“I know that period in his life is supposed to have been really troubled and unpleasant and dark, but I’ve got to be honest, I never saw that in him at all,” agrees Elton John, who meets Lennon for the first time in Los Angeles early that fall of 1973 through their mutual friend Tony King—Apple’s US manager at the time, though he soon leaves to manage Elton’s fledgling Rocket Records.

Elton is spending a month in Los Angeles in advance of MCA’s October 5, 1973, US release of his double (and seventh studio) album, Goodbye Yellow Brick Road. “Elton John and his wordsmith Bernie Taupin,” Creem magazine says in its review, “now have perched a short tier below the BeatleStones on the mass pop scale (not enough heterosexual good looks; too many ballads).”

The two men have more in common than simply being chart-topping British rock stars. “Elton’s notorious for being a very fast writer,” says his guitarist Davey Johnstone, “and also a little impatient in the studio.” Yellow Brick Road was recorded in two weeks; Lennon has clocked some even faster speeds in the studio (his single “Instant Karma!” and the Beatles’ Please Please Me were both done in a single day).

At their first meeting, Elton recalls walking into the Capitol offices to find Lennon waltzing with Tony King, who’s dressed in full drag as Queen Elizabeth, complete with tiara, shooting a TV ad for John’s new album, Mind Games.

“I took to him straightaway,” Elton recalls. Not only because the Beatles were among his idols, but also specifically because Lennon “was a Beatle who thought it was a good idea to promote his new album by dancing around with a man dragged up as the Queen, for fuck’s sake. I thought: we’re going to get along like a house on fire. And I was right.”

Elton teasingly calls the pair of them “Fred Astaire and Ginger Beer” (i.e., queer) and snaps a few Polaroids.

“I’m gonna impound all those pictures till I get me green card,” John jokes.

“Behave yourself, Sharon Cavendish!” Tony King calls out to Elton. “It’s her drag name,” he explains to Lennon, who looks puzzled, then intrigued.

“I want to be Morag,” John declares.

“It doesn’t work like that,” Elton chides. “You can’t choose your drag name—someone has to give it to you. She’s the one who named me Sharon Cavendish,” Elton says, pointing at King, who nods and adjusts his tiara.

“‘Cavendish’ comes from a keyboard player in the fifties called Kay Cavendish, who was always billed as ‘Kitten on the Keys,’” King explains with a laugh.

“I love giving people drag names,” says Elton, declaring to Lennon, “You’re…Carol Dakota!”

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