It’s no secret that the Troubadour nightclub in Los Angeles has many stories to tell, one of them being the first time Elton John ever met one of his heroes. “I saw him, and my knees went zzzippp,” the singer once recalled. In the early 1970s, John was a particularly impressionable musician who looked up to many while establishing his own songwriting and piano playing, one of which ended up becoming a fixation of his for four decades.
It was that one night at the Troubadour nightclub that John first stumbled across Leon Russell, a man whose overt rock star appearance starkly contrasted with his and his music partner Bernie Taupin’s more quintessential British stiffness. “They were both very shy and very English, and Elton told me I looked like a proper rock star,” Russell once recalled, detailing the moment the pair came over to his house for the first time.
Opposites attract, at least; that adage rings true in some of the most inspiring musical atmospheres, as their differences were quickly set aside, and they all found themselves huddled around a piano in no time, setting the foundation for what would eventually become The Union, many, many years before they would even put pen to paper and begin working on the coveted album.
“Piano playing-wise, I’d say he’s my biggest hero,” John said during an interview with The Spectacle in 2008. Russell had such a profound impact on the star that he often brought John to tears, mostly because it took him “back to one of the most beautiful and fantastic times of my life,” per the Elton John website. As the years went by, Russell became a different kind of legend, one resigned to more delicate spaces, while John’s career enjoyed success after success, milestone after milestone.
Before Russell’s longtime association with John, however, Russell found himself stuck between a rock and a hard place. John’s intervention all but changed his entire life, subverting the inevitable path to failure he felt so convinced he was destined to follow. “Elton came and found me in the ditch on the side of the highway of life and took me up to the high stages and treated me like a king,” the musician said.
In John’s view, he felt enamoured with the musician, so much so that he felt indebted and had an overwhelming urge to support him in any way that he could. “It was a true love affair,” he told Shortlist. “It was watching someone come alive again, feeling love, feeling wanted, feeling acknowledged. We’re not going to dump him. We’re going to nurture him. He’s going to have money in the bank, and he’s not going to have to play toilets, and that’s what I wanted for him.”
It wasn’t all just John, however. Russell’s subsequent successes and accolades may have been enabled by his relationship with John, but he had the talent and drive to begin with; it was just his environment that threatened to circumnavigate his rightful journey. Even after his death, John remains proud of “what a wonderful and incredible artist” he was and how much he inspired him in his own artistic vision.
