He’s still standing
As Elton John’s farewell tour hits MSG, his longtime collaborator looks back on the highlights
HAVING played nearly 3,000 shows with Elton John since 1972, Davey Johnstone — the Rocket Man’s trusted musical director and guitarist — says it’s tough to pick favorites. Maybe Friday’s stop at Madison Square Garden as part of Elton’s long farewell tour will end up on his list. But there is one 1974 concert at the Garden that stands out from all the rest they have done in New York.
That’s when John Lennon joined them onstage on Thanksgiving Day as part of a deal he’d made when Elton played piano on the Beatle legend’s single “Whatever Gets You Thru the Night.”
“I was at the studio,” says Johnstone, “and Elton said, ‘Well, I’ll play on it, but if it gets to No. 1, you have to come onstage with us at Madison Square Garden.’ And John went, ‘Yeah, OK’ because he never expected it to be a No. 1 hit, which it was. So John had to make good on his promise.”
And did he ever: Lennon sat in for “Whatever Gets You Thru the Night” plus two Beatles classics —“Lucy in the Sky With Diamonds” and “I Saw Her Standing There” — in what would be one of his last concert performances. “It was insane,” says Johnstone, 67, of the surprise appearance that is referenced in “Empty Garden (Hey Hey Johnny),” Elton’s 1982 tribute to the slain Lennon.
In addition to Friday’s concert, Johnstone and his boss will be rocking the Garden on the Farewell Yellow Brick Road tour on Nov. 8 and 9, and again in March 2019. The massive tour is scheduled to go on through 2021.
“It’s ridiculous that it’s such a huge undertaking,” says Johnstone. “Usually we just go out and kick ass without many production trappings, but we decided, since this is the farewell tour, to make it very special.”
Their musical journey together goes back a long, long time: It started when the Scottish-born, LA-based Johnstone — then in a folk-rock group called Magna Carta — was brought in to work on the guitar part for the title track of Elton’s 1971 album, “Madman Across the Water.”
“He played me the chord sequence, and I said, ‘Well, what about something like this?’ And I played something. And he said, ‘Well, that’s it!’ So we cut that song, ‘Holiday Inn,’ ‘Tiny Dancer’ and ‘Levon’ all in that first day.”
Then Elton asked Johnstone to join his band, and the guitarist went on to play on a string of golden-era classics such as “Saturday Night’s Alright for Fighting” (“one of the earliest kick-in-theass things for me”), “Rocket Man” (the title of Elton’s upcoming biopic) and a chart-topping cover of “Lucy in the Sky With Diamonds” (on which Johnstone convinced Lennon to play guitar).
Johnstone — who has also played mandolin, banjo and sitar — even cowrote the 1983 hit “I Guess That’s Why They Call It the Blues” with Elton and his lyricist partner Bernie Taupin. “That song has a special place in my heart, obviously,” he says.
But life on the road isn’t the nonstop party that it once was. “It was completely nuts!” says Johnstone. “We were out of control . . . doing all kinds of illicit things. But since Elton got sober, and I got sober a bunch of years ago, [staying clean has] become my focus. We’re very lucky to be around still because we were pretty crazy.”
So is Johnstone sad to be coming to the end of the yellow brick road? “Are you kidding? No — we’re exhausted. With the amount of shows that we’ve done over the years, I think we’ve worked harder than just about any band in history.”