LYCOS RETRIEVER 
Elton John: Bernie Taupin
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Elton John is scheduled to perform 91 shows over the next three years in Las Vegas at the Coliseum at Caesars Palace in Las Vegas. Elton John’s show is called The Red Piano and features 15 Elton hits packed into 90 minutes. It is a once in a lifetime experience. This Las Vegas extravaganza, The Red Piano is a career overview of Elton John’s last thirty years. The hit music is coupled with huge video images created by photographer David LaChapelle. The songs Elton John plays in his shows are the hits written by Bernie Taupin including Tiny dancer, Rocket Man, I’m still Standing, Pinball Wizard, Candles in the wind, Daniel, Bennie and the Jets, Crocodile Rock, and don’t let the sun Go down on Me. Opening night had many stars in the audience including Michael Douglas, Catherine Zeta-Jones, Barbara Walters, Pamela Anderson, Christina Aguilera, Kathy Griffin and Sharon Osbourne.
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John's second album, titled Elton John, included "Your Song", which shot into the top ten in both the U.S. and U.K. And ever since, Elton John has been one of pop music's biggest stars. He had 30 top 40 hits between 1970 and 1982, with at least one top 40 single every year until 1996, and had seven consecutive #1 albums. Taupin and John have drifted apart and come back together several times since their first break-up in 1976, with toe-tapping an inevitable byproduct.
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For his second album, John and Taupin hired producer Gus Dudgeon and arranger Paul Buckmaster, who contributed grandiose string charts to Elton John. Released in the summer of 1970, Elton John began to make inroads in America, where it appeared on MCA's Uni subsidiary. In August, he gave his first American concert at the Troubadour in Los Angeles, which received enthusiastic reviews, as well as praise from Quincy Jones and Leon Russell. Throughout the fall, Elton John continued to climb the charts on the strength of the Top Ten single "Your Song." John followed it quickly in February 1971 with the concept album Tumbleweed Connection, which received heavy airplay on album-oriented radio in the U.S., helping it climb into the Top Ten. The rapid release of Tumbleweed Connection established a pattern of frequent releases that John maintained throughout his career. In 1971, he released the live 11-17-70 and the Friends soundtrack, before releasing Madman Across the Water late in the year. Madman Across the Water was successful, but John achieved stardom with the follow-up, 1972's Honky Chateau.
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In the 1975 autobiographical album Captain Fantastic and the Brown Dirt Cowboy, Elton John revealed his previously ambiguous personality, with Taupin's lyrics describing their early days as struggling songwriters and musicians in London. The lyrics and accompanying photo booklet are infused with a specific sense of place and time that is otherwise rare in John's music. "Someone Saved My Life Tonight" was the hit single from this album and captured an early turning point in John's life.
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Throughout the mid-'70s, John's concerts were enormously popular, as were his singles and albums, and he continued to record and perform at a rapid pace until 1976. That year, he revealed in an interview in Rolling Stone that he was bisexual; he would later admit that the confession was a compromise, since he was afraid to reveal that he was homosexual. Many fans reacted negatively to John's bisexuality, and his audience began to shrink somewhat in the late '70s. The decline in his record sales was ... due to his exhaustion. After 1976, John cut his performance schedule drastically, announcing that he was retiring from live performances in 1977 and started recording only one album a year. His relationship with Taupin became strained following the release of 1976's double album Blue Moves, and the lyricist began working with other musicians.
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John and Taupin were hired by Dick James to become staff songwriters at his fledgling DJM in 1968. The pair collaborated at a rapid rate, with Taupin submitting batches of lyrics -- he often wrote a song an hour -- every few weeks. John would then write music without changing the words, sometimes completing the songs in under a half-hour. Over the next two years, the duo wrote songs for pop singers like Roger Cook and Lulu. In the meantime, John recorded cover versions of current hits for budget labels to be sold in supermarkets. By the summer of 1968, he had begun recording singles for release under his own name.
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Bernie Taupin