1982 · Behind the Songs
“Fifteen months after December 1980, a tribute Elton John almost didn’t dare to record.”
John Lennon had been gone fifteen months when Elton John and Bernie Taupin recorded his farewell. Cut in September and October 1981 for Jump Up!, John’s sixteenth album, and produced by Chris Thomas, “Empty Garden (Hey Hey Johnny)” was released on May 28, 1982, in Britain as the album’s second single — and in America as its first — on Rocket at home and Geffen across the Atlantic.
The two men had been genuine friends. Lennon played on John’s 1974 cover of “Lucy in the Sky with Diamonds” — whose B-side was Lennon’s own “One Day (At a Time)” — and they worked together on “Whatever Gets You thru the Night” from Walls and Bridges. When that single reached number one, Lennon kept a promise and joined John on stage at Madison Square Garden on Thanksgiving night, 1974.
Taupin’s lyric turns the Garden into a garden: an empty stage where a friend used to stand, and growing things as a measure of what Lennon made and what his absence took away. The plea “Can’t you come out to play?” reaches back to Lennon’s “Dear Prudence” from the White Album. John later admitted he had feared a tribute song would come out clumsy — he had already tried once, wordlessly, with “The Man Who Never Died,” later a bonus track on the Ice on Fire reissue.
The recording is restrained: John on Yamaha CP-70 electric grand piano and harpsichord, James Newton Howard on synthesizer, Richie Zito on acoustic guitar, Dee Murray on bass, and Jeff Porcaro on drums and LinnDrum. Billboard heard it as closer to John’s best work than his recent records; Record World called it a simple, touching tribute. It reached number 13 in America and number eight in Canada, though only number 51 in Britain; the single ran 4:06 against the album’s 5:05, with “Take Me Down to the Ocean” on the B-side.
He could barely stand to play it afterward. Apart from the 1982 world tour, John rarely performed the song live, saying the memories were too painful — though there were exceptions: a Madison Square Garden night in 1982 with Sean Lennon and Yoko Ono in the audience, its television debut on Saturday Night Live on April 17, 1982, with Johnny Cash hosting, and a return in the Million Dollar Piano shows of April 2013.