Attila: The band that made Billy Joel check “into a nut house”
Inspired by the early rhythm and blues artists of the 1950s, Billy Joel was still just like any other run-of-the-mill music fan until he saw The Beatles’ famous debut on US television.
When a 14-year-old Joel sat in front of the TV for the Ed O’Sullivan Show on February 9th, 1964, a future manifested in his mind’s eye. “That one performance changed my life,” Joel once recalled. “Up to that moment, I’d never considered playing rock as a career. And when I saw four guys who didn’t look like they’d come out of the Hollywood star mill, who played their own songs and instruments, and especially because you could see this look in John Lennon’s face.”
Joel was in awe. As far as he was concerned, Lennon “looked like he was always saying: ‘Fuck you!’ – I said: ‘I know these guys, I can relate to these guys, I am these guys. This is what I’m going to do – play in a rock band’.” Amid a tumultuous childhood, their visceral, punkish appeal immediately hit home.
In the late 1960s, Joel dropped out of high school to pursue his passion for rock music. Joel’s first earnest movements came in 1967 when he and his school friend John Small played in a local psych-rock group, the Hassles. In 1969, after a couple of unsuccessful albums, Joel and Small left the Hassles to form a duo with a revised sound, naming themselves Atilla.
At the turn of the decade, heavier rock and metal groups like Led Zeppelin, Black Sabbath and Deep Purple took the baton from The Beatles. Inspired by the ever-mutating beast of rock ‘n’ roll, Joel traded in his classical piano for a Hammond B-3 organ and joined drummer Small for some heavy metal composition.
The duo’s first hurdle was coordinating their equipment to create the distorted metal sound on a tight budget. Without an electric guitar handy, they decided to plug Joel’s organ into a Marshall amp with the distortion and overdrive turned up to eleven.
The pair played a handful of early gigs at clubs around New York City, with Joel’s vocals barely decipherable above the thunderous roar of his organ. “End of the sixties, I was in a two-man group,” Joel recalled in a 1985 interview with Dan Neer. “We were heavy metal; we were going to destroy the world with amplification.”
“We had titles like ‘Godzilla’, ‘March of the Huns’, ‘Brain Invasion’,” he continued. “A lot of people think [I] just came out of the piano bar… I did a lot of heavy metal for a while. We had about a dozen gigs, and nobody could stay in the room when we were playing. It was too loud. We drove people literally out of clubs. [They would say,] ‘It was great, but we can’t stay in the club.'”
Despite the alienation and burst eardrums, Atilla managed to secure a deal with Epic Records and set about recording material for their first and only album, Attila. As one can imagine, given the live reception and one-album run, Attila was a commercial and critical disaster.
Attila finally disbanded after Joel began an affair with Small’s wife, Elizabeth Weber Small, whom he eventually married. But not before he hit his lowest ebb. Reflecting on the sham of his first band years later, Joel told David Sheff, “I had ten huge amplifiers. People would come just to see the setup. We released one album and played five or six gigs. I thought, This is insane; I can’t do this. Finally, when I was 20 or 21, Attila split up.”
While his time in the band might have been brief and unenjoyable, Attila coming to an end was far from a relief. “I had been going out with this girl, and we split up. I felt really sorry for myself. That’s when I checked into a nut house,” he explained. “My life was very scary. I didn’t have a high school diploma. Nothing was working out for me musically. My big, heavy romance had broken up. I had no money, no place to live. I was sleeping in a laundromat.”
He was a million miles from The Beatles who first inspired him and he knew something had to change. So, he sought help. “It was a version of One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest. I went to Meadowbrook Hospital in East Meadow, Long Island,” he recalled. It quickly became clear to him, however, that his bout of depression was far more mild than the ailments the other patients were suffering from.
After three weeks, Joel was released, and he looked to improve his future with renewed vigour. “I decided that at that point, instead of being hung up on making it as a performer, I was going to be a songwriter,” he recalled. “The guy who managed Attila got me a deal somehow to make a record.” The rest, as they say, is ancient history.
Joel embarked on his now legendary solo career in 1971 with his debut LP, Cold Spring Harbor. However, it wasn’t until 1973’s follow-up, Piano Man, that Joel would finally break through to global recognition. He has now sold around 150million records, making him one of the most successful musicians of all time, despite his perilous beginning.
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