Elton John’s “Honky Château.”
January 15, 1972. In an 18th-century château, in the remote village of Hérouville in northern France, 19 miles from Paris, a man sits at a Steinway piano beneath a gleaming chandelier. He plays a minor-seventh chord and sings a lyric inspired by a Ray Bradbury short story:
“She packed my bags last night pre-flight…”
After a week of rehearsals and writing, it was the first day of recording for what would be Elton John’s fifth studio album “Honky Château.” It was the beginning of something extraordinary: not just the recording of the song that sent the piano-rocker’s career hurtling into the stratosphere, but a special chapter for that well appointed room in the Château d’Hérouville.
The Honky Château, the brainchild of composer Michel Magne, would be known by various names over the years: Studio Hérouville, Château d’Hérouville, Michel Magne Studios, Strawberry Studios. In the 1970s, such diverse artists as Pink Floyd, T. Rex, Cat Stevens, Iggy Pop, and Fleetwood Mac would record outstanding albums there.
It was the studio where David Bowie recorded “Low,” with a little help from a deck of cards brandished by Brian Eno — each card bearing a vaguely cosmic suggestion along the lines of “Imagine the music as a set of disconnected events” or “Turn it upside down.” (Bowie picked up bad vibes in the Château’s master bedroom.) That same year, the Bee Gees laid down “Stayin’ Alive” and “How Deep Is Your Love” at the Château, apparently writing the tunes not in the studio itself, but in the stairwell. (Later, Robin Gibb spotted the stairwell in a French pornographic film called “The Kinky Ladies of Bourbon Street.”)
For Elton — he had just legally changed his name from Reginald Kenneth Dwight to Elton Hercules John — January 1972 was the beginning of an incredible run. Over the next couple of years, he recorded three albums at the Château which happened to feature several of the finest songs of his career: “Daniel,” “Crocodile Rock,” “Candle in the Wind,” “Bennie and the Jets,” “Goodbye Yellow Brick Road,” and “Saturday Night’s Alright for Fighting.”
By all accounts, the “Honky Château” sessions were focused and astonishingly fruitful — the result, it seems, of exquisite surroundings far from home. As engineer Ken Scott notes in an essay included in the new 50th anniversary edition: “One of the amazing things for me about the Château was that there were these very big windows … [you could] look out over the most gorgeous French countryside” — the very countryside, indeed, gazed upon by Van Gogh, who lived and died nearby in Auvers-sur-Oise.
As Elton notes in the same essay: “The first morning we were there, I had three [songs] done by the time the band drifted downstairs looking for something to eat.” This would be an exceptional rate of productivity even if the songs didn’t include the monumental “Mona Lisas and Mad Hatters” and “Rocket Man.” Lyricist Bernie Taupin, poised over his typewriter in another room, seems to have been equally inspired and prolific during this time.
While the resulting record alternates between moods heartfelt (“Rocket Man,” “Mona Lisas and Mad Hatters”) and humorous (“Honky Cat,” “I Think I’m Going to Kill Myself”), the overall impression, if not precisely bucolic, feels as clean and crisp as country air, particularly after the contrasting darkness of “Madman Across the Water.” From Davey Johnstone’s cheeky banjo-plucking on “Honky Cat” to Dee Murray’s marvelously unfettered basslines on “Rocket Man,” a sense of freedom and openness is pervasive — and infectious. An instrumental session demo for “Susie (Dramas)” included in the 50th anniversary edition — one of a number of included outtakes taken from the original session tapes — captures the ease and enthusiasm of everyone involved.
For a few years, that far-off location in rural France provided a perfectly splendid backdrop to a lot of splendid music. (The studio closed in 1985; squatters soon moved in.) Of those records, though, Elton John’s “Honky Château” is the one whose sound feels most inextricable from the charmed setting in which it was recorded. As Elton sings, in one of the most soothing tracks he ever recorded: “But God this is a mellow time.”