The song Billy Joel said recieved “backlash” from the radio
In the age of social media and music streaming, it is easy to forget the level of power that radio stations once held. It didn’t matter if you had written the greatest song in the world; if the radio stations didn’t like it, it wouldn’t get played, and therefore fewer people would buy it.
Typically, the artists and genres shunned by radio stations in America were those which were a little too subversive or abrasive to be marketable. Punk rock, for instance, spent the majority of its early years deliberately ignored by mainstream radio stations on both sides of the Atlantic – band names like the Sex Pistols and Dead Kennedys were never going to be uttered by a perpetually cheery daytime radio host. As such, the soft rock stylings of somebody like Billy Joel, at around that same time in the mid-1970s, came as a godsend to radio stations.
Joel had been around since the mid-1960s, but it wasn’t until the release of his 1973 magnum opus, ‘Piano Man’, that he arrived on the radars of most mainstream audiences. With a runtime approaching six minutes, though, the song was deemed far too long to be played, unedited, on the radio, so Joel’s masterpiece was cut down to a measly three minutes, which never sat right with the songwriter.
With those earworm lyrics and endearing soft rock and folk influences, it is no surprise that the radio edit of the song garnered a lot of airtime on radio stations, helping to introduce widespread audiences to the songwriting mastery of Joel. Still, the idea that his work had to be trimmed down to a certain timestamp remained a thorn in the side of the musician, spurring him on to create the defiant single ‘The Entertainer’, in response.
A rather cynical effort in which Joel attacks the fickle and often exploitative nature of the music industry, ‘The Entertainer’ was quite the departure from his previous work, but its strong attitude and folk-centric sound helped to make the song a hit anyway. The track peaked at 34 in the US singles chart upon its release, failing to recapture the success of Joel’s other work, despite the quality of the songwriting. According to Joel himself, a prevailing reason for this lackluster performance was a lack of radio support.
In fairness, Joel directly attacked mainstream radio stations within the lyrics of the song, owing to their demands to cut the length of ‘Piano Man’, so it is no surprise that those same radio DJs didn’t take too kindly to ‘The Entertainer’. During a Q&A session at Harvard in 1994, Joel recalled, “The disc jockeys on the radio play this and they go ‘what the hell is this guy bitching about?’ He just had a hit with ‘Piano Man’, already he’s bitching about being a rockstar.” He added, “So there was a sort of a backlash.”
Joel, of course, survived the radio backlash against ‘The Entertainer’, and the song is still hailed among the songwriter’s greatest efforts. However, it seems unlikely that the song was ever intended to be a hit in the first place. Rather, it was Joel’s statement against industry interference in art and music; if he writes a six-minute song, why should some radio manager deem that that song should be cut down?
It’s that streak of bloody-minded defiance that’s kept Billy Joel such a fixture in mainstream rock for decades. Through all the hits and all the ups and downs, he’s never really felt the urge to play to other people’s tune, choosing instead to stick to his guns and back his own songwriting.
