I’m glad somebody posted the lyrics, because it’ll make this easier to follow. The one error is that “His family business thrives” actually follows “Levon sells cartoon balloons in town.”
“Levon” is one of those Taupin songs, like “Mona Lisas and Mad Hatters”, that sneaks in the back door of your head. Just as you think it’s saying one thing, you discover there’s that makes it’s saying something else.
The first line might ordinarilly evoke the image of a “war hero”, a la Gulf War or World War II, the kind of war wounded guy that most young people today know and adore. But this was in the Vietnam War days, and Vietnam War veterans were a jaded lot, victims of a gargantuan pissing contest among rulers, woefully disresptected in those days, and just slightly above lepers on the social empathy scale.
The second line, calling his child Jesus, was another blow. Gus Dudgeon calls the line “ironic” (and the whole song “cinematic”) because Levon is used as what he describes as “a so-called christian name”. Levon was inspired by Levon Helm, founder, drummer, and lead singer of The Band, a raucous gutter rock band with surprisingly mellow harmonies. Helm would hardly be described (then, at least) as “Christian”.
Just to make sure the listener knows the context, Taupin presents Levon as wealthy, able to afford the finest school. Again, the image might be lost on post 80s people, because wealth in those days (especially in rock music) was a pejorative condition. Notice that Levon is presented with miserly images of counting his money all day in his garage.
A sub-theme of futility with a surreal twist of fate arises when the war begins (Vietman was a long war, spanning decades), and the New York Times announces that God is dead (as it did in an actual headline in the 60s). Levon is born to Alvin Tustig, a poor man without significance, who had great hopes for his son. But the jading of the society, with its now dead God, is an eerie precursor to the jading of Levon himself, whose life will center around petty matters like wealth and poverty, while the greater matters of his own honor and his own son will slowly escape him, like air escaping from a slow leak.
Jesus, his son, just wastes the days away like Levon does, but with a difference. Jesus longs for something, and we get the sense that Levon never did. Jesus wants to get out of there ("…wants to go to Venus Leaving Levon far behind…"), finding his father uninspiring and spiritually dead. But now you wonder, because Levon was intended to carry on the family faith and tradition. When Elton bellows out the line “He shall be Levon,” it sounds like “He shall be-lieve on.”
But he doesn’t. He doesn’t believe on. He was supposed to be a good man, but he wraps up everything he has and everything he is in a tight and private coccoon. How can a man be good when God is dead? Not when He doesn’t exist, but when He did exist — and then DIED!
It’s a song about hope and dread, optimism and futility, faith and cynicism. The real hope in the song is Jesus, provided he can escape. Incidentally, the name Jesus is mentioned on the same album, Madman Across the Water, twice more, in “Rotten Peaches” and “Tiny Dancer”.
No, no ethics threads here, unless someone posts a question about ethics. Thanks for playing Madman in my honor. As soon as I read that, I put it on myself.