The highs are silky sweet, the vocals are full-bodied and breathy, and the tonal balance is perfection from top to bottom.
The first track starts off the album with a bang. Ballad of a Well-Known Gun has huge, weighty drums and bass, arrayed across a stage stretching from wall to wall.
Extraordinary Engineering
There are three amazing sounding Elton John records on our Top 100 list, two of them engineered by the estimable Robin Geoffrey Cable, Trident Studios’ house engineer in 1972. His work on Tumbleweed and the first album marks him as one of the All Time Greats in my book. Madman, the album to follow, seems to be a more difficult recording to master properly. Few copies are any good. That said, the best copies are nearly as good sounding as the two titles mentioned above.
Popular Music Doesn't Get Any Better
If you have any doubts that Elton was a pop music genius, just play this record. It's all the proof you will ever need. Tumbleweed Connection and Honky Chateau are the two titles that are as close to perfect pop recordings as will ever exist in this world. 10 on a scale of 1 to 10.
The Tubey Magic Top Ten
You don't need tube equipment to hear the prodigious amounts of Tubey Magic that exist on this recording. For those of you who've experienced top quality analog pressings of Meddle or Dark Side of the Moon, or practically any jazz album on Contemporary, whether played through tubes or transistors, that's the luscious sound of Tubey Magic, and it is all over Tumbleweed Connection.
Ranked strictly in terms of Tubey Magic I would have to put this album on our list of Most Tubey Magical Rock Recordings of All Time, right up there with Sgt. Pepper (1967), Meddle (1971), Dark Side of the Moon (1973), the first Eagles album (1972), the first Dire Straits album (1977, and clearly the outlier in this group), the first Doors album (1967), Ziggy Stardust (1972), Tumbleweed Connection (1970), and a handful of others.
