"Piano Man" by Billy Joel: Everything You Didn't Know

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Speaker 1: Like a beer, and we're bringing you a story that is both sad and sweet, and you better believe we know it complete.

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Speaker 1: And today we're sharing a drink we call trivia, but it's better than going down a Wikipedia rabbit hole alone.

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Speaker 2: I'm officially out of song references for this introduction.

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Speaker 1: Today we're discussing the signature hit for one of my all time favorite musicians. We're talking about Piano Man by mister William Martin.

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Speaker 2: Joe.

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Speaker 1: Now, I have lots of thoughts about Billy Joel, and I will share at least seventy percent of them with you over the course of this episode. I am endlessly fascinated by him. First of all, I love the music. I think he has a tremendous average of truly great songs. I saw an amazing tweet a few weeks back that I hold near and dear to my heart Billy Joel's evidence that many Americans think they love rock and roll, but actually love show tunes.

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Speaker 2: I myself happen to love both.

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Speaker 1: More so, I'm fascinated by him because he's one of the only musicians of his stature who just stopped. He notched an astonishing thirty three top forty hits. That's an awful lot. That's twice as many as Bruce Springsteen, The Eagles, or Fleetwood Mac.

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Speaker 2: He sold over one hundred and.

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Speaker 1: Fifty million records, making him the fourth best selling solo artist of all time, behind Garth Brooks, Elvis Presley, and Michael Jackson. But he famously hasn't released an album of new material, new.

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Speaker 2: Pop material, I should say, since the eighteen ninety.

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Speaker 1: Three smashed River of Dreams. For thirty years, he's basically abandoned pop songwriting. So not only didn't he dilute his discography with half baked late era releases like insert your favorite boomer rock icon here, but he developed a semi mythical reputation as this lost genius, and I will always be intrigued by recluses, which I mean, he's not a recluse. No one who sells that mass to Square Garden monthly for ten years can take that title. But the abrupt end of his one man hit parade adds this weird sense of mystery and intrigue to a character who previously wasn't very mysterious. I love when there's a hidden dark side to something that's really sunny and frivolous.

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Speaker 2: You sure do. And the best part to me is that he claims he's never stopped writing, So I just picture him as hold up in his long Island Xanadu.

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Speaker 1: Writing irritatingly catchy symphonies for no one. He's become the JD. Salinger of pop music until how that is. Earlier this year, exactly half a century after Piano Man first entered the charts, he released a new song called Turn the Lights Back On, which is the closest thing there were an artistic comeback we've seen in his three decades of self imposed creative exile. Many fans hope this is a prelude to a new album and I'm definitely one of them. I'm absolutely thrilled by this development. To me, it's up there with Brian Wilson finishing his Lost Smile project after thirty seven years. It's something I just never thought would happen. Hi, go, I have to ask, do you care?

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Speaker 2: I don't care, but but you know, I am fascinated by Billy Joel for the same reasons that you are. Like, I think I can trace it all back to well, other than hearing all of these songs ring up and thinking that like Yanoman was one of the most profound things that I'd ever heard. I mean, I was like fourteen or thirteen, maybe it must have been younger actually, But the thing is, he's always been so ubiquitous that I've never really care to dive in further. Like, I don't have any knowledge of his deep cuts or his non hits except for Mimi twenty seventeen because that's not slap. Yes it does. But I'm more fascinated by Billy Joel the celebrity and musician and training wreck than I am Billy Joel the works, and I think I can trace it all back to one exact place, which is Chuck Closterman writing about it. Yeah, that was the first time where someone had really laid out the like the myth of tension between yeah, or just the tension between being like one of the all time saddest, most divorce men in the world and just like you know, the piano man, like he's that's it. It's a wonderful contradiction, contradictory existence is is old Billy and that's what's fascinating to me. And also Attila. Oh, yes, we will, we will talk about Attila.

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Speaker 1: I'm really glad you mentioned the Chuck Clusterman piece because to me, that was like, we'll talk about it later, but.

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Speaker 2: A sea change in his reputation.

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Speaker 1: I feel like that was the first time and he would looked at the dark underbelly of Billy Joel. It's like I was talking about earlier, that was the first time that, like you said, people realize that there was this this deep undercurrent of sad, and we like deep undercurrents of sad on this show.

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Speaker 2: We sure do.

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Speaker 1: How do you write him as a as a musician and a songwriter, because that is one thing that I belatedly.

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Speaker 2: Realized about Billy Joel, which was that a lot of people hate Billy Joel. I don't hate him. I mean his entire songwriting is Beethoven meets the Beatles, which is not as lame as it sounds. I think because he has that sort of pugnacious quality to him, just like literally pugnacious as a pugilist, that he can sell something like that, whereas like I don't really go for it with other people. But yeah, man, he writes, he writes bangers. It's Billy Joel. He's outsold the Eagles and Fleetwood back, Like, what do you? What is my opinion matter?

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Speaker 1: I mean, to me, Billy will always be linked to that other piano man, his British counterpart, Elton John, and I used to co host another podcast where we compare and contrasted.

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Speaker 2: The merits of these guys on one episode. And though I love Elton John deeply and I play some on my own.

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Speaker 1: Personal mount Rushmore of musicians, I gotta give Billy the edge, if for.

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Speaker 2: No other reason that he does the music and lyrics right. Yeah. I've never really found Elton's pawning off of lyrics to someone else to really even be that Like, the lyrics to me not particularly impressive it's like, sorry, Bernie, it is Bernie, right, Bernie Toppen, Yeah, yeah, yeah, I mean Bernie would like facts lyrics over to Elton and then he would just stick him up on his piano bench. Oh I've heard.

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Speaker 1: Yeah.

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Speaker 2: I mean it's something workman like about that that boves me out. Well yeah yeah, I still don't care. And if that's the case, they should be better lyrics, not ones that make me think, Okay, that's fine, Like really, you needed to farm that part out and that's what you got. I just say, he's not like. I mean, I've been on my own Billy Jolian depression has led me down a David Berman rabbit hole recently. Oh wow. Yeah. And I've been listening to the Silver Jews record American Water and David Burman's last record is Purple Mountains, and I'm like, those are clever lyrics like Warren Zyvonne has clever lyrics to be to be a cliche, Ell, let's cost el as clever lyrics like Bernie is just I don't know, man, I maybe I'd not British enough. And I guess I also have to give Billy Joel the credit because he's American and I like the British, Yeah, I mean with Billy.

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Speaker 1: For me, you get the sense of him as this tortured loaner pouring his heart out at the piano. And that's obviously become such a cliche view of you know, the artist, capital T, capital A, but it's it's a powerful archetype. And to me with Billy Joel, well, there's a vulnerability there which I find a little easier connect to. And there's this touch of the romantic in him, since he's just hopelessly ruled by his emotions. I mean yeah, as he sings in one of his truly great songs, Summer Highland Falls, it's either sadness or euphoria with Billy Joel. And I'm probably overstating it, but I put him in the continuum of American songwriters alongside Irving Berlin and the Gershwins.

