player, Elton Dean, and "John" from Baldry. Armed with solid experience ranging from the classics to the blues, plenty of ambition, and a new name, the stage was set for him to move from backup to big time. All he needed was a special spark to light the fire within him. That spark was Bernie Taupin.     Upside-Do wn Creative Process   Elton Johns career as a pianist and as a singer was stalled; he even flunked a voice audition in 1967 at Liberty Records. He did, however, get work as a studio musician at Liberty, where Ray Williams, the head of A&R, handed him a bunch of lyrics written by a "fellow from Lincolnshire" who couldnt compose music, named Bernie Taupin. By the autumn of 1967, John (although he was still called Reggie Dwight then) had put music to several of Taupins lyrics including "Scarecrow" and "A Dandelion Dies in the Wind" and mailed them to him. Both were folk songs reflecting Taupins life growing up on a farm. Eventually Williams brought Taupin to the recording studio where John was doing session work and with the simple words "meet Bernie" ignited one of the longest-lasting and most commercially successful partnerships in the music industry. Perhaps an unconventional pairing, the synergy between John, trained in classical music, and Taupin, a farm boy who nevertheless loved classical poetry by Coleridge and Tennyson, birthed some of the most emotion-evoking songs in music history. Taupin was impressed with how much John knew about music; John recognized that Taupins lyrics, though sometimes cryptic, had an intriguing, mystical, earthy quality that connected at a deeper emotional level than any- thing he had written himself. It wasnt long before Taupin (who soon became the brother John never had) moved into the home where John and his mother still lived. Their brotherhood would provide the foun- dation for a lifelong collaboration and help them survive strains that might sever other, less personal partnerships.     The team tackled the creative process just as they had on their first collaboration, which would become a hallmark difference between their collaborative team and others in the business. Taupin wrote the lyrics first, then handed them off to John, who wrote the music around them, abandoning the traditional process in which lyrics are written after the music. As a result, the music is lyric-driven rather than music-driven, and to this day, that is how the team works. "Im a musical mouthpiece for his lyrics, which I love," John explained on VH1s Behind the Music. Although confetti didnt fly with the release of the teams initial