Dance

?Blue-jean baby, L.A. lady / Seamstress for the band / Pretty-eyed, pirate smile / You?ll marry a music man“

This minor hit has often been mischaracterized as being about Taupin?s first wife just because it was dedicated to her on Elton John?s album. However, the wordsmith has gone on record that ?Tiny Dancer? is about his (and Elton?s) first trip to Los Angeles and the free-spirited ?ethereal? women who sought to be part of the music scene in any way they could. (No wonder it was such a perfect fit for ?Almost Famous? and Miss Penny Lane.) The song is a perfect example of Taupin?s knack for creating these golden snapshots with an economy of language.

?A couple of the sounds that I really like / Are the sounds of a switchblade and a motorbike / I’m a juvenile product of the working class / Whose best friend floats in the bottom of a glass?

When writing this most rocking of Elton?s hits, Taupin drew on his teenage days hanging out in music clubs with boorish, violent characters. His intention was to take the ?out on the town? concept of ?50s American rock songs and transport it to an English setting. Apparently that meant lots more alcohol ? including the famous euphemism, ?get about as oiled as a diesel train.? The rhythm of Bernie?s words perfectly matches the revved-up energy of Elton?s music.

“I used to be the main express / All steam and whistles heading west / Picking up my pain from door to door / Riding on the Storyline / Furnace burning overtime / But this train don’t stop there anymore“

Taupin sometimes writes from his perspective and sometimes channels Elton?s view ? which appears to be the case on the No. 8 entry in the list of Top 10 Bernie Taupin Lyrics. The lyricist uses a train metaphor to allow his worn and weary superstar partner to look back on his hard-partying days and over-romanticized music. The minor hit is a melancholy masterpiece sung by a rocker who, yes, is still standing, but hardly feels like a little kid anymore.

“Oh you danced in death like a marionette on the vengeance of the law“

This song was written when mass shootings were a freak occurrence in the U.S., and not a media event that seems to happen multiple times a year. In the chilling ?Ticking,? Taupin creates a fictional scene of 14 dead in a Queens bar at the hands of an unstable gunman. It?s probably tempting to write a song like this as a parable, but we?re offered no easy answers in this seven-minute ballad, just a humane look at tragedy. The most descriptive line is also the most unsettling, in which Taupin invokes a marionette to describe the killer?s bullet-riddled demise.

“For we were spinning out our lines walking on the wire / Hand in hand went music and the rhyme / The Captain and the Kid stepping in the ring“

Taupin and John created ?Captain Fantastic? as a concept album to tell stories from their pre-fame struggles in the late ?60s. As such, Taupin wrote the songs in the order they appear on the record ? starting with the steady-rolling title track, which is an origin story for the comic book personas of these two musical heroes. The language is weird and wonderful and the story sets the scene of two halves of a whole, hoping to take the whole world by storm.

?I can’t light no more of your darkness / All my pictures seem to fade to black and white / I’m growing tired and time stands still before me / Frozen here on the ladder of my life?

Elton and Bernie planned something epic ? their inspiration was the Righteous Brothers? ?You?ve Lost That Lovin? Feeling? ? for this ?Caribou? highlight. Although Taupin has said he?s not sure if their plans caused him to vary his lyrical approach, it looks like he pumped up the prose to imbue a song about love and loss with the stakes of life and death. That?s not a bad thing. Anything less would have been swallowed by the sweeping accompaniment. As in every entry in the Top 10 Bernie Taupin lyrics, his words hold their own.

“In those silent happy seconds / That surround the sound of this event / A parent smile is made in moments / They have made for you a friend“

Taupin drew from his own life on this often overlooked jewel from Elton?s breakout album. Yet, he didn?t employ his own memories for ?The Greatest Discovery?; instead, he imagined what it was like for his older brother Tony when Bernie was born. It?s one of those warm and fuzzy songs that never overshoots into saccharine territory. That?s because of how well it captures the feeling of childhood wonder, as well as how all these little details in your brain add up to memories of the most important moments in your life.

?You know you can’t hold me forever / I didn’t sign up with you / I’m not a present for your friends to open / This boy?s too young to be singing the blues?

The story goes that ?The Wizard of Oz? was the first movie Taupin ever saw. So on this soaring ballad, he pitted childhood memories (the yellow brick road from the Hollywood movie and the farm he grew up on) against each other in a repudiation of the opulence of the superstar lifestyle. The irony is that this song (along with the LP that shares its name) made John and Taupin even bigger stars; it remains Elton?s best-selling studio album.