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Speaker 2: Yeah, I'd put him there. Oh, thank you, Wow. I was expecting to fight. No. I you know, he's especially since like as he puts it, part of his like or as you put it, part of his like Hamburg period. To bring everything back to the Dan Beatles was essentially faking his way through jazz standards. Now at that time, most of the modern jazz canon was still tin panlle stuff. So he's a great piano player too, man, I don't I know much less about that than you do. But he's funny. He's always like, yeah, no, Elton can play the pants off me. I got a weak left hands, which actually, I mean, obviously he's an incredible pianist and he's Bally Joel and he's classically trained. But if you listen to him both back to back, I hear what he means. Oh yeah, I've always preferred Elton's piano playing. I don't know. This is interesting, don't they haven't They like spent sniping each other and like finally buried the hatchet.

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Speaker 1: I don't know if they bury the hatchet. Maybe they just shut up about it in the press or agreed to stop going to the press. I mean it was Elton worried about Billy's drinking really and felt that he was going to if ever call.

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Speaker 2: The phrase was rehab light.

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Speaker 1: Nelton was like, yeah, when I went to rehab, they didn't have TVs and I.

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Speaker 2: Was like scrubbing the floor with toothbrushes. Okay, that's some boomers, Like, I don't know, man, I don't buy that. General. I'm going to I'm going to drive down our iTunes rating another half star for coming to the Boomers and saying I don't like the British. But yeah, I mean, I don't know, man, I don't buy Elton's that he was concerned. I think Elton didn't want any competition. Oh maybe no.

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Speaker 1: But I mean, you know, Billy, he took feelings that frequently left him confused and overwhelmed and made something beautiful out of them.

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Speaker 2: And I think we should all be so lucky. Amen.

00:10:15
Speaker 1: Yeah, right, And for many their first impression of Billy Joel was piano man. The topic of today's episode. It's a lightly fictionalized retelling of Billy's own experience as a lounge singer at a Hollywood bar, and as we'll discuss, Billy's career basically seemed over before it even got started, and he felt just as trapped and dejected as the barflies that surrounded him. The result was a compassionate look at those lost souls and a song that steeped in regret, unfulfillment, and isolation. And yet it's been embraced in the last fifty years as a source of solace to those who hear it or join in at countless pub sing alongs. It's an unspoken invitation to share your sorrows and commiserate together at the end of the day.

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Speaker 2: It's not a song about depressed losers, but a reminder that at one time or another, we're all depressed losers.

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Speaker 1: Piano Man is a song about connection and how that's ultimately what gets you through.

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Speaker 2: Well from his early heavy metal band.

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Speaker 1: Seriously, we'll get to that. It's my favorite part of probably any episode we've done. To the recording staff who that inadvertently led to the creation of this deathless Classic's hidden heartbreak behind his greatest love songs, and all the reasons why his signature tune was an unlikely hit. Here's everything you didn't know about Billy, Joel and Piano Man. Well, now for one of the greatest bait and switches in TMI history. Before we talk about this beloved pub sing along, we're gonna have to talk about.

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Speaker 2: Nazis Indiana Jones's voice. Can you do it? You gotta do it? Nazis, I hate these guys. That's such a great life. Nazis, I hate these guys. Did did George Lucis. It applies that somebody likes these guys well, yes, a, but it also implies that like a certain familiarity with the Nazis, like among all of the other guys that Indiana Jones has hung out with, the Nazis, do then fall into the bad pilet.

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Speaker 1: Yeah, Billy Joel's father was born to a relatively wealthy Jewish family in Nuremberg, and they ran a mail ordered textile firm that's been loosely described as the German.

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Speaker 2: Equivalent of Sears Roebuck. It's called the Carl Joel Linen Goods Company, but no one needs to know that. But I'm telling you anyway that just that just sounds like an indie band nowadays. That's your new EP. Yeah.

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Speaker 1: As the Nazis took hold, they persuaded, or forced, more appropriately, the Joel family to sell the company to a non jew for pennies on the dollar or mark I guess, roughly one fifth of the company's actual value, and making matters worse. When they actually went to collect their money, they were cryptically advised to focus on their family's safety, So after the family business was essentially stolen from them, the Joel family pretty much saw the writing on the wall. This was nineteen thirty eight, one year before Hitler invaded poland then kicked off WW two, the Big One. This was also around the time that Hitler's propaganda leader Joseph Gerbels was quoted as saying the jew is a waste product. It's a clinical issue more than a social one. So Billy's father and his family did the smart thing and fled the country. Fortunately, many of Billy's relatives were not so lucky and were killed in concentration camps. Due to the deeply shameful quota system implemented by the US, the Jewels were not permitted in the United States at first.

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Speaker 2: Instead, they settled in Cuba for several years.

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Speaker 1: During which point Billy's father, Helmut, attended the University of Havana with Fidel Castro. I love that, right, go as we think they hung out they played baseball together?

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Speaker 2: Yeah, I mean maybe what was he studying at the University of Havana poly Sai communications, interpretive dance, theater, miner English English Lit.

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Speaker 1: But eventually the Joel family finally emigrated to the United States, and this entire saga is the subject of an excellent documentary, The Joel Files, which features Billy and many of his relatives learning about their past. So that's that's all heavy, that's all very heavy style. Yeah yeah, and it only it only gets heavier. Billy's parents met at a City College of New York production of a Gilbert and Sullivan musical. I've seen both Pirates of Penzance and The Micado Sided, but neither. It's a fitting starting point for the all two brief bonds that would birth one child, Billy Joel. Billy Joel was born on May ninth, nineteen forty nine, in the Bronx before his family decamped to the prefab Levittown tracked houses of Hicksville, Long Island, which is on the short list of the most stereotypical post war American existences.

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Speaker 2: That edyone could possibly imagine. Also from Hicksville, Eddie Money and also Sterling Morrison with the Velvet Underground. They were both born in Hicksville, as was You Had Somebody Too? Yes, Steely Dan guitarist Denny Diaz on some of their first records. He plays the ripping guitar solo on Bodhisatfa. Oh that's him. Yeah, how did you Did you just have that at already or did you go to the Higgsville Wikipedia page. No, I googled famous people from Hicksville, which that list runs dry?

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Speaker 1: Yeah? Yeah, it does, Yeah, pretty quick. Good Pool, Goodpool. I told you that there was no stone Unturns, but you found one.

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Speaker 2: Thank you.

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Speaker 1: The Joels adopted Billy's older cousin, Judy, whose mother Billy's maternal aunt, has stuck her head in a gas oven upon learning she had cancer for fear of being a drain on the family. Depression and ruthless practicality was something of a theme in Billy's early life, and, in case it's not abundantly obvious, all was not well in the Joel household. Billy's father, Helmet, traveled a great deal for his day job at General Electric and was rarely around. He was never happy in the United States, where he considered people to be uneducated and materialistic. Settling in Levittown probably did little to dispel these notions, considering this was literally the inspiration for the song little Boxes, Little Boxes on the Hillside made a ticky tacky, ticky tacking. Billy remembers his dad as a dark presence around the house, a formative memory occurred when his father told him life is a cesspool at age six. As Billy would recall, I didn't fully understand what he meant at the time. Years later, it occurred to me that that was a pretty rough thing to say to a kid.

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Speaker 2: Yeah, I had an uncle one who told me, and this was I think from one of his favorite Italian movies, that he said life is like the latter to a chicken coop shortened. That's great, that's good. I like that. Yeah. Yeah, So Billy Joel's dad man.

