Davey Johnstone Talks About Goodbye Yellow Brick Road – Part 3
By the Editor@EltonJohn.com
A still from the 1973 Bryan Forbes documentary.
We conclude our interview with guitarist Davey Johnstone by talking about more of the songs from Goodbye Yellow Brick Road, including the non-LP b-sides (which can be found on the new 5-disc and 2-disc Editions of the 40th Anniversary reissue).
EltonJohn.com: The Ballad Of Danny Bailey has quite the band arrangement.
Davey Johnstone: Now that is a great song. I love Danny Bailey ’cause it’s so different. It’s got an interesting chord sequence and a great story in the lyric. We had a really good time with that jam at the end – especially Dee and I. Elton was really into that piano vamp, and Dee was so good…so inventive. With this band, Elton could get to be the keyboard player he wanted. Nobody was trying to outplay anybody else, that was the beauty of it. Danny Bailey was probably the second take. Most of our stuff was first, second or third take.
Dirty Little Girl: That’s a filthy track….it’s such good fun. I liked what I played on one of the tracks, so I just did a variation on it on another track. And each was in a separate [left or right] channel in the studio as we were recording it. It was like, “Oh that’ll be great if we pan that over that way so that it’s really wide.” That is how it was in my headphones as I double-tracked.
Gus was one of the first guys to do piano in stereo. Most people, even The Beatles and everyone, had the piano on its own [mono] channel. But Gus had this stereo piano sound; that became Elton’s trademark. So we decided to do guitars that way: acoustic guitars right and left…electric guitars right and left…some of the background vocals as well.
EJ.com: What is the effect at the beginning of All The Girls Love Alice?
DJ: The one with a kind of wobbly sound? That’s a Uni-Vibe guitar. At the beginning I used the volume pedal, which blanks out the guitar sound completely, and I had the Uni-Vibe play on fast speed (it had a slow speed and a fast speed, almost like what the Leslie amp did for guitars and organs). And I played a chord and swelled it up to you get that sound. And then when it does into the verse, I go into the straight guitar without any effect on it. Towards the end – that’s one of those steel bottle openers sliding down the neck of the guitar. And it sounded so great we double-tracked it! All those sound effects at the end: Nigel’s car is on that (on the gravel driveway outside the Château)…and I think the siren was from an effects library or something. All the other stuff is really just me doing guitars. That’s the thing about being a small outfit. We would do all these things and it wouldn’t take long.
Your Sister Can’t Twist (But She Can Rock ‘n’ Roll): There are several background vocal parts in that. And one of the parts, that should be quite straight forward, is the “ahhh-ahhh-ahhh-ahhh” at the beginning and in the middle. It’s kind of a nod to all the rock & roll records that have come before. But I said, “Why don’t we do one track of ‘ahhh’ [sings one tone] and then we’ll do another track of ‘ahhh’ [sings another tone]? And Gus can just switch them in and out when he wants.” It came out really well.
And then during the choruses we sing a background part, which actually consists of the words fjurkny-fjurkny [“fyerk-nay”]. That was part of our band language back then. Not necessarily rude, just something we all said.
EJ.com: Putting Sister and Saturday Night’s Alright (For Fighting) so close together on the album, where the space in between is almost a part of the song…was that Gus’ idea?
DJ: It totally was. After he sequenced the album and I heard that I went, “Now that’s one of the best things I’ve ever heard.” ‘Cos it goes from this very fast, rockabilly kind of tune into that heavy intro of Saturday Night. It really shows the weight of Saturday Night, which is actually quite slow. A lot of people think it’s really fast, but it’s nowhere near as fast as Sister.
EJ.com: The story about Saturday Night is that Elton did not record his piano part on to it until later.
DJ: Way later. After I’d done about eight guitars or something. We kept adding guitars ‘cos it sounded so good. He didn’t want piano on it. We had to convince him, “You gotta play that Jerry Lee Lewis glissando on it (when the piano comes in at the first chorus)!” I already was playing, like, four guitars on the song and then we added four more guitars at the beginning of the instrumental part. Then we added two more at the end of the solo. So there were ten guitars at one point. And then coming in to the last chorus I did a slide guitar with Dave Hentschel adding an ARP ‘woosh’ behind it.
EJ.com: You played a steel guitar on Roy Rogers, as befits a country and western song.
DJ: Yeah, that was the idea. That was very easy; I knew what I wanted to play. And after I’d done the acoustic guitars on the basic track, which was actually a pretty cool sound, I did the slide guitars with a steel slide.
Social Disease: There’s a banjo on this one, and some Uni-Vibe guitar. Acoustic guitar…there’s all kinds of stuff on this track. And the barking dogs [at the beginning] were from around the Château grounds. We just hung the mics out the window and they picked up the different sounds.
Harmony: The first chord is a B with an E-flat in the bass, which is very odd sound. And so I thought, “My guitar is tuned in E and so I can’t play an E-flat. What if I tuned the whole guitar down to E-flat?” Which I did and then I played a C major 7 chord, which sounded like a B major 7 chord over an E-flat. We were nuts. It was like, “What can we do to this song?”
The great thing about Harmony was that we stacked those backing vocals at the end there. We had all these ideas, with different parts and layers and everything. We just knew what we were going to do. We stole a lot of Beach Boys ideas. “Well, we can do this – we’ll just add more vocals and use them like an effect.” Following the bass line and all that kind of thing.
It became an early strong point within our group; not only did we find we played well together, but also doing the backing vocals. The first time we sang together was Rocket Man and it was like, “Ohh, we’re onto something else here.” We started to take a lot of pride in it. And Elton loved it. He would say, “Hey guys, you can do your thing. I know it’s going to be great. I’ll see you later.” And he’d split. And me and Dee and Nigel (with great input from Gus and Dave Hentschel) would stick around and do it to our hearts content. I mean, the vocals on Harmony took us over a day. Everything was done track by track by track by track. By the end of it we were all destroyed, but it was worth it. The great thing that we had on our side was the fact that we had total faith in Gus Dudgeon and what he was doing.
Whenever You’re Ready (We’ll Go Steady Again): That’s a slide-guitar with some vibrato. I think Rod Stewart was going to record this song at one point. I know he did Let Me Be Your Car (an outtake from Don’t Shoot Me…). That was written for Rod, and I think he was really keen on doing this one also.
Jack Rabbit: This one had mandolin, acoustic guitar, banjo, electric guitar, slide guitar. It was like, “Okay, Davey, this one’s yours.” There’s no piano on it. He loved that we could take it from a piano band to a guitar band or whatever. I mean, he wrote it on piano, obviously, but then he pretty much said, “This is a country song…no piano necessary.”
Screw You: The main guitar was plugged through a Leslie amp. It was two twelve-string guitars, so they were slightly out of phase with one another. Then I added two guitars and tuned every string to the same note, which I don’t think had ever been done before. All six strings were tuned to, I think, D and we double-tracked it. Then when it gets to the chorus I quadruple-tracked it! You can really hear them on those grinding chords in the chorus.
Click here to read Part One of our interview with Davey Johnstone.
Click here to read Part Two of our interview with Davey Johnstone.