“I’ve Had an Amazing, Unbelievable Career”: Elton John Guitarist Davey Johnstone Names His Top Five Tracks

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A call from a producer changed the life of a young guitarist who was just starting to get his career off the ground.

The next thing I knew I was playing on the new album, Madman Across the Water (opens in new tab), which was produced by Guts, who asked me to meet John, whom he was producing.

Elton was writing such beautiful songs with Bernie Taupin

The title track was one of the four cuts I played on. I was asked to join the band after a week after the sessions.

There was no need to be asked twice. John’s music appealed to the Scottish-born guitarist.

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There were beautiful songs written by Elton and Bernie Taupin. You had Paul Buckmaster working with them and they were both cool and talented.

The whole thing felt right to me. He was a wonderful piano player and singer, and now he was getting his shot at being a front man and not just a studio musician, there was a terrific atmosphere around him.

You could tell things were going somewhere

You could see that things were moving.

The rhythm section of the new band included Dee Murray, who had begun working with the singer a year before.

The quartet jelled quickly, no matter which style of music they were presented, and they tackled it like seasoned pros, instinctively playing the right lick at the right time.

For his part, he didn’t overplay his hand, but he made each phrase and solo stand out.

He says it was a blank canvas, and he had to do whatever he wanted. I was the only guitar player in the group, and I loved the freedom that came with it.

After he joined the band, the hits began to come.

Musically, it was a blank canvas, and I got to do whatever I wanted

Between 1971 and 1976, the group recorded eight studio albums (nearly all of them stone-classic multimillion sellers), and when they weren’t laying down tracks, they were on tours that got longer and more elaborate.

The band’s schedule didn’t allow for a lot of time to work on recordings.

The album Goodbye Yellow Brick Road took 16 days to make.

The person says that they worked very quickly. We didn’t think anything of it in those days, that’s how things were done.

It really was such a brilliant era for making music

We did both ‘Saturday Night’s Alright for Fighting’ and ‘Rocket Man’ in three takes, and both took two passes to get it right. I know that sounds crazy, but we knew what we were doing. The creativity flowed fast.

We were having the time of our lives, but we were recording and touring all the time. It was a good time for making music.

He enjoyed coming up with guitar riffs, one of the key aspects of his job. He points out songs such as “Saturday Night’s Alright for Fighting” and “The Bitch Is Back” as key examples.

He says they are his. Someone would say, “We need a great guitar thing for the beginning, and after the chorus we’ll come back to it” when we ran down a song.

“Candle in the Wind” is a rare instance in which John had a definite idea of what he wanted to hear.

Elton came up with a great guitar riff, but to be honest, I didn’t think it was going to work

He says that Elton came up with a great guitar riffs but he didn’t think it would work.

He thought I would play the guitar lick underneath when he sang the wordscandle in the wind. I didn’t think that would sound right, and it went against my style of playing guitar licks over important lines.

He wanted David to try it, and he was very keen on it. I said I would give it a go. I did the overdub after the part came up, and I thought it sounded good.

I doubled it because we kept it in. He has a laugh. I have to admit, to this day, it sounds good.

His solo work includes just two albums, Smiling Face and Deeper Than My Roots, which is a stark contrast to his discography with John.

The guitarist was going to record a new album of his own material, but touring commitments with John kept the idea off the ground.

When the singer was halfway through his three-year farewell yellow brick road tour in March 2020 he was forced to curtail the band’s shows and shut down the entire concert industry due to the COVID epidemic.

He decided to get cracking when he faced an extended period at home. Onetime Wings drummer Denny Seiwell was tapped to play on several of the tracks, including the soaring melancholic ballad “Melting Snow.”

The majority of the album is a family affair, with the guitarist’s children performing a number of duties, including lead vocals on all but one cut.

A lot of musical ground is covered in this rich set.

The shimmering album opener, “Go Easy on My Heart,” has echoes of Roy Orbison, while the laid-back acoustic gem, “Meu Amor,” has a distinct Latin feel.

