The hit machine cometh

Sure, Elton could play all these songs in his sleep, but he sure plays them well

Norman Provencher
The Ottawa Citizen

Bruno Schlumberger, The Ottawa Citizen / Elton John knows his crowd. When he played Tiny Dancer for a couple celebrating an anniversary, most couples there thought it was for them.

Now Ottawa knows why they call Elton John the Rocket Man. The pint-sized pianist jetted into the capital around suppertime Friday night, limoed out to the Corel Centre, jumped on stage and knocked out about 16,000 fans, limoed out and was probably tucked into his Montreal hotel room before most of his fans had negotiated the Queensway home. He was a few hundred thousand dollars richer and few, if any, in the crowd would complain about the deal.

Sure, there was a calculated feel to the whole thing. There weren't many chances taken during the show, and you got the feeling sometimes that he could do his "off-the-cuff" stuff in his sleep.

But John knows his crowd, and he knows they want the hits, all-Elton all-the-time, and, with more than 40 top-40 hits over his three decades in show biz, he's just the maestro to do it.

The show was a model of organization, ballads switching over to up-tempo stuff and back again. Just as the power chords to classics like Saturday Night's Alright For Fighting or Honky Cat were fading out, it was Bic moment time with a power ballad like Don't Let the Sun Go Down on Me or a movie theme like Can You Feel the Love Tonight.

He's still a master of the schmooze, although he doesn't do it as much as in his younger days. He warned the crowd from the beginning that "we're going to do some old songs, we'll do some recent songs and we'll do some new songs. I hope that's all right." What do you think? Later, a couple who were apparently celebrating a wedding anniversary were honoured with a version of Tiny Dancer, and most of the couples in the crowd thought the song was for them.

Unlike his early days, when he'd show up in powdered wigs and 12-inch platform shoes, these days the 50-year-old singer is content with a simple-yet-elegant cerise suit and black shirt and leaves most of the campy stuff to longtime buddy and guitarist Davey Johnstone, who adopted heroic rock-god posture for the simplest of solos (and most of them were, unfortunately, very simple indeed.)

John's voice may have had better days (although, again, no one in the crowd seemed to mind), and he laboured to try to hit some of the upper-register notes (and gave up on a few).

On the other hand, people sometimes forget what a frighteningly good piano player the man is. His six-minute improvisation leading into I Don't Wanna Go On (With You Like That) was probably worth the price of admission for some people.

Similarly, the explosive seven-piece backup band was awesome. None of the members -- apart from Johnstone -- were named (or we missed any such mention) but the percussion section was particularly dandy as was the second guitar player.

And, no, true to his word, he didn't play either version of Candle in the Wind. Instead, as he's done at other recent concerts, he sang Sand and Water in dedication to his friends Princess Diana and Gianni Versace. Similarly, he dedicated a solo version of The Last Song to people living with AIDS.

In the end, a dandy version of Your Song (dedicated, of course, to the fans), and it was time for John to catch his plane and the fans to go pay the babysitters, both sides happy with the deal.