The genre Billy Joel never wanted to become: “Groups I think are horrible”
Billy Joel didn’t seem like the kind of guy that most people would expect to become a rock star.
He certainly wanted to become a famous musician if he could, but a lot of those dreams seemed to take place in the back of the stage behind the keyboards while someone else was singing. But once he started making a name for himself as a solo act, he needed a bit of an adjustment period before he was ready to fill some of the biggest venues that anyone of his generation had ever played.
But during the first few records, Joel wasn’t sure if he was ever going to be able to make things last for very long as a solo star. He liked the idea of playing music, but it wasn’t until five records in that he started to really understand the size and scope of his music. The Stranger was an absolute monster, and it was time for him to graduate from the piano bars of the world to some of the stadium circuits.
Then again, there aren’t that many people outside of Elton John and Little Richard who sounded great in a stadium. Ray Charles didn’t get to play those massive shows when he was first coming up, and even though Joel had his idols in mind when playing a lot of his tunes, how the hell is someone supposed to have the same kind of appeal as what people like Boston or Van Halen do whenever they play?
That wasn’t the kind of show that he was trying to put on, and even when he was at the top of the charts, Joel figured that it was a lot better for him to start pumping the brakes on that kind of stadium performance. He may have been playing Madison Square Garden, but every single time he performed in a venue of that size, every one of those screaming fans felt like they were entering a smoky club listening to one of the greatest piano players of all time tear through the classics.
After all, Joel’s favourite musicians were people like Bach and Beethoven, and you can hear that influence in the way that he approaches those massive audiences. He doesn’t claim to have the same star power as Mick Jagger or anything, and while there are more people these days who will see him as a legend, he’s much more content to have written the songs than to try to play like Queen every single night.
Because while stadium rock can be fun, Joel felt that it would be a cold day in hell before he started sounding like Def Leppard, saying, “I’ve always liked what I do; I still like what I do, and I hope to God I can keep it in perspective. I am going to be a musician my whole life. I look at Coliseum rock groups that I think are horrible, and they draw millions of people. Now, is that success? As long as I got my self‐respect, that’s all I care about.”
And when you see the people that he hangs out with in the industry, it’s easy to see why he would get along with people like Elton John and Bruce Springsteen. His friends were all willing to put themselves on the line to make the best music they could, and while those stadiums of fans will be in the back of their mind every so often, it’s much better for them to focus on writing that next great song than worrying about how much money they make by the end of the tour.
So while the big hair metal bands that sold out stadiums around the world had their palace, that was never what Joel was interested in. He liked the idea of being an average guy and continuing to deliver his tunes, and as long as he had a piano by his side, he was more than happy to play anything that he could to satisfy his fans.
