The musician Billy Joel crowned as “the definitive piano artist”
There’s no real rule in the great Book of Rock to explain how Billy Joel became one of the biggest rock stars in the world.
No one really knows the formula for becoming the greatest frontman that the world has ever seen, but even in the era when Led Zeppelin were dominating the rock and roll sphere, the fact that a kid from Long Island playing the piano could become the biggest stars in the world was solely down to the strength of the songs. Everyone loved him when he played those classics, but he felt that some musicians did a much better job at showboating when they were in front of a crowd.
‘The Piano Man’ certainly had his dopey stage banter to get him through almost every song he sang, but there was already a bit of a stigma around the piano to begin with. Rock and roll was a guitar genre in every sense of the word, and no matter how much Little Richard could pound the hell out of the piano, there were still going to be people teasing kids like Joel in the hallway because of his taking lessons on how to play.
But as he’s clearly shown, lessons are part of the reason why someone can write these incredible tunes. You need to learn the rules before you can break them, and even when Joel was playing in some of his early bands, he was already able to play circles around everyone else. He could still get by making the greatest tunes that he could, but that was nothing compared to how Elton John was getting everyone’s attention when he first landed in America.
Despite being known as one of the greatest glam rock icons of his day, John was still the average songwriter like everyone else, and a lot of his songs were indebted to what he had been listening to. He was a lot more influenced by everyone from The Beatles to James Taylor whenever he performed, but even if Leon Russell was one of his idols, John was going to give the crowd more than just a simple show.
He wanted the chance to wow everyone, and Joel felt that John was doing the right thing by bringing the piano to the forefront, saying, “I wanted to be a rock and roll star when I was a teenager, now I’m 27 and I want to be a good musician. Elton really broke the piano pop barrier and he became the definitive piano rock artist and anybody who became known after him was compared to Elton John. I don’t play the same way that he does. [His] style is very rhythmic. My style is more [about] five fingers.”
If I’m judging both of them together, though, John might actually be the better pianist, considering his body of work. Sure, Joel has made classical pieces that he has given to someone else to play in 2001, but thanks to working on different pieces by the likes of Beethoven, you can hear a lot of those baroque arrangements in a lot of what John does, particularly in a song like ‘Funeral For a Friend’ where he makes the piano actually sound like it’s crying.
But even if Joel got compared to John, though, it’s hard to really mistake a Billy Joel song for anyone else. He was the quintessential artist of New York at the time, and even when he was making some of his pop-flavoured tunes, you could always hear a little bit of a nod to the kinds of tunes that he had begun woodshedding when he first put his hands on the keys when he was a kid.
So while John did end up getting a lot of the praise for being one of the greatest musicians that the genre had ever seen, Joel never needed to feel in competition with him by any stretch. They were both great at what they did, but Joel always had his own flavour of rock and roll that managed to transcend what everyone else was doing. It wasn’t necessarily cool, but it got the job done much better than anyone else behind the keys.
