John and Taupin’s Playback Session : Songwriting duo strolls through its song catalogue

In the 19 years since Elton John made his U.S. debut at the Troubadour in West Hollywood, the English singer-composer and lyricist Bernie Taupin have become the most successful songwriting team in rock since Lennon-McCartney.

The pair have written more than three dozen Top 40 hits, establishing John as the most popular recording artist of the 1970s and one of the 15 most popular of the ‘80s, according to researcher Joel Whitburn’s book, “Top Pop Singles 1955-1986.” They’ve written together except for a brief period around 1980 when John worked with other lyricists.

In their best songs, John and Taupin combine traditional pop craft with a rock-era sense of energy and lyric intimacy, and fans will surely call out for their favorites when John plays the Forum in Inglewood on Tuesday, Wednesday and Friday, then the Pacific Amphitheatre in Costa Mesa on Saturday.

Some fans will be eager for the delicate, early John-Taupin compositions such as “Your Song” and “I Need You to Turn To.” Others prefer the more spunky “Bennie and the Jets” or “Philadelphia Freedom.” Still others will be most eager to hear the sing-along nostalgia found in “Sad Songs (Say So Much).”

About old songs, John said, “It’s amazing some of the things fans like. There are times when they’ll mention a song and you’ll think privately, ‘Oh, my God, how could you possibly like that one?’ But certain songs do stand out for all of us. You even remember what you were doing when you first heard them.

“I heard ‘Brown Sugar’ for the first time in Chicago and I thought it was incredible,” he recalled of the Rolling Stones’ 1971 hit. “I guess it had just come out and the stores didn’t have a copy yet, so I went to a radio station and talked them into letting me have a copy. I just had to keep playing it over and over.”

But what about their own songs?

What are John and Taupin’s favorites among the hundreds of songs they’ve written?

Both shied away from compiling such a list, suggesting it would always change. Taupin said he almost always favors the most recent material, so he would probably end up listing the 10 songs on John’s new “Sleeping With the Past” album, which is scheduled to be released on Aug. 28.

Both, however, agreed to a compromise: They’d react, in separate interviews, to a list of my 10 favorite John-Taupin tunes. They were asked to give a general impression of where the song would rank among their favorites and offer any memories the song brings to mind. The songs are listed here chronologically:

‘Your Song’

From “Elton John” (1970)

JOHN: “That was our first hit, a point I guess you always remember. I also think of the song as kind of my crutch because you can always depend on it to work in the show. It’s sort of like my ‘My Way,’ I suppose. On my own list of favorites, it’d probably be in the upper third. This is the first tour, by the way, where we aren’t doing it.”

TAUPIN: “I am still proud of it because it’s probably our standard, but it doesn’t have any great feeling or meaning for me. The nicest thing is it was probably the first good love song I wrote. I understand, though, when someone now says the words are pretty hokey. But you have to remember, I was just 17 when I wrote it.”

‘Sixty Years On’

From “Elton John”

JOHN: “I like it a lot. It reminds me of the first (U.S.) album . . . the orchestral arrangements on those tracks. When we did the shows in Australia with the orchestra, we opened with it and it was just spine-tingling.”

TAUPIN: “Those songs from the beginning don’t necessarily rank very high on my scale anymore, although ‘Sixty Years On’ would probably be close to the top of the songs from that era. I was reading a lot of dark fantasy stories and science fiction in those days and I think that brushed off in my writing.”

‘Country Comfort’

From “Tumbleweed Connection” (1971)

JOHN: “Not one of my favorites. . . . I also think our version on ‘Tumbleweed Connection’ was a little too sugary. We threw the whole kitchen sink on it.”

TAUPIN: “I think it was pretty classic, though I don’t think we recorded it very well. The problem when we cut that particular track was that we wanted it to have a country feel and we put everything you’d find on a dozen country records on it . . . steel guitars and fiddles . . . everything. I’d like to hear it redone by a really good country band.”

‘Daniel’

From “Don’t Shoot Me, I’m Only the Piano Player” (1973)

JOHN: “One of my favorites, a song that I never have gotten tired of singing. Like almost everything we’ve ever done, I wrote the music after Bernie wrote the lyrics. I’m sure Bernie has thought of some of the songs as ballads and I turn them into fast songs, but we know each other well enough to where we don’t have serious disagreements over that.”

TAUPIN: “As with ‘Your Song,’ I’ve heard it so many times that I sometimes get tired of it, but I still believe it is a very good song. The interesting thing is that no one ever seemed to really understand what the story was about. The original idea was based on something I had read in Newsweek about veterans coming home and being pampered and being made to feel like second-rate citizens. . . . ‘Oh, I feel so sorry for you.’ Actually, they just wanted to be normal human beings again. ‘Daniel’ was a fictional idea of a vet coming home and saying, ‘Hey, I want to go somewhere where nobody knows me.’ He’s talking in the song to his brother. The original lyric was much longer and probably would have explained it.”

