The 1980 song Billy Joel never wanted to play live again: “This song really sucks”
Half of what made Billy Joel one of the biggest artists in the world was his ability to throw down whenever he played live.
Regardless of how soft some of his records seemed whenever someone heard them on the radio, he was willing to do everything he could to make the best music that anyone had ever heard whenever he filled Madison Square Garden. It was never easy for him to go onstage and act like one of the biggest stars in the world, but even if he felt right at home singing ‘Piano Man’ and ‘You May Be Right’, all it took was one bad performance for him to start questioning what he was doing.
But it was only natural for even legends to make mistakes. Every one of Joel’s songs are perfectly composed on every single level, and even if he can improvise more than a few times whenever he plays, it’s not like it takes away from the song. He was still trying to make extensions on his ideas, and sometimes the improvisational stuff that he plays manages to sound better than what he originally laid down.
Then again, Joel is also the first person to say when he thought that some of his records weren’t any good. The biggest songs of his career are hits for a reason, but when looking at some of the ones that charted, Joel has said repeatedly that there was no real reason for him to make a song like ‘We Didn’t Start the Fire’. He was even willing to write off entire albums in his catalogue, but the worst kinds of songs are the ones that disrupt an entire project.
It would be one thing for an album like The Bridge to be a little bit uninspired compared to everything else in his catalogue, but in the post-Stranger era, Joel seemed to be able to do no wrong. 52nd Street was the first time that he got to make a more jazz-focused project, and while everyone might not have taken to that kind of approach, Glass Houses was the moment where he finally felt like he made a pure rock and roll statement.
Some of the tunes may have been a little bit corny, but he was never going to apologise for stretching himself. He needed to keep improving on every album and going into different territory, but even if he had some of the best rockers on this record, he felt that he took things a step too far on ‘Cetait Toi (You Were The One)’. Singing in French might not have been a bad idea, but he didn’t realise how badly he butchered things until he actually had to play the song overseas.
His American audiences might not have known the difference, but after getting the pronunciation wrong during shows in France, he was convinced he never needed to play the tune again, saying, “Do you remember the movie The Producers, how after they do ‘Springtime For Hitler,’ the audience just sits there? Well, that’s what the French did after I performed that song.
“The worst thing you can do to the French is to massacre their language. After the show I asked the promoter ‘What happened?’ And he said, ‘Well, they thought that you were singing in Polish.’ That’s when I said, this song really sucks.”
And while Joel could simply move on, there were more than a few songs that he felt the same way about whenever he performed them. He wasn’t going to go as far as to sing in another language, but the fact that ‘Honesty’ had some of the most self-righteous lyrics that he had ever seen, he knew that it was time to retire songs like that, so he didn’t come off like a jackass talking down to people.
It was always nice to see Joel reaching for other kinds of influences, but being able to sing in French is a skill given to only a select few English songwriters, and Joel certainly wasn’t making his own version of ‘Michelle’. He was out of his depth, and sometimes all you needed was people from the home country to let him know when he was working well outside of his comfort zone.
