Ryan’s Rocket Man

In this series, we’ve been spending time with artists who didn’t just make hits — they rewired popular music itself.

Some of them crashed.
Some of them burned out.
Some of them never got old enough to figure out who they might have become.

In the previous episode, we talked about Michael Jackson — a man whose genius was wrapped in pressure, pain, and dependency, and whose life ended in an overdose in a rented mansion in Los Angeles.

Today’s story easily could have ended the same way.

But it didn’t.

Transcript

Welcome to Celebrate Creativity.

I’m George Bartley and this episode is entitled Ryan’s Rocket Man
    
In this series, we’ve been spending time with artists who didn’t just make hits — they rewired popular music itself.

Some of them crashed.
Some of them burned out.
Some of them never got old enough to figure out who they might have become.

In the previous episode, we talked about Michael Jackson — a man whose genius was wrapped in pressure, pain, and dependency, and whose life ended in an overdose in a rented mansion in Los Angeles.

Today’s story easily could have ended the same way.

But it didn’t.

Today we’re talking about a shy boy from suburban England who became a peacock at the piano…
a man who turned sequined baseball uniforms and oversized glasses into a new language of pop…
and — crucially for this episode — a man whose life was changed by a teenager from Indiana named Ryan White.

This is Elton John.
Not just “Rocket Man.”
Elton the survivor.
Elton the man who almost died from his addictions… and the Indiana kid who helped pull him back.

Let’s start far, far away from stadiums and sequined Dodgers uniforms.

Elton John begins life as someone else entirely:
Reginald Kenneth Dwight — Reggie — born March 25, 1947, in a quiet suburb called Pinner, just outside London.

Picture a small English house in the late 1940s.
Radio in the corner.
Teakettle on.
Rationing still a recent memory.

In that house, there’s a little upright piano.
And there’s a little boy who can’t stop touching it.

By four years old, Reggie is picking out melodies he’s heard on the radio.
By eleven, he’s won a scholarship to the Royal Academy of Music in London.

Teachers there notice something startling:
they’ll play a complex piece of classical music — Bach, maybe, or Chopin — and this little kid with big glasses can sit down afterwards and play it back largely from memory.

That’s not normal.
That’s a gift.

But gifts like that don’t always make life easier.

At home, things are tense.
His father is a strict military man — all rules and discipline.
His mother is emotional, fiery.
There are arguments.
There is distance.

What Reggie remembers most fondly is his grandmother, who adored him and absolutely doted on his music. He’d climb up on the piano bench and bash away… and she would be his first and best audience.

So you have this split screen early on:

On one side, the world of rules and uniforms and “behave yourself.”

On the other, this wild, emotional world at the piano, where he can be as loud and dramatic as he wants.
That split never really goes away.
It just gets bigger — and louder.

As a teenager, Reggie does what a lot of young musicians do: he joins a band.

The band is called Bluesology, and they spend years backing visiting American soul and R&B artists touring around the UK. So before he’s Elton John, superstar, he’s Reggie Dwight at the back of the stage, playing behind people like Patti LaBelle and Major Lance.

That’s important.

Because Elton doesn’t just grow up wanting to be a star — he also learns how to be an accompanist.
He learns how to sit in a groove.
He learns how to support someone else’s voice.
He learns that rhythm and harmony are a kind of conversation.

All that time, though, he’s also writing songs.
Little fragments, chord progressions, half-finished tunes.

What he needs — desperately — is a voice to go with that music.

And that’s where fate, and the postal system, step in.

An individual by the name of Reginald Dwight answers  a “songwriters wanted” ad from a music publisher.
He shows up, shy and hopeful, with some lyrics and melodies. The publisher takes one look and says, politely, “These might not be it.”

But then — and this is one of those hinge points in creative history — the publisher takes a stack of lyrics from another kid who answered the ad, and hands them to Reggie in a sealed envelope.

