The group Billy Joel said was as important as Beethoven: “Probably my favourite band”
When looking at the history of rock and roll, Billy Joel wasn’t the kind of person who seemed to be the rock star type.
He was never going to be the ultimate frontman or go out on mile-long solos like everyone else did, but when you look at his spot in history, he has been the epitome of what the working man’s musician was always supposed to be. He could carry every single show without much of a problem on his charm alone, but there were pieces of his record collection that helped get him to the top of the charts. And big surprise: it wasn’t necessarily rock and roll records.
Because when listening to Joel’s greatest tunes, a lot of his chords aren’t necessarily from the rock and roll oeuvre. He was a student of everyone from The Beatles to Chuck Berry, but when listening to some of his later records, a lot of his more eclectic influences started to seep in a little bit. 52nd Street is very much indebted to the jazz work that he was listening to when he was a kid, and Glass Houses is much more of a rock and roll record, but if there was one genre that stood out to him, it was classical music.
Which is probably one of the least cool genres to expose to a rock and roll fan. If someone has listened to nothing but bands like The Stones for their entire life, it’s hard for them to get that invested in listening to Mozart or listening to anything that Chopin had ever done. But there was a special place in Joel’s heart for Beethoven, and it’s not hard to see why when listening to the way he constructs music.
The classical genius is still celebrated as one of the greatest composers who ever lived, but it was about more than simply making complex classical pieces. Joel could always hear the emotions that his idol was going through every time he heard his music, and when picking out different pieces of his masterpieces, you could really hear the breath in his music as he slowly found the perfect note for any given section.
The same could be said about Beatles records like Sgt Peppers and Abbey Road, but when Joel first heard Led Zeppelin, he was blown away by what he had heard. Mixing up the blues to make everything heavier was nothing new at that point, but the way that Jimmy Page laid into the groove with the rest of the band had the same impact as those classical compositions that Joel was hearing in his youth.
This was rock and roll moving up a gear, and those songs would forever be a part of Joel’s record collection, saying, “I got the first Led Zeppelin album and it just pulverise me. It was like hearing Beethoven’s Ninth Symphony for the first time. John Bonham, great drummer. Jimmy Page, a virtuoso guitar player, almost like a classical orchestra self-contained in his guitar playing. [And with] John Paul Jones and Robert Plant, I mean, what a great band. Probably my favourite band from that whole era from 1969 to the mid 1970s.”
That might be bold words to put on a band like Zeppelin, but looking at PAge’s guitar playing, it’s not like Joel was blowing smoke that much. Not everything that Page played was perfect, and there are parts of the solo in ‘Heartbreaker’ that are a little on the sloppy side, but when listening to a song like ‘Kashmir’, they had practically moulded together the classical side of music with rock and roll seamlessly.
So while Beethoven has earned its place in musical history as one of the foundations of Western music, the same could be said of Zeppelin’s riffs in a few centuries. You could hear the influences from the blues in there, but there was always that fifth element that gave everyone of their songs so much weight.
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