The one singer Billy Joel said was too good to work with
Throughout his entire career, Billy Joel seemed to be the anti-rock star in many respects.
He had all the star power and the kind of hits that many people would have killed to have written, but at the same time, he was the kind of musician that treated every one of his gigs like a day job rather than being the musical outlaws that Led Zeppelin appeared to be every time they performed. Joel was happy just to have a job doing what he loved, and while he was able to rub elbows with legends, he felt that some of the biggest musicians were out of his league whenever he called them up.
At the same time, it’s not like Joel couldn’t have some fun playing with his friends every now and again. Although he has had his fair share of spats with someone like Elton John, it’s hard to really think of them as two sides of the same coin, both of them bringing a more sophisticated touch to rock and roll every single time they perform. But it’s one thing playing with a contemporary compared to the people that made you want to play music in the first place.
Sure, Joel would have probably needed a time machine if he wanted to perform with Beethoven, but it was already a rush getting the chance to perform with someone like Ray Charles. He was the epitome of what a singing piano player was supposed to be, and yet when listening to both of them go back and forth on a song like ‘My Baby Grand’, it’s easy to see every lesson that Charles had to teach Joel back in the day.
But whereas ‘The Piano Man’ wanted to take a step away from music for a while, it might take the right person to help bring him back from the brink. ‘Turn the Lights Back On’ was a fantastic way to reintroduce yourself to the world, but if you look at a lot of Joel’s peers, everyone from John to Don Henley have told him that he still has a lot more to offer the world than doing his greatest hits tour for the thousandth time.
And it’s not like Joel isn’t open to the idea of jamming with a bunch of people. He had loved what The Traveling Wilburys had done getting every legend together under one roof, and he even had the idea of putting together a version of that kind of group with Henley, Sting, and John Mayer, but there was one caveat: he was never going to ask Paul McCartney to come close to what he was doing.
Macca and Joel have certainly been friendly over the years, but Joel felt that what the former Beatle has done was far too great for him to work with, saying, “Well, everybody’s busy … You always say to the other guys, ‘Yeah, I’ll see you on the road and we’ll get together’ and you never do it. [But McCartney] He was in the super-est group of all-time. I don’t have the nerve to do that. I can’t.”
That might sound a bit insane coming from the person who wrote literal symphonies in the 2000s, but you have to put yourself in Joel’s shoes for a second. The whole point of a band like the Wilburys was about everyone leaving their ego at the door, and while McCartney could certainly collaborate with whoever he wanted to, who the hell was going to be that asshole who claimed that something the former Beatle did was terrible?
Still, all of those potential bandmates are still among the living, and since McCartney could collaborate with a band like Nirvana, there’s nothing stopping Joel from making his dreams come true. After all, the world has been robbed of any new Joel music for too long, and the idea of this being the one thing that brings him back might be the best thing that we could ever ask for.
