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(Credits: Far Out / Heinrich Klaffs)
No rock and roll star needs to have a great technical voice to get themselves over the finish line all the time. Bob Dylan never claimed to be Pavarotti with an acoustic guitar in his hands, and some of the greatest tunes of all time are usually coming from someone who has character to their voice rather than looking for some kind of major vocal award or anything. But even for someone who didn’t consider himself a singer first, Elton John always respected the craft when he approached his own music.
Then again, John never claimed to be one of the greatest singers of all time. He had incredibly good diction and was able to interpret Bernie Taupin’s lyrics beautifully whenever the time called for it, but he was always a working songwriter before anything else, and if no one else was going to sing his songs, he was going to have to play them himself to get noticed.
And listening to many of his first records, you can hear the influences in his voice as clear as day whenever he sings. There’s never any one inspiration that he pulled from at any time, so while his piano work may have borrowed from everyone from Little Richard to Bach, it was easy for him to take cues from everyone from John Lennon to Jerry Lee Lewis to Stevie Wonder, depending on what the song needed.
But John quickly found himself in the middle of a club that he didn’t necessarily ask to join as well. The glam-rock scene felt like it was tailormade for his brand of camp, but listening to every band that was shoved into the mix with him, T Rex didn’t sound like ‘Your Song’ at all, and Sweet were far closer to a party band than anything that came off of an album like Madman Across the Water.
John always fashioned himself more as a James Taylor-type of songwriter who wrote the best music that he could, and while Rod Stewart didn’t fit into that mould at first, he and John were the friendliest of rivals when they first started trading jabs at each other. The stories about them having their own nicknames for each other and disrupting their rival’s promotional tours were hilarious to see, but John knew it always came out of a deep love and respect as well.
Because even when Stewart took a beating in his time for sounding too commercial during his career, John felt that there was no reason to complain when he hadn’t lost his step, saying, “I think because Rod’s records were so huge, [the critics] thought that he had sold out. But that voice can sing anything, and it sounds good.”
While there were admittedly some people reasonably upset when he was making more commercial material, it’s not like Stewart couldn’t recognise when something went wrong. Despite ‘Do Ya Think I’m Sexy’ being one of the most loathed songs in rock history for a certain disco-fearing public, Stewart himself has said that he wouldn’t be caught dead with the song had he written it today.
Even if he does have a few hiccups in his career, though, John does have a point about him never losing his touch when it comes to singing perfect melodies. Not everything had to be the most complicated thing in the world, but once that rasp comes in on either ‘Maggie May’, ‘Hot Legs’ or ‘Stay With Me’ by The Faces, Stewart always was the epitome of what a rock and roll singer should sound like.
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