Elton John: 10 Best Classic Rock Songs
2. Crocodile Rock
The early seventies saw the rock world looking backwards to create its future, grafting an amped up, beefy sound to classic 1950s rock and roll music. Everyone from John Lennon to T-Rex and ELO were evoking the spirit of Phil Spector with a new glam sheen. Few were quite so overt in their nostalgia as Elton John on Crocodile Rock.
Crocodile Rock wears its influences on its sleeve. The “la, lalalalala,” refrain recalls the Fifties girl groups that were a big influence on British Invasion rockers a decade earlier. Bernie Taupin’s lyric paints an American dream of “old gold Chevys” and jukebox hits onto a musical canvas that borders on pastiche.
Thankfully it’s a pastiche so well worked as to equal or even surpass its source material and survive as an unmistakhighlight of the glam rock era.