The song “Boxer in the Corner” is a lo-fi alt-rock number with moments of absorbing psychedelia, and towards the end, Johnstone swoops in with a sparky, rousing lead.

A pair of tracks reveal more than a passing Beatles influence: “One Look in Your Eyes” is bathed in dreamy keyboards that bear a striking resemblance to “Blue Jay Way” and the lush harmonies sound reminiscent of the three-part vocals on Abbey Road’s

If the Fab Four nod goes over anyone’s head, there’s a bonus cover of “Here, There and Everywhere” featuring Johnstone’s exquisite mandolin playing.

The guitarist doesn’t showboat, he always plays in service to the song and melody, and he points to George Harrison as his North Star.

George [Harrison] is one of my biggest idols, no doubt about it

George is one of the biggest idols of mine, no doubt about it. From listening to him, I learned a lot about playing and not playing.

He was a master of guitar parts that meant something. You wouldn’t hear him soloing blindly; his parts came in and out, and made the whole thing better.

The way I approach playing has always been the same, and it is something that has been talked about in regards to how I play.

The final show of John’s farewell tour will be in Sweden in July of 2023, with John rejoining him earlier this year.

The guitarist doesn’t consider the end of his performing days with the singer to be a sad experience. It is a sweet experience. I’m almost done with touring.

I can’t think of many bands who have been able to tour at this level over all these decades

I have had a wonderful career. I can’t think of many bands who have been able to tour at this level over the years.

There were years when he wasn’t playing in the band, so it’s nice to have him back. The same goes for a percussionist. We have people finishing this wonderful thing with us. I think it’s pretty cool.

It would have been easy to come up with 100 or so tracks, so we asked Johnstone to tell us his memories of recording five cuts with John.

1. “Mona Lisas and Mad Hatters” from ‘Honky Chateau’ (1972)

Elton did not make demos back in the day. He would often play us a new song that he had just written and we would be right there while he wrote. When he was playing, we started to work out our parts so we knew what to do when the time came.

Elton never said, “I want you to do this, or please, don’t do that.” We did what we were told. We would be encouraged by the words of Gus Dudgeon. We need to double-track that. Let’s do it more than once. It was a blast.

I used an Ovation Spanish-style nylon-string acoustic… It wasn’t a highbrow guitar, but it played beautifully and sounded great

I remember when I heard the song “Mona Lisas”, I thought the sound of the mandolin would be beautiful in this area. I thought it would work well with the acoustic fingerpicking.

I knew what I was going to do. I had played the instrument since I was 15. I had experience with traditional folk music. In my teens, I picked up all that stuff. I was going to come to him with a tapestry of sounds.

It was an easy place to lay down. I used a nylon-string acoustic guitar. The guitar was very nice. I used it again on his 1988 album, Reg Strikes Back. It wasn’t a highbrow guitar, but it played great.

2. “Crocodile Rock” from ‘Don’t Shoot Me I’m Only the Piano Player’ (1973)

It was obvious that it was a tongue-in-cheek send-up of rock and roll when it was played for us. He sang that high-pitched part like it was from Pat Boone’s 1962 hit song “Speedy Gonzales.”

We were stealing small things. I started to wonder if there were any guitar parts that were similar to the ones that belonged to Duane Eddy. The song required a lot of work for me.

There are parts where it is clean and cool, like the Shadows or the Ventures, but in the chorus it is very distorted. I did about eight or 10 tracks of guitar; I would pick my spots when I wanted to do them.

I can’t stress how much fun it was in those days

I can’t stress how much fun it was, because it was only me and Dee. Someone would say, ‘Oh, you know what,’ after we did a track. There are some hand claps that need to be done here. All of us would run to the mic and do them. We did not spend more than one day on a song.

I picked up a black Stratocaster in London in 1967, for the clean parts. It is in the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame, and it was one of my favorites. I have a bone to pick with the people running the place because they never put the band in the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame. I want my guitar back

It’s a good-time song. As soon as people heard it, they knew it was just fun, straight-up rock and roll

I played a Les Paul goldtop on the guitar.

