If you assumed Elton John’s “Bennie and the Jets” is a live concert recording, we wouldn’t blame you, but you would be wrong. Despite what the sounds featured throughout the track might suggest, John recorded the Goodbye Yellow Brick Road track at the same place where he recorded the rest of the album: Strawberry Studios in Château d’Hérouville, France.
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Moreover, the live audience audio producer Gus Dudgeon overdubbed into the final album version wasn’t even entirely from John’s performances. Some of those cheers, claps, and whistles came from a different rock icon altogether.
How The Live Audience Sounds Came To Be
Like so many iconic moments of rock ‘n’ roll history, the idea to make Elton John’s “Bennie and the Jets” sound like a live recording happened by accident. In the first few seconds of the song, John hits a single chord on the piano before the rest of the band comes in. Producer Gus Dudgeon later said, “I turned to the engineer [David Hentschel], and I said, ‘What does that remind you of?’ It’s the sort of thing that people do on stage just before they’re going to start a song. Just to kind of get everybody, ‘Okay, here we go, ready?’ That chord being there made me think, ‘Maybe we should fake-live this.’”
The decision to make a studio track sound like a live recording only strengthened the opinion of John and the rest of his band that the song was very, very strange. Guitarist Davey Johnstone called the track “one of the oddest songs we ever recorded.” Lyricist Bernie Taupin admitted that the song had an eccentric origin, telling Rolling Stone, “I saw Bennie and the Jets as a sort of proto-sci-fi punk band fronted by an androgynous woman who looks like something out of a Helmut Newton photograph.”
John thought the song was so strange that he hesitated to release “Bennie and the Jets” as a single. “I had an argument with MCA,” John recalled to Rolling Stone. “The only reason I caved was because the song was the number one black record in Detroit. I went, ‘Oh my God,’ I mean, I’m a white boy from England. And I said, ‘Okay, you’ve got it.’ It just shows you that you can’t see the wood through the trees. To this day, I cannot see that song as a single.”
The Rock Icon Subtly Featured In “Bennie and the Jets”
Pulling live concert audio from Elton John’s past performances was only natural for the making of “Bennie and the Jets.” Producer Gus Dudgeon was, after all, trying to make the Goodbye Yellow Brick Road track sound like John was actually on stage. But John wasn’t the only rock star whose live concert footage Dudgeon pulled from. “Bennie and the Jets” also features audio from Jimi Hendrix’s iconic Isle of Wight festival performance in 1970. His August 31 appearance at the tumultuous, multi-day event would be Hendrix’s last major performance in England before his death on September 18.
Hendrix’s set included “Midnight Lightning,” “Foxy Lady,” “Lover Man,” “Freedom,” his rendition of Bob Dylan’s “All Along the Watchtower,” and “In From the Storm.” Hendrix played alongside Mitch Mitchell on drums and Billy Cox on bass. Although no actual musical footage of Hendrix’s performance made it onto “Bennie and the Jets,” the noise from the crowd certainly did, forever linking the two rock icons in a subtle and fascinating way.
Photo by Chris Walter/WireImage
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