The other kid is a farm boy from Lincolnshire named Bernie Taupin.

Reggie goes home, opens the envelope, and feels something click.

The words are cinematic, emotional, a little strange, a little grand.
They’re exactly the kind of lyrics that invite melody.

He starts writing music to Bernie’s words almost immediately.
Within a short time, the two meet in person.

One is shy, bespectacled, a musical prodigy who doesn’t like the sound of his own lyrics.
The other is a poet in denim — all words, no tunes.

They shake hands and begin one of the longest and most successful songwriting partnerships in pop history.

Reggie also makes another decision:
if he’s going to become the artist he feels inside, he needs a different name.

He borrows “Elton” from Elton Dean, the sax player in Bluesology,
and “John” from Long John Baldry, a towering British blues singer he admired.

Sometimes reinvention really is that literal:
new name, new act, new life.

The albums that keep coming

The first Elton John album, Empty Sky, comes out in 1969. It’s more of a sketchbook than a manifesto.

But then, very quickly, the floodgates open.

Elton John — the self-titled album — arrives in 1970 with “Your Song,” that gentle, almost awkward love ballad that sounds like someone singing directly from their diary.

It’s not cool.
It’s not ironic.
It’s earnest in a way that was slightly unfashionable then — and maybe even more unfashionable now.

And people fall in love with it.

Next comes Tumbleweed Connection, an imaginary Western dreamed up by two English kids who’d never set foot in the American frontier…
then Madman Across the Water with its dark, spiraling title track…
then Honky Château, with “Rocket Man.”

By the time we get to Goodbye Yellow Brick Road, something enormous has happened.

Between 1972 and 1975, Elton John releases a run of albums that, looking back, doesn’t seem human:
Honky Château, Don’t Shoot Me I’m Only the Piano Player, Goodbye Yellow Brick Road, Caribou, Captain Fantastic and the Brown Dirt Cowboy, Rock of the Westies.

In the United States, he scores seven consecutive number-one albums.

Seven.

For a while, he essentially is Top 40 radio.

And the songs are shockingly diverse.
You have the tenderness of “Tiny Dancer”…
the swagger of “Bennie and the Jets”…
the rage of “Saturday Night’s Alright for Fighting”…
the melancholy of “Candle in the Wind.”

It’s as if he’s scoring every side of 1970s life at once.

But if you were in those arenas, you wouldn’t just have heard the songs.
You would have seen something else entirely.

The man in the sequined Dodgers uniform

Elton John’s stage persona in the 1970s is… there’s really no nicer word… outrageous.

He doesn’t just walk onstage; he erupts onstage.

We’re talking:

Feathered headdresses.

Platform boots high enough to terrify a chiropractor.

Glasses so big they should get billing in the program.

A glittering Los Angeles Dodgers baseball uniform worn at Dodger Stadium in 1975, absolutely covered in sequins.

If David Bowie was the alien rock star,
Elton John is the court jester, the mad king, and the piano professor, all rolled into one.

He’s also funny.
Between songs, he tells stories.
He jokes.
He punctures his own grandeur.

It’s as if he knows that the costumes are armor — that they let him be bigger than he feels inside.

But here’s the crucial thing:
under all the feathers and rhinestones, the musicianship is absolutely solid. He can hammer out rock & roll, slip into gospel chords, and play country or Broadway-style ballads without ever losing the thread.

He is, fundamentally, a player — and the costumes never hide that.

Now, somewhere in here — and this is where the story starts to darken — success begins to curdle into something else.

The high cost of high times

Fame at that level is not normal.
Human beings were not built to have entire arenas scream their name night after night.

Elton is shy by nature.
He doesn’t particularly like confrontation.
He wants, more than anything, to be loved.

And fame offers love — or what looks like love.
But it also offers easy access to numbness.

Drugs enter the picture in a serious way.
Cocaine becomes a daily, then hourly thing.
Alcohol follows.
Food becomes another drug; he binges and purges, spiraling into bulimia.

