The 1974 cover song Billy Joel absolutely despised: “cut to pieces”
Billy Joel didn’t ever want to be a snob when it came to his own music.
Every single one of his songs were supposed to be the most complete version of the tune that it could possibly be, but there was no saying that some songs registered with the public more than others whenever he performed. He wasn’t the guy to talk to when talking about which songs were going to stand the test of time, but he had a pretty good idea of what his songs weren’t supposed to sound like whenever someone played them.
That said, it’s not like Joel had to be in love with everything that he played, either. He knew that he had the potential to make something great every time he walked into the studio, but there was also a good chance that some of his songs didn’t hit the mark like they were supposed to, whether that meant the melody being wrong or the song not having anything all that memorable about it behind the scenes.
In fact, there are some cases where other artists have managed to do Joel’s songs better than he could in certain areas. He had already tried his hand at being a songwriter first and a performer second, and even when making some of the biggest hits of his career on Storm Front, ‘Shameless’ already had a whole new lease on life when it was given to Garth Brooks to turn it into a country tune.
And why not? After all, Joel did have a healthy respect for country music, but he also knew that it was a slippery slope for him to go down before he got into music that was too mushy. He could make some beautiful ballads, but he still wanted to remind everyone that he was still a rocker at heart. But that was easier said than done in the early days when the biggest songs of his career were tunes like ‘Piano Man’ and ‘You’re My Home’.
Still, there are worse songs to be known for at that time than what Joel was working with. He had already come off one of the worst slumps in his career right out of the gate with his debut album, but when you listen to him performing ‘You’re My Home’, you can feel that he’s genuinely sincere about everything he’s saying. He knew that nothing could be better than the life he had with his other half, so naturally, the worst thing you could do was turn the song into something schmaltzy.
And yet that’s exactly what happened when Joel heard Helen Reddy cover his tune, saying, “Helen Reddy once cut something of mine, a song called ‘You’re My Home,’ which wasn’t great. I did it at a gig once and introduced it sayin,’ ‘This is a song of mine Helen Reddy cut… to pieces.’ Turns out her husband or her manager was in the audience, and they were talkin’ about suing me. Then Helen got in touch and said she was never recording one of my songs again, and I was like, ‘D’you promise?’”
But a lot of that may have been down to Reddy’s reputation of being more interested in easy listening music. Joel still wanted to have a little bit of credibility as a rock and roll star, so having someone like this take an interest in your songs would have been like if Led Zeppelin got big and all of a sudden there were people like Rosemary Clooney trying to do her own version of ‘Thank You’.
That’s not how Joel saw himself, and even if could still appreciate the other renditions of his tunes, he needed to have some more miles under his belt before he could approve of the smoother versions of his tunes. He was still writing his masterpieces, and he wasn’t about to let someone else get in the way of him making tunes that had a bit more bite to them later on.
