![]() ![]() ![]() Nearly all the dozen or so songs you hear in this movie were originally. He has been part of the pop-music mainstream for so long - more than 50 years! - that the scope of his genius and the scale of his accomplishments risk being taken for granted. It's certain that Elton John has nothing left to prove, but it's also possible that he's underappreciated. He’d reportedly mastered the piano by age 3, playing complex pieces and making them look easy. John’s family was quick to recognize his talents. It's fan service of an especially and characteristically generous kind. Indisputably one of the most famous piano players alive today, Elton John’s unique compositions blended elements of pop and rock that no one had seen before. (The instrumental score, threaded with echoes and allusions to his hits, with special attention to ''Goodbye Yellow Brick Road,'' is by Matthew Margeson.)īut the point of ''Rocketman'' isn't self-aggrandizement. John, now 72, married and many years sober, serves as an executive producer and the author (with his lyricist Bernie Taupin, of course) of most of the soundtrack. But like that booklet, the movie - a testament to self-realization and a chronicle of recovery - is very much an authorized life. Back in the '70s, the fact that John was gay counted as an official secret, as did the extent of his devotion to alcohol, cocaine and other substances. ''Rocketman,'' directed by Dexter Fletcher from a screenplay by Lee Hall, recounts a slightly updated, substantially more candid version of the same story. I spent many hours that summer on the beanbag chair in the green-carpeted den, listening to ''Someone Saved My Life Tonight'' and poring over the tale of how a shy, bespectacled piano prodigy named Reginald Dwight blossomed into the internationally renowned song stylist dominating my turntable and millions of others. Nestled inside the sleeve was a graphic-novel-style booklet about the singer's life, a source of great fascination to me at the time. ![]() The first album I ever bought with my own allowance was ''Captain Fantastic and the Brown Dirt Cowboy,'' one of two studio LPs Elton John released in 1975. ![]()
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