ENTERTAINMENT: Elton’s twisted death dream
You really can find everything on the Internet, even if you can’t see it on a 40-foot LED screen.
Seeing Elton John again this week — a full review will run in Neon next Friday — made me curious about an outrageous video for “Someone Saved My Life Tonight” that director David LaChapelle had slipped in since I last saw “The Red Piano.”
The Colosseum folk say it joined the show in the Spring of 2007. I don’t get around to re-review every show every year, but I still revisit them more often than the national press, who tend to cover the initial openings and move on. So I was trying to find out if John and LaChapelle had created the “Someone” video with the rest of the show in 2004, and deliberately waited to “sneak” it in after the original wave of publicity.
I didn’t find the answer to that question, but did find the entire video. I expected maybe a shaky, cell-phone shot from the audience, but this is a pro transfer.
Imagine it on one of the largest video screens in the world, and you have what I believe is safe to say, the most transgressive work ever seen in a mainstream Las Vegas show.
(Until recently there existed a revue called “Fashionistas” with a bondage sequence, but it was a niche title seen by fewer people in three years than Elton will host three nights).
Other “Red Piano” footage serves up some peek-a-boo glimpses of retro-’70s porn stars,
and maybe they are what inspired the curious disclaimer at the Colosseum’s box office:
The Red Piano is designed with a Vegas theme and mature audiences in mind. The video imagery that accompanies the music may at times be considered risque, and includes montage style scenes that include brief frontal nudity. The video content is designed within the context of the songs and overall theme of the show.
The disclaimer does not mention the frontal nudity in this one is part of a twisted death dream in which a pasty-white transgender model named Amanda Lepore is electrocuted, with flames shooting out of … Well, you can watch it (and who couldn’t, after reading this far?). But don’t say you weren’t double-disclaimered:
I’m a fan of David Lynch and Stanley Kubrick’s “A Clockwork Orange,” 
and the video reminded me of both. Still, my begrudging respect for putting something so in-your-face on such a giant screen was outweighed by the fact that the film hijacks the song and — unlike the other videos in the show — changes its meaning completely instead of reinforcing it.
Robin Zimmerman, the living encyclopedia of all things Elton, (she caught every performance when she lived in Las Vegas) says she “can’t stand” the video and recaps the real events behind the autobiographical 1975 tune:
“The actual story in the song is that while Elton and Bernie (Taupin, his lyricist) were trying to get their career launched, Elton hooked up with Linda Woodrow, a bossy and domineering American woman with some money from her father. She somehow convinced Elton to get engaged, and also wanted him to give up his musical aspirations. For a short time, she, Elton, and Bernie, shared a basement flat in a house in Islington, in London's East End, where, in one of his earliest recorded hissy-fits, a despairing Elton made a mock-showing of a suicide attempt, by putting down a pillow for comfort (in front of a gas oven) and opening the window first. It was all bad with Linda, and Elton needed to get out of it. Another musician friend, Long John Baldry, took Elton to the pub one night, kept him up late talking, and talked him out of marrying her. The next day Elton moved out. Linda got a legal writ for breach of promise and claimed she was pregnant. She wasn't, and that was the end of that.”
The video does get the pillow-in-front-of-the-oven part right.
