Keyboard colleagues

October 13, 2010 at 12:00a.m.

Elton John and Leon Russell team up for new duet album

By Randy Lewis

Los Angeles Times

LOS ANGELES

Few people can get away with telling an anecdote about being on safari in Africa and make it sound like a trip to the supermarket.

But for Elton John, that’s precisely how and where he became inspired to call his keyboard-playing pal Leon Russell after more than three decades since they’d last spoken. That call ultimately led them to record “The Union,” a duet album coming out Tuesday.

“In 2008, I did a [Sundance cable channel] program called ‘Spectacle,’ which I produced with my partner, David Furnish,” said John, 63, referencing the Elvis Costello-hosted music interview-performance series he helped create. “I chose three singer-songwriters to talk about that I thought had been neglected: one was David Ackles, one was Laura Nyro and one was Leon Russell. At the end of the program, I kind of made up a pseudo-Leon Russell song. Because my partner, David, had never heard of these people, he went out and bought all the CDs and put them on his iPod.

“In January of 2009, I was in Africa on safari, getting ready to go to lunch, and David started playing Leon’s greatest hits,” John told a small audience gathered recently at the West Los Angeles recording studio where he, Russell and producer T Bone Burnett recorded “The Union” earlier this year.

As he sat on a swivel chair in front of the studio’s expansive mixing board with the studio lights dimmed, Burnett looked on from a few feet away while Russell, 68, relaxed in an overstuffed recliner chair at the back wall.

“About four tracks in I started to weep uncontrollably, and [Furnish] said, ‘For God’s sake, what is wrong?’ I said, ‘This takes me back to one of the most beautiful times in my life: the late-’60s and early-’70s,’” John recalled. “Leon Russell was my idol; he became my idol, became the person that I wanted to play like, that I wanted to sing like and who I eventually met at the Troubadour club on the second night I came here in 1970.”

That was during the week of performances at the fabled West Hollywood club that made John a star virtually overnight.

“He was sitting in the audience with his long, silver hair and his glasses, frightening the hell out of me,” John said, “but after the show [he was] so incredibly sweet. We consequently went and did some shows together. It was wonderful to be able to tour with your idol and be treated so sweetly by someone who, really, you thought could have eaten you for breakfast as far as it comes to playing the piano.”

Russell remembers that tour from a slightly different perspective. Of that night at the Troubadour, he said, “I think he might have been a little nervous being it was his first time in America. I really wasn’t bowled over — until he was opening some shows for me. I went out to see his show, and I thought that my career was over. It was really quite fantastic.”

Indeed, there was a time in 1970 and ’71, after both had released their debut albums, when each was poised for major star status: John from an outpouring of critical raves for the beauty and sensitivity of such early numbers as “Your Song” and “Sixty Years On,” many of which he and lyricist Bernie Taupin wrote out of their love for American country and gospel music; Russell lauded for swampy rockers such as “Delta Lady” and “Roll Away the Stone” as well as heart-rending ballads such as the oft-recorded “A Song for You” and “Superstar,” which became a No. 2 hit for the Carpenters in 1971.

At that point, Russell had the greater momentum, coming off stints working as a bandleader for Joe Cocker and Delaney and Bonnie Bramlett, having established himself previously as a top session-player in the Los Angeles amalgam of studio aces known as the Wrecking Crew for knocking out hit after hit for Phil Spector, the Beach Boys, Frank and Nancy Sinatra, Sam Cooke, the Fifth Dimension, Sonny & Cher and on and on.

Soon, however, John’s career eclipsed Russell’s as he soared to the top of the pop charts and stayed there throughout the ’70s and much of the ’80s and ’90s as well. Or as Russell succinctly puts it: “He went to the top and I went to the bottom.”

Russell hit his chart peak in 1972 with the single “Tight Rope,” which reached No. 11, and subsequently traveled pop music’s rootsy tributaries, exploring country, blues, gospel and jazz. He has continued to write, record and release albums on his own Leon Russell Records label, but he hasn’t dented the national album sales chart in nearly 30 years.

John, meanwhile became the biggest-selling artist in all of pop during the 1970s.

So 30-plus years later, John decided that he hadn’t done enough for the man whose music he so admired.

“I listened to these CDs, and I said to David. ... ‘I really have to speak to this man and tell him how much I love him and how much I miss him and how much his music means to me.’”

With the help of John’s U.S. manager, John Barbis, John did just that.