1984 was an excellent year for Elton John and as I love it so much, I've decided to upload the first American Breaking Hearts show! Tempe 1984! The show is 90% complete and in fair quality (Tiny Dancer does suffer from the tape speeding up badly!) but we are missing the final encore. I apologize for not uploading for a while (family issues and other business but I will attempt to upload a few shows over the next few days!)

The US Breaking Hearts Tour is an interesting one in Elton's career. At this first show on the tour, he announces before Restless that this will be his last American tour and he has said in interviews that he became bored of the touring game. However, he is still mostly consistent throughout the tour as a whole but not as consistent as he was in Europe. Saying that though, some of his best prime-live performances come from this tour and some of the early US shows have awesome examples of this! Now onto proceedings!

Elton and the band sound fantastic on this show with high energy on all the songs performed in the set! Prime examples include Tiny Dancer where he does nice embellishments, Levon is excellent as he uses album phrasing on one of the choruses (he only does this on the first two shows!), Rocket Man is brilliant but is unusual as it is the shortest prime live version (even shorter than 1985!), Restless where he flubs the words but sounds great, Candle In The Wind where he does 1985 phrasing on the first verse plus he doesn't really oversing the song so this version goes high on my list, Don't Let The Sun Go Down On Me which is very similar to a European version, Bennie And The Jets where Elton still holds out the B4 'magazine' falsettos plus hit's the third chorus on D5's and has an excellent piano solo! Sorry Seems To Be The Hardest is also a great 1984 version with an audience member showing his approval of him playing the song, Philadelphia Freedom which is a fantastic version with no real errors from any band members unlike the next night, the medley is the same as usual, Kiss The Bride where the C5's are clean from Elton, Too Low For Zero where Elton flubs the first line which is highly unusual for this song, One More Arrow where Elton hits a wrong piano chord in the intro plus he has a noticeable rasp on his lower notes in addition to rushing the phrasing on some of the higher notes so I'm not a big fan of this version, I'm Still Standing which is a nice consistent 1984 version apart from the end of the song, Your Song which is a typical 1984 version without the C5 hit at Wembley and Saturday Night's Alright For Fighting which is quite slow compared to other versions but has a fantastic improv section plus Elton aces the vocals! All in all this is a show not to be missed! Enjoy!

- Adam, Elton Bootlegs