1972 · Behind the Songs
“A gunshot outside a hotel window, and the city answered back in song.”
Bernie Taupin’s New York began with a gunshot. On his first visit to the city, he heard one go off near his hotel window, and the experience — the beauty and the menace of the place side by side — became “Mona Lisas and Mad Hatters.” He took part of his inspiration from Ben E. King’s “Spanish Harlem,” the Leiber and Spector song with its rose in Spanish Harlem, and wrote one of his most direct lyrics.
John set it sparely. Recorded in January 1972 at the Château d’Hérouville in France and mixed at Trident in London, with Gus Dudgeon producing, the track runs five minutes on little more than John’s voice and acoustic piano, Davey Johnstone’s electric, acoustic, and slide guitars and mandolin, and Dee Murray’s bass. It appeared on Honky Château, released May 19, 1972, on Uni in America and DJM in Britain.
It was never a single, but it became a keeper. John has called it one of his all-time favorites — he said so introducing it at his sixtieth-birthday concert at Madison Square Garden — and he has played it more than a hundred times in concert. In Britain it surfaced as the B-side of the “Harmony” single in 1980.
The song kept finding new rooms. John played it at the Concert for New York City at Madison Square Garden on October 20, 2001; it underscored a New York scene in Almost Famous; and sixteen years after the original, he recorded a sequel, “Mona Lisas and Mad Hatters (Part Two),” for 1988’s Reg Strikes Back. Rolling Stone’s Jon Landau praised it on release in 1972, and AllMusic’s Stewart Mason later noted the emotional directness of its lyric.
For a song about a city that can feel mythic and merciless in the same block, that directness is the point. Taupin saw New York once, clearly, and John made sure the music never got in the way.