STARSHIP One – Four Years of Flying Fun

When you go to see an Elton John concert, chances are you usually arrive in your car, a taxi, or public transportation. But have you ever wondered how Elton travels from city to city on his expansive tours?

By John F. Higgins

Elton and the band‘s first excursions through the US in 1970 and 1971 involved little more than rented station wagons or vans and staying in the country’s cookie-cutter motels. And voilà… the song Holiday Inn on 1971’s Madman Across The Water LP!

In the spring of 1972, they moved up to a hired Greyhound bus, ploughing across middle America from (primarily) one college to another.

Then, during the fall US tour that same year, Elton upgraded once more. Commercial airline flights would take him from city to city, with limousines waiting to shuttle him between airports, venues and hotels.

This trajectory continued…

For the 134 US shows played between August 1973 and 1976, Elton leased his own Boeing 720 airliner.

The star’s massive popularity had provided him with the opportunity many aspiring musicians dream of and he was able to use cities across North America as hubs from which he and the band would fly to each gig.

Named the Starship One, the jet had been in use by United Airlines from 1960 to 1973, at which point singer Bobby Sherman purchased it and completely redesigned the interior, to the tune of $200,000, to provide various rock-and-roll acts a “private world of elegance” as they crisscrossed the continent.

This eliminated the need to be checking in and out of different hotels every day. Usually, by the time the house lights came back on after a performance, Elton and his entourage were already following their police escort to a private terminal at the local airport, before winging their way in sheer luxury for an hour or so to the nearest anchor city where they could easily relax.

Led Zeppelin was the first group to avail itself of this suite-in-the-sky, almost immediately establishing a great many legendary tales of the tailplane. Amongst the other acts that used the Starship were Peter Frampton, Alice Cooper, and Deep Purple.

Elton kept the three-man cockpit crew and cabin crew of four busy over four years while he toured his consecutive #1 albums Goodbye Yellow Brick Road, Caribou/Greatest Hits, and Rock Of The Westies.

Elton first rented the Starship for his 1973 tour, which began in Mobile, AL on August 15, two weeks after the end of Led Zeppelin’s tour of the US. During the interim, the plane’s exterior had been repainted and Elton’s name stenciled on the fuselage.

At a cost of $2,500 a day, or $5 a mile (whichever was greater), the four-engine aircraft flew from base cities like Los Angeles, Dallas, New York, and Chicago to nearby locations along the three-month tour… Elton’s largest to date.

The interior, almost a half a football field in length, was outfitted with what the plane’s brochure called “penthouse-like luxury heretofore available only to heads of state.” Instead of row after row of seats, as you would normally find on an airliner, the Starship had a Club Room (thick maroon carpets, swivel chairs, divan and videotape monitor), Grand Salon (15-foot brass bar and embedded electric organ across from a 30-foot couch along the port side) and Gallery (master bedroom, shower and library, which had an electric fireplace and was stocked with all manner of feature film videotapes).

Stewardesses Bianca, Sandy, and Susie, and bartender John Ross made sure everyone – the capacity was 40 but early on the Starship typically had less than ten passengers on board during Elton’s charters – wanted for nothing. The crew would attend the concerts as Elton’s guests when the tour ran multiple nights in the same city and the plane was not needed that evening.

The pilots and crew were so experienced that everyone felt safe during the flights. “They told us that the plane was capable of flying under a bridge,” Anett Murray recalls. “Thankfully we did not get a demonstration.”

The Starship did have a close call one day. With just a few minutes before they were to touch down – the landing gear was down – the pilot all of a sudden pulled the throttle and the plane went up “like a rocket.” After the ordeal, and a safe landing, the passengers were told there had been another plane on the landing runway.

For that fall 1974 tour of America, Elton had the plane painted with stars on the underside and “Elton John Band Tour 1974” along the top. On September 25, prior to flying to Dallas for the first show of the tour, Elton invited his entire entourage of 30-odd people (his band, the Kiki Dee Band, both crews, the Muscle Shoals Horns, and wives/girlfriends) for a massive photo shoot on the tarmac at LAX.

Elton often whiled away the flight hours either watching movies or playing backgammon with members of the entourage. Occasionally he would play the onboard Thomas organ.

Others in the tour party found more creative ways of breaking the monotony. Once, when the plane was taxiing down the runway, Elton’s drummer Nigel Olsson took a fold-out laminated Starship brochure from off of the bar, put it down on the floor, and sat on it. When the jet took off, the g-force flung him down the aisle and into the bar. Undaunted, he sat in one of the cabin’s serving trays and hurtled down the rest of the aisle while the plane was still climbing on full power, leaving all observers (except the flight crew) in stitches.

This run of clear space along the interior of the aircraft also provided Elton the opportunity to get some roller skating in while aloft during the 1976 summer stadium tour.

On September 25, 1973, a surprise guest joined the manifest. Unbeknownst to Elton, who had retreated to the bedroom in the rear of the plane, Stevie Wonder flew from New York up to Boston for the concert that evening. Elton had to be coaxed out to witness the Motown superstar playing a medley of Elton’s hits on the Starship’s organ. Stevie joined Elton on stage at Boston Garden that evening for a rendition of Honky Tonk Women and Superstition, with Stevie on electric piano and performing for the first time since suffering injuries in an automobile accident six weeks prior.

14 months later, John Lennon also joined Elton and the band on the one-hour flight from New York to Boston. The two had been friends for a year, and had recorded songs together in New York and Colorado, but the former Beatle had yet to attend an Elton John concert and wanted to see what he was getting himself into since he would be joining Elton on stage at Madison Square Garden the following evening in fulfillment of a bet he “lost” by having his Whatever Gets You Thru The Night top the Billboard singles chart.

With the end of Elton’s Louder Than Concorde… tour on August 17, 1976, Elton came off the road for the better part of a year and no longer required the Starship. The plane itself was losing its appeal in general, thanks to changing economics and increasing fuel costs, and was eventually dismantled for parts.

But for four years in the mid-1970s, and much like Elton’s career…what a ride!