“A slip noose hanging in my darkest dreams / I’m strangled by your haunted social scene / Just a pawn out-played by a dominating queen“

For this magnum opus, Taupin told a story that actually happened to his buddy Elton. In 1969, John was being cajoled by a woman into a marriage that was destined to be a mistake (for reasons we fully understand now), and he nearly committed suicide. He was convinced to stay alive, get out of the engagement and focus on his music by Long John Baldry, and Elton lived to sing the tale ? as penned by Taupin. The lyricist manages to treat the incidents with the decorum they deserve while still creating vivid scenes packed with imagery that is nothing short of, ahem, fantastic.

?Until you’ve seen this trash can dream come true / You stand at the edge, while people run you through?

Taupin wrote this classic (one of Elton?s personal favorites) after his first time in New York City. It represents the mercurial city through contrasts ? all-night revelers and lonely artists, rich men and doomed hobos, ?Spanish Harlem? the song and Spanish Harlem the actual place. There?s beauty in all of it, even to a country boy like Bernie. ?Mona Lisas and Mad Hatters? has been termed one of Taupin?s most direct compositions. That?s true, but his language is never so basic that it?s unable to continue to grow in the listener?s imagination. These are magic words, specific enough to get you to the place, playful enough to let you decide what happens.

‘Rocky Raccoon,’ Paul McCartney’s Old West tune of love and revenge, was actually written 7,000 miles away from the black mountain hills of Dakota. ?I was sitting on the roof in India with a guitar ? John and I were sitting ?round playing guitar,? McCartney told Radio Luxembourg. ?And I started playing the chords of ?Rocky Raccoon.?? McCartney eventually changed Rocky?s name from ?Sassoon? to ?Raccoon,? because “it sounded more like a cowboy.?

Producer George Martin contributed the saloon-style honky-tonk piano as McCartney wrote the lyrics on the fly at Abbey Road. ?’Rocky Raccoon’ is quirky, very me,? McCartney said in ‘Many Years From Now.’ ?I like talking blues so I started off like that, then I did my tongue-in-cheek parody of a western and threw in some amusing lines. I just tried to keep it amusing, really; it’s me writing a play, a little one-act play giving them most of the dialogue.?

When former Manfred Mann lead singer Paul Jones recorded ‘The Dog Presides,’ the session featured barking sound effects and an unlikely drummer: Paul McCartney. A few days later, the Beatles entered the studio to record ‘Hey Bullfrog,’ which John Lennon in ‘All We Are Saying‘ would call, ?a good sounding record that means nothing.’

In ‘Many Years From Now,’ McCartney said, ?There’s a little rap at the end between John and I, we went into a crazy little thing at the end.? Recalling the Paul Jones session, McCartney unexpectedly began to bark like a dog. The Beatles liked it so much that they changed the title to ‘Hey Bulldog.’ McCartney explained, ?We always tried to make every song different because we figured, ?Why write something like the last one? We’ve done that.? We were on a ladder so there was never any sense of stepping down a rung, or even staying on the same rung, it was better to move one rung ahead.?

In Aug. 1967, George Harrison rented a house in the Hollywood Hills on a street named Blue Jay Way. A visit from former Beatles publicist Derek Taylor would yield one of the Top 10 Beatles Animal Songs, ‘Blue Jay Way.’ ?Derek Taylor got held up. He rang to say he’d be late. I told him on the phone that the house was in Blue Jay Way,? Harrison said in ‘The Beatles’ by Hunter Davies. ?There was a fog and it got later and later. To keep myself awake, just as a joke to pass the time while I waited, I wrote a song about waiting for him in Blue Jay Way. There was a little Hammond organ in the corner of this house which I hadn’t noticed until then… so I messed around on it and the song came.? The opening line, ?There’s a fog upon L.A. / And my friends have lost their way,? sets the spacey, psychedelic vibe, which is exaggerated by vocals played backwards during the mix.

When John Lennon and Yoko Ono began taking heroin in 1968, it alarmed the other Beatles and directly impacted Lennon?s music. ?He was getting into harder drugs than we’d been into and so his songs were taking on more references to heroin,? Paul McCartney said in ‘Many Years From Now.’ ?Until that point we had made rather mild, oblique references to pot or LSD. Now John started talking about fixes and monkeys.”

Lennon, however, maintained that ‘Everybody?s Got Something to Hide Except Me and My Monkey’ was not about having a monkey on his back. ?That was just a sort of nice line that I made into a song. It was about me and Yoko,? Lennon said in ‘All We Are Saying.’ ?All this sort of madness is going on around us because we just happened to want to be together all the time.?

‘Dig a Pony’ was recorded during the famous rooftop concert of the film ‘Let It Be.’ Though ‘Dig a Pony’ was influenced by his relationship with Yoko Ono, John Lennon maintained that most of the lyrics were nonsense. In the documentary ‘Imagine,’ Lennon said, ?I was just having fun with words. It was literally a nonsense song. You just take words and you stick them together, and you see if they have any meaning. Some of them do and some of them don’t.?

