The singer Billy Joel said was always great: “I loved almost everything”
Anyone who has been around for as long as Billy Joel has to have some tunes that they prefer more than others.
No one is necessarily going to have that same sense of passion every single time they go behind the keyboard to sing ‘Piano Man’, and Joel has made it abundantly clear when he thought that the lyrics of his tunes weren’t up to snuff or if he wrote a melody that was absolute crap. But there are a few select musicians who seemed to make perfection every time Joel picked up one of their records.
Then again, it’s hard to really compete with the greatest artists of all time in Joel’s book. The biggest bands out when he was making waves may have been acts like Led Zeppelin, but when you compare the biggest rock bands in the world to what he heard out of people like Beethoven and Bach, it’s not like they were giving him the same kind of rush whenever he played ‘Whole Lotta Love’.
Rock and roll didn’t have time to think about being that complex, but it didn’t matter that artists couldn’t find some strange ways to get the melodies in their heads out. The Beatles didn’t know the first thing about music theory when they started, but when they had someone like George Marin helping them along in the studio, it wasn’t all that hard for them to turn a tune like’Because’ into the kind of classical masterpiece that it would end up becoming on Abbey Road.
But even if the Fab Four pulled from the greatest artists of their time, Jimi Hendrix was paving the way for what music could mean in the future. He already looked like a psychedelic alien when he first crashlanded in England, but when he actually started playing guitar, people got a firm look at what music could sound like with the right effects. But even if he was making sounds no one had heard, it was all about the songwriting and the techniques that he was making behind the scenes.
He was a sonic artist whenever he strapped on a guitar, and while there are many times when he could play the hell out of the blues, a lot of his greatest tunes involved him going through the most beautiful chordal passages ever. No one could have dreamed of coming up with what ended up in ‘Little Wing’ or ‘The Wind Cries Mary’, and despite knowing the ins and outs of theory, Joel was still taken aback by what he was hearing.
This kind of music came out of nowhere, and even though Hendrix was only around for a few years, Joel felt that every single thing that he played was absolutely perfect, saying, “I loved almost everything he ever did. It was almost like he squeezed his entire life into three years. He died at 27 and he was just getting started. And to look at the amount of stuff that he was able to make in such a short amount of time. I loved everything.”
And it’s not like the rest of the world wasn’t taking notice, either. The entire rock and roll world was transfixed by his every move, and even when looking at what he was planning on doing, there was no limit to the kind of beautiful music he could have made had he decided to get together with Miles Davis towards the end of his life and start making even more classics into the 1970s.
That wasn’t exactly in the cards after he passed away, but there are still people trying to dissect everything that he ever did. And while most kids might not understand the kind of magic that Hendrix was working with back in the day, just put on ‘Machine Gun’ and remember where you were the first time you heard a guitar weep like that.
