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MORE THAN HITS
Elton does it all

Most of our older rock stars have long since realized that their audience isn’t coming for new material or deeper album tracks. For all the hype about A Bigger Bang’s being the best Stones album in decades, they ventured only three songs from it during their hit-heavy show at Fenway Park. And to judge from early set lists, when Paul McCartney hits town this week, we’ll be getting a lot of Beatles and very little from Chaos and Creation in the Backyard.

Elton John is the last artist you’d expect to buck the trend, since he’s played all-hits shows and barely plugged his new albums since the ’80s. Yet his show at the TD Banknorth Garden last Friday turned out to be a Bruce Springsteen kind of marathon, with plenty of surprises. He began with eight songs from his current Peachtree Road (Universal) and followed with eight more from the 1975 Captain Fantastic and the Brown Dirt Cowboy (Island). He did both in sequence, leaving out only four songs from Peachtree and two from Captain Fantastic. And then he played for another two hours, what amounted to a standard, satisfying Elton John show, with all the expected hits (the extended " Rocket Man " and " Bennie & the Jets " ) and a couple of unexpected ones (neither " Levon " nor " Sorry Seems To Be the Hardest Word " had been done lately). But that first hour-plus was the real payoff for fans, showing him in stripped-down, singer-songwriter mode.

Captain Fantastic is the oddball album of his superstar era, with only one hit single ( " Someone Saved My Life Tonight " ) and a lot of autobiographical musing. The songs are longer and trickier than his norm, venturing toward prog-rock, and both John, who’s lately gotten some of his high register back, and his current band were up to the challenge. (The return of original drummer Nigel Olsson makes all the difference.) But the Peachtree material was no slouch ether, harking back to the countryish Tumbleweed Connection (Island) era. Lyricist Bernie Taupin shows his mettle by crafting resonant words on the decidedly non-rock topic of middle-aged contentment. And Elton went so far as to open " My Elusive Drug " with a dedication: " This is about the drugs and booze I used to do before I got clean and met the love of my life. So this one’s for David. " No small feat for an artist who rarely mentions his personal life on stage.

BY BRETT MILANO

Issue Date: September 23 - 29, 2005
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