The song Billy Joel originally wrote in the persona of Mick Jagger
Honestly, there’s no feeling like revelling in gossip that doesn’t remotely involve you. I can relate to Billy Joel on that front.
You can indulge in the mystery and exaggeration, storytelling and surprise at every turn, knowing all the while that you have the peace and contentment of it not affecting your life. Come to think of it, it’s the exact reason why we all love leaning into the microcosmic world of celebrities and stardom so much.
No one can fault Joel for following the very same path – after all, he was the one for so long who fell into the merciless hands of that vicious rumour mill, regardless of whether those stories ever proved to be true or not. As such, his one turn of putting the shoe on the other foot, it wasn’t necessarily done out of malice, but just a case of seeing what it felt like from the other side to cast aspersions.
Fittingly, the song in question was his 1978 hit ‘Big Shot’, which Joel used to assume the mantle of one Mick Jagger. To an outsider, those might seem like enormous and intimidating shoes to fill, but you’ve got to remember that in the business of rock stars, any persona is open to interpretation, and anyone’s private business is your business too.
Of course, Joel wasn’t so cruel as to strip Jagger down to his bare bones and expose every secret he had ever been told, but by virtue of being friends with the Rolling Stones frontman and his then-wife Bianca, he had a much closer seat to watch the action unfold than most. As such, he said he wrote the song from the imagined perspective of Jagger lecturing Bianca over her partying escapades.
Although the eventual result of the song may have spun off into a land of wild dreams, its inspiration was borne out of a moment of stark reality. Joel had indeed gone to dinner with the couple and thus conceived of the idea for the track – but later, when that rumour mill came back to bite him, and it got misconstrued that he’d been on a date with Bianca, it’s fair to say that he got a taste of his own medicine.
The singer later put all his cards on the table to Howard Stern in 2010, admitting that the song was indeed about Jagger and his wife, but not in the scandalous way that people had made out. Joel was simply fascinated with the dynamics of their relationship, something which Jagger had laid bare previously on his own tracks like ‘Luxury’, so he was only reimagining that version of reality.
While that had become more than obvious quite a while before, namely through Joel’s imitation of Jagger’s voice, inflections, and singing style in the second verse of the song, it didn’t exactly help his cause in batting away the rumours that Bianca filed for divorce from her husband that very same year, stating she had made the decision on the grounds of adultery. An unfortunate coincidence.
Joel, of course, was no stranger to divorce proceedings in his own life, but this was a situation where he truly had to plead for his innocence as the break-up of the Jagger marriage was their own private business, and genuinely had nothing to do with him. Sure, there is a certain irony in knowing that, ultimately, Jagger and Joel were largely singing from the same hymn sheet when it came to women, but his once chance at a ‘Big Shot’ really did backfire.