This is the Elton John who later says that, in his worst days, his schedule would be something like:

Stay up for days on end, fueled by cocaine and booze.
Crash, exhausted and starving.
Eat enormous amounts of food.
Force himself to throw up.
And then… start the cycle again.

From the outside, the hits keep coming.
Even in the 1980s, when some critics start treating him like a ‘70s relic, he lands songs like “I’m Still Standing,” “Sad Songs (Say So Much),” “I Guess That’s Why They Call It the Blues,” and, eventually, “Sacrifice.”

So on the charts, it looks like a comeback.

Inside, it’s a slow motion collapse.

And this is where Indiana quietly enters the frame.

The boy from Indiana

Before Elton meets Ryan White, we need to meet Ryan ourselves.

Ryan White is born in Kokomo, Indiana, in 1971.
He’s a hemophiliac — his blood doesn’t clot properly — which means he needs frequent transfusions and special treatments.

In 1984, one of those treatments infects him with HIV, at a time when HIV/AIDS is still deeply misunderstood, heavily stigmatized, and the subject of wild rumors.

Ryan is thirteen years old.

When he tries to return to his middle school in nearby Russiaville, panic breaks out.
Parents are afraid.
Some students are afraid.
The school bars him from attending.

Overnight, this polite, soft-spoken kid from Indiana becomes the center of a legal and moral battle about who gets to belong.

He and his mother fight back in court.
They eventually win the right for him to attend school… but the harassment and ignorance are relentless.
Bullets are fired into the family home.
People whisper.
Some turn away.

Finally, Ryan and his mother move to Cicero, Indiana — to Hamilton Heights High School — which, to its eternal credit, prepares its students, welcomes Ryan, and becomes a kind of model for compassion.

Ryan keeps doing interviews.
He appears on talk shows.
He speaks calmly to reporters.
He makes it much harder for people to pretend that AIDS only happens to “those people,” over there, far away.

If you care at all about creativity — about the human imagination — it’s important to say this:

Ryan White changes the way America imagines AIDS.
He puts a new picture in people’s minds.

Not a tabloid headline.
Not a stereotype.
A teenager from Indiana who wants to go to school.

And one day, on television, he’s asked:
“If you could meet anyone, who would you most like to meet?”

Ryan says:
“Elton John.”

Elton meets Ryan

Now we jump back across the Atlantic.

Somewhere in the middle of Elton’s own chaos — the drugs, the tours, the confusion — he sees that interview. He hears this sick teenager in Indiana say he’d like to meet him.

And Elton feels something.
Call it responsibility.
Call it curiosity.
Call it a tug on his heart.

He reaches out.

He calls the White family.
He visits them.
He becomes, gradually, a friend.

Not just a famous person dropping in once for a photo.
A real friend.

He helps with medical bills.
He flies them to concerts.
He spends time in their home.

And maybe the most radical thing he does — in that era of fear and misinformation — is simply be there.
No gloves.
No theatrical distancing.
Just a person, showing up.

Ryan and his mother, Jeanne, later talk about how much joy he brought, how valued he made them feel. And Elton, on his side, is confronted with a kind of courage that makes his own life look — in his words — “out of control.”

All this builds toward a week in April of 1990, in Indianapolis.

In early April 1990, Ryan White is hospitalized in Indianapolis with AIDS-related pneumonia.

By this time, he is nationally known.
His case has become a symbol not just of medical injustice, but of what happens when fear meets ignorance.

On April 8, 1990, at the age of eighteen, Ryan White dies.

Elton is there with the family in Indianapolis.
He helps with practical details.
He grieves with them.
He plays “Skyline Pigeon” at Ryan’s funeral — a tender, early Elton John song that suddenly sounds almost like a hymn.

You can imagine that scene:

A church in Indianapolis.
Family, friends, classmates.
Television cameras out on the sidewalk.
And at the piano, a man who is both one of the most famous musicians on earth… and, inwardly, a deeply broken person.

