Funeral For A Friend / Love Lies Bleeding

He was 26 years old. Two years of nonstop touring had worn him down to the point where he was convinced he was burning out, finished, done. So he opened Goodbye Yellow Brick Road with eleven minutes of melodrama and called it a funeral.

“Funeral For A Friend” starts with synthesizers that don’t sound like they come from anywhere. The ARP and the Mellotron build slowly, one layer on top of another, until the weight of the thing threatens to collapse it. Then the drums come in and it turns into a prog-rock epic that would make Yes jealous. None of it is restrained. None of it is supposed to be.

The move into “Love Lies Bleeding” happens without a seam. The funeral march becomes a breakup song, or a suicide note, or both at once. I wonder if those changes have left a scar on you, he sings, and the whole eleven minutes resolves into one subject. Loss. The loss of innocence, the loss of love, the loss of whoever you were before the machine got hold of you.

This was 1973. He was selling out arenas, the costumes getting more ridiculous by the month, turning into a caricature of himself in real time and able to watch it happen. “Funeral For A Friend” was him working through it. The plain version is that the person who started the journey was, in some real sense, already dead, and he wrote the music to bury him.

The album went to number one. The tour sold out. The man who was sure he was finished kept going for another fifty years.

But something did die in there. You can hear it in the opening synths, before a single word — the long goodbye that never quite finishes.