00:17:28
Speaker 1: Despite all the effort that it had taken to get to the United States, he decided he didn't want to be there anymore, so he divorced Billy's mom and left his young son and moved back to Europe in the late fifties. He settled in Vienna, where he started a new family, a better family, a faster family, a stronger family. Billy, who was around eight years old at the time, would recall his mother, Rosalind, staring out the front window of the house at the end of the day when all the husbands in the neighborhood were coming back from work, and when Billy would ask her what she was doing she'd reply, just looking.

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Speaker 2: Maybe your father's coming home. He was eight. Good God, I just it sounds like his whole life was like a John Cheever short story, like alcoholism and suburban on Wei. Yeah, I can't believe he moved back to Long Island. Like with all the scratch that he had, he couldn't think of anything better than the hell he knew. Come on, dude, don't move back to the place that ruined your young life. He's doing it. It's Gatsby man. He's gonna do it over. He's gonna do it over and get it right.

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Speaker 1: As you would probably think, this all deeply affected young Billy, he would say. Without my own father around, I was constantly searching for my own identity.

00:18:50
Speaker 2: In some ways, this can free you up.

00:18:52
Speaker 1: You can be anything you want, But in other ways, you may not feel like you ever have a center. And much like John Lennon, Billy wouldn't see his dad again until he was on the cusp of fame in his mid twenties. It was the early seventies when the promo department at his record label thought it would be a good idea to put them in touch. Thankfully, this reunion went better than John Lennon's did with his dad, and Billy and his father remained in contact for the rest of his life. In fact, going to visit him in Vienna led him to write the song of the same name, which is one of my favorite Billy Joel songs. Billy would later admit that had his father been present in his childhood, it's unlikely that he would have pursued.

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Speaker 2: A career in music.

00:19:30
Speaker 1: It simply seemed far too impractical for his father to allow. This is ironic considering Billy's father, Helmet, was a classically trained pianist and Billy inherited his love of music. Actually runs very deep in the Joel family. Billy's younger half brother, Alex, would become a musical director for a major theater in Vienna for over a decade. Back when Billy's mother and father were still married, they obtained the piano for their house in a unique way, Let's sing. At first, they believed they were going to have another baby after Billy, and this was not welcome news because they didn't have a lot of money, and when they learned that she was not pregnant after all, they decided to splurge on a cheap upright so that Helmet could play around the house, which was a sound that Rosalind loved.

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Speaker 2: This piano is your brother, Oh God.

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Speaker 1: After Helmet left the family, young Billy tortured his mother by playing what he would refer to as the storm song. This consisted of tinkling the keys of the top part of the piano at random to sound like rain, and then bang the low notes at the other end to simulate thunder. After God knows how many weeks of this, Billy's mom forced him to take piano lessons.

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Speaker 2: This didn't make him especially popular in the neighborhood, since playing piano wasn't viewed as especially masculine, especially considering the piano teacher also taught ballet. Naturally, Billy den't with shouts of Billy, where's your tutu from the local wise asses, as well as anti Semitic stuff like yo, Joel, you killed Jesus, I'm going to beat your ass, and inquiries about the horns that Shirley must be growing on his head in Long Island.

00:21:10
Speaker 1: And he believed it too, He said, he used to like feel his head and he was certain and he could feel like horn nubs when he was a little boy, this poor boy Jesus Christ to warn off these bullies. Billy took up boxing, eventually competing in the amateur Golden Gloves circuit. They ultimately won twenty two of his matches. It's a pretty good average. His early boxing career ended when his opponent broke his nose. You can still kind of see it in his face. Thankfully, though, the skill allowed the pugnacious Billy to defend himself against physical bullies, though it would prove no match against the emotional and litigious bullies of the music industry, as we will see. As Billy continued his piano lessons, he grew fond of the music of Beethoven. His mother, who worked hard to pay for his lessons, with one to hear pieces he learned, but unfortunately Billy would seldom practice, so instead he made up pieces that sounded like Beethoven and also Mozart, and these were basically his compositional beginnings. He would later write the fifty second Street song Rosalinda's Eyes in his mother's honor, supposedly as the song his father.

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Speaker 2: Should have written for his mother. The very thought of that makes me want to cry. I just love how much he invites this kind of pain into his life like it's admirable because it's like I guess, rather than repressing it, which would have been the begner thing to do, he's like determined to excize it and write it literally right the wrong by writing a song.

00:22:42
Speaker 1: But if he was like me and just was like whiny about it and such like an open festering wound of a person, that would be intolerable.

00:22:51
Speaker 2: But because he's like.

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Speaker 1: A long island, like you know, he would describe himself as looking like the kind of guy who makes pizza, Like yeah, he's just like like he doesn't give off an immediately apparent sense of like sorrow or any kind of real emotional intelligence whatsoever. And that there's something about sad men and I mean men, you know what I mean, like like the toxic masculine male who is trying to grapple with his feelings and doesn't quite have the emotional intelligence too, or I should have say, the emotional vocabulary too. That's that's really touching to me. Maybe it's from just like watching like, yeah, guys of that age, like try that's true.

00:23:38
Speaker 2: He truly has all of the elements necessary to become like the worst guy from your hometown, like boxed a little, went through a series of divorces, likes to drink and drive like the only thing separating him from the worst guy you know from your hometown is his enormous talent. No, I mean, that's a great point. In subsequent interviews, Billy would say that he was very shy until his teens. That's when I realized I could make my piano talk for me, he would write in a letter to a friend. The piano spoke what I was feeling. His musical ambitions expanded after the Beatles broke through in early nineteen sixty four, and like so many others of his milieu, his life was changed after seeing them on the Ed Sullivan Show. He would later say that one performance changed my life. Up to that moment, I never considered playing rock as a career. And when I saw four guys who didn't look like they'd come out of the Hollywood star mill, who played their own songs and instruments, and especially because you could see this look in John Lennon's face, and he looked like he was always saying you, I said, I know these guys. I could relate to these guys. I am these guys. This is what I'm going to do playing a rock band. He joined a band called The Echoes while attending Hicksville High which may or may not be known better as being the alma mater of twenty twenty's powerpop group The Lemon Twigs.

00:24:55
Speaker 1: You know them, No, oh they're good. You wouldn't like them, but I do. Shout out to my buddy Andrew Bank. Good turn me on to them. Yeah.