‘Funeral for a Friend/Love Lies Bleeding’

Medley from “Goodbye Yellow Brick Road” (1973)

JOHN: “The two were written completely separately and we just put them together on the spur of the moment and it worked. I like the instrumental better than the other one (‘Love . . . ‘).

TAUPIN: “I never get tired of hearing that song, especially the instrumental construction at the beginning. I also like the fury of ‘Love Lies Bleeding.’ There’s a great deal of anger and torment in that song. It’s a very real song to me . . . a statement of what touring and rock ‘n’ roll does to the family life.”

‘Don’t Let the Sun Go Down on Me’

From “Caribou” (1974)

JOHN: “It is my Beach Boys tribute. I was always so much influenced by them, especially Brian Wilson. In fact, some of the Beach Boys sang on the record. It’s probably one of my top three favorites of the songs we’ve written.”

TAUPIN: “I prefer it in concert to the record version because it is more emotional. It still retains a lot of emotion. I like it a lot, but would it be in my Top 10? I don’t know.”

‘Sorry Seems to Be the Hardest Word’

From “Blue Moves”(1976)

JOHN: “One of the few songs of ours that I can hear Sinatra singing, and I think he did sing it once in concert. For me, it’s one of the best ballads we’ve ever written, which is why it has stayed in the show for a long time.”

TAUPIN: “It was one of the few things we ever wrote when the music came first. I remember Elton had a house on Tower Grove Drive in Los Angeles and I stopped by one afternoon. He was tinkling on the piano and I just listened for a while. Finally, I thought of the title line and went home and completed the song. It’s probably our best song from that period.”

‘Tonight’

From “Blue Moves” (1970) JOHN: “This would be very high. ‘Blue Moves’ is my favorite of our albums.”

TAUPIN: “It was a very personal song. That whole album was my sort of exorcism of ghosts . . . sort of related to the breakup of my first marriage. . . . The line about not fighting again, just going to sleep. It was very difficult for me to listen to at one time, but my life has changed a lot and it doesn’t have that torturous edge for me anymore.”

‘I Guess That’s Why They Call It the Blues’

From “Too Late for Zero” (1983) JOHN: “It sometimes takes a while before a song begins to grow on you. Sometimes it doesn’t happen until you do it live. And sometimes it is just to opposite. ‘Nikita’ worked on record, but not very well on stage. With ‘I Guess That’s Why They Call It the Blues,’ though, I felt right away that it was something special. . . . The same with ‘Daniel’ or ‘Don’t Let the Sun Go Down on Me.’ I think ‘The Blues’ is one of the best songs we’ve ever written. It would most certainly be one of my top three favorites.”

TAUPIN: “That would definitely be in my Top 10. It was based on a letter I wrote to my wife Toni when I was away recording an album. I was saying we’ll be back together soon and I think the first line in the song was actually in the letter. Elton’s melody is brilliant.”

‘Sad Songs (Say So Much)’

From “Breaking Hearts” (1984) JOHN: “It’d be somewhere in my top half, I guess, but not near the top. It works much better on stage than on record because we have turned it into a gospel type thing and quickened the pace on it--which is what (producer) Chris Thomas wanted to do when we first recorded it.”

TAUPIN: “When we wrote it, I told Elton, ‘This is going to be No. 1 all over the world’ and I was amazed when it only got to No. 7 here. I think it is a terrific song. It really conveys the message--about hearing something on the radio and remembering what you were doing at a time in your life. In fact, it’s a song about just what we are doing now--reminiscing about music and old times.”

Reminiscing about favorite old songs last year also helped shape the music on John’s new album. The 10 tunes are an ode to the R&B; records that John and Taupin listened to as youngsters in England.

“We both loved those old Motown and Stax and Chess records. Not just the stars like Marvin Gaye and Otis Redding, but people who would be considered obscure over here. . . . The James Carrs and Betty Everetts who were much bigger in England than they ever were here,” said John, 42.

“One of the biggest thrills I ever had was when I got to back performers like Patti LaBelle and Billy Stewart when I was 18. It was always my favorite sort of music and it in a way still is. I just wish it would get back to its uncluttered roots.”

The memory of those days came up when Taupin and John were talking about the tone of the next album.

Said Taupin of last year’s “Reg Strikes Back” LP, “I wasn’t very pleased with the last album and some of the other albums because I thought they were too choppy. . . . Too many varying styles and maybe some substandard material. So, I thought it was important to get a cohesive, heartfelt feel to this album and Elton was thinking along the same lines.”

While reminiscing about old records, they decided to write some songs in the spirit of the early R&B; hits that they loved. Taupin even sat down and actually listened to records by the likes of the Drifters, Ray Charles and Otis Redding before writing the lyrics for the new album.

When he passed the lyrics on to John, he even marked on some of the sheets of paper the artist he had in mind when he wrote the lyrics. “The idea wasn’t to copy any specific record,” Taupin said, “but to get a feel for the era.”