Courtesy Henry Holt

Courtesy Henry HoltEven after Elton John got sober, he was stil prone to bad behavior, as he demonstrates in another excerpt from his juicy memoir ME, published in the U.K.’s Daily Mail.

Elton recalls that in 1997, he and Tina Turner were planning a joint tour, but things started badly.  Elton claims Tina called him to tell him all the things he needed to change before they could work together.

“She didn’t like my hair, she didn’t like the color of my piano, and she didn’t like my clothes,” Elton writes. “‘You wear too much Versace, and it makes you look fat — you have to wear Armani,’ she announced.”

Elton says after that phone call, he “got off the phone and burst into tears,” telling his partner David, “‘She sounded like my f****** mother.'”

When rehearsals started, Elton recalls, things went from bad to worse. Tina accused each member of his band, one-by-one, of not playing her hit “Proud Mary” properly, until she finally turned to Elton and said, “It’s you! You’re not playing it right!”

Elton writes, “The subsequent debate about whether I knew how to play ‘Proud Mary’ became quite heated, before I brought it to a conclusion by telling Tina Turner to stick her f****** song up her a** and stormed off.”

“There’s an unspoken rule that musicians don’t treat their fellow musicians like s***,” Elton explains.

When he apologized to Tina later that day, she told him the issue was that she didn’t like the fact that he’d been improvising on the song.  He writes, “That made it obvious the tour wasn’t going to work.”

“We made up later,” he concludes. “She came for dinner and left a big lipstick kiss in the visitors’ book.”

ME is out October 15.

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