The song Billy Joel couldn’t have made without heroin: “It got me so high”
Billy Joel doesn’t normally strike everyone as the kind of party animal that you’d expect out of rock stars.
It’s not like ‘The Piano Man’ didn’t know how to have a good time whenever he was working on some of his best records, but even at the height of his vices, he didn’t seem like the kind of guy that was going to be living out the sex, drugs and rock and roll lifestyle the same way that Mötley Crüe did in their prime. But there was a darker side to Joel, and he did end up falling prey to some of the most dangerous vices that anyone has ever gone through in the music industry.
It was no big secret that Joel liked to have some fun after the show was over, but the fact that he ended up putting a lot of his escapades into his songs should really tell you all you need to know. ‘Big Shot’ was already a song about how he would get screwed up every single night and wake up with a spike through his brain, and even when his wife was telling him to slow things down before he got hurt, ‘You May Be Right’ was practically his kiss-off song to her saying that he didn’t have that much of a problem.
But when you look at the very beginning of Joel’s career, there were moments where he was dangerously close to becoming one of the major junkies of rock and roll. He could enjoy a few drinks every single time he went out, but the idea of him getting hooked on heroin didn’t seem to make sense with the kind of music that he made every single night.
Because when you look at the greatest bands in classic rock history, you can tell the kind of drugs they’re taking based on the music half the time. ZZ Top is a boozy rock and roll outfit, half of the biggest bands in Los Angeles during the hair metal movement were buried under a mountain of cocaine, but Joel’s first foray into using heroin was an experiment that he only needed to try once before he realised that he didn’t need it anymore.
And while he poured out a lot of his feelings about the drug on the song ‘Scandinavian Skies’, Joel said that he knew better than to get involved in that kind of stuff for the rest of his life, saying, “It got me so high, I didn’t know how to deal with it. I can see how people get addicted to this, because you just get way out and go to another place.” But listening to the song it’s associated with, ‘Scandinavian Skies’ doesn’t necessarily sound like the most intoxicating thing in the world.
As opposed to Keith Richards talking about the drug on a song like ‘Coming Down Again’, there’s a certain haze around this tune that feels a lot closer to what Joel’s experience was. The backing track is borderline psychedelic, and since the whole song is meant to be on the slow side compared to everything else on the record, it does give you the same feeling as dragging your feet like Richards’s masterpiece does.
But that also comes from the fact that The Nylon Curtain was meant to be something different. Joel had spent years trying to reinvent his sound at every turn, and this was his excuse to pull out all the stops and make the kind of record that he felt could compete with Sgt Peppers as a musical statement. It didn’t necessarily achieve the same commercial success, but considering what every song was about, Joel was prepared to take the kind of risks that all of his heroes did on record.
He could tell brilliant stories already, but if he was going to tackle more serious subject matter, he was going to need to put his audience in that situation. And while ‘Scandinavian Skies’ doesn’t exactly put the needle into your veins by any stretch, it does evoke the same sense of airiness, euphoria, and abject terror that comes with someone that’s been strung out one too many times.
