Featured Essay: Once Upon a Time: Captain Fantastic Turns 50

by J.A. Bartlett

It is the spring of 1975, and I am 15 years old. Elton John is my favorite artist, and sometime in March, his new song comes on the radio. I love “Philadelphia Freedom” in a way I have loved no other song, by Elton or anybody else, but because I don’t buy singles anymore, I decide to wait for the new album. Captain Fantastic and the Brown Dirt Cowboy is released at the end of May, and I am, as best I can recall, among the million people who buy a copy during its first few days in stores. But there’s a problem: “Philadelphia Freedom” isn’t on it. Neither is “Lucy in the Sky With Diamonds,” which had gone to #1 in January. So it is with a palpable sense of disappointment that I sit down to listen. 

I take off the shrink wrap and open the gatefold cover. The record is tucked in one side, and in the other are two booklets. “Lyrics” has the words to the songs. “Scraps” has clippings and pictures from Elton and Bernie Taupin’s struggling days, plus a graphic biography telling the story of their rise from young men living in their parents’ houses to their current fame. There is also a poster of the album’s cover art, emblazoned with the words “from the end of the world to your town.” The poster quickly goes up on the wall of my bedroom, where it will hang for several years, even after I leave home, until one of my brothers moves into the room.

The album deserves better than the tiny stereo I have in my bedroom, so my first listen is on the family’s big console stereo, which is in a pleasant room that we call the sunporch. (The sunporch has a bookshelf and a comfortable antique rocker. It is also carpeted with an unforgettable orange shag that looks like nothing so much as Chef Boy-ar-Dee canned spaghetti. But I digress.) My disappointment over the absence of “Philadelphia Freedom” mostly disappears once I drop the needle. The album moves gracefully from style to style. The title song has a country feel. “Tell Me When the Whistle Blows” sounds like Philadelphia soul (and makes me long for “Philadelphia Freedom” a little bit). “Someone Saved My Life Tonight” tells an intriguing story, but 15-year-old me can’t quite grasp the emotion in it yet. “Gotta Get a Meal Ticket” is a riff-rocker unlike anything else on the album. I am enchanted by “Writing,” one of Elton’s most fetching musical compositions. 

Wow, I think, this is the most interesting music I’ve ever heard. 

But then things take a turn. “We All Fall in Love Sometimes” is as beautiful a love song as Elton and Bernie would ever write, but sad at the same time. It segues into the last track on the album, “Curtains.” The slow burn of “Curtains” is hypnotic, but as I follow along with the lyrics, the words burrow deep:  

I held a dandelion That said the time had come To leave upon the wind Not to return When summer burned the earth again 

I am listening to the album at the end of May, days before school gets out for the summer. When we  return in the fall, I will have different teachers, different routines, and maybe even some different friends, in that way friendships could shift depending on who you sat next to in class. At 15, I am already someone resistant to change, so the melancholy feeling of being unable to return to what once was is already in my head. “Curtains” gives me words for it that I didn’t have. 

Cultivate the freshest flower This garden ever grew Beneath these branches I once wrote Such childish words for you But that’s okay There’s treasure children always seek to find And just like us You must have had A once upon a time 

After those final lines, the song explodes into a dramatic “Hey Jude”-style coda, with Elton singing “oh-oh-oh-oh” and “lum-de-lum-de-lay-oh” over and over again. They’re nonsense words, but they’re filled with emotion nevertheless; the music is punctuated with chimes that make the words seem desperately important. 

Based on the finality of “Curtains,” I think to myself oh my God, Elton is going to retire. (He did not, of course; five months later he would release Rock of the Westies, and his career would continue, down to an unimaginable 50 years in the future. But I digress.)

The finality of “Curtains” never leaves me. Three years later, I will speak at my high school graduation ceremony. I won’t think enough of the speech to save a copy, although I’d like to read it now. What I do remember is that it ended with “and just like us, you must have had a once upon a time.” 

***

In the late 80s, Captain Fantastic was one of the first CDs I ever bought. I bought it again when the deluxe CD edition came out in 2005–an edition that finally added “Philadelphia Freedom” to the album, as well as “Lucy in the Sky With Diamonds” and some uncollected B-sides, plus a second disc featuring the whole album performed live at a Wembley Stadium show in the summer of ‘75. If I were still buying vinyl, I would probably have snagged the 2018 reissue of the original album. 

I still listen to Captain Fantastic a few times a year. Certain songs have changed in my estimation over half-a-century: I like “Tell Me When the Whistle Blows” a lot more than I did, and I don’t rank “Writing” quite so high. But the album as a whole still remains my single favorite album of all time. 

As it turns out, 15-year-old me got one thing wrong: you can return to what once was. Captain Fantastic can take me back to when the world seemed manageable in a way it doesn’t anymore, a world where everything that’s going to happen hasn’t happened yet, where everything is potential and all roads remain open. That kind of time travel is not the only purpose I have for listening to music, but it’s one of them. And I’ll bet it’s one of your reasons, too. We all use music to revisit places in time that we cherish, whether they’re from high school, college, a marriage, a town we used to live in, a job we used to have. 

In other words: just like me, you must have had a once upon a time. 

J. A. Bartlett is a radio DJ and writer in Madison, Wisconsin. He has been writing about music and radio since 2004 (!) at his website, The Hits Just Keep on Comin’. He is also on Bluesky at jabartlett.bsky.social. 

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