Drummer delivers solid walls of sound for Elton John
Click here to read the full transcript of Doug Fox’s interview with Nigel Olsson.
It’s a little bit funny, the feeling inside that Nigel Olsson gets every time he’s about to step on stage with one of the most popular artists in recording history.
And while Olsson’s name may be a mystery to a majority of music fans, it’s safe to say there’s not a one of them who is unfamiliar with his work — seeing as how he laid down the backbeat on a string of hit songs, including the likes of “Rocket Man (I Think It’s Gonna be a Long, Long Time),” “Crocodile Rock,” “Bennie and the Jets,” “Candle in the Wind,” Goodbye Yellow Brick Road, “Don’t Let the Sun Go Down on Me” and “Someone Saved My Life Tonight,” among many others.
Olsson has literally enjoyed the best seat in the house, perched behind his drums during the most productive periods of Elton John’s remarkable near-40-year touring career — which includes a stop Feb. 19 at EnergySolutions Arena in Salt Lake City as part of the Face 2 Face tour featuring John and Billy Joel. (The Salt Lake appearance was one in a string of dates which were postponed in November due to an undisclosed health issue by Joel.)
And even though Olsson logged his 1,500th live performance with John last summer, he still admits to battling a case of nerves before each and every concert, culminating when he tugs on his trademark drumming gloves — left hand always first — just prior to climbing the stage.
Inevitably, the jitters give way to adrenaline as Olsson looks out into the sea of faces and soaks in the disparate crowd’s unbridled enthusiasm.
“Especially that we’re now these old geezers rocking out … it’s insane to look out in the audience, after all these years, and see the older people, the real older people, the younger people and little kids,” said Olsson in a November telephone interview from his home in Woodland Hills, Calif. “We have such a huge catalog of stuff that I guess we appeal to all of these different age groups, which is amazing. And we’re still going strong. …
“It still amazes me every single night that we pull all these people in, and they’re jumping up and down and screaming. It’s great!”
That John and his band still receive that nightly adulation is due in large measure to their capture-lightning-in-a-bottle period in the early 1970s. Unless you actually lived through that time, it’s nearly impossible to grasp what a phenomenon John was from 1970-75. That half decade ranks among the most productive five-year stretches of any artist as John released nine studio albums (the last six of which went to No. 1), charted 13 top 10 singles, had his “Greatest Hits” album spend 10 weeks at No. 1 and sold out flashy concerts from coast to coast — often adorned in stage attire so outrageous it would make Liberace blush.
Olsson was there for the majority of that run — from John’s very first American show through the recording of the “Captain Fantastic and the Brown Dirt Cowboy” album in 1975. He was unexpectedly dismissed that summer as John executed a surprising band shakeup at the peak of his popularity before the recording of “Rock of the Westies,” which hit No. 1 in late 1975, ending the string of consecutive chart-toppers.
Olsson, who reunited with the original band for a couple-year stint in the early 1980s before resurfacing in John’s lineup from 2000 to the present, first met Elton when both of them were kicking about the session circuit at Dick James Studios in England in the late 1960s. John actually helped Olsson land a position in the hard rock band Uriah Heep — a gig which lasted for all of nine dates, before fate intervened and Olsson sat in for what was supposed to be a one-off promotional show with John for his eponymously titled U.S. debut record.
“So we went to the Dick James Studio, this tiny little studio of our publishing company in London, and within the first, I would say, eight bars of the first thing we played, which was probably “Your Song” at that time, that’s when I knew, ‘Oh … this is the stuff I want to be doing,’ ” Olsson said. “Because with Uriah Heep, they were a great, great headbanger band, or whatever you could call it, but that just wasn’t my forte. I wanted to do something that I could play with the lyrics and play to the low end of the piano. It was so inspiring in those first few bars that I said, ‘This is great. This is great.’ And we did the show — and that was the deciding moment. We said, ‘We can’t just do this one show, we’ve got to carry on. And here we are, still carrying on.”
John’s U.S. concert debut, on Aug. 25, 1970, at the Troubadour club in West Hollywood, Calif., is the stuff of legend. John’s band — a threesome at the time with Olsson and bassist Dee Murray — so wowed the crowd and critics that subsequent newspaper reviews instantly heralded the arrival of a star. Pretty heady stuff for three lads who were primarily worried about how they were going to cover the lush orchestrations and backing vocals of the album in a live setting.
“When we came over here, we thought, ‘How on earth are we going to pull this off?’ — because of the strings and this, that and the other,” said Olsson, recalling the band’s Troubadour debut. “And we pulled it off — just the three of us. It was just so amazing. And we really didn’t have time, because things were happening so fast for us, we didn’t have time to look back and think, ‘Well, wow, this is really cool.’ And then it became the stage where we’d record, then we’d tour. Then we’d go back in the studio, and tour. So we were always kind of touring the album before and putting a couple of things from the new record out — which was really exciting for the fans, but for three or four years there, when we first came over here, it was just insane. We didn’t realize how big we were, you know? So, there’s a lot of times where I’ve thought back and said, ‘How on earth did we pull that off?’ “
In addition to his drumming, Olsson made a huge contribution to the band’s sound through background vocals — which he primarily shared with bandmates Murray and guitarist Davey Johnstone, who joined the fold full-time in 1972. In fact, on many of those early hit albums, John would work on his main tracks during the day and then leave the studio. Olsson, Murray and Johnstone would work into the night with producer Gus Dudgeon coming up with the ear-turning background vocals that augment all those songs.
