The musician Billy Joel said never made any mistakes: “He shows you his humanity”
The music of Billy Joel wasn’t about trying to capture a moment in the studio.
He could be clinically precise when he wanted to be, and given his background of taking lessons, he wasn’t exactly trying to hide the kind of chops he had or his lifelong love of classical music behind the scenes. Many of his hits are practically good enough to be studied by any college music professor, but sometimes the best songs of all time tend to have the right blemishes scattered throughout the recording.
Granted, Joel didn’t always have the highest tolerance for when some of his songs were tampered with. His debut album has some of his brilliant tunes already on display, like ‘She’s Got A Way’, but considering how fast the tape got sped up and the fact that Joel ended up throwing the album out onto the street the first time he heard it, it’s probably not the first record that he’s looking to revisit or anything.
But life’s about making those kinds of mistakes as well. After all, this is the same composer who wrote a song called ‘You’re Only Human’, so it’s not like he was ever trying to become too much of a perfectionist. He could make albums that he thought were bound to be masterpieces, like The Nylon Curtain, but An Innocent Man managed to get the same kind of pop success thanks to every member of his band sounding like they’re having fun on tracks like ‘Uptown Girl’ and ‘The Longest Time’.
If there was one moment where Joel really needed to be on the ball, though, it was playing in front of one of his musical heroes. Anyone else would have given everything they had to play with an artist like Ray Charles, and while ‘My Baby Grand’ was far from the most complicated song that Joel had ever written, he had a few key lessons that he took away from listening to Charles up close.
Despite already setting the template for the rock and roll piano player, what Charles did for the genre was about putting elements of soul into everything he did. He could turn blues into a soulful masterpiece, put heart into nearly any rock and roll tune, and even managed to put swagger into some of the most laid-back country tunes of all time, but part of the reason why it resonated with Grohl was because of how rough some of those recordings were.
Anyone could spend time getting great at their craft, but even if Charles made a mistake, Joel was knocked out by how well he was able to make the keyboard sound absolutely beautiful regardless, saying, “You can’t listen to Ray Charles and not say, ‘This is a man who felt deeply, who has lived this music.’ He shows you his humanity. The spontaneity is evident. Another guy might say, ‘That was a mistake, we can’t leave that in.’ No, Ray left it in. The mistake became the hook.”
Sure, that means that the official transcript of what Charles is playing might have some wrong notes in it, but that’s hardly a knock against him in any respect. He was still one of the finest songwriters of his generation, and even when he was singing everything from ‘Georgia On My Mind’ to ‘What’d I Say’, a lot of those rough sections that most would go over wouldn’t have had the same swagger if they were fixed in postproduction.
If we were to make a one-to-one comparison, though, what Charles did on piano is the same thing that Aretha Franklin did with her voice. Both of them could absolutely destroy any venue they filled, but despite having a few pitch issues, no one in their right mind was going to tell either of them that they needed to go back and try the whole thing again.
