Second
Time Around
Elton
John
Goodbye Yellow Brick Road (Island)
As the music industry staggers into the last stages of life, the work of every artist who put a note on wax is being reissued, often with grand packaging and much fanfare. I am something of an expert on recycled goods, if I do say so myself (which I do, because no one else will), which means I have a bag of retail tricks to share. Here's number one: beware the alternative take and the unreleased song. If an album is worth owning, it's worth owning in its original size and shape; there is no such thing as an unreleased gem, because – in case you weren't paying attention – record labels are owned by a breed of capitalists so voracious they make great white sharks seem like canned tuna. (If the average record exec thought the sound of his mother being strangled would ship platinum, old ladies would start dropping like flies – 20 years later they'd add notes by Charles Manson, add a few pictures, wrap it up nice, and sell it again.)
Sir Elton was already a superstar when he recorded Goodbye Yellow Brick Road, a number-one hit in 1973 on both sides of the pond that spawned four hit singles: "Saturday Night's Alright for Fighting," "Bennie and the Jets," "Candle in the Wind," and the title track. The original album had 17 songs, and with one exception ("Candle in the Wind," ruined forever in tribute to Princess Di), they stand up just fine – which is why only four songs were added to this set. Three – "Whenever You're Ready," "Jack Rabbitt," and "Screw You (Young Man Blues)" – were finished at the time. The forth, an acoustic version of "Candle in the Wind," is gratuitous, but I suppose it could have been the abominable tribute version, so I'm not complaining. The fact is that though this album is so eclectic, overblown (like the '70s), and poppy that it works better as an enormous collection of potential singles, Goodbye Yellow Brick Road shows why his lordship is one of the three or four most popular pop musicians of the past 30 years. Which is, in case you missed the point, a barely qualified rave. (J.H. Tompkins)
