Shepherding Julian Lennon across the Atlantic during the summer of 1974 came with an unexpected bonus for Davey Johnstone.
John Lennon's first son and ex-wife, Cynthia Lennon, joined the Elton John crew on the S.S. France for the trip to New York City, where Lennon would be visiting his father. During the journey John, Johnstone and company were working up songs and arrangements for Captain Fantastic and the Brown Dirty Cowboy, which they'd be recording at Caribou Ranch in Nederland, Colorado, where they'd also made the Caribou album earlier that year.
The session would also include a cover of the Beatles' "Lucy in the Sky With Diamonds," on which Lennon would play electric guitar and provide backing vocals under the pseudonym Dr. Winston O'Boogie.
"We were kind of chaperoning Julian, making sure he didn't get in too much trouble," Johnstone tells Guitar Player via Zoom from his home in California. "John met us at the New York Harbor, and it was quite a remarkable time. I'm a huge Beatles fan, so I'm going, 'Shit, this is John Lennon and he's enjoying our music.' There was talk of him coming to Caribou and hanging out for a couple of weeks, and we were like, 'Yeah, come, hang out!'
"And he did do that. He came to the ranch. I think we had pretty much finished Captain Fantastic when he arrived, which freed us up to do other things -- like 'Lucy in the Sky With Diamonds.' I let him use my [1969 Les Paul] goldtop on the track, and we all played together. It was just a blast to do that, especially a song from Sgt. Pepper's. That was a really decent version of that song."
Elton John's version of "Lucy in the Sky With Diamonds," which came out as a standalone single during mid-November of 1974, hit number one on the Billboard Hot 100 chart and was certified Gold. The session also included the standalone single "Philadelphia Freedom." Both are included on a recently released 50th anniversary deluxe edition of Captain Fantastic... The Gold Top, sadly, was stolen some years later, Johnstone says.
Although John's Farewell Yellow Brick Road tour ended back in July of 2023, Johnstone — also the Rocket Man's longtime bandleader — has hardly been living a life of leisure.
"I don't think I've retired. I don't think I ever will retire," he says. "That's just the way I am. I'm really enjoying this part of my life. I get to revisit some of that older music by playing with the band occasionally, and I'm doing a lot of my own stuff."
The Scottish native, who started working with John during sessions for 1971's Madman Across the Water album before joining the band full-time, still performs the occasional private show with John — "maybe six a year instead of six a week," he says. "We're really having a lot of fun. It's much more enjoyable than all the work we did before."
When you hear the work we did, I'm always amazed by the level of musicianship. We were modeling ourselves on kind of a Beatles thing."
— Davey Johnstone
But he also has other projects he's working on, including a new solo album Johnstone says he's finished, with his son Charlie — who also worked on Johnstone's last album, Deeper Than My Roots in 2022 — co-writing and engineering. Johnstone's first solo album, Smiling Face, came out during 1973, while he and John Jorgenson, who's also recorded and toured with John over the years, collaborated on Crop Circles in 1999.
"I'm really proud of this new record," says Johnstone, 74, who hopes to release it during the first half of 2026. "It's got a lot of older sensibilities. It's not a modern record by any stretch of the imagination, although Charlie is a modern engineer, so maybe it is a moder record.
"Charlie and I finished a couple months ago, and once a week I listen to the whole thing. It's blowing my mind — and I'm very self-critical. If I'm still loving it, I'm thinking people are really gonna like this record."
Johnstone — who spoke with us last year about key guitar moments from John’s 1973 smash Goodbye Yellow Brick Road — says he's also in the midst of writing a memoir, but he's particularly excited about a documentary that's in progress about the early Elton John band with himself, bass guitar player Dee Murray, drummer Nigel Olsson and, later, Ray Cooper. The project, he says, was inspired by a conversation 20 years ago with the late Murray's first wife, Anett.
"She called me one day and said not enough people know about Dee," Johnstone says. "There's not books about him, nobody knows. They don't have a clue about him, and he was such a brilliant player.
“So we started kicking ideas around. Over the years, we had to let it gather dust because Elton and his manager and husband, David Furnish, were doing their own documentary. Now that that's out we came back into it earlier this year and we've got a great team behind us, and we're very, very excited about it."
There's no timetable for the film's release as of yet, but Johnstone says he hopes it will engender a greater appreciation for how good the band was in its early 70s heyday, something that's hammered in, he says, on the new Captain Fantastic... set.
"When you hear the work we did, I'm always amazed by the level of musicianship," says Johnstone, who has shared five guitar tips with us. "The playing itself and the parts for each musician are so unique. Dare I say it, we were modeling ourselves on kind of a Beatles thing. I'm a huge Beatles fan, so we had that sensibility. It was a great band."
