Elton John is returning to Dodger Stadium for a victory lap.
Following a lengthy delay due to the COVID-19 pandemic, the 74-year-old pop star announced Wednesday that he’s extended his farewell tour into 2022 with dates in Europe and North America, including a pair of shows at the Los Angeles venue that helped make him a superstar.
John will play Dodger Stadium on November 19 and 20 next year, nearly half a century after he famously donned a bedazzled Dodgers uniform to entertain a combined 110,000 fans in two sold-out concerts in 1975 — concerts so crucial to the singer’s legend that they were splashily dramatised in 2019’s ‘Rocketman’ biopic.
The LA gigs will serve as his “grand finale in the United States,” John said in a statement, after which he plans to take the Farewell Yellow Brick Road Tour to New Zealand and Australia in 2023 before permanently retiring from the road. John, who says he wants to spend more time with his children, launched the tour in 2018 and had already played dozens of cities around the world — including LA, where he stopped for multiple concerts at Staples Center and the Forum — when COVID forced him to pause in March 2020. He’s set to resume the trek September 1 in Berlin.
Named after 1973’s ‘Goodbye Yellow Brick Road’ album, the road show is an elaborate but fast-moving digest of John’s five-decade career that features renditions of indelible hits such as ‘Bennie and the Jets,’ ‘Tiny Dancer,’ ‘Levon,’ ‘Crocodile Rock’ and ‘Don’t Let the Sun Go Down on Me.’
At each of his LA dates in 2019, John took a moment to shout out former Times pop music critic Robert Hilburn, whose effusive review of John’s 1970 residency at the Troubadour — another gig memorably dramatised in ‘Rocketman’ — brought the music industry’s attention to a then-obscure act.
Tickets for John’s 2022 Dodger Stadium concerts — which will follow stadium shows in Chicago, Atlanta, Nashville and Houston, among other cities — are set to go on sale June 30.
