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(CNN) - If you saw "Rocketman," you'll know that Elton John overcame shyness and a serious drug problem to become one of the world's biggest pop stars.
But you don't even know half.
Sir Elton has a new and honest memoir, "Me" (Me), which is full of enlightening and funny stories about his half century in the entertainment world.
Here are 11 of the most juicy details.
He knocked down the airship of Rod Stewart
The two British rockers, friends since the late 1960s, like to joke with each other. Stewart calls Elton "Sharon," while Elton calls him "Phyllis."
When John started losing his hair in the 70s, Stewart sent him a helmet-shaped hair dryer as a joke.
Elton John and Rod Stewart in London in 1978.
But Elton took revenge. In the early 80s, Stewart was playing at a concert in London that was announced with an airship flying over the place with his face on it. Elton hired someone to take him down.
An hour later the phone rang: it was Stewart and he was crazy.
"Where has my damn balloon gone?" He shouted, according to John's book. “It was you, right? Cow!".
Brian Wilson managed to annoy him by singing 'Your Song' over and over again
On Elton's first tour of the United States in 1970, Wilson invited him and his entourage to his Bel Air mansion, where the lonely Beach Boy greeted them at the door singing John's first hit chorus: “I hope you don't mind, "I hope you don't mind, that I put down in words ..."
Wilson continued singing again and again while showing the house to the group.
"By then," John wrote, "the novelty of listening to the choir of 'Your Song' sung by one of the true geniuses of pop history began to fade a bit."
At one point, Wilson even woke up his bewildered daughters and sang the song to them.
His mother insisted on seeing 'Deep Throat' on his plane
Elton then traveled the United States in the “Starship,” a Boeing air-conditioned passenger plane that was once used by Led Zeppelin. The plane was painted red, white and blue and had a bar counter, sofas and a TV.
"Deep Throat" was released in 1972.
During one of the tours he took his middle-aged mother, who asked to see "Deep Throat", the pornographic film of Linda Lovelace that was a sensation at that time. I wasn't sure what it was, but "everyone is talking about it, isn't it?" She said.
Elton and his bandmates were wringing nervously while their mother shouted in horror while Lovelace did her thing: “Oh my God, what is happening now? Oh! I can not look! How is he doing that?
He and John Lennon hid from Andy Warhol during a cocaine binge
John Lennon and Yoko Ono in 1980.
Elton and the former Beatle were in their suite at a hotel in New York, "making their way through a pile of coca" when they knocked on the door.
Elton peered through the peephole of the door. It was Warhol, the famous pop artist, who carried a Polaroid camera.
"No way. Don't open, ”said Lennon. "Do you want me to come take pictures when you have coca hanging from your nose?"
They ignored the repeated blows and Warhol finally left.
He doesn't like sex so much and he thinks that is why he doesn't have AIDS
As a young rock star, John had many opportunities to have casual relationships. But he says he always liked to see others have sex rather than do it himself.
"I was an observer, a voyeur," he writes.
“Not being so interested in having sex is the reason I never got HIV. If he had been, he would surely be dead. ”
Once he threw oranges at Bob Dylan
Bob Dylan at the Farm Aid concert in 1985.
Elton and his fellow musicians used to organize big parties. After dinner, everyone played a game in which words are represented by gestures.
Apparently, Paul Simon and Art Garfunkel were not very good at it, but not as bad as Bob Dylan, who, according to Elton, could not fully understand "how many words?"
Drunk, Elton started throwing oranges at him, then was embarrassed when his funny representative called him the next day to tell him what he had done.
He finally met his idol, Elvis, months before his death
It was June 1976 and Presley was performing in a stadium in the suburbs of Maryland. Elton took his mother behind the scenes before the show, excited to meet the musical icon that had inspired him.
The meeting was discouraging.
Elvis Presley in the 1970s.
“When I passed (his entourage) to shake his hand, my heart broke. There was something desperate, visibly wrong with him. I was overweight, gray and sweaty.
“He moved like someone coming out of a general anesthetic, rare and slow. Drops of black hair dye fell down his forehead. He was completely gone, he was hardly consistent. ”
When they left, Elton's mother said: "He will be dead next year." I was right.
His hair loss was a problem for years
In the mid-1970s, Elton was balding. A bad dye job in New York made him lose what was left of his hair. A disastrous hair transplant made things worse.
To hide the fall, John wore hats in public almost every day for a decade.
Elton John in concert in Los Angeles on an undetermined date.
In the late 80s he put on extensions, but it looked so horrible that a critic wrote "It looked like he had a dead squirrel on his head."
Finally, he gave up and put on a wig.
"It's the strangest thing," he writes. “People were absolutely obsessed with my hair, or lack thereof, for years. Then I started wearing a wig and practically no one has mentioned it since. ”
He acted in a Donald Duck costume before 500,000 people
In 1980, Elton played a concert in Central Park in New York for half a million people, the largest audience of his career.
For the bis, his team prepared him a Donald duck costume, but they couldn't rehearse with him before.
Upon returning to the stage, Elton soon realized two problems: the huge duck feet of the costume made walking almost impossible and "had a huge padded butt" that made sitting very difficult.
Everything was so ridiculous that when “Your Song” began - squatting on the piano - it caused laughter.
"Once again," he writes, "Bernie's tender ballad of flourishing love (Taupin) was decimated by my choice of dress on stage."
Richard Gere and Sylvester Stallone almost fight over Princess Diana and he witnessed
Princess Diana and Elton John in 1985.
In the early 1990s, Elton organized a party in London for Disney executive Jeffrey Katzenberg. Among the guests were Princess Diana, then separated from Prince Charles, and Gere and Stallone, who were visiting England.
Diana and Gere got along so well that they spent much of the night sitting on the floor by the fireplace, "engrossed in conversation."
This apparently did not seem good to Stallone, and the two actors soon clashed in a hallway. Only a hurried intervention by John Furnish, John's partner, avoided a possible blow fight.
"If Diana left me speechless, that was nothing compared to the impact it could have on straight men," writes John. "They seemed to completely lose their minds in his presence."
He is Eminem's godfather in AA
Elton John and Eminem in 2001.
After years of drug abuse, Elton has been clean for decades. He has also become a mentor to rapper Eminem, who fought an addiction to prescription drugs.
The two have an unusual friendship.
"Every time I call to see how he is, he always greets me in the same way: 'Hello, you (expletive)', what I suppose is very Eminem."
Elton John