Elton John thrills at Madison Square with 'Farewell Yellow Brick Road' tour

Elton John began saying his goodbyes to New York City on Thursday night at Madison Square Garden, starting a two-night stand there. It was his first local stop on his three-year, globe-spanning Farewell Yellow Brick Road tour, with a show that lasts more than two and a half hours and doesn’t even have room for all of his hits.

Although the newest song in the set, “Believe,” was released in 1995, there were some fans who had been born since then singing along to his catalogue, which conquered American pop radio in the early 1970s and has never entirely disappeared. Last month, Young Thug released “High,” which is built (with John’s enthusiastic permission) on “Rocket Man,” from 1972.

At 71, John has long since earned his retirement from the road. He has been touring, he said onstage, since 1969. He has racked up hundreds of millions of sales and the awards that go with them and has scored hit Broadway musicals (“The Lion King,” “Billy Elliot”) on the side. Through the years, he has been a thoroughgoing crowd pleaser. On Thursday night, his most contentious speech was about how “greedy” drug companies could help end AIDS.

He doesn’t jump on top of his piano anymore, or kick up both legs while pounding the keyboard the way he used to, as shown in a career-spanning video montage while he sang his ever more appropriate boast about perseverance, “I’m Still Standing.” Yet he has stayed vigorous, still splashing his two-fisted chords and singing with focused gusto. Musicians who have been with him since the 1970s — Nigel Olsson on drums; Ray Cooper on percussion; and his bandleader, Davey Johnstone, on guitar — easily execute their longtime parts.

Familiar as they are now, John’s hits are eccentric at heart. Although he is English, he chose to ground himself deeply in American music — gospel, boogie-woogie, blues, country, early rock ’n’ roll — as much as in England’s traditions of hymns and music hall. The lyrics, which are largely written by Bernie Taupin and then set to music by John, can be as oblique as “Levon” or as blunt as “The Bitch Is Back”; they can be character studies, like “Tiny Dancer,” or semi-biographical, like “Someone Saved My Life Tonight.”

But his hits became hits because of some part of his music lodges immediately, and tenaciously, in memory. When he cued the audience to sing “la, la la la la la” in “Crocodile Rock,” there was no hesitation across the arena. The concert began with John seated at the piano, hitting one chord hard and waiting, knowingly, for it to register — not long at all. That one chord was instantly recognizable as the beginning of “Bennie and the Jets”: a song about a pop star for the “kids” who is famous as much for her image — “electric boots, a mohair suit” — as her music. She could be an idol, or a stand-in, for the guy singing about her. Bespectacled and balding, John traded initially on talent more than looks, then went on to revel in outlandishly costumed excess as soon as he commanded big stages.

John is making a typically flamboyant visual farewell. During little breaks on Thursday, he switched from a black, gold-sequined, pink-lapeled suit to a flowered brocade jacket with pink pants to an elaborately embroidered blue robe, with corresponding eyeglasses. 

He also performed at what appeared to be a self-driving grand piano that could cross the stage as he played, below a video screen framed by a frieze of career highlights. Some of the video clips, like the Los Angeles street scenes played above “Tiny Dancer,” were distracting, while in “Rocket Man,” images of Earth seen from space were just right.

At what was billed as a farewell concert, what stood out was how many farewells Taupin and John were already writing decades ago. One of the only non-hits that John chose to feature was “Indian Sunset,” a song about Native American genocide, the most final farewell. The other non-hit was “All the Girls Love Alice,” a rocking requiem for a promiscuous lesbian teenager. “Love Lies Bleeding,” with its instrumental introduction “Funeral for a Friend,” is a musician’s farewell to a lover who left, and “Daniel,” as a video revealed, is a farewell to a soldier lost in battle. “Candle in the Wind” bid farewell to Marilyn Monroe as a victim of stardom.

The concert’s finale — spoiler alert — was “Goodbye Yellow Brick Road,” a 1973 song about turning away from stardom and going back to the farm: something John obviously did not do. He has earned stardom, maintained it, exulted in it. “I will miss you very, very much,” he told the arena audience as he spoke about retiring from touring. But not soon. He returns to Madison Square Garden more than once: Nov. 8-9 and March 5-6; there’s a Nassau Coliseum date on Nov. 16, 2019. For now, the road continues.

@2018NewYorkTimesService