Taupin added he was then left a bloody mess when a dog that was in the pool with them sunk his gnashers into his thigh.
He said: “The studio dog, a very large, yet normally complacent German shepherd, decided to join in the fun.
“Imagining me to be some discarded pool toy, he locked his ample jaws around my flailing leg, clamping down on my thigh with precise intent.
“It didn’t really hurt, but then again, like my friend, I was seriously blitzed and numb by way of intoxication.
“The puncture was deep and obviously in need of medical assistance.”
Taupin was in such a state staff at the studio leaped to save him.
He added in his memoir Scattershot: “Aware of my predicament, the altogether sober staff at the studio were on it in a jiffy.
“I wasn’t even dry before they’d tossed me in the back of a jeep, wearing little more than a pair of shorts and nursing a bottle of Wild Turkey.
“With the latter in my hand, I alternated by taking slugs from the bottle while simultaneously dousing my wound with generous splashes of the rapidly dwindling bourbon.
“Whether or not this dramatic form of vintage sterilisation was something I’d picked up from too many westerns or in reality it really worked was inconsequential since the wound was starting to sting considerably and I was freezing my a** off.”
Taupin said he ended up being carted to the local “sawbone” doctor who he said resembled Frankenstein’s monster actor Boris Karloff.
He was laid in his mess of an office, which he said was filled with “random jam jars” and “teetering piles of journals and files” before he was fixed up and jabbed with a rabies shot.
Taupin said: “If you’ve ever had a rabies shot, you’ll be aware that the needle looks like it’s three feet long and hurts like a son of a b***h.
“The implementation of it into your leg, especially administered by someone you’re not completely sure is actually in the medical profession, is frightening at best.
“So much fluid was injected into the locality of the wound that it caused my quadriceps to spasm and my leg to kick uncontrollably. It was not, I can assure you, a pleasant experience.
“Burglarised, paralysed, and now punctured, I wondered how things could get worse.”
Taupin added that bizarrely, his trip back to the studio after his agonising rabies jab ended with a Biblical plague of frogs – with “chicken”-sized frogs sitting in the potholed-ridden roads who had been attracted out by the rain.
He was then confronted by a swarm of cockroaches in his room.
The songwriter added about how John had spent years abusing him: “These sort of jousting tournaments between the two of us went all the way back to the days when he took great pleasure in placing a hot teaspoon on the back of my hand at any given opportunity.
“This along with farting silently in back seat of a car and awaiting my reaction with a silly grin on his face were early juvenile but harmless party tricks.
“They, however, tended to get a little more aggressive as we aged, and when alcohol and drugs came into play.”