00:25:05
Speaker 2: Joel always remembered the time when the band played at the local church fair when his crush, an older girl named Virginia Callahan, watched mouth agape from the front role. She would later be immortalized as the Virginia in Only the Good Die Young. It's worth noting how much of the fact that music could be used to attract women was a big part of its attraction to Billy. There's supposedly a moment in the eighties at which he found himself at a bar in Saint Barts playing piano and being surrounded by supermodels Elle Macpherson and Christy Brinkley, both of whom he would date and immortalize in the song Uptown Girl and a Young Whitney Houston, a point at which he recalled saying a silent prayer to his childhood piano tutor. His twin idols all through his adolescent were Beethoven and the Beatles. As a teen, he worked late nights as an organist in bands and bars. These late nights cause him to a crucial English class, which prevented him from getting a high school diploma upon his graduation in nineteen sixty seven. Instead of attending summer school to make up for the credits, he basically said screw it, and his oft told reasoning was the hell with it. If I'm not going to Columbia University, I'm going to Columbia Records, and you don't need a high school diploma over there. As we will see, he did indeed go to Columbia Records and was subsequently given an honorary diploma from Hicksville High in the nineties, Soon after hearing The Beatles on Sullivan, Billy was invited to join a group called the Echoes, who had just a great series of names. They would later become the Emeralds and then later the Lost Souls. That's good, it's good. It's funny because it's kind of just imagine that bit in spinal A Mighty Wind, No, a Mighty Wind when they taught Eugene Hudson's character is getting more depressed, and his album titles, and they just flashed his album RT. The last one is called Digging My Own Grave. I'm just like the Echoes, the Emeralds, the Last Souls, the Cadavers. Billy wrote his first song for the group, a pastiche of the British Invasion covers that they'd play called Time and Time Again. It was recorded as a demo and went unreleased until two thousand and five box set called My Lives I Didn't do It. It's terrible. One of his bandmates was a guy named Jim, who Billy would immortalize on the Turnstiles track James. As we see when we talk about piano man, Billy doesn't change names often in his songs from the real people he's basing them on. The Echoes were marginally successful on the Long Island club circuit in the mid sixties Whatever the Fat Means, and Billy supplemented his income playing on sessions for Chubby Checker, best known for The Twist and the iconic street tough girl group The Shangri Laws. It does very much so. Billy played on a demo for Leader of the Pack and possibly wound up playing on Remember Parentheses walking in the Sand, which you may know as being a great song later covered by Aerosmith and then becoming a viral TikTok hit the sped up version though right, it's like the Chipmunky version by Yeah. Billy left the Echoes or whatever they were called by that point to join his first semi pro group called the Hassles. They were another Long Island group who were sign united artists, not unlike Mitch Ryder and the Detroit Wheels or the Young Rascals. The Hassles are fairly famous among joel heads since they have an extensive discography, at least for a short lived prefame band of a future famous solo artist. They released four singles and two albums, self titled Debut in nineteen sixty seven and the awesomely titled Hour of the Wolf in nineteen sixty nine, sessions for which Judy Garland I'm now hearing was present for He's.

00:29:30
Speaker 1: Like Forrest scump Man, He's got connections with all these crazy people.

00:29:33
Speaker 2: Yeah. Apparently she was a friend of the producer. All of these musical offerings bombed. We only mention it because of a the tragic comic jol of it all, and to note that the Hassle's bass player, how we Arthur Blovelt went on to co founder the band Ramjam, who had a hit with Black Betty in nineteen seventy seven. So there's your bar band trivia fact for the night Billy Joel and the Black Betty guy were in a band together. I like that. Billy would later say how the lead singer of the Hassles became, in his words, a Jesus freak, and wrote Joel an irate letter during the controversy over the release of Only the Good Die Young, which was banned in various markets for being supposedly anti Catholic. As you meditate on that, we'll be right back with more too much information after these messages. So this is all but a preamble to Atilla, one of the most cited and hilarious early pre fame bands of more famous guys. Prior to becoming the Piano Man, Billy Joel created a two man heavy metal project with an overly distorted organ and drums and the name of that band was attila my fetish for contextualize and would have to assume that he heard like Vanilla fran Yeah, I was gonna say Vanilla Fudge a Grand Bond organization. Oh and like and I got the Vita Iron Butterflies. Yeah, deep purple, like John Lord's stuff with deep purple, and when I can also do that. And so in nineteen seventy, Billy Joel teamed up with his Hassle's bandmate John Small for a duo which was supposedly modeled after late sixties proto metal bands like led Zeppelin and Black Sabbath. But yeah, it sounds more like the kind of slug shrug just distorted B three. Did Billy actually use a B three in this or did he use something like a Lowry?

00:31:38
Speaker 1: I think he used the Hammond organ that he like cannibalized and yeah, yeah, well a lot.

00:31:44
Speaker 2: Of those guys did that. I mean, basically, you could swap out the the power tubes in them for guitar. Yeah, amp guts to really overload them, which I think is what John Lord did. Billy apparently used his power for mimicry to fake a British accent and sneak into led Zeppelin and Hendrix concerts by pretending to be a roadie, which worked until he was literally booted from one concert by a notorious British music industry heavy Don Arden, who may be familiar to listeners of this show as Sharon Osborne's dad, Billy and drummer John Small hold up in the basement of John's parents wallpaper store to rig Billy's Hammond organ up to a Marshall stack. It was, as you describe it, an artistic abomination and a health hazard since they got a ton of nasty shocks. Yeah. This, you know. I have some friends with them Aunt modding and everything, and one of the first things that everybody does is change the two prong plug for a ground like a three prong because particularly with Hammon's, because they're an electro mechanical device, they would build up a charge that was stored in them, and you could literally kill yourself if you touched it. Yeah, because guys would chop the they would chop the legs out so that they could mount them on top of other keyboards or whatever. And yeah, if you didn't know what you were doing, you could, specifically with Hammin's, you could kill yourself because they stored an electrical charge. And they used to call those old two prong plugs that came with all of them the widow Maker. So if you see, like if you get into any of these guitar amp or Hammond amp communities, they're like swapped out the original widow maker for a three prong plug. But that's the only change. Like it's really fascinating anyway. As Billy would later tell biographer Fred Shrewers, I got a wall wall pedal so I could wow WowWee you like Jimmy, and added a distortion pedal, which I figured would double the mangled noise we were already making. Then we just pinned the volume to the wall, believing themselves to be, as you said, unstoppable. Was that there, we said, unstoppable. They played the results to their manager, who somehow managed to get them a fifty thousand dollars advance from Epic Records, despite privately believing Attila to be the worst crap I ever heard in my life. I think that that's like half a million dollars today. Yeah, it's insane. I mean, god, dude, the record industry was just so awesome for this generation of people who would just fail and fail again until becoming hugely ritulated at a scale, at a scale no other musician would ever live since. As Billy would tell journalist Dan Near in nineteen eighty five, we were going to destroy the world with amplification. We had titles like Godzilla, March of the Huns, Brain Invasion. A lot of people think I just came out of the piano bar, which he didn't. Seriously, I weren't go listen to it. Tila, Yeah, yeah, Anyway, they named Vandatilla, with Joel saying, if you're going to assault the rock world and crush it under ten Marshal Amps, wouldn't Attila the hunt who plundered Italy and Gaul and slaughtered quite a few innocents along the way, work as a role model. Self titled album they released in July nineteen seventy has one of the greatest covers in rock history, and I think everyone should just take some time to google it. Billy and drummer John Small, whose whole name must be read all the time, are dressed in what appears to be Viking or just generic Barbarian fur outfits while standing in a meat locker with slabs of meat hanging everywhere. It is hilarious as is, but considering that one of those men with the poodle perm and mustache is Billy Joel, the comedic value of it is off the charts. The whole venture, as you say, just endears Billy to everyone more. Yet he does not share that view. He deemed the project a colossal failure and later dismissed it is psychedelic bullshit. It souped up amplification that they worked so hard to achieve as a double edged sword because it would literally drive the audience away at gigs. In a twenty twelve interview with Alec Baldwin on NPR, Joel said people went fleeing from wherever we'd play. We were so loud you could see blood coming off of people's ears. It was just horrible. Thank god it didn't happen, because I would have screamed myself right out of the business. What did they do with the fifty grand? Anyway? The band Attilla died in an extremely dramatic fashion when Billy began having an affair with his bandmate, drummer John Small's wife, Elizabeth Weber. Considering it was a two person band, and they lived in the same apartment building. This made things awkward. Drummer John Small discovered the affair in between back to back gigs for Attila. So they were when you say back to back gigs, were they playing two nights or were they playing two sets? Two sets of Yeah, that's very different. Sadly, Billy was under the impression that John and Elizabeth's marriage was all but over, and she had already told John that she had been sleeping with Billy. Both of those things were not true, and Billy was hit with a tidal wave of guilt. Billy left their shared apartment building and spent a period of time homeless, sleeping in laundromats, cars, subways, and what you just described as the woods. He also described it as the woods like the park. I don't just say full on Long Island woods. I don't know. We'll find out more. If you were a loved one was homeless with Billy Joel during the period in the early nineteen seventies, please get in touch with us. Joel subsequently solved this by moving home with his mother, which was the ultimate indignity. At the age of twenty one, Racked with guilt, he called his now ex bandmate drummer John Small to apologize. Small came over to talk to Billy in person, only to find him passed out on the floor after having taken an over dose of sleeping pills. Billy was rushed to the er, where his stomach was pumped, and he famously recalled waking up in the hospital and thinking, oh great, I couldn't even do this right. He tried to write that wrong once again in a few weeks, when he drank a bottle of old English scratch cover, which he said he chose in another all time sound bite because it looked quote tastier than bleach. As he would later say, I remember sitting in a chair waiting to die. I thought, I'll sit in this chair and I'll die here. I ended up sitting there polishing my mother's furniture by farting a lot. He survived the incident and checked himself into his psychiatric hospital for three weeks. Thankfully, Billy got the help that he needed, and almost two decades later, he'd released a song called You're Only Human Parentheses Second Wind, which he wrote in an admirable effort to dissuade teenage suicides. The truly bizarre video inspired by the Frank Capra Christmas classic It's a Wonderful Life, features Joel as a mysterious, trench coated fallen angel figure who convinces I Love sixteen to back away from the edge of the Queensboro question Mark Bridge after his girlfriend breaks up with him. How do you feel about that?