Later, Elton says that week — that funeral — shook him to his core.

He flies back to his hotel room after the funeral, looks at himself, and realizes:

“I’m sitting here blowing my life apart with cocaine and drink and bulimia… while this kid, who never did anything wrong except need a blood transfusion, had more courage, more grace, more dignity than I’ve ever shown.”

He has told audiences, including crowds in Indianapolis, that Ryan White “saved [his] life.”

Because within about six months, Elton John finally does what people around him had been begging him to do for years:

He checks himself into rehab.
He gets help.
He gets sober.
And he stays that way.

That’s the hinge.
That’s the moment the story veers away from the kind of ending we saw with Michael Jackson.

And it happens here, with an Indiana teenager as the moral compass.

A new life, a new foundation

When Elton comes out of rehab, the world looks different.

The drugs are gone.
The secrecy is gone.
The bulimia, the self-punishment — he begins to face all of that.

But here’s what’s remarkable: he doesn’t just quietly go back to making records. He uses that mirror Ryan held up to him as a mandate.

In 1992, Elton John founds the Elton John AIDS Foundation.
He pours his money, his energy, his Rolodex, and his fame into combating HIV and AIDS around the world.

Over the years, that foundation raises hundreds of millions of dollars.
It funds prevention and treatment.
It supports education programs.
It backs organizations working with some of the most stigmatized communities on the planet.

In other words, the man who used to use fame mostly as a way to get numb now uses fame as a tool for service.

It’s hard not to hear Ryan in that.
And hard not to hear Indianapolis.

The second act: still at the piano

Meanwhile, the music doesn’t stop.
The second act of Elton’s career is quieter on the surface, but creatively rich.

His first fully sober album, The One, comes out in 1992. The songs feel more grounded, more honest. The title track is not about escape; it’s about commitment.

Then Disney calls.

Elton teams up with lyricist Tim Rice to write the songs for The Lion King.

This is one of those moments where you realize how flexible his talent is. This is the same songwriter who once sang about drunken Saturdays and deranged bandmates — now writing “Circle of Life,” “Hakuna Matata,” and “Can You Feel the Love Tonight” for an animated lion cub.

He wins an Oscar.
A whole new generation grows up knowing his melodies without even realizing that the guy who wrote their childhood soundtrack also once wore a glitter baseball uniform at Dodger Stadium and nearly killed himself with cocaine.

He goes on to co-write the musical Aida for Broadway, winning a Tony for Best Original Score.
Later, he scores Billy Elliot the Musical, about a boy trying to dance his way out of a coal mining town.

If the first half of his career is about running away from his past, the second half feels like he’s finally weaving all the pieces together.

He comes out publicly as gay.
He finds a partner, David Furnish.
They enter a civil partnership when the UK allows it, and marry when it becomes legal.
Together, they build a family, raising two sons.

Slowly, the story of Elton John becomes less about survival in the moment… and more about staying present over time.

A very long goodbye

Fame has a short memory.
Pop music especially.

Most artists get a few years, maybe a decade, in the spotlight.

Elton John tours for more than fifty years.

In the late 2010s and early 2020s, he embarks on his Farewell Yellow Brick Road tour — a farewell tour so massive and so long that it almost becomes a running joke.

But underneath the jokes is something real:
this is a man taking his time to say goodbye properly.

He plays around 300 shows.
The tour becomes the highest-grossing concert tour of all time.
He’s not doing it for the money; at this point, he doesn’t need the money. He’s doing it, you sense, because saying goodbye to the road is saying goodbye to a whole self.

In November 2022, he returns to Dodger Stadium — the scene of that wild 1975 sequined-uniform concert — to play his final North American shows.

There’s something beautifully circular about that:
the young man in the glittery baseball suit comes back as an older, sober, married, philanthropic version of himself, closing the loop.

