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Forty years after Yellow Brick Road, Sir Elton John—swollen, heavy, hypertensive—looked a little like a frog who'd been stung by a bee.
At Moda Center on Thursday night, he entered the stage in near-total darkness, approaching the piano with a careful, post-menopausal waddle. The Knight of Tin Pan Alley looked distressingly fragile. Meanwhile, his hired guitarist looked like a Die Hard villain, with thinning blonde locks cascading around Lou Reed's face. The drummer, by all appearances, was a moonlighting Joe Biden. As the music started, the arena filled with a thousand tiny Eltons on a thousand phone screens—Galaxys and Galaxys of Elton, each one diminished.
That is, until the man sang.
Like Neil Diamond or Celine Dion, Elton John traffics in feelings far too large to be anything but abstract; it is titanic show-biz schmaltz that knows no human age. He was never young, really, and he was far too alien in youth to be any stranger now. All that matters is that voice, and Sir Elton's baritone was in amazingly beautiful form, as rich as it ever was in his twenties—as long as you don't mind he's never even going to try for the high notes he's now surgically unable to hit.
During "Bennie and the Jets," the night's second song, John leaned hard both on the keys and his own pipes, lurching and scooping willfully into each new note like an enthusiastic drunk in a smoking lounge. He steamed straight into Candle in the Wind without more than a cursory applause break, leaving the crowd of mostly over-50 couples scrambling for their cell phone LED lights to approximate Norma Jean's snuffed-too-soon flame.
Precious few creative sunglasses were in evidence in a surprisingly conservative-looking crowd—Elton's, even, were a comparatively discreet royal blue—with the exception of one pair of truly inspiring glitter-guitar sunglasses worn by a woman in a red top.
"I got another pair for him," she said, gesturing to the man next to her, "but he wouldn't wear them."
Nonetheless, only at a VFW hall could you find so many drunk-seeming sexagenarians—and according to a companion, the Moda Center ladies' room smelled a lot like pot.
Sir Elton, meanwhile, had hits to burn and was wasting no time. During "Tiny Dancer" the great voice rasped with the thrill of the moment. At the end of "Levon," John stood sideways at the bench for an endless no-look honky-tonk jam, stirring the crowd into the sort of clenched-fist stationary grooving usually reserved for the ends of wedding receptions.
Above the stage, what had at first looked like a chandelier was slowly distending to become a massive breast made of light, complete with golden nipple. The nozzle at its end threatened to explode with something—glitter, confetti, desperate happiness—but instead receded sadly back into the rafters without so much as a squirt.
As the band played an operatically slow version of "Rocket Man," an hour into the set, two huge screens above the stage played a low-budget Second Life-style animation of Sir Elton's own recent life: two men holding hands atop a wedding cake, then a couple of elves manically screwing in a garden, and then John's adopted children emerging in black-and-white cut-out from a blossoming daisy. Pianos spun through widest space. Staircases bloomed with carnations. Onstage, the guitarist had at some point swapped out one neck for two, but he never touched the frets on the second one.
My God, it was all so wonderful. The convergence of awful taste, genius-level songcraft and fever-pitch sincerity was deeply irresistible, a blinding hurricane force of feelings felt so hard it didn't even matter what the feelings were.
But as the last notes of "Rocket Man" faded, John announced that he would now be playing "Hey, Ahab" from 2010's The Union album, leaving the parade of classics behind.
That was our cue. The white whale, we knew, had long since come our way.
WWeek 2015