00:39:10
Speaker 1: I mean, I love the whole trope of like kind of like crusty, grumpy, rumpled angel.

00:39:18
Speaker 2: Coming out of the work to like save someone. Call that the Wings of Desire effect.

00:39:23
Speaker 1: I was gonna call that the John Travolta movie Michael effect, but.

00:39:28
Speaker 2: I love how much you hate that movie. Yeah, because again, go everyone wim Wenders. Go watch wim Wenders Wings of Desires much better than Michael or the American version of the movie City of Angels, which at least gave us in the case Googoo Doll's deathless hit iris.

00:39:47
Speaker 1: I can't listen to that song because I accidentally plagiarized it for a love note that I wrote a girl in ninth grade.

00:39:52
Speaker 2: It's a very botherous It's one of the most Jordan things you could have said about that. Weirdly's co host Adam Savage was in the video for Your Only Human Parentheses Second Wind. So this all relates to today's episode because Joel's omniscient Hobo angel character haralds his arrival by playing the harmonica part to Yano Man. So back to nineteen seventy all this mess ended about as well as it could have. Joel sought help for his depression and lived to you say today Check's notes today wonderful. If he dies tomorrow, this will be so weird. He married Elizabeth Webber, the woman at the center of the Attila love triangle, later writing songs like She's always a woman to me and just the way you are for her, always a woman as compared to what well.

00:40:46
Speaker 1: Also, she was also his manager, so maybe that was what he meant. She's always a manager to me, doesn't I'm quite the same that.

00:40:55
Speaker 2: Doesn't talk about her Sometimes a woman, sometimes a manager. They would later divorced. Yeah, yeah, we'll touch on that later. Billy did remain friends with his Attila bandmate, drummer John Small, who would go on to become a music video director, overseeing the video for Uptown Girl co starring Billy's second wife, Christy Brinkley. It's a tangled web. Billy Joel has woven Billy's tortured relationships with women in unrelenting reputation as a romantic sap bolstered in every interview and fact about his life is one of the things that induces him to I think both of us. He tells the story of his high school girlfriend wanting to break up before she went up to college. Joel was devastated and said, well, you mean a lot to me, Patty, after all we had sex. Her response was so what. He then doubled down on that by asking her to marry him. She said no. Still, they remained friends to this day. At some point during the two thousands, they had lunch and Billy Joel told her about one of his new girlfriends. The woman responded, she may have your heart, but I have your soul, A truly insane thing to say, and even more baffling or insane that Joel responded by asking for a pen to write that line down. Good God, just good God.

00:42:23
Speaker 1: Another positive outcome of the Attila implosion is that Billy Joel abandoned his truly terrible sonic experiments in amplification.

00:42:31
Speaker 2: I decided I.

00:42:32
Speaker 1: No longer wanted to be a rock and roll star. He'd say, I got that out of my system. I was about nineteen or twenty. I wanted to write songs now. As nineteen seventy turned in nineteen seventy one, he decided that he wanted out of the spotlight entirely and sought to become purely a songwriter. But the advice he was getting, according to him, was that the best way to get your songs out there was to record them yourself and release an album. Considering this was the dawn of the so called singer songwriter era, this seemed like a very good idea. Indeed, I honestly can't tell how much this explanation is just a croc so that Billy doesn't look quite so much like a craven genre hopper, going from what from British Invasion to late sixties psye rock to now singer songwriter stuff.

00:43:19
Speaker 2: I don't know. I'll choose to believe him. I mean, he took a lot of swings, yeah, bat yes, and finally hit it out of the park big swings.

00:43:29
Speaker 1: You could not take a bigger swing than Attila. Honestly, so began the solo career of Billy Joel and adding to his Forest Gump like reputation, Billy was given a cash advance by Michael Lang, the key organizer of Woodstock. Billy claims he briefly attended Woodstock.

00:43:48
Speaker 2: But quickly left.

00:43:49
Speaker 1: I went up for one day, realized I didn't really care for mud rain or acid, and hitchhiked back home. This meant that, to his imns regret, he missed Jimmy Hendricks's legend very performance at the National Anthem. Billy Joe on acid a discussion point.

00:44:06
Speaker 2: I think he.

00:44:08
Speaker 1: I think I read that he took acid three times, all in the early seventies, and one time he freaked out and put on James Taylor's album and remembers just constantly just just calling out to the heavens.

00:44:20
Speaker 2: Save me, James, save me. What a fascinating man. I love this man. I can see how someone with Billy's back story would not baggage. It was an experience on acid, yep.

00:44:36
Speaker 1: Anyhow, Michael Lang, the Woodsuck organizer, signed Billy and passed.

00:44:39
Speaker 2: Them along to his colleague Already Rip.

00:44:42
Speaker 1: Remember that name sounds like a Paul Schaeffer in Spinal Tap character.

00:44:49
Speaker 2: Already Rip it does.

00:44:52
Speaker 1: Already was a co founder of a small label called Family Productions, interesting label title in.

00:44:59
Speaker 2: The era of Charles Manson and his Family.

