The 1973 song Billy Joel called “one of the coolest”
Billy Joel didn’t always concern himself with sounding cool every single time he made a record.
There are more than a few times in his catalogue where he sounded more than a little bit corny, but that didn’t matter to him as long as the songs sounded good. Everyone has a little bit of corniness inside of them, but that didn’t stop Joel from listening to songs that sounded like the coolest musical pieces ever created.
But while Joel did have influences from some of the most suave rock and roll stars to ever walk the planet, he was never going to make it to their level by any stretch. He knew that he wasn’t going to sing like Ray Charles or be able to blow out everyone’s speakers the same way that Led Zeppelin did, but his attempts at getting anywhere close to that were what made him sound the way he did every single time he made a record.
Then again, throwing in the influence from classical music was always going to be a stumbling block for the casual rock and roll fan. Most people simply didn’t want to hear about the ‘Piano Man’ tearing through some of the biggest names from centuries before, but that didn’t stop Joel from pulling from people like Beethoven every now and again whenever he made a record. There was a lot to pull from, but he knew that The Beatles had just as much of an effect on him as classical composers.
The Fab Four were among the finest bands in the world, and there wasn’t a soul on the planet that wasn’t affected by their music in some way. But even in a band that seemed to write the soundtrack of the back half of the 20th century, it wasn’t like they didn’t have their corny members, either. After all, Paul McCartney made his living off sounding corny, but there were moments where he could rock out as well.
The history books like to paint McCartney as the balladeer while John Lennon was the musical maverick trying out new things from time to time, but Macca could do the same thing. He was the one who was trying to make new sounds on ‘Helter Skelter’, and even when working on some of his more high-profile solo songs, Joel was knocked out when he first heard what McCartney could do with a Bond theme on ‘Live and Let Die’.
This was in the middle of McCartney putting together Wings and trying to figure out what he wanted to do with the rest of his life, but Joel felt that there were so many pieces of that theme that sounded cooler than anything else featured in a James Bond movie, saying, “When I first heard [it], I thought it was one of the coolest James Bond songs I had ever heard. I remember these old Bond songs like ‘Goldfinger’. It was all kinds of Hollywood music. But ‘Live and Let Die’, Paul stepped up to the plate and knocked it out of the park. I love the song. We used to do it at soundcheck. It’s just fun to play.”
Granted, Joel admitted that there was no way that he was going to be able to emulate McCartney when he did his version of the tune. Some of the high notes in the original version are some of the greatest moments of McCartney’s career, and while Joel goes lower on his version, he does get the same amount of grit that you’re looking for in a song like that.
Did the song end up earning him any cool points with the rock and roll crowd? That, of course, is up to you, but there are hardly any other musicians on the planet who could get down to the nitty-gritty of what made a song like this so classic. Joel knew that there was no other way to top it because he was the one who could take a look under the hood and see the true mechanics behind everything he was playing.
