The one band Billy Joel couldn’t stand listening to: “I like intelligent guitar work”
Billy Joel tended to be a much different beast whenever he started to write his own take on a rock and roll song.
He was far more well-read in music theory than almost anyone next to him, and while it’s easy to keep comparing him to Elton John every time he came out with a new record, there was a lot more sophistication in the way that ‘The Piano Man’ played that didn’t always clash with the more rhythmic side of John’s playing. He was always looking for a more fluid way of crafting songs, and while not every one of his tunes were easy to write, he would rather get to the finish line than settle for jamming.
Whereas most of the greatest bands of all time have some of their best songs come out of jams, there’s hardly anything on Joel’s records that doesn’t sound through-composed. Every one of them had a beginning, middle and end whenever you heard them, and even when he was making more ambitious pieces like ‘Scenes from an Italian Restaurant’, every piece of the puzzle was meant to strike the right balance between pop song smarts and the kind of grooves that he heard out of bands like Led Zeppelin.
His music had a certain punch and power behind it, but when you look through some of his favourite artists, they were doing the same thing. None of his favourite bands were jamming for the hell of it, and while Joel could appreciate a band like The Grateful Dead, there was never any point in him trying to write like them whenever he started mining for different song ideas in the studio.
He needed a little bit more energy, and while The Dead had their own vibe that built up one of the biggest fanbases of all time, Joel was never all that impressed with what they were doing when hanging around the Woodstock crowd, saying, “The Grateful Dead — a lot of people like them, but I never got into them. I went to their shows, I tried, I got stoned, I did everything I was supposed to do. Look, I like guitar playing — Jeff Beck, Jimmy, Page, Hendrix, Clapton. I like intelligent guitar work. I don’t like mindless boogie jams; it nauseates me after a while.”
And when looking at The Dead, they were almost the polar opposite of what Joel wanted half the time in his music. Live Dead is one of the finest live albums ever made in most people’s eyes, but for someone that wanted a lot of his ambitious pieces to go somewhere, hearing all of them jamming on the same riff for ages while Jerry Garcia guided them through every other chord change felt like treading water after a while.
You can say that Hendrix was doing the exact same thing, but the difference between Garcia and Hendrix was the way that they approached their solos. Garcia was creating another world for people to live in every single time he started playing music, but you could hear Hendrix setting up a scene whenever he played, almost forming a song within the song whenever he constructed a piece like ‘The Wind Cries Mary’ or the beautifully harrowing solo in the song ‘Machine Gun’.
That’s the same way that Joel usually sets up a lot of his more showboating moments. The beginning of ‘Angry Young Man’ features one of the most unhinged keyboard lines that almost sounds like a sequencer, but when you look at the lyrics about a kid that was slowly going through life and getting more frustrated by the minute, that line is practically an encapsulation of all the frustrating things going through his head.
So while The Dead were the kind of band that Joel could only stomach for so long, it had more to do with their approach than their abilities as musicians. Each of them were absolute monsters on their instruments, but sometimes you need a little bit more hooks in the song than trying to jam for an hour.