00:45:04
Speaker 1: Artie had actually worked with Billy Joel way back when he was doing sessions for the Shangri Las earlier in the mid sixties, which is interesting. He signed twenty two year old Billy Joel to a contract that history would later take a rather dim view of.

00:45:19
Speaker 2: It was a classic music industry screw.

00:45:21
Speaker 1: But at the time Billy was happy and started writing material for the album that would become his solo debut, Cold Spring Harbor.

00:45:29
Speaker 2: Do you know this album? No, it's really good.

00:45:32
Speaker 1: It's given short shrift by many fans, and it's also disowned by Billy himself for a reason.

00:45:37
Speaker 2: To assume I'm a fan, Oh okay, I mean, I'm just I'm not, like I said, I've never I know the songs I've been listening to all my damn life, Like, I'm not going to go looking for rare b sides, especially one that he says he hates.

00:45:53
Speaker 1: Well okay, well, well we'll talk about why he hates it. But the songs on the album are really great. She's Got Away It is incredible song. Everybody Loves You Now is an incredible song. Got to Begin Again is a really great song. My personal favorite is Tomorrow Is Today, which has lyrics that are believed to have been taken from one of his suicide notes. And even if that's not true, the sentiment certainly comes from that period and it's an extremely powerful piece of music.

00:46:20
Speaker 2: Definitely check that song out. I mean, just the phrase tomorrow is today. What it sounds like a sounds like a discarded James Bond title. Tomorrow ever Dies Wow, Tomorrow is not enough, Tomorrow is Today? Now go back to tomorrow and ever Dies Wow. Nice, nicely done. Billy Joel high hopes for Cold Spring Harbor.

00:46:47
Speaker 1: He recorded in LA with some of the best studio session players in town, and shortly before it was due to be released in late nineteen seventy one, according to legend, at least, he held a listening party at his home with some friends.

00:46:59
Speaker 2: How was his advance for this one that I don't know that on seventy grand seventy five grand?

00:47:06
Speaker 1: Well go easy on him, because he placed the acetate on the turntable with all of his friends in the room, he dropped the needle so excited to showcase this music. I mean you know, one of these songs came from a suicide note. For Christ's sake, this was deep, personal, meaningful music. He dropped the needle on the acetate and he heard what he would later describe as the voice of a chipmunk coming out of the speakers. There had been an error in the mastering which had the unintended side effect of speeding up the tapes, causing everything on the record to sound higher pitched. The thirty four minutes of music they had recorded had been sped up to twenty nine minutes on the pressing, and it sped up the songs by a semi tone, which admittedly isn't a ton.

00:47:51
Speaker 2: You said it was a half tone, a half a semi tone earlier. Oh, it's a semitone. Then I misspoke, Okay, I know, I mean this been like all the time, That's what I Oh. Yeah, famously it was one of them was kind of blue. What Yeah, musicians would have to you would have to detune your own instrument to be able to play along with kind of blue on certain test pressings. WHOA yeah, I mean, huh, yeah, I don't know. I I'm just going down where I always go to find out about the Steve Hoffman forums. This is the guy here claiming most, if not all, of Fats Domino's Imperial singles were sped up. Whoa Jerry Rafferty, The forty five of Baker Street was sped up. Damn time has come today by Chamber Brothers more than a feeling by Boston versus some of that are slowed down. Tiers of a Clown was supposedly slowed down for their forty five version Ramblin' Man. I guess it had to do with radio pushes, because they would they wanted to make songs feel more excited, so they would basically speed them up from the album version of the version that was actually recorded.

00:49:05
Speaker 1: Well exciting, or they wanted to squeeze in more ads, which is the I heard.

00:49:10
Speaker 2: Baker's Banquet was supposedly even mastered and released at the wrong speed or too slow. Real of Stone stuff. Yeah, So all of what I'm saying is to say, shut up, really.

00:49:22
Speaker 1: Well, well, I just want to Brian Wilson did this intentionally sped up his vocals by a semitone on the Beach Boys pet sound song Caroline No to Sound Younger, and that Paul McCartney did the same thing the following year, in nineteen sixty seven on When I'm sixty four, to also make himself sound younger.

00:49:41
Speaker 2: But Billy wasn't.

00:49:42
Speaker 1: Trying to sound younger. If anything, He's probably he was twenty two. He's probably trying to sound more mature and have more gravitas to his voice, and he was not happy at having his voice sped up and sounding higher. And according to legend, he was so furious that he ripped the record off the turntable and either threw it against the wall or, depending on the version of the story being told, literally ran out of the house and hurled it into the street Frisbee style, which is the version I prefer, kind of like the Walter White breaking bad throw the pizza and landed up on the roof.

00:50:13
Speaker 2: You know, either way, no good. So I was just reading down on this forward and I think what happens is people have talked about some of the problem with these is that the speed at which the was recorded was not always dictated to the mastering engineer, like the mixing engineer in some cases didn't say what speed it was recorded the tape tape speed, so the mastering engineer has to kind of just shoot for what could be an educated guess. I don't know. I find that stuff really interesting. Well, Billy didn't. Billy Joel disagreed.

00:50:47
Speaker 1: Yeah, he was very depressed because it had been a nightmare making this record, with this guy already rip acting as producer, demanding take after take to the point where Billy had no idea how to sing his own songs anymore, and he was hoping that all this hard work would yield a great sounding record, but alas this was not the case. It was so depressing he'd later say, I wanted to crawl into my piano and close the lid.

00:51:13
Speaker 2: It would get worse.

00:51:15
Speaker 1: This label, Family Productions, was hemorrhaging money and couldn't afford to fix the mastering error. So, partially due to this wonky sound, and partially due to general label mismanagement and poor distribution, Billy's album Cold Spring Harbor was a commercial failure. Apparently, the president of the company that was in charge of distribution was dealing with the deteriorating condition of his cancer stricken son and effectively, though understandably, left the company rudderless as he was grappling with his grief, Lacking proper distribution and promotion. The only thing Billy could do was hit the road and tour in hopes of generating excitement for the record. He and his band played colleges opening for the likes of the Jay Giles band, Bad Finger and Yes. But by Billy's account, this was not fun. We didn't make any money. Nobody got paid.

00:52:04
Speaker 2: He said.

00:52:05
Speaker 1: We were toying around to one of these little camper trailer things, eating peanut butter and jelly sandwiches.

00:52:11
Speaker 2: Bitch, bitch, bitch. Good lord, you got to open for a Yes like. He was a big Yes fan too. He was excited about that. Dude. You got to watch Wakeman play keys every night, like God, damn fry baby, this generation man, fifty thousand dollars in nineteen seventy is an advance. That's exciting.

00:52:31
Speaker 1: Now.

00:52:32
Speaker 2: Yeah, it's insane now, Yeah, nobody gets fifty grand to make a record with your your second your first record, Attila was no Hassles and then Attila. Jesus, I don't know, man, bitch, bitch, bitch the Billy Joel story, I must. I have to say that I do like him. I am just you know, he's a complainer, so am I but I never got fifty grand to make a record or toured with Yes.

