Bernie Taupin wrote the lyrics to the best-selling song of all time. He couldn't tell you any of them.
That's one of the revelations contained in Scattershot, the new memoir from the man most famous as Elton John's songwriting partner of over half a century. That the song in question is the rewritten version of "Candle in the Wind" that John performed for Princess Diana's Westminster Abbey funeral makes Taupin's amnesia a little more understandable. Not only is the lyric battling for headspace with the original version, but there's also likely never been a hit song with a worse popularity-to-durability ratio. No one plays "Candle in the Wind '97" these days—probably because it's less a song than a musical commemorative plaque, an inscription of the collective grief that flooded much of the world upon the untimely death of the Princess of Wales.
The rest of the John/Taupin catalog, by contrast, is seemingly eternal, a fact that has only been underscored by the prolonged valedictory that the more famous half of the duo has been on over the past five years. Sir Elton's extended farewell has encompassed a massive global tour (the most successful in box office history), a pair of mega-hits that paired him with Dua Lipa and Britney Spears, a best-selling autobiography, a "fantasy musical" biopic that grossed close to $200 million, and, just for good measure, a second Academy Award. After decades of virtually unrivaled commercial success (according to the official Billboard tally, the Beatles and the Rolling Stones are the only more successful acts in the history of the music industry) and what can only be described as critical indifference, the world seems to be converging on what has always been the obvious conclusion: Elton John belongs on pop music's Mount Rushmore.
Yet even among this orgy of acclaim, there are precious few thoughts spared for Bernie Taupin—which, one gets the sense, probably doesn't much faze him.
Taupin is perhaps without parallel in the rock era: It's hard to think of anyone else who's so central to popular music as we know it yet whom you'd probably fail to recognize if you ran into him in the grocery store. That's an oddity, yes; but it's also probably the central reason that the John/Taupin partnership works so well. While the Rocket Man—who lives like Louis XIV and, as The Muppet Show once put it, "dresses like a stolen car"—seems perpetually at risk of drifting out of orbit, his solitary, rural lyricist has two feet perpetually on the ground.
It's doubtful, after all, that Elton John has ever participated in the kind of bar brawl chronicled in "Saturday Night's Alright (For Fighting)." Taupin can tell you the pub that inspired it. It's improbable that, per the lyrics to "Goodbye Yellow Brick Road," Sir Elton—who, it bears noting, insists on traveling with at least two tiaras—has ever longed to go back to his plough. Taupin, by contrast, has spent the past 30 years living the cowboy life in California's Santa Ynez Valley, where he was once an accomplished rider in cutting horse competitions. And it's certain that, no matter the account of "Crocodile Rock," Elton never really paid any mind to the tightness of Suzie's dress. Bernie, who's on his fourth marriage, assuredly did.
While Elton John deserves credit for creating melodies captivating enough to provide the requisite suspension of disbelief, Taupin deserves at least as much for keeping a man who lives a lifestyle that would make a sultan blush tethered to the real world. Without Taupin, we'd have long ago drifted into the era of Elton writing songs about his least favorite flower arrangements.
That earthiness is on display throughout Scattershot, which is, if anything, a book-length testimony to Taupin's indifference to fame. Yes, there are the requisite rock star accounts of booze and girls. And, yes, there's an eclectic sampling of celebrity character sketches: Led Zeppelin's John Bonham was the most unpleasant man in rock 'n' roll; Taupin once cold-cocked John Belushi in a bar for insulting his girlfriend; talking to Andy Warhol was "like conversing with an eight-year-old girl"; Nicolas Cage, having just road-tripped from L.A. to Las Vegas with Charlie Sheen, described the drive to Taupin as "not without its ramifications."
Those A-list interactions, however, make up only a very modest portion of the book, and for a simple reason—Taupin is a legend but not really a celebrity. Scattershot, after all, devotes considerably more time and affection to the lyricist's rodeo buddies than to anyone with a star on Hollywood Boulevard. Even Elton John himself is in large measure absent from the story, an omission that Taupin acknowledges only elliptically and in the book's final paragraph.
