Frogman
A History of Violence (1974)
It’s January 20, 1974, and in Nederland, Colorado, at a mile and a half above sea level, Elton John is working on his first album to be recorded in the United States. The evening session is about to start. Bernie has written a song about a mass shooting in a New York bar and Elton has been snatching time to work out the melodies and phrasing. The band are on a tight schedule. They’ve been locked away in this studio high in the Rocky Mountains for two weeks now and it’s the final day of recording. Next they’re off to Japan and Australia, resuming the Goodbye Yellow Brick Road world tour.
The song is called Ticking and it’s planned as the epic conclusion to the album. Bernie had wanted to write a set of lyrics about violence in America in 1973. He’d seen Targets, read up on Whitman, tasted the crackle of electricity in the air, and felt the blazing hot sun coming down fast. Holed up in his snowbound trailer with deliberately untuned baby grand, Elton liked the darkness of Bernie’s new material. There was Sick City about New York and the child whores who came to the shows. Ticking was set in Queens, at a bar called the Kicking Mule. Some kid goes crazy and shoots the place up, killing fourteen people. There was a streetwise rawness to the lyrics: Some gook said “His brain’s just snapped” then someone called the police / You’d knifed a Negro waiter who had tried to calm you down. The sort of thing the Stones might record.