The character-driven Tumbleweed Connection doesn’t sound anything like the sleek soundtrack work that Elton John devolved into by the ’90s. It hardly sounds like his peak ’70s stuff, either.
This Old West-themed collaboration with Bernie Taupin, released on Oct. 30, 1070, was writerly and brave enough to experiment with song form in a way John rarely did again. It was piano music, sure, but with an active, jazz-influenced rhythm section and delicately interwoven additional instruments. Fully formed people inhabited places newly imagined but seemingly from long ago.
Very much influenced by the contemporary Music From Big Pink by the Band, Tumbleweed Connection walks many of the same Americana backroads. There were songs about family and its difficult legacies (“Son of Your Father,” “My Father’s Gun”), about outlaws (“Ballad of a Well-Known Gun”) and homebodies (“Country Comfort”), lost love (the quietly majestic “Come Down in Time,” with a lonesome oboe), the search for salvation (“Where to Now St. Peter?,” “Burn Down the Mission”) and the first-ever appearance together of classic-era bassist Dee Murray and drummer Nigel Olsson (“Amoreena”).
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It’s all a world – or maybe a galaxy – away from The Lion King. Perhaps John felt emboldened by the interest building up around his nascent career. That propelled Tumbleweed Connection into the Top 5 in both the U.S. and John’s native U.K., but there were no singles. It was perhaps just as well, since this settled, deeply involving album was always best heard as a complete thought. The only song that remained as John played his farewell tour, more than five decades later, was the towering finale “Burn Down the Mission.”
Tumbleweed Connection quickly tumbled back down the charts, and John seemed to lose his nerve. As he built toward multi-platinum successes, there were fewer fully formed, distinctive narratives peopled by the likes of Blind Joseph, Amoreena and Deacon Lee. He rarely let loose like this musically again, contrasting well-placed melancholic pauses with these bruising barrelhouse runs.
The choruses didn’t try so hard, so stories that unfolded in the verses had an opportunity to resonate. The same couldn’t always be said in later years, as Elton John became his own main character. By 1975, he’d release the sprawling concept album Captain Fantastic and the Brown Dirt Cowboy – and the subject was actually himself.
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Gallery Credit: Matt Springer
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