The one artist Billy Joel that considered perfect: “Don’t mess around”
No artist can claim to have a perfect discography. For all of the great moments that Led Zeppelin have to their name, there’s something like ‘Hot Dog’ to disrupt everything, and no amount of Beatles fans have ever tried to make a defence that ‘Revolution 9’ deserves to be on the same level as ‘Hey Jude’ or ‘While My Guitar Gently Weeps’. That’s just from the rock era, though, and Billy Joel knew that one of the only perfect artists he ever heard was Beethoven.
When talking about the credentials of rock and roll, classical musicians aren’t really considered that cool. That virtuosity may fly in progressive rock every now and then, but there are just as many moments where it teeters between being interesting and bordering on the kind of music that plays over the loudspeakers of a church.
There tends to be a specific disconnect a lot of the time, but it was second nature to Joel. Throughout his time playing piano, he got into artists like Brahms just as much as The Beatles, usually trying his best to emulate what he heard on the records and putting his own variations on every track.
Hell, some of those pieces even landed on his records. Every movement of a song like ‘Prelude/Angry Young Man’ feels like a specific episode from a classical composition, and even if he couldn’t play the whole thing himself, Fantasies and Delusions may be one of the biggest highlights from his career as a classical composer.
Once he tried to put his first melodies together, Joel learned quickly that no one could mess with Beethoven when performing ‘Moonlight Sonata’, telling Howard Stern, “There’s something so longing about it. I was playing it, and my old man was upstairs taking a nap. I start playing *plays a livelier version*, and he comes down and smacks me off the piano bench. You don’t mess around with Beethoven. He’s perfect, that to try and rock it up would be sacrilege.”
Then again, Joel eventually got the chance to at least pay respect to Beethoven in his own small way. Despite not giving his estate royalties, Joel ended up putting together a different take on one of Beethoven’s pieces for the track ‘This Night’, which involved him taking the melody wholesale, putting his own set of lyrics to it, and swinging the rhythm to make it sound like an old-time rock and roll ballad.
For as embarrassing as classical music seems now, Joel may have been onto something when looking at what his heroes would end up doing later. Just look at how Paul McCartney branched out in his later career, eventually creating different classical pieces like The Liverpool Oratorio and then ultimately reworking a lot of his old material to fit the new format on albums like Working Classical.
A lot of rockers might call Beethoven the equivalent of elevator music, but Joel knew that there was something more to him than that. This music could touch souls, and no matter how many times people try to match it, there’s no point trying to compete with one of the greatest melodicists of all time.
