ roll fan ever since his mother brought home Elvis’s “Heartbreak Hotel” on 78, and a real, working musician long before he was famous. His stories of being on the road with the “outrageously gay” Long John Baldry or backing American r’n’b stars like Patti Labelle and Major Lance in the English hinterlands were hilarious; his tales of drug use and debauchery, satisfyingly lurid.

I suspected that my musician husband (an even bigger music snob than me) would also really dig Elton’s memoir. He did. Thus it came to pass that one Saturday night not too long ago, we watched Rocketman, the musical biopic more or less based on EJ’s life.

Here’s another thing ’80s me, giving the stink eye to the pop-loving temp, would have been loath to admit: I love classic movie musicals. Like many kids growing up in the ’60s and ’70s, my parents had a lot of soundtrack LPs, with the result being I can sing along with almost all of West Side Story or The Sound of Music.

Now I discovered that yet another soundtrack had wormed its way into my head. Making dinner post-Rocketman, I downloaded Elton John’s Greatest Hits and was shocked to discover I knew the lyrics (or a close facsimile thereof) to almost every song. How many times had I listened to that album anyway? Or was it the radio tuned to a rock-and-roll station in the junior-high art room? Who knows. But dancing around the kitchen as I belted out “Saturday Night’s All Right for Fighting” and “Crocodile Rock” to my husband’s great amusement, I had to admit this stuff was pretty catchy after all.

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CURVE YOUR ENTHUSIASM (13)

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