00:53:07
Speaker 1: But this tour also featured a performance at the Mari Soul Festival in Puerto Rico, which is widely hailed as the first international pop music festival on the island, as well as what's been argued the first truly important show of Billy Joel's career. Though few in the crowd of ten thousand people knew who he was, there were some label reps there who were impressed with his performance, which would pay off later. And he also got to meet Dave Brubeck. That's cool, right, We love Dave Brubeck, adding to his Forrest Gump chart. But all in all, Billy was not happy being an artist on Arti Ripp's Family Productions label. Already had been the producer of Cold Spring Harbor, so the sound screw up could be laid at his feet.

00:53:50
Speaker 2: The record wasn't distributed and got zero.

00:53:52
Speaker 1: Airplay, and now Billy's monthly stipend had evaporated due to the label's money problems.

00:53:58
Speaker 2: He wanted off the label.

00:54:00
Speaker 1: But unfortunately he'd signed one of those nightmarish early rock and roll contracts that tied him up for the rest of his natural life. He'd signed away his publishing rights, licensing rights, copyrights, mechanical rights, everything forever.

00:54:13
Speaker 2: The irassable Artie Rip would later.

00:54:15
Speaker 1: Say, there ain't no hole in that contract other than the loose leaf binder hole. That's the only hole in it. He is more or less a real life cigar chopping executive. Billy would describe him as quote gangstery on the other side of the desk in his office, made guests sit in a chair shaped like a hand. You were literally in the palm of this guy's hands in his office.

00:54:42
Speaker 2: Love that. So.

00:54:43
Speaker 1: Unable to extricate himself from this contract, Billy did the next best thing.

00:54:47
Speaker 2: He skipped town. He relocated to la.

00:54:50
Speaker 1: With his girlfriend soon to be wife, Elizabeth Weber, and her young son, at the end of nineteen seventy two, heading clear across the country in a Datson station wagon. This was a partially practical matter, since they could no longer afford the homemade shared an oyster bay along Island now that the money had dried up. But Billy would also characterize this period as quote hiding out while he tried to find a way out of his miserable, exploitive record.

00:55:15
Speaker 2: Contract.

00:55:16
Speaker 1: My hope was that by going underground, already would lose track of me and be persuaded sometime in the future to let me out of this onerous deal I'd made. Bizarrely for an artist so strongly identified with New York, Billy Joel would spend three years out in LA. He would eventually write The Ronettes pastiche Sagabye to Hollywood. Upon his departure in nineteen seventy five, things started off on a weird footing in LA because Billy had assumed that his girlfriend Elizabeth, had cleared it with her former husband, Billy's former Attila bandmate John Small, to.

00:55:50
Speaker 2: Take their five year old son across the country from New York to LA to live.

00:55:56
Speaker 1: She did not much in the same way that she didn't tell drummer John Small that she and Billy were having an affair.

00:56:03
Speaker 2: Communication.

00:56:05
Speaker 1: I guess they were on a divorce at this point, but communication not good between these two.

00:56:10
Speaker 2: Poor John. Astonishing to me that she was like, Yeah, I'm just gonna I'll just take the kid. Just no, okay, do you didn't think that you didn't foresee that being a problem. There's the seventies, probably like he doesn't want them.

00:56:25
Speaker 1: Poor drummer John Small showed up in Los Angeles one day, shortly after Billy and Elizabeth and the little boy.

00:56:32
Speaker 2: Arrived with private investigators in tow. Soon, everybody but Billy flew back to New York to sort the issue out, leaving him alone in a strange New town.

00:56:43
Speaker 1: Billy's biographer would later note that the best trust between the future divorce is likely started then and there.

00:56:50
Speaker 2: He had no kidding it didn't start when she lied to him about the relationship with her husband, though probably started there. Actually.

00:57:00
Speaker 1: Eventually she would return to la with her son, and Billy found himself needing to support all of them. He said he at the time that he had just seen the Godfather, and so you know, being there for your family was like a real, real heavy thing on his mind at this point. So long island, so long, So it's so long island energy.

00:57:20
Speaker 2: Yeah, I saw my Godfather really crystallized a few things for me.

00:57:23
Speaker 1: It made me realize I had to get money to support my family. It hadn't occurred to me until I saw the Godfather. So Billy took a job playing piano at a bar called the Executive Lounge on Wilshire Boulevard on the border of.

00:57:39
Speaker 2: Korea Town in Hollywood.

00:57:42
Speaker 1: Despite its optimistic name, the bar was, by Billy's own estimation, a quote loser bar where people went after losing at the track, completing the whole undercover guys, which I don't really understand why he felt the need to do, because I can't imagine already Rip could claim a piece of his piano bar income. Billy Joel performed as Billy Martin, not to be confused with the Major League Baseball manager of.

00:58:10
Speaker 2: The same name. The pseudonym came from Billy's own middle name Martin.

00:58:15
Speaker 1: He'd later say, people think I made the name Billy Joel up.

00:58:19
Speaker 2: I would have come up with something better if I was going to make a name up. He's a quote machine. He is, Yeah, he really is.

00:58:28
Speaker 1: Billy took the dressing up in character when he performed at the Executive Lounge, wearing shirts with the collar turned all the way up and buttons undone halfway down his chest. He would say the character Steve Martin and Bill Murray do was a goof. I was doing too, but people didn't know I was kidding. They thought, Wow, this guy's really hip.

00:58:48
Speaker 2: It was a sobering period for Billy. A year earlier, it seemed like his dreams of musical stardom were in reach. Now he was a stranger in a strange town, playing requests at a bar for you in scale and tips well. His girlfriend waided tables nearby. He worked from dinner till two in the morning, six days a week. This was, in essence Billy's Hamburg period.

00:59:11
Speaker 1: To use a Beatles analogy, his boot camp phase right is yeah, incubator phase exactly yeah. Rather than play his own songs, his repertoire was mostly standards like Stardust, and as time goes by, he'd say, somebody would ask me for a song and I didn't know the song from a hole in the wall. But he'd play enough major sevens you can make a lot of the songs sound like other songs, not a song, but reminiscent of a song. He demonstrates this in a lot of interviews where because he in every unity gives you sitting at a piano and it's pretty fine.

00:59:46
Speaker 2: I don't I'll never forget going into the Steinway Place in midtime Manhattan, and there's just an enormous oil painting of Billy Joel, you know, like a like a like a leather bomber jacket, like leaning on a Steinway. He's like, hell yeah, painting. Yes, it was a painting. It's amaz well after.

01:00:06
Speaker 1: I think he was there for six I mean he was at this bar for six months, but not long into his tenure he had the idea of turning the experience into a new composition. I was like, I've got to get a song out of this. It took place over a period of time. I came up with a melody sing us, a song piano man, and then little by little I filled in the characters in the scenario.

01:00:27
Speaker 2: So I guess it took a couple of weeks.

01:00:29
Speaker 1: He would call to look out the windows song, in other words, a sketch of what was literally in front of him.

01:00:35
Speaker 2: How do you feel about the nuances of Joel's writing in this particular song. I mean, it does We'll get to in a minute. It doesn't really seem.

01:00:43
Speaker 1: Like he he made a lot of choices.

01:00:46
Speaker 2: It seemed like he was just describing what was in front of him. Were you positive? You really like they're sharing a drink. They call loneliness, but it's better than drinking alone. I believe you chatted me about.

01:00:56
Speaker 1: That's a great line. Yeah, it's an incredible line, I think. I mean, there are some who feel that he.

