Music History Monday: The Great-Grandmother of All Concert Tours: Elton John’s “Farewell Yellow Brick Road: The Final Tour”

We mark the conclusion on November 20, 2022 – one year ago today – of the North American leg of Elton John’s “Farewell Yellow Brick Road: The Final Tour.”  The concert took place at Dodgers Stadium in Los Angeles; it was the third of three “farewell” concerts held at Dodgers Stadium. The three concerts (on November 17, 19, and 20) saw a total attendance of 142,970 people and grossed $23,462,993.

Since the first rock ‘n’ roll concert , which was held in Cleveland on March 21, 1952 (that would be the “Moondog Coronation Ball”), there have been rock ‘n’ roll concert tours and there have been rock ‘n’ roll farewell concert tours.  But Elton John’s “Farewell Yellow Brick Road: The Final Tour” was in a league of its own and will likely never, ever be matched.  The numbers are mind-boggling and bladder-weakening.  The tour, interrupted, as it was, by the COVID epidemic, ran for nearly five years, from September 8, 2018, to July 8, 2023.  It began in Allentown, Pennsylvania and concluded in Stockholm, Sweden. It consisted of nine separate legs (or “tours within the tour”) and a total of 330 shows.  All together, the tour was attended by 6.1 million fans of Elton Hercules John (born Reginald Kenneth Dwight on March 25, 1947) and generated a box office total of $939.1 million (heck, given all the merchandise that was also sold at the concerts, let’s just round that number up and call it a cool billion).  

Given these numbers, it should come as no surprise that Elton John’s “Farewell Yellow Brick Road: The Final Tour” is the highest grossing, the longest running, and most highly attended concert tour of all time.  

Elton John (born Reginald Dwight, 1947)

We will save a detailed biography of Maestro John for another time, so please – for now – suffice it the following.

Born in the ‘burbs just northwest of London, he began playing the piano as a young child.  Lessons began at seven, and by the time he was eleven his talents as a pianist were such that he won a scholarship to London’s Royal Academy of Music.  Young Reggie attended the Royal Academy part-time for the next five years, later claiming that what he enjoyed best was playing the music of Chopin and Sebastian Bach and singing in the Academy chorus.

At the age of 15, with the support and assistance of his mother and stepfather, Reggie got a job playing the piano – Thursday through Sunday evenings – at a local pub located in the Northwood Hills Hotel. (The hotel is still there, at 76 Joel Street, Northwood, about 10 miles northwest of central London.) It was there that he played standards and songs of his own composition. 

Reg began playing in bands (most notably one he helped found called Bluesology), and even though his eyesight at the time was just fine, he began wearing black, horn-rimmed glasses in solidarity with Buddy Holly.…

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