‘Big Shot’: the song Billy Joel wrote while imagining he was Mick Jagger
Surely everybody wants to be Mick Jagger? He’s the epitome of the rock and roll dream, the ultimate frontman. He’s a myth, a legend, an icon, so much so that not even other musical heroes are immune to his pull.
By now, Jagger is so much more than just a musician or a public figure. He feels more like an absolute phenomenon, influencing everything from fashion to film, as well as obviously reshaping the entirety of rock in his image.
How many artists have been accused of copying him? Then try to conceive how many more bands have taken inspiration and influence from The Rolling Stones, especially given that so many of their timeless anthems feel like rock standards by now, as if they’re tests that all musicians have to pass if they want to graduate up.
Still, a Stones gig is a sell-out. Hordes and hordes of fans battle for tickets to see Jagger live and witness his infamous moves and renowned stage presence. By all accounts, he’s still got it, and he’s had it now for decades – how many other stars can boast that?
Rich, attractive, talented: he’s got it all. So really, it’s no wonder that even other celebrities look towards Jagger and seem to wish they were him, or that they could embody just a bit more of his goddamn swagger.
Now imagine the scene. Billy Joel is in his bedroom, looking at himself in the mirror, listening to The Stones and dancing around in a fantasy in which he is Jagger. It’s a classic teenage girl type of image as a person gets lost in a dream where they are the person they idolise, if only for a moment or for a song. Most would have to put on the music of others to sink into that, but Joel took it a step further and seemingly wrote his own soundtrack.
‘Big Shot’ is exactly that. After having dinner with his wife, Bianca Jagger, one time, Joel said he wrote the track imagining Jagger performing it, telling Howard Stern, “I was thinking of Mick singing that to her.”
It feels like a part two to ‘Uptown Girl’ as he drops in on this glitzy scene, of which the Jaggers, in the late 1970s, were very much at the centre of, as they fell into Andy Warhol’s New York art crowd. Referencing Elaine’s, a happening restaurant the nouveau riche loved, and the designer Halston, he’s hitting all the reference points that were more than accessible to the famed couple, but that left Joel himself feeling inferior.
To sink into the fantasy even more, he did his finest Jagger impression in the music video, copying The Stones’ singer’s mannerisms and moves as his band play around him.
However, there is one fantasy he was keen to clear up – Billy Joel did not try to steal Mick Jagger’s wife away. “I read that the song ‘Big Shot’ is said to be about a date I had with Bianca Jagger,” he said later in a 2006 interview. Making it clear that he was never any threat to the iconic relationship, he stated again for the record, “I never had a date with Bianca Jagger.”
Instead, he simply wanted to play the frontman for a song.