Scattershot is also not especially concerned with appraising the duo's work. Taupin drops only a handful of details about their best-known songs. The title for "Candle in the Wind" was cribbed from Solzhenitsyn and the subject was Marilyn Monroe only because the lyricist thought she was the most accessible vehicle for the song's message ("I'd have preferred to eulogize someone I had more empathy for"). "Daniel"—often mistaken for a gay love song—was actually intended as note of empathy for Vietnam War veterans. "Island Girl," despite being a #1 hit, now embarrasses its authors as racially insensitive (John retired it from his live set decades ago). But these nuggets are the exceptions rather than the rule. Indeed, Taupin announces within the book's first few pages that he's not especially keen on analyzing his lyrics and doesn't remember the inspiration for many of them anyway.
So, what's the result of a memoir from Elton John's songwriting partner that isn't that interested in either Elton John or the songs themselves? Surprisingly enough, it's one of the more clear-eyed redemption stories ever to emerge out of the entertainment business.
Bernie Taupin's version of fame and fortune, it turns out, was a particularly listless one. Even at the breakneck pace Elton John maintained during his classic years—from 1970 to 1976, he and Taupin paired for 10 albums, two of them doubles—the lyricist had an excess of time on his hands. Elton was on a constant treadmill of touring, press, writing, and recording. As for Bernie? He had to show up with a dozen or so lyrics a couple of times a year.
Taupin is never quite explicit about the resulting ennui, but it's littered throughout his accounts of the '70s and '80s, most of which he seems to have spent drinking, traveling, bedding pretty girls, and dabbling in drugs. It's a bizarro version of the familiar rock star parabola, with all of the attendant vices (the vignette in which the lyricist has to flee Barbados after drunkenly stealing a bus is straight out of Spinal Tap) but none of the time in the limelight. That lack of celebrity is likely also the reason that when Taupin came to his senses in middle age he settled into a decidedly bourgeois version of the good life.
The theme of Scattershot's final chapters, after all, is defiantly unhip: faith, flag, and family. The Bernie Taupin of 2023 is a practicing Christian whose time is divided between his wife and teenage daughters and a new career as an artist—specializing in canvases heavy on Americana. And while the book is in no way a political volume, Taupin drops lots of hints that he doesn't subscribe to the reflexive progressivism one would expect of a Baby Boom rocker. Joseph Stalin, Che Guevara, the Bolsheviks, John Lennon's lyrics to "Imagine," political correctness at Disneyland, and vegans all come in for criticism along the way.
At a time when his longtime collaborator is being feted at every turn, this book should occasion an overdue reconsideration of the silent partner in one of pop music's greatest songwriting teams. For every Elton John song you know by heart, there's a deep cut that's a more impressive example of his lyricist's craft. "Honky Cat" and "Goodbye Yellow Brick Road" may be the most famous examples of Taupin wrestling with leaving his country roots behind, but neither lyric can match 1992's "The North" for sheer poignance. "Candle in the Wind" may be the pair's signature celebrity ode, but there are deeper themes at work in 1973's "Roy Rogers" and 2012's "Oscar Wilde Gets Out." "Daniel" may have been written with veterans in mind, but it pales in comparison with 1970's "Talking Old Soldiers," perhaps the subtlest work of Taupin's career. Scattershot, however, is so devoid of status anxiety that it never attempts to make the case for John and Taupin's place in the pantheon of popular music, even elliptically.
And, really, why bother? Res ipsa loquitur.
Scattershot: Life, Music, Elton & Me
by Bernie Taupin
Hachette Books, 416 pp., $32.50
Troy Senik is a former presidential speechwriter and the author of A Man of Iron: The Turbulent Life and Improbable Presidency of Grover Cleveland.