How The Beatles inspired Billy Joel’s favourite Billy Joel song: “That’s pretty much what I did”
One evening, Billy Joel was sat at the Fontana di Trevi restaurant in New York City across from Carnegie Hall. The waiter didn’t recognise the budding star, so his casual demeanour remained when he offered up the pithy line, “Bottle of white, bottle of red, perhaps a bottle of rosé instead?”
In the hands of anyone, such a run of words might have provoked a smile. For Joel, something else happened. Instantly, Joel liked the melody of this jokey plonky pushing slogan and made a mental note of it. It was a common practice for the songwriter, and one which had seen him become one of the more affluent members of the current venue he found himself sat in.
However, one line doesn’t make an entire song, and as Joel chewed over that unfortunate truth in the little restaurant, he thought about all the other half-baked lines he had kicking around in his musical pantry. Pushing them with his thoughts across the muddied plate of his mind, it became clear, a few strands a meal did not make. He mused over ostensibly plain pieces of lyricism like “Things are OK with me these days,” which he just couldn’t shift, and with a little sauce, suddenly things started to make sense.
This little collage of lines—mini vignettes from his life began to stack up, a bit like an opera. As fate would have it, he was in opera town in a restaurant set up to service the patrons. As he looked around at the crowd, “Things are OK with me these days,” seemed to fit the patrons of this humble Italian restaurant perfectly. He gazed around at yuppie kids who had sadly had to succumb to seats a few tiers cheaper than the royal box and a restaurant that was equally restrained from opulence.
All of a sudden, ‘Scenes from an Italian Restaurant’ was born. The song would be a tale of folks who reached their main course a bit too early, so to speak, and Joel, as the reliable narrator in the corner, contentedly watching it with an air of humility. So, that was the story all sewn up, but what of the sound? Musically, the track was still a jigsaw in his head. At this stage, he welcomed the great puzzle solvers into the equation, the band that figured out so many things for so many people.
“I had always admired the B-side of Abbey Road,” Joel told USA Today regarding the iconic medley that wraps up The Beatles classic, “which was essentially a bunch of songs strung together by [producer] George Martin.”
The genesis of the idea was taken from snippets of recordings ranging from The White Album to the completed but not yet released Let It Be, brought together in a brainwave by Paul McCartney – but producer George Martin also had a significant role to play, as he liked to make more than clear.
He previously told Rolling Stone: “I wanted to get John and Paul to think more seriously about their music,” as “Paul was all for experimenting like that,” and as such, the motive became clear. The medley was The Beatles’ symphony, their farewell magnum opus, which represented seven years as a band, but left an indelible imprint on the world for the rest of time.
As Joel correctly continued: “What happened was The Beatles didn’t have completely finished songs or wholly fleshed-out ideas, and George said, ‘What have you got?’ John said, ‘Well I got this,’ and Paul said, ‘I got that.’ They all sat around and went, ‘Hmm, we can put this together and that’ll fit in there.’ And that’s pretty much what I did.”
Now the cacophony of clamouring restaurant scenes was formed. The whole concept fit perfectly. Each musical transition was like a trip from table-to-table housed under the same ambient Italian feel. The complex time signature switches were like the contrast between Joel’s leisurely dining, and the ageing opera alumni hurriedly racing towards a show.
This all culminated in the anthem that Joel calls his favourite. Speaking about this The Stranger classic, Joel proclaimed it to be the number one Billy Joel song in his entire discography. It is undoubtedly a track that encapsulates the songsmith as an artist.
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