someone saved my life tonight

thoughts about elton john, my teen years, and youthful despair

[i am traveling upstate for a funeral for the next few days, so there will be no week in joy or new content until late next week]

1975. I was 13 years old, a rebellious fledgling teenager living off the adrenaline of rock and roll. Led Zeppelin. Kiss. Bowie. Pink Floyd. That’s what we were listening to in the converted garages of suburbia, cramped together in the teenage version of clubhouses pretending to be cooler than we actually were. It’s hard to be cool at 13. You still wear a thin veneer of childhood at that age, a softness that belies the affectation you present as you sit there sipping a stolen Rheingold beer while listening to music whose meaning still escapes you. We liked to believe we were hardcore, the kind of kids who wanted to rock and roll all night and party every day and despite the fact that at 13 we had already perfected the art of rolling a joint we were still soft. When we left the garages we went home and let our guards down. Everyone had their thing they hid from the others, that one thing that might stop you from looking like the juvenile delinquents hopped up on rock and roll we wanted to be seen as. I know Eddie had his Archie & Veronica comic books. Me, I had Elton John.

I had harbored a secret love for Elton since 1973 when “Daniel” entered my heart and “Crocodile Rock” got stuck in my brain. I bought Don’t Shoot Me, I’m Only the Piano Player with my allowance thinking it was the epitome of anything Elton John could ever accomplish musically and then later that year Goodbye Yellow Brick Road came out and I was blown away. I was eleven then, too young to really get the nuances of the album but old enough to know it was brilliant.

I never told anyone about my Elton John obsession; how I would collect magazine articles about him, cut them out and carefully tape them into a scrapbook dedicated to all things Elton. I had no Elton John posters on my wall, no album covers hung as art. I had a hard enough time maintaining friends as it was; my loose circuit of garage rock kids was just a bunch of superficial friendships held together by Robert Plant and the lure of getting high while discussing the meaning of “Stairway to Heaven.” I couldn’t let what few friends I had know I was secretly the biggest Elton John fan on Long Island.

And then came Captain Fantastic and the Brown Dirt Cowboy. My mother took me to the store to buy it the day it came out. I spent the ride home from the store gawking at the album cover, studying it. When I got home I intended to listen, as I always listened to new albums, from start to finish. But I got stuck on the last song on the first side: “Someone Saved My Life Tonight.”

There are few songs that catch you like that on the first hearing, songs that sound immediately familiar, songs that feel like they were meant to live inside you. I had no idea what the song was really about and that didn’t matter. I knew what it felt like to me. I had no idea of the emotions that had been bottled up inside me but the cork had been pulled out and everything came rushing at me. What does a 13 year old know what to do with such a rush of feelings? Nothing but cry. So I sat there listening to “Someone Saved My Life Tonight” over and over again, letting the rush of sadness, loneliness and darkness work itself out of me. I had no idea why Elton John’s life needed to be saved or what events led him to the point of writing that song or what it meant to him, I only knew how the music, the pain within transferred to my own psyche and forced out things I’d been feeling but could never articulate.

At first I didn’t know if I was crying for Elton John’s despair or for mine. Hell, I didn’t even know what despair was at that age. It was just a feeling I had no words for, a weighing down of my soul that kept me from being truly happy. And here was Elton, so obviously unhappy with things in his life. Was he fleeing from the thing that made him unhappy or was he fleeing from his unhappiness in general? I dug deep into the words, trying to decipher them. The thought of him walking head on into the deep end of the river filled me with dread yet at the same time I thought about how freeing that would be, to just slip into the water and let it take me.

Elton John had given me this: my first real thought of suicide. It both frightened me and gave me a sense of elation. To be free of everything, free of the constant struggle to fit in, the loneliness I felt even when in a room full of people seemingly just like me, the constraints of the cloak of invisibility I seemed to wear all the time. What if I didn’t want to do this anymore? What if this was all there was, a lifelong fight to be heard, seen, acknowledged and liked? Wouldn’t it just be better to walk into the deep end of the river now and not have to struggle through countless years of having my heart and soul crushed on a daily basis?

I listened to “Someone Saved My Life Tonight” for most of that evening, writing down a few words in a journal I kept tucked away with my Elton John albums. I knew I’d never have the guts to kill myself. But I also knew my first time thinking about it would not be my last. And there was some small comfort in the fact that this musician I idolized shared what felt like a sacred moment with me; that moment when you think maybe enough is enough. I thought about how many other people in the world have felt like ending it all and how many actually did it. It was a sobering thought and I pushed myself into thinking that it could get better, it would get better. After all, Elton John walked away from that river and freed himself from his unhappiness. If he could do it, so could I.

The next day I bought an Elton John t-shirt, one with the cover of Captain Fantastic ironed on to it. Coming out to those garage friends as an Elton John fan was my way of freeing myself from a part of my darkness. Here I am, I was saying. This is me. Take it or leave it. Whether I was really saying that to myself or to them, I still don’t know. I just know that 40 listens of “Someone Saved My Life Tonight” pushed me into a new phase of my life. Because suddenly all my friends seemed like little kids, just a bunch of punks sitting in an overgrown clubhouse arguing over KISS lyrics. I wanted to shout at them “I thought about killing myself last night,” but I didn’t because they wouldn’t understand. I wanted to sit them down and make them listen to the song a dozen times or so until they got something out of it but I didn’t because they wouldn’t understand. I wanted to tell them about me, about my feelings, about my inadequacy. But I didn’t because they wouldn’t understand.

So I went home and listened to Captain Fantastic and the Brown Dirt Cowboy again, because Elton John understood.