"John Lennon and I drugged a lot together and had some uncontrolled nights." The publication of Elton John's memoirs (Middlesex, 1947), on sale worldwide starting this week, promises to leave his eyes wide and jaws disengaged. Reginald Kenneth Dwight turns in his autobiography 'Me' (in Spain it will be 'Me' and will be published by Reservoir Books) all his traumatic experiences, from the bad relationship with his mother to the shock that supposed to become the first superstar of music to speak openly of his homosexuality . Also his moments of glory, his illustrious friendships (from Lady Di to Andy Warhol, going through the members of the Beatles) or his final redemption from the hand of her husband, David Furnish. And the creative process that led him to create some of the most exciting songs in pop history, such as 'Rocket Man' and 'Your song'. And, of course, mountains of cocaine .

In the book, Elton talks about 'coca' with a tone between fun and nightmare. He had a good time, yes, but it also made him hit bottom in the late 80s, as he repeats every time he has the chance. But, before, there was room for many anecdotes, like the one in the book with John Lennon. He met him in 1973 through Tony King, manager of Apple Records in Los Angeles. Lennon was in what he called "lost weekend", the period of a year and a half in which he was separated from Yoko Ono. He was recording a television ad to promote his album 'Mind games'. In the video he appeared dancing with Tony King, this transvestite of the Queen of England, Isabel II. "We're going to take a fucking mother," Elton thought immediately.

PANIC ROOM

From that moment, they ran a few sprees together or with other musicians just as lost bullets, such as Nilsson or Dr. John. But the funniest of all happened in New York. Both had reserved a suite at the Sherry-Netherland hotel to account for a mountain of 'farlopa'. After locking the latch, someone knocked on the door. The first thing Elton thought was that it was the police. Lennon told him to go through the peephole to see who he was. "I felt a peculiar mixture of relief and disbelief." It was Andy Warhol .

Whispering very softly, he told him who was calling. "John began to shake his head frantically and made the gesture of cutting his neck." He told her, in an equally whispering voice, that he never even thought about opening. But Warhol kept knocking on the door. Then the author of Imagine asked him if Warhol was carrying his camera. It was a rhetorical question. He always went everywhere with his polaroid. "And you want me to come in here to take pictures when you have 'coca' stalactites hanging from your nose?" John Lennon asked his friend. So, between whispers, they both looked at the mountain of cocaine. "We slowly backed up to get back to what we had in hand, trying to ignore that the most famous pop artist on the planet was pounding the door without stopping."

Somehow, Elton John led to the rapprochement between Lennon and Yoko Ono that would lead to their reconciliation . It was on Thanksgiving Day 1974, after a concert by the two musicians at Madison Square Garden in New York that ended with Lennon playing the tambourine in 'The bitch is back'. When the lights went out, the three of them (John, Yoko and Elton) went to a bar where Uri Geller suddenly appeared bending spoons. The fruit of that reunion was Sean Taro Ono Lennon, which Yoko gave birth in New York in 1975 and of which he was godfather Elton John . His birth marked the beginning of a quieter stage in the life of the former Beatle. The family moved to the Dakota building, a place that always gave his friend a bad feeling, as he says in the book: "There was something that was sinister to me, I didn't like its architecture. Just looking at it, I was getting chills."

The news of Lennon's murder in 1980 surprised Elton in the middle of a tour, just landed in Melbourne (Australia). He had already buried other friends, such as Marc Bolan (T. Rex) in 1977 and Keith Moon (The Who) in 1978, but John's loss had a different effect.

TOO DIFFICULT TO TOUCH

Soon, he locked himself in the studio with his lyricist, Bernie Taupin , and they both wrote 'Empty garden', which was included in their album 'Jump up!' (1982). In the memoir, Elton John confesses that it is one of his favorite songs, although he rarely plays it live. "It's too hard to play, too emotional," he confesses. So much so that he threw himself several years without doing so and that, decades after his composition, he burst into tears when he recovered her in a performance in Las Vegas. "I really loved John, and when you love someone so much, I think you're never able to get over his death," he says on another page. That performance together on Thanksgiving 1974 was the last concert Lennon offered.

Hence, to kill the pain (and also because he liked barbarity, what the hell), Elton continued with his narcotic career. Some of the most lucid passages in the book are reflections on the relationship between the artist and the drug: "I liked the sensation. That high of self-esteem and euphoria. The feeling that suddenly I could open myself, that I did not feel supported or intimidated, that he could talk to anyone. That was stupid, of course. He was full of energy, was curious, sense of humor and thirst for knowledge: he didn't need a drug to be able to talk to people. "

"As expected, snorting a line of coca and putting on another immediately afterwards was something very typical of me . I was never that kind of drug addict who could never go to bed without shooting himself, or that he needed to consume on a daily basis. But Once I started, I couldn't stop until I was sure that there was no more cocaine left in the surroundings. I realized shortly after that I needed to have someone by my side - a sound technician, an operator - to get me watch the coca: not because I felt too important or too scared to be the one to keep the 'merca', but because if I was in charge of the coca reserves for a given night, when tea time came there would be nothing left ".

"My appetite for that roll," Elton continues, "was incredible, enough to be commented on in the circles in which I moved. Since I was a rock star who spent a lot of time in Los Angeles in the 1970s, it was a feat nothing despicable. " That was the problem, he emphasizes in the pages of I. "As I drank 'coca', I was no longer a rational human being. You tell yourself that everything is going well, arguing as proof the fact that drug use is not affecting your career. But it cannot be that you get that huge amount of coca in a healthy and correct way. You become an irresponsible person with whom you cannot reason, obsessive with yourself, you are the one who dictates the rules. If you do not do it for good, you will do it for bad. It is a crap drug " .

The book also includes a letter to cocaine written from Lutheran Hospital in Park Ridge (Illinois), dated August 10, 1990. "It's been 16 years since we lived together, you and I," the letter begins, which runs through the relationship of Elton John with the drug, whose endpoint occurred in a profusely reported detoxification process. For those who want to get to the point, at the end of the volume there is a juicy onomastic and thematic index in which these episodes are detailed. Look for the "addictions" and "detoxification" sections - with various equally juicy subsections - and join the points on the line.

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