Whatever Gets You Thru The Night

1974

‘Whatever Gets You Thru The Night’ was released as the first single from ‘Walls and Bridges‘ on 23 September 1974. It became John’s first solo No.1 single in the USA and featured Elton John performing backing vocals and piano.

“I was fiddling about one night and Elton John walked in with Tony King of Apple — you know, we’re all good friends — and the next minute Elton said, ‘Say, can I put a bit of piano on that?’ I said, ‘Sure, love it!’ He zapped in. I was amazed at his ability: I knew him, but I’d never seen him play. A fine musician, great piano player. I was really pleasantly surprised at the way he could get in on such a loose track and add to it and keep up with the rhythm changes — obviously, ’cause it doesn’t keep the same rhythm… And then he sang with me. We had a great time.”

– John Lennon, 1974

John: I remember hearing Elton John’s ‘Your Song’ in America. It was one of Elton’s first big hits. And I remember thinking, ‘Great! That’s the first new thing that’s happened since we [The Beatles] happened.’ It was a step forward.

There was something about his vocals that was an improvement on all of the English vocals until then. I was pleased with it. And I was pleased with Bowie’s thing and I hadn’t even heard him. I just got this feeling from the image and the projections that were coming out of England of him. You could feel it.

Elton John: In New York, we stayed at the Pierre Hotel on Fifth Avenue. John Lennon was in the suite above mine, and called down. He wanted to play us the rough mixes of his new album. Moreover, he wanted me to play on two of the songs, ‘Surprise Surprise’ and ‘Whatever Gets You Thru The Night’. The second track sounded like a hit, even more so a couple of nights later when we went to the Record Plant East studio, just off Times Square.

John: Elton popped in on the session for Walls and Bridges and played piano and ended up singing ‘Whatever Gets You Thru the Night’ with me, which was a great shot in the arm. I’d done three quarters of it, ‘Now what do we do? Should we put a camel on it or a xylophone?’ And he came in and said, ‘Hey, I’ll play some piano!’

Then I heard from a friend that he was doing ‘Lucy In The Sky With Diamonds’. Would I be there when he cut ‘Lucy’? Maybe not play on it, but just be there? So I went along [to Caribou Ranch recording studios in Colorado] and I sang in the chorus and contributed the reggae in the middle. That’s me out of tune in the background, doing the reggae bit – I got it wrong just like I did the original on Sgt. Pepper!

Then he asked if ‘Whatever Gets You Thru The Night’ got to be Number One, would I appear onstage with him, and I said sure, not thinking in a million years it was gonna get to Number One; Al Coury or no Al Coury [the promotion man at Capitol)] but it did, and Elton called me and said I hadn’t to break my word.

Elton John: To his credit, he didn’t try to shirk the bet when ‘Whatever Gets You Thru The Night’ did make Number One, not even after he travelled up to a show in Boston with Tony King to see what he was getting himself into. I came onstage for the encore wearing something that basically resembled a little heart-shaped chocolate box with a tunic attached to it, and John turned to Tony, looking a bit aghast, and said, ‘Fucking hell, is this what rock and roll’s all about nowadays, then?’

John: I went to see Elton at Boston and I was nervous just watching him. I was thinking, ‘Thank god it isn’t me’ as he was getting dressed to go on. I went through my stage fright at Boston so by the time I got to Madison Square Garden, I had a good time, and when I walked on they were all screaming and shouting. It was like Beatlemania. I was thinking, ‘What is this?’, ’cos I hadn’t heard it since the Beatles.

Elton John: In my whole career, I’ve honestly never heard a crowd make a noise like the one they made when I introduced him. It just went on and on and on. But I knew how they felt. I was as giddy about it as they were, so were the rest of the band.

John: It brought the roof down. It was déjà vu for me, not like the Beatles’ screaming bit, but the place was really rocking. We’d had a rehearsal but we weren’t that together. By the time we got to ‘I Saw Her Standing There’, Elton’s piano was jumping off the floor! It was Elton’s idea to do that song. He had wanted me to do ‘Imagine’ but I didn’t want to come on like Dean Martin doing my classic hits. I wanted to have some fun and play some rock and roll, and I didn’t want to do more than three because it was Elton’s show after all. He suggested ‘I Saw Her Standing There’ and I thought, ‘Great!’, because I never sang the original of that; Paul sang it and I did the harmony.

Elton had been working in Dick James’s office when we used to send our demos in, and there’s a long relationship musically with Elton that people don’t really know about. He has this sort of Beatle thing from way back. He’d take the demos home and play them and, well, it meant a lot to me and it meant a hell of a lot to Elton, and he was in tears. It was a great high night, a really high night.

Elton John: It was probably the highlight of our careers to that point, to have someone like that share a stage with you. The three songs flew by, and he was off. He came back for the encore, this time with Bernie in tow, both of them playing tambourines on ‘The Bitch Is Back’. It was fabulous.

John: Yoko and I met backstage and somebody said, ‘Well, there’s two people in love.’ That was before we got back together. But that’s probably when we felt something. It was very weird. I didn’t know she was there, ‘cause if I’d known she was there I would have been too nervous to go on. I would have been terrified. She was backstage afterwards and there was just that moment when we saw each other and it was like in the movies when time stands still.

And there was silence. Everything went silent and we were just looking at each other and…

‘Oh, hello.’

I knew she’d sent Elton and I a flower each, and we were wearing them onstage, but I didn’t know she was there and then everybody was around us and…

‘flash’, ‘flash’, ‘flash’…

But there was that moment of silence. Somebody observed it and told me later on, after we were back together again, and said, ‘a friend of mine saw you backstage and thought if ever there were two in love, it’s those two.’ And I thought, well, it’s weird somebody
noticed it. So it was a great night.’

Elton John: It had been a bizarre day. But ultimately it led to John reuniting with Yoko, having Sean – my godson – and retreating into a life of domestic contentment in the Dakota Building. I was happy for him.

I realized I might have exhausted the possibilities of retail therapy when I found myself buying a cuckoo clock that, instead of a cuckoo, had a large wooden penis that popped in and out of it every hour. I gave it to John Lennon when I went to visit him.

I thought it was a good present for a man who had everything. John & Yoko were as bad as me when it came to shopping. The various apartments they owned in the Dakota were so full of priceless artworks, antiques and clothes that I once sent them a card, rewriting the lyrics to ‘Imagine’: ‘Imagine six apartments, it isn’t hard to do, one is full of fur coats, another’s full of shoes’. They owned herds of cows, for God’s sake – prize Holstein cattle. Years later, I asked what had happened to them. Yoko shrugged and said: ‘Oh, I got rid of them. All that moo-ing.’