Credit: Far Out / YouTube Still
Sun 30 August 2026 19:30, UK
Elton John didn’t ever bother trying to make the same song again whenever he made a new record.
The whole point of any of his albums was to keep getting better, and while he didn’t always have the youthful spirit that he did when he first started, you can tell that he has reached a point in the modern age where he is much more happy to be able to make the greatest written tunes that he can with Bernie Taupin by his side. But there are always going to be those few albums that tend to get him down in the dumps every now and again as well.
But you can’t really blame John for having a few albums that miss the mark every now and again. Some of the biggest pieces of his discography make up some of the biggest rock and roll songs ever made, and you can’t really expect the same pair of songwriters to suddenly write some of the greatest songs of all time twice. Goodbye Yellow Brick Road was where everything came together to a certain degree, but the bottom was bound to fall out from under them sooner rather than later.
And when you listen to what John was doing once he reached the late 1970s, he was clearly starting to not take care of himself or his music. Victim of Love was bogged down by some of the most lacklustre production of his career, and even though he did recover from it with songs like ‘I’m Still Standing’, there were bound to be more low points on Leather Jackets than anything else he ever did.
Those studio sessions might be set in stone forever, but John didn’t want to live his life as a studio creation. He may have given up the road for the rest of his career now, but when you look at the kinds of shows that he was putting on during his prime, you couldn’t script a better band for him to work with. He even managed to get John Lennon onstage with him during that time, but John occasionally had shows where things didn’t go as well as he had planned when he started.
The idea of playing an inaugural show for Captain Fantastic and the Brown Dirt Cowboy made a lot of sense, but the thought of playing the whole album in full for a crowd that hadn’t heard a note of it before was bound to be a bit of a misfire. Still, John could deliver to any crowd that he played to, and 17-11-70 marked a moment in time where he was still fairly green and trying to get everyone to listen to him.
A few fateful gigs at the Troubadour definitely put him on the right track, but when John listened back to the tapes of those sessions today, he was more than a little bit dejected about how good the performances were, saying, “Some of the playing on 17-11-70 is quite incredible. I get depressed sometimes when I hear it because I don’t know if I can ever play as well as that again. That three piece band – Nigel (Nigel Olsson, drums) and Dee (Dee Murray, bass) and myself – we did different versions than the Elton John record, and the response … We could not believe it. We were like kids in heaven.”
Further reading: From The Vault
As someone who has sold exactly zero records and wouldn’t know the first thing about playing any songs this complicated live, though, John might be a little too hard on himself here. These are epics that were meant to be shown to the people, and while not all of them found their way into John’s setlist over the years, hearing him in his element is a lot more interesting, knowing what would come next.
These were the days before he had been solidified as a rock and roll god, and getting to hear this version of him playing is one of the great snapshots of his career. There’s some influence of everyone from Little Richard to Leon Russell in his delivery, and compared to where he would go, this is like watching someone who’s clearly a legend discover what makes them legendary in real time.