It is a good song. It was fun, straight-up rock and roll when people heard about it. We did not play it live a lot. It had become a thing where some people said, “Well, it’s a huge hit, but it’s not very cool.” I would tell him to do it. There is a nod to rock and roll.

I am glad we are doing it again. All of these songs are valid.

3. “Funeral for a Friend/Love Lies Bleeding” from ‘Goodbye Yellow Brick Road’ (1973)

It has been a staple of our set for a long time. David Hentschel did a great job on that synthesizer section of the song. The album’s engineer, Hentschel, used elements of various songs on the album to write the introduction and perform it on an ARP synthesizer.

When we come in with the slow part, we do volume pedal slides that sound like Indian flutes or something, and I am on the acoustic piano. We went straight on because we wanted the song to come in after the funeral.

I did a bass guitar part on my Les Paul during the whole of the movie. It was a three-pickup Custom that he bought. He wanted a guitar so I picked it out for him. I had some guitars that were stolen, so he said to use this one for a while. I used to play that guitar a lot, and it is on this song.

A lot of people have said to me, ‘That’s so iconic,’ which is always nice to hear

I created a specific guitar part that was kind of ringing and chimey. It was a theme in the song. There are some big power chords that I play.

A lot of people have said that, which is great. People have heard these parts. Les Paul is going through a couple of 50- watt Marshall tube Amps.

I went back to the goldtop for solo. I don’t know how much fun it was to play that part. He was a huge fan of the guitar but had never been in a band like ours. He would say to do another guitar. You can double-track that!

He didn’t put a piano on Saturday Night’s Alright for Fighting until after I had done all the guitars. We would layer four tracks of guitar and the sound would get bigger and bigger.

4. “All the Young Girls Love Alice” from ‘Goodbye Yellow Brick Road’ (1973)

It opens with a cool guitar volume swell. Since way back, I have used the Uni-Vibe for a variety of sounds. There wasn’t a lot of hardware for guitarists back then. You may have had a volume pedal, a Cry Baby wah pedal, a fuzz pedal and a Uni-Vibe.

That was sort of the end. I enjoyed the Uni-Vibe. You would get a beautiful slow phasing sound if you put it to the upright position. If you flattened it out, it would create a fast wobbly sound.

I found out that if I used the Uni-Vibe with my volume pedal, I got a wonderful singing sound.

I loved the Uni-Vibe

I went into a song. It needed to be a lot more aggressive. That was the one that Elton liked the best. He said, “Oh, shit, that’s great,” after I came up with another part. I jumped on the song when I heard it, it was a very pumping one. We went to a straight crunch sound for the basic structure of the song, after I clicked off the Uni-Vibe.

I used a bottle on my guitar strings for overdubs. That is how I got the sounds. They sound like cars going by, which we overdubbed, but a lot of them are guitar effects that I did.

5. “I’ve Seen That Movie Too” from ‘Goodbye Yellow Brick Road’ (1973)

It is such an atmospheric song. The majority of the track was acoustic rhythm guitar. I didn’t want to get in the way with too many electric guitars when Paul Buckmaster was writing the string arrangement.

The man said that he really felt that the guitar solo should be there. I asked why he didn’t flip the tape over. I wanted to try a backwards guitar solo. It wasn’t so easy. To know which track the guitar was going to come up on, you had to turn the tape over on the spools, re-record it, and then rewrite the track sheet. You didn’t know what you were going to come up with when you played it again.

After I first heard the Beatles create it on songs like I’m Only Sleeping, I loved the effect of it.

Getting a backward guitar part is really hit or miss, but I’ve always loved the effect

The beginning and end of the tape was marked by Guts. I was going to make half of the solo backwards so it would be different and cool, and at the end I would bring in some electric stuff. I thought that would destroy people’s hearts. It came out great because we did it the way we did it. There was luck involved.

Everybody screamed when they heard it back in the control room. That’s it! It sounded beautiful and was what I wanted. There were lots of happy accidents like that. Sometimes we tried things that didn’t work out, but we had the luxury of experimenting.

We were very fortunate to be able to do what we wanted.

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