The Billy Joel song that was almost completely erased: “I impulsively hit all the buttons”
We’re all prone to making mistakes – it’s within our human nature to do so. Even those who are seemingly beyond reproach are capable of making errors, and when they own up to having fudged something, it makes them seem just as human as the rest of us. However, sometimes our silly little mistakes can turn out to be happy accidents, and there are plenty of examples in pop songs where artists have owned their blunders and left them to be seen by the world.
The B-52’s’ ‘Love Shack’ sees Cindy Wilson miss her vocal cue emphatically when shouting, “Tin roof rusted”, yet the group chose to keep it in the song, which still managed to become their biggest hit. Similarly, the sliding bass in the introduction to The Breeders’ hit ‘Cannonball’ was also never meant to be a semitone out from the rest of the song, but as bassist Josephine Wiggs repeatedly made the mistake of playing it incorrectly, the band chose to record the song with the blip left in. Both of these examples demonstrate when a mistake becomes iconic.
Billy Joel would fall victim, or benefactor, to a similar mishap when recording his 1982 song ‘Pressure’. Desperate to get everything right on the track, his endeavour to nail a particularly fiddly section of the song almost resulted in catastrophe and could have ended up ruining the entire recording.
Towards the end of the third track from The Nylon Curtain, there’s a section where Joel experimented with a variety of vocal effects, something that he had been attempting to do throughout the album’s sessions. In an effort to get his voice to sound akin to a synthesised horn sound, he recorded a large range of notes that were clustered together and played back through an emulator.
The resulting sound that came out fit perfectly into the song, but Joel wanted to add one final touch to the segment where he screamed the song’s title “with the same inflection that a Royal Air Force captain might use,” as he attested in producer Phil Ramone’s book, Making Records: The Scenes Behind the Music.
However, in trying to isolate the vocal take on the master tape, Joel’s untameable enthusiasm almost became a hindrance and could have prevented the track from ever seeing the light of day. “While the master tape was running,” Joel recalls. “I impulsively hit all the buttons on the tape machine to punch out everything but the section with the yelling. Phil was dumbstruck. ‘God! What did you do? You erased part of the song!’ Phil was right: for that one segment everything stops dead but my voice, but it was just what the track needed.”
While the backing isn’t meant to drop out at that point, the emphasis placed on Joel’s guttural yell towards the song’s climax really elevates the track in a way that wouldn’t have been possible had the track beneath it still been audible. As far as mistakes go, this one not only failed to cause any damage, but it actually improved what was there in the first place. So much for aiming for perfection.
