The one band Billy Joel never wanted to play in again: “I got that out of my system”
When Billy Joel first debuted in the 1970s, he wasn’t exactly cut out to be a rock and roll star.
Some of the biggest names in rock and roll had always been used to being the pinup stars, and in a world that was overrun with people trying to be the next Mick Jagger or David Bowie, the thought of a kid from Long Island trying to do that from behind the piano wasn’t going to make a lot of sense. But it’s not like Joel didn’t have a few ideas of how he was going to become one of the biggest stars in the world.
He had already joined The Hassles, trying to be a member of a world-famous band, but there came a time when he was going to need to write his own songs. No matter how much he liked being a member of a band, something about his songs spoke to people unlike anything else, and even when you listen to some of his lesser albums, you hardly find any tune that was lacking in a few areas.
He wrote to make the best possible version of every one of his songs, and you can hear that all the way back on Cold Spring Harbor. Fans at the time might have had to get over the fact that the album was sped up and sounded absolutely nothing like him, but when he tried again on ‘Piano Man’, everyone found the one song that was going to become his identifying anthem for the rest of his career.
And while Joel was overjoyed with ‘Piano Man’ at the time, it’s not like he sees the tune as his favourite song or anything. Sure, it’s become one of the greatest sing-alongs every time he plays a show, but one of the greatest gifts that the song has given him is that it managed to wash the taste of Attila out of everybody’s mouth before they even realised he had made a heavy metal record.
Because when you think about it, Joel should never even be in the same area code as ‘heavy metal’. He does have his moments where he throws a song like ‘Highway to Hell’ into the setlist, but an entire album of him trying to channel Led Zeppelin isn’t exactly what everyone was looking for, and Joel knew it from the moment that he started making it on his own. This was not his wheelhouse, and it would have got ugly if he stayed on that road.
He wasn’t ashamed of the record exactly, but he did realise that he was going to need to change fast if he was going to make everything work, saying, “We were so loud. You could see blood coming out of people’s ears. It was just horrible. Thank God it didn’t happen because I would’ve screamed myself right out of the business. I decided I no longer want[ed] to be a rock and roll star. I got that out of my system. I was about 19 or 20. I want to write songs now.”
But I’m going to attempt one thing that most people in my field are afraid to do: I’m going to try to defend this album now. After all, the keyboard approach to heavy metal was never a bad idea, and even some of the biggest names in the genre, like Sabbath and Deep Purple, had their moments when the keyboard or the organ took centre stage. It’s just that Joel didn’t have the range to pull something like this.
Every now and again, on the record is a song that seems to be halfway towards being a classic, but it ends up getting interrupted by him throwing in whatever other strange sound is in the mix. There was nothing inherently wrong with Joel trying to make this kind of album, but seeing him try out being Robert Plant is like watching Van Morrison trying to become the next David Bowie. It was never going to work, and once ‘The Piano Man’ found his lane, he wasn’t going to give it up for the world.