The concert is filmed for a live special.
In 2024, that special wins an Emmy.

Elton already has Grammys.
He has Oscars.
He has a Tony.

With the Emmy, he becomes one of the rare few artists to achieve an EGOT — all four major American entertainment awards.

That’s quite a journey for the shy boy from Pinner who once sat at his grandmother’s piano.

So what do we do with this story in the context of this series — this neighborhood of   ?

When we talked about Michael Jackson, the shape of the story was heartbreak:
Look what incredible art this man made… and look how his life narrowed, and narrowed, and finally ended alone, surrounded by yes-men and anesthetic.
With Elton, the shape is different.

Here’s someone who had every ingredient for the same kind of tragedy:

childhood pain,

an almost inhuman level of fame,

unlimited access to drugs,

people around him who profited from keeping the show rolling.

The path was there.
And he walked a good long way  .

What changed the ending wasn’t a new hit song.
It wasn’t a clever business decision.
It was a relationship.

It was a teenager from Indiana — from Kokomo and Cicero and Indianapolis — holding up a mirror.

Ryan didn’t lecture Elton.
He didn’t sit him down for an intervention.
He simply was who he was: brave, honest, funny, determined to live his life in the middle of disease and stigma.

And Elton saw that.
He saw the contrast between Ryan’s courage and his own self-destruction.
He went to a funeral in Indianapolis and realized, “If I don’t change, I’m going to end up dead — and I will have thrown away a life that people like Ryan never had a chance to live.”

That realization — and the decision to act on it — is what gives us Elton John the survivor.

It’s what gives us decades of sober music, of AIDS activism, of mentorship to younger artists.

In a series about the lives of great musicians, I think it’s important to say plainly:

Talent is not enough.
Genius is not enough.
What often makes the difference is who we meet along the way — and whether we let those meetings change us.

Still standing

As we sit here today, Elton John is in his late seventies.

He has survived things that kill a lot of people much younger than him:
addiction, eating disorders, depression, the strange pressure cooker of superstardom.

He has done things most musicians will never do:

Sold hundreds of millions of records.

Played to millions of people on every continent.

Won every major entertainment award.

Been knighted.

Seen his songs sung by stadiums… and by small children standing on coffee tables, pretending to be lions.

But when he talks about what matters most, it’s not the trophies.

Again and again, he comes back to three things:

His sobriety.
His family.
And his obligation — his word — to people like Ryan White to use his life well.

The man who once wrote “I’m Still Standing” as a defiant pop anthem now sings it as a kind of literal truth.

“I’m still standing.”
Not because he was stronger than anyone else.
Not because fame protected him.
But because, at exactly the right moment, someone from Indiana held up a mirror and he dared to look.

So, where does that leave us in this month of musical giants?

We’ve spent time with artists who burned fast and died young.
We’ve spent time with artists whose lives are cautionary tales.
We’ve spent time with artists whose stories are, frankly, heartbreaking.

Elton John gives us a different kind of ending.

Not a neat, tidy, happily-ever-after — life doesn’t really do those.
But a story in which someone turns around before the overdose, before the last hospital bed, before the final scandal.

A story in which pop music, and activism, and friendship, and Indiana all weave together.

So the next time you hear “Rocket Man” drifting out of a grocery store speaker…
or “Your Song” playing at a wedding…
or “Circle of Life” announced by a badly-behaved toddler in a lion costume…

…you can enjoy them as pure, joyful pop.

But maybe, somewhere underneath, you’ll also remember the teenager from Kokomo who wanted to meet Elton John…
and the man at the piano in Indianapolis who finally decided he wanted to live.


In the next episode we will begin a new series regarding creativity - Conversations with Toys - especially appropriate for this time of year, and probably the most exciting podcast subject that I have ever dealt with. And I know you will enjoy it too

I’m George Bartley.
Thank you for listening to Celebrate Creativity.