01:01:01
Speaker 2: Took a really condescending view towards his cohorts in the bar, both the ones that worked there and also the patrons. I don't think so.

01:01:11
Speaker 1: I think that it's a fairly compassionate look at these people, because he feels as though he is one of them.

01:01:18
Speaker 2: I guess what do you think. I don't have an opinion. I don't care. Are we going to try and cancel Billy Joel for writing unsympathetically about barflies these? Really? Surely there's other people on the list before him, much worse things.

01:01:37
Speaker 1: But when we get to the whole critical appraisal of Billy Joel section of this, a lot of people this song kind of soured him to a lot of critics because they felt that he came across as kind of arrogant, which was not the impression I got.

01:01:54
Speaker 2: Yeah, yeah, I don't see that. I mean, if anything, it's just cliches, yeah, and names that happened to apparently conveniently rhyme in real life.

01:02:04
Speaker 1: But anyway, but you know, I will say I remember I watched an early one of the first I think it was Goldfinger, one of the early James Bond movies, with my family, maybe a year ago, and.

01:02:14
Speaker 2: I hadn't seen them a long, long, long, long long time, and it was really weird.

01:02:18
Speaker 1: How when you watch something that spawned a gazillion cliches. Yes, it's strange to be like, wait, no, this isn't actually a cliche. It feels like it with every fiber of my being. But actually, this is the thing, this is the original, this is the thing that birthed a thousand imitators.

01:02:37
Speaker 2: And I kind of get that sense with this song. Yeah sure, or mister bud Jangles. So a spoiler alert, The song Piano Man is extremely literal. Of course, Jordan brought it back to the Beatles, comparing it to Paul McCartney's Penny Lane lyrics, almost journalistic in their detail, save for a few twists, A smile ran away from his face and so forth. Billy would explain during a talk at Harvard in nineteen ninety four, all of the characters in that bar were actually real people. John at the bar was this guy named John, and he was at the bar. He was a friend of mine, and he gave me drinks for free. The gig sucked, but hey, free drinks. Well back we yeah, fun fact as we get to the he's quick with a joke or he'll light up your smoke section. Billy quit smoking after seeing a hypnotist in Boston who you have a tangential connection to.

01:03:33
Speaker 1: Yeah, a friend of mine's dad went to see this hypnotist to help him stop smoking, maybe like ten years ago. The same Billy did an impression of him on stage, and my friend's dad did a similar impression. He was is either Hungary or a Polish guy? Is that racist? I don't remember which one. Sorry, I'm hungary and it's okay, Yeah, that's my Billy Joel. That's actually that's probably of all the degrees of separation I have, the Billy Joel, probably the closest one I have, which is a shame because he's like I almost called him my White way All. That's an unfortunate term. Guy looks like Billy Joel. But I would love the interview with Billy Joel. Anybody listening right now is connection to Billy Joel? How many times canna say Billy Joel? And this anecdote this is gonna let you punch yourself out.

01:04:19
Speaker 2: Next up in the song, we have Paul the real estate novelist, a phrase that has baffled music fans for years. Was he writing novels about real estate? Oh? Wow? No, no, not, but I like that. Billy would explain that Paul was a real estate broker who would sit at bar and attempt to write the next great American novel. And Davy, according to Joel, was actually a guy who was in the Navy. He would go out of his way to defend accusations of being a lazy rhymer. But Davey was in fact, at least reportedly in the Merchant Marines. And we have verified details from the daughter of Davy. Hmmm, scoop for you, and probably was for years, his daughter Lisa told songfacts dot Com. Davy met Billy Joel in a pub in Spain in nineteen seventy two while he was in the Navy. He married while he was in the navy, had three children. He passed away in two thousand and three. Of als, it really hurts when I hear this song played on the radio and they leave this part out.

01:05:22
Speaker 1: I mean, what they don't give a bio for every character named this.

01:05:28
Speaker 2: In any song. You don't issue corrections for popular song. What if she went like a thirty second stinger tacked onto the end where Billy Joel was like, yeah, the guy he had als and he had three children, and I'd regret the error. People are weird man. The waitress who practiced politics was Billy's then girlfriend, later first wife, and eventually divorcee, Elizabeth Webber, aka the one who repeatedly lied to him about circumstances of her life that would impact his, and he tried to kill him off over her during the heat of their whole Attila love triangle with drummer John Small. She actually ran away for weeks and no one could find her. Just the model of stability this woman. She later married Billy in September of nineteen seventy three, after having arranged the wedding herself and telling Billy, we're getting married tomorrow and if you don't, I'm leaving you. I'm starting to think she was an actual psychopath, or at the very least had like borderline personality disorder. These are not the actions of a sane, well adjusted person.

01:06:31
Speaker 1: Let's say that no I made according to him it was the actions of a Catholic person sure living in sin Well, He said, I didn't think it was the right thing to do.

01:06:40
Speaker 2: I thought it was the right thing to do by her, Perhaps unsurprisingly given her streak of unearned confidence, Elizabeth subsequently became Billy's manager a short while later, so with Maybe One.

01:06:54
Speaker 1: Nothing bad ever happens when you appoint a loved one or family member in a business position.

01:07:00
Speaker 2: Though often she is portrayed as some kind of villain in the Billy Joel story, we do have her to thank for inspiring some of his most romantic songs, including She's Got Away, She's Always a Woman, and most famously, just the Way You Are. He wrote the latter song as a gift for her, using a melody that supposedly came to him in a dream, a Lah Yesterday and the riff to Satisfaction. According to legend, after he Billy presented it to Elizabeth, she asked, does this mean that I get the publishing too? It wasn't astute, if completely soulless question, as this song proved to be his first big hit and a Grammy winner.

01:07:35
Speaker 1: Of course it every woman wants to hear you get the publishing two sweetheart.

01:07:40
Speaker 2: What ann Yeah, so defend her to me? As a non billy Joel fans with someone who bears him no quarrel? Why is she not considered just an out and out villain the woke left? Yeah? I mean, I guess we all learned our lesson with Yoko. Oh Okay, I don't I don't know, I don't know, I don't know. I genuinely I am as much of a Joel head as I am. I he loved her, and sometimes that with people in your life, you just gotta let him have that. Billy was actually gonna leave just the way you are off the Stranger, until Linda Ronstat and Phoebe Snow stopped by the studio and told him he was crazy if he didn't include it. Perhaps needless to say, Joel and Weber's marriage slowly deteriorated, but Joel remained hopeful until nineteen eighty two, when he suffered a brutal motorcycle accident that injured both of his hands, which, obviously for piano player, is less than ideal. Is that the one that he references in You might be right when he says I'll even drive to BEDSTI drive my motorcycle in the rain.

01:09:01
Speaker 1: You know, I never thought about that. Maybe it is I know that he like really screwed. I think it was the thumb of his left hand. It's like all just like the bone in it is gone.

01:09:11
Speaker 2: It's just like, yeah, that's why he said he can't break break strings with his left hand anymore. Right, Yeah, yeah, so he used to be able to break piano strings before the accident. Anyway, Continuing along this woman's villainous streak, she visited him in the hospital and asked him to sign a contract which he was probably physically incapable of doing at the time, that asked him to hand over the majority of their assets to her Oz for gasps. Billy Joel was supposedly so heartbreaking over this that they got