Some that do have meaning may reference the Rolling Stones. Lennon once claimed that Mick Jagger and the boys repeatedly ripped off the Fab Four. Everything the Beatles do, Lennon told Rolling Stone,?Mick does exactly the same. They are not in the same class, musicwise or powerwise ? never were.? Which would explain this line: ?I roll a stoney / Well you can imitate everyone you know.? That?s cold, but it makes ‘Dig a Pony’ one of our Top 10 Beatles Animal Songs.

In the 1960?s, ?pig? was a popular derogatory term for the police, but George Harrison said in ‘I Me Mine‘ that class and corporate greed, not cops, was the target of ‘Piggies.’ ??Piggies? is a social comment. I was stuck for one line in the middle until my mother came up with the lyric, ?What they need is a damn good whacking,? which is a nice simple way of saying they need a good hiding. It needed to rhyme with ?backing,? ?lacking,? and had absolutely nothing to do with American policemen.?

The track features a harpsichord, a string quartet and the sounds of pigs snorting, which Lennon put together from Abbey Road?s sound effects library. An additional verse, dropped from the record, was reinstated by Harrison in concert: ?Everywhere there’s lots of piggies / Playing piggy pranks / And you can see them on their trotters / Down at the piggy banks / Paying piggy thanks / To the pig brother.?

Ringo Starr only wrote two songs for the Beatles: ‘Don?t Pass Me By’ and the wonderful ‘Octopus?s Garden.’ ?I wrote ?Octopus?s Garden? in Sardinia. Peter Sellers had lent us his yacht and we went out for the day,? Starr said in ‘Anthology.’ ?I stayed out on deck with the captain and we talked about octopuses. He told me that they hang out in their caves and they go around the seabed finding shiny stones and tin cans and bottles to put in front of their cave like a garden. I thought this was fabulous, because at the time I just wanted to be under the sea too. A couple of tokes later with the guitar ? and we had ‘Octopus?s Garden’!?

George Harrison, who helped Starr with the tune, acknowledged its lyrical depth. ?On the surface, it’s just like a daft kids? song, but the lyrics are great,? Harrison told Ritchie Yorke. ?I find very deep meaning in the lyrics, which Ringo probably doesn?t see.? The song?s undersea sound effects came from Starr blowing bubbles into a glass of water.

‘Blackbird’ was entirely a solo effort by Paul McCartney, accompanied only by his acoustic guitar and tapping foot, which was recorded by a mic on the floor. The sound of blackbirds was later overdubbed. McCartney wrote the song in Scotland, though he was inspired by racial turmoil in America. In ‘Many Years From Now,’ McCartney said, ?Those were the days of the civil rights movement, which all of us cared passionately about, so this was really a song from me to a black woman, experiencing these problems in the States: ?Let me encourage you to keep trying, to keep your faith, there is hope.?? The opening of ‘Blackbird’ reveals the influence of Bach?s ‘Bourree in E minor,’ a favorite of McCartney and George Harrison as young guitarists.

Throughout the Beatles? catalog, cryptic lyrics usually identify a tune as pure John Lennon. ??And Your Bird Can Sing? was John’s song,? Paul McCartney said in ‘Many Years From Now.’ ?I suspect that I helped with the verses because the songs were nearly always written without second and third verses. I seem to remember working on that middle eight with him but it’s John’s song, 80-20 to John.?

The reference to a ?bird,? or ?girl? in British slang, may be another slap at Mick Jagger, who would often boast about his girlfriend, pop singer Marianne Faithfull. But what makes ‘And Your Bird Can Sing’ one of the Top 10 Beatles Animal Songs is the rich double-lead guitar work by McCartney and George Harrison.

It?s no mystery why the lyrics of John Lennon?s classic, ‘I Am the Walrus,’ are confusing; the song is a stew of influences that include a nursery rhyme and a poem by Lewis Carroll, who wrote ‘Alice in Wonderland.’ Psychedelics also played a part in writing the first two lines: ?I am he as you are he as you are me and we are all together / See how they run like pigs from a gun, see how they fly.” ?The first line was written on one acid trip one weekend,? Lennon said in ‘All We Are Saying.’ “The second line was written on the next acid trip the next weekend, and it was filled in after I met Yoko.?

The playground rhyme, ?Yellow matter custard, green slop pie, all mixed together with a dead dog’s eye? would become ?Yellow matter custard, dripping from a dead dog’s eye.? Carroll?s poem, ?The Walrus and the Carpenter,? would provide the title character. As the song ends, we hear a few lines from Shakespeare?s ‘King Lear.’ Lennon chanced upon a BBC radio broadcast of the play, recorded it and mixed it into the song.