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It is by now beyond question that Elton John is a competent and classy entertainer. Few people who have achieved his popularity have succeeded in maintaining his standards for performance and professionalism.

Jon Landau

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Jon Landau
Age: 77
Born: 1947
Born: May 14
Composer
Journalist
Music Critic
Record Producer
Talent Manager
the United States of America
Standards
Succeeded
Beyond
Competent
Question
Popularity
People
Maintaining
Elton
Achieved
Classy
Performance
Professionalism
John
Entertainer
Performances
Entertainers

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One gets the impression that Elvis Presley does what his business advisors think will be most profitable. My advice to them: Put Elvis Presley in the studio with a bunch of good, contemporary rockers, lock the studio up, and tell him he can't come out until he's done made an album that rocks from beginning to end.
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The early Bob Dylan was compulsively drawn to the conflict between stability and the search for immortality.
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While the Beatles always had George Martin around to clean up their act, the Rolling Stones had Andrew Loog Oldham to coarsen theirs.
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When the Beatles cut old rock n' roll, they were recording music still in their performing repertoire, and besides, they never thought of the music as old.
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'Call Me' is not an exceptional Al Green album, but it is as solid as a rock at its center.
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Bob Dylan was the source of pop music's unpredictability in the Sixties. Never as big a record-seller as commonly imagined, his importance was first aesthetic and social, and then as an influence.
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Everyone eventually winds up writing about themselves - the problem is finding the best way to go about it. To write about oneself literally, in the first person, presumes a more interesting personal life and philosophy than most rock lyricists possess. John Lennon was good for one great album based on musical direct address, 'Plastic Ono Band.
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On first listening, Joni Mitchell's 'Court And Spark,' the first truly great pop album of 1974, sounds surprisingly light by the third or fourth listening, it reveals its underlying tensions.
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The Rolling Stones are constantly changing, but beneath the changes they remain the most formal of rock bands. Their successive releases have been continuous extensions of their approach, not radical redefinitions, as has so often been the case with the Beatles.
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As a performing group, the Beatles began by playing old rock favorites, for dancing, to tough audiences in Liverpool and Hamburg. When they began writing seriously, they discovered that they couldn't compose in the early American rock tradition.
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The title song of David Bowie's 'Young Americans' is one of his handful of classics, a bizarre mixture of social comment, run-on lyric style, English pop and American soul.
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To her audience, Janis Joplin has remained a symbol, artifact and reminder of late Sixties youth culture. Her popularity never derived from her musical ability, but from her capacity to link her fantasies of freedom and immortality with ours.
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It didn't matter that Charlie Chaplin may not have been a great director or a great anything else. He made great movies.
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'Sing It Again Rod' touches all the solo bases since Stewart's departure from the Jeff Beck Band, wherein he cut his teeth on American audiences for $75 a week plus expenses, and wisely ignores his generally inferior work with the Faces.
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The only criticism heard with any frequency of Elton John's first American album, 'Elton John,' was that the production was too grandiose. The melodies were superb, and lyrics frequently very good, and the performances flawless.
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My ambition was to be a record producer, and I had started doing that in the late '60s with my work with the MC5 and my friend Livingston Taylor.
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I saw rock n' roll future and its name is Bruce Springsteen.
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Elton John himself never seems pretentious but Bernie Taupin's lyrics often do - sometimes pretentious in a clever sort of way, but pretentious nonetheless. There is a conflict between Elton's and Bernie's personal styles, no doubt about it.
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Joni Mitchell seems destined to remain in a state of permanent dissatisfaction - always knowing what she would like to do, always more depressed when it's done.
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Sly Stone doesn't make good albums: only good records. His style is so infinite and revolves around so many crucial aspects that it has only come together perfectly on a handful of his singles.
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