Top Ten 1975 Songs: Curtains (#1)

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Anyone who had any doubt about who was going to head the 1975 list just wasn’t paying attention. I only mentioned him 6,000 times this month. Ah, but which song?? He had three #1 hits in 1975 (and that doesn’t count the “guest vocal” on Neil Sedaka’s “Bad Blood,” which I already used). The reason I started listening to rock and roll full time, and his history-making album, will close out the look back 50 years. #1: Curtains - Elton John Oh, sure, I could’ve used the hits (his #1 hits in 1975 were “Lucy in the Sky With Diamonds,” “Philadelphia Freedom,” and “Island Girl”), or even the hit from this album (“Someone Saved My Life Tonight”), but when we’re talking about the pure musical joy of 1975, this is the song that comes to mind first. Fifty years ago this week Captain Fantastic and the Brown Dirt Cowboy was released. It became the first album in Billboard history to debut on the album chart at #1. (For the record, the second album to debut at #1 came a few months later, Elton’s next album Rock of the Westies.) At a time when it would have been easy to just throw any stuff out there because the public would eat it up because, hey, it was ELTON JOHN (see: “Solar Prestige a Gammon” on Caribou…on second thought, DON’T, because you can’t un-hear that!), Elton and Bernie bared their souls as they detailed their start as a team (they met, if you didn’t know, by both answering a “songwriters wanted” ad in a trade paper in England…Bernie couldn’t write music and Elton couldn’t write lyrics, so they got paired together) and the brutality of the music business (“it’s party time for the guys in the Tower of Babel, Sodom meet Gomorrah, Cain meet Abel”). It should never have been a hit. It was too intimate, too personal, and, well, too UN-commercial. But it was a hit, selling over a million copies in its first four days of release. This marvelous tune closes the album, echoing back to the first song where “the Captain and the Kid” were “stepping in the ring.” In that song, there was the warning that “it’s a long and lonely climb.” Here they looked at the big stars so far above them and said, “Just like us, you must have had a once upon a time.” They picked the story up decades later on The Captain and the Kid, with their first US tour (“we heard Richard Nixon say ‘welcome to the USA’”). Here, though, they ended the story, unsure of anything. Elton John has been my favorite rocker since 1975. I had every album he made at one point (and things like the Friends soundtrack where he did two songs). He’s made some exceptional albums in his career (give a listen to 2001’s Songs From the West Coast, showing that he wasn’t even close to “past his prime” then), but this album is the one I’d take if I only had one to take. And if I only had one song to take, it’d be this one. Thanks for the masterpiece, Elton. And thank you for reading. Curtains Written by Elton John and Bernie Taupin Recorded by Elton John From Captain Fantastic and the Brown Dirt Cowboy, 1975 Beneath these branches: