Chapter 1

A Long, Long Time

To fly all this way to California, across the Atlantic from England in a jumbo jet, to the land of freedom, adventure, and rock'n'roll, only to end up on a red bloody London bus. He'd wanted to roar off in a Cadillac or something, instead of trundling toward Hollywood, taking "fucking forever" to get there. He was totally embarrassed, totally pissed off.

He hadn't even wanted to come. It was his music publisher and record label boss, Dick James, who persuaded him to make the trip. Dick was fifty and an old-school music biz figure, with his bald head and business suits and thick-rimmed glasses. He'd made his fortune publishing the songs of the Beatles, so he knew a thing or two.

The problem was that Elton's second album, recorded at great expense and titled simply Elton John, had been released in April in Britain and hadn't fared much better than his first, Empty Sky, which had tanked. As the pages of the 1970 calendar began to blow away, he was running out of options.

He'd been sorely tempted to take up an offer from Jeff Beck, the swaggering star guitarist who had been kicked out of the Yardbirds in '66 for his repeated no-shows and fizzing tantrums. Since then, the drably named Jeff Beck Group had made two albums that sold well in America, before falling apart in a cloud of petty arguments and ego huffs.

One night in July at the Speakeasy club in London, the rock star hangout just north of Oxford Street, Beck had caught a show by Elton's new three-piece band. Impressed by what he saw, Beck came up with a proposal: Back me and we'll tour the States. Then Elton heard the terms of the deal-for every booking, Beck would take 90 percent of the [...] fee. Elton and the band would share just 10 percent.

Nevertheless, he thought, Wow, a thousand dollars a night. Still sounds like a lot of money.

Dick James talked him out of it.

"You'll be a bigger star in America than Jeff Beck in a year's time," he insisted.

"I thought, Oh, Dick, you're so stupid," Elton remembers.

Now it was August and he'd touched down in Los Angeles, thrilled to his fingertips to actually be in America. Exiting the airport, he'd been greeted by the sight of the double-decker parked outside. His face fell and it quickly had to be explained to him by Norman Winter, his new U.S. publicist, that the bus was a surprise stunt he'd planned for him. It would carry Elton and the band into L.A. and fanfare his arrival in style.

A screaming message in huge white letters on a black banner ran almost the entire length of it: elton john has arrived.

Dutifully, Elton had stepped onto the rear platform of the open-backed London bus. It really didn't feel as though he'd "arrived." But if he had, it had taken him a long, long time.

The very first thing Reg could remember was sitting at the piano.

In his blurry memory, his gran Ivy lifts him onto her knee and he immediately starts banging the keys. In the days that follow, no one can keep him away from the seemingly captivating instrument. One day his infantile pounding somehow gives way to his working out the chords and elegant top line of "The Skater's Waltz."

His mum, Sheila, is flabbergasted. Reg is only three but it quickly becomes apparent that he has quite a gift.

"I just sat down," he remembers, "and I could pick out a tune very easily."

By the time he was four, in 1951, Reg had a mass of bubbly hair, which made him look cherubic and a bit like Shirley Temple. A typical preschooler, he was prone to tantrums, though the piano seemed to be a reliable source of calm for him. If he was kicking and screaming, his father placing him on its stool always cooled his hysteria.

There was music all around the house: from the wireless, from the cabinet-sized, varnished-wood-encased radiogram (part radio, part gramophone) on which Sheila and his dad, Stanley, would play their