“We’d just come up with ideas as we went along,” Olsson said. “It was such fun to do that — and there were some things we just sort of broke down laughing and had to stop the session because we couldn’t stop laughing. And we sped things up and slowed ’em down and had a good laugh.
“We were allowed to do whatever — if anybody had an idea, we’d try it. It wouldn’t be, ‘Oh, no, that’s crap, we’re not going to do that!’ And just sitting there the next day when Elton came back in and had a playback at 15 million decibels — because Elton really liked to hear it loud — just seeing his face when he heard what we’d done the night before, it was great. It was great. And mostly we didn’t have to change anything.”
Olsson said he is a self-taught skinsmith — having never taken any drum lessons and learning his craft initially by playing along with records. “I can’t do a drum roll,” he said. “I couldn’t tell you what a paradiddle is.”
As such, don’t confuse him with many of his flashier counterparts in the rock drumming scene. That’s not his bag. His job — as it has been from the very beginning — is to complement the lyrics and make the star look and sound, well, fantastic.
“Actually, my signature is that I kind of play a little bit behind the beat just to hold everything back, which to me makes it more dynamic, especially on the slow ballads. That’s my thing, the big ballads,” he said. “I never like to overplay because I want the lyrics to come out and let people hear what the song is all about instead of putting these huge fills in. I do them at random, basically.”
In his spare time, Olsson is a racing aficionado, listing the Miller Motorsports Park in Tooele as one of his favorite tracks. Now that he is touring full-time again, however, he’s had to put the brakes on his racing hobby.
“I still miss racing, but, you know, being the drummer, if you make one mistake on the race track, it could lead to … not being the drummer,” Olsson said with a laugh. “But I do have my instructor’s license and I can teach people how to do the right things on the track.”
Doing the right things on the track? That could easily be Olsson’s musical mantra as well.
“You know, I don’t listen a lot to our [early albums], but when I do, I really appreciate the heartfelt energy of the songs and the way it was recorded,” he said. “I’ve had a great life. I’m a very lucky man. I was in the right place at the right time.”
Perfect timing, after all, is a drummer’s greatest gift.
Doug Fox can be reached at (801) 344-2548 or dfox@heraldextra.com.
Face 2 Face Tour
The Face 2 Face tour featuring Elton John and Billy Joel is billed as the most successful and longest-running concert pairing in pop history — and it’s hard to argue.
John and Joel first began touring together in 1994, and have taken their unique evening of well-known hits to stadiums and arenas around the country on occasional jaunts ever since. The tour made one previous stop in Salt Lake City — at the then-Delta Center in 2001.
“We are honored to have Billy Joel and Elton John come together on one stage and to perform here in Salt Lake City,” said Mark Powell, vice president of events at EnergySolutions Arena, in a press release. “These two artists are legends in the world of music, and it brings me great joy to be part of bringing two superstars to their fans.”
The show’s format opens with the two piano men performing several songs as a duet and trading vocal lines on each other’s hits. Each artist then does a set with his own group, before a grand finale unites both full bands for a half-dozen of John’s and Joel’s biggest hits.
The show unfolds as a full evening of entertainment for the fans in attendance, but it presents a bit of an emotional dilemma for the band members — especially of John’s band, which typically go on first.
“It’s total fun from start to finish. The only drag for me, I can’t speak for the other guys, but I’m sure they’d agree, is we go on and do our set and then go off while Billy does his set, and then we all go on at the end,” said Nigel Olsson, John’s longtime drummer. “So that hour and a half or whatever in between, when we’re waiting to go back on at the end for the big jam session, for me it’s a nightmare because you’ve got the adrenaline pumping and then you have to go off and wait an hour and a half, and try to keep that energy up. So that’s quite annoying for me, ’cause I just want to get up there and keep on that huge, high level of giving it some hell, you know?”
Which begs the question: Just what does the band do during that break?
“Well, we just sit around the dressing room and eat popcorn or whatever they have or M&M’s — only the red ones!” said Olsson with a laugh, before adding a disclaimer of “No!”
Whatever goes on backstage, the onstage performances are always colorful. John and Joel shared a mutual admiration for each other’s abilities in a press release.
“The great thing about performing with Elton is that he is such a good piano player,” said Joel, “and that makes me have to dig deep to keep up with him, not to mention, I’ve got the best seat in the house — only one piano away from Elton John.”
“I love touring with Billy,” said John. “I have the greatest respect for him, and we’re such good friends.”
— Doug Fox