The 1979 anthem Billy Joel wrote after an awkward dinner with Mick Jagger: “Uptown riding in your limousine”
Billy Joel can count himself among Carly Simon, David Bowie, and Maroon 5 as having plucked a song from Dartford’s most famous son, Mick Jagger.
It started with dinner. Some time in the 1970s, the New York ‘Piano Man’ shared the evening with The Rolling Stones frontman while he was married to his first and only wife, Bianca Pérez-Mora Macías. It’s hard to pin exact dates, but Joel has claimed Jagger was working out the lyrics to ‘Luxury’ during the meeting, which wound up appearing on 1974’s It’s Only Rock ‘n Roll.
In any case, the two later Studio 54 regulars were chewing the fat in some Manhattan joint. Allegedly, Bianca was dressed to the nines and living an opulent lifestyle that could rankle her rockstar husband. We can only speculate, but it’s thought that during dinner, Jagger had let slip his frustrations with the marriage and his wife’s lavish nightlife.
Joel was taking notes. It turns out that the low-key sniping and petty grievances nagging the couple’s marital bliss was lyrical gold for the songsmith’s perennial search for tune. Putting pen to paper that evening, Joel would sketch out his ‘Big Shot’ thumper.
It was a pivotal moment for both Joel and Jagger. The Stones were creaking into their classic rock parody that saw off their golden era and fueled the punk seethe waiting in the wings to take them down a peg or two. Joel was restless. Eager to shake off the urban balladry he’d found mammoth fame for on The Stranger, Joel decided to jump into some power pop bluster for his next big studio venture.
The second single from 1978’s 52nd Street, ‘Big Shot’ whips up a piano stomping swagger, depicting a fatigued protagonist furiously mocking a woman’s morning hangover after she’d been gallivanting around town chasing drink and drugs.
Lyrically racing around popular night spots like Elaine’s and Halston, Joel takes a potshot at the crowds he was certainly mingling with in his acerbic rant, “Well, you went uptown riding in your limousine / With your fine Park Avenue clothes / You had the Dom Pérignon in your hand / And the spoon up your nose.”
The Jagger connection isn’t obvious, and Joel remained coy about its genesis over the years. At a 1996 Q&A at Florida State University, Joel claimed ‘Big Shot’ was about someone he was close to, as well as himself. Jump to his appearance on The Howard Stern Show in 2010, where he confirmed his dinner date with the couple, sowing ‘Big Shot’s lyrical seeds, going on to then affect Jagger’s South East Estuary dialect when pipit up with some of his old hits’ verses.
It was written with Jagger firmly in mind. With such a clarified understanding, Joel’s performance partway through the ‘Big Shot’ video makes more sense, putting on just a hint of The Stones frontman’s signature prancing strut for its pumped promo, over 30 years before Maroon 5 paid homage to the Stones singer’s moves in their chart-topping pop number.
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