The Smiley Smile Message Board

Did cocaine damage Elton's voice?  I'm watching a PBS concert of him, and he's got so much force and strength in his voice, but can't hit that strange falsetto he had to save his life.  He doesn't even try, to the point that he removes the high points from some of the songs.

I know he's been like that for decades to an extent, but what happened?  One of the greatest things about him was how when he went up into false or whatever, he went slightly sharp and it just had this excited, 'smile on your face' sound. 

"holllld ME CLOSA! tiny dancca....."

Completely gone now.

Thom Bell sessions in the late 70s finally taught him to sing in his natural (lower) range.

Vocal nodules hit in 86, and he had to have throat surgery. Killed most of his falsettos.

Voice was stable through the 90s, but then he over toured in the oughts (more than 100 shows a year -- heaviest loads of his career) and blew it out. He still has most of the post 86 range, but the tone is pretty coarse, except when he sings low.

Alright, thank you.  That's kind of how it looked to me, that he still had his 80's 90's voice but it was really coarse.  He really has to put a lot into many of those vocals, like "I'm Still Standing" I thought he was going to have a stroke to sing it like that. 

Real shame his falsetto is gone, I really liked it. 

He always kind of had a 'marbles in your mouth' vocal anyways, so now that it's a little rougher it's kind of hard to make out what he's saying. 

It was still a pretty good show, though. 

If he has some vocal rest, he can still pull off some good things live, and his album vocals are still pretty listenable. But it does show that overuse can do more vocal damage than drugs!

Try telling that to Bob Dylan...

Dylan now sounds like a used ashtray in a dive bar. Shame.

He's got no one to blame but himself. He never took care of his voice - way back in 1983/84, he was chainsmoking and told a reporter "my voice is so bad, nothing can help it" - but he sounded great then compared to now. Not a pretty voice, no, but he still had some range, expression in it.

Elton sounds like Vic Reeves' replicating the pub singer style.

Indeed - in live terms he certainly does appear to have mastered the art of singing by making noises that sound like words... but aren't.

I thought he sounded pretty great at the iTunes Festival last month.

Bob sounded great (and raspy) on Tempest. I wonder if they have to use effects to strengthen the sound of his voice. He sounds much worse live.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KqvomfoYVOo 4:30 of this video is interesting.

That would be the same efect used on pretty much any singer in a studio ever. Takes can be patched together, only one song recorded each day, etc. I doubt Bob, given that he produces his own records these days, would allow autotune or any such nonsense. But his engineers have gone on the record saying he'll cut up and rearrange his vocal takes, so I'm sure some selection of good-sounding bits goes on there.

Yeah that's how everyone records vocals. The reason why I was questioning that was because he is known to record quickly in the studio, often completely live with no overdubs. He also exhibits so little range in concert that it his voice on tracks like Roll On John is striking. I was thinking maybe subtle pitch shifting was used in the mixing process (which he never takes part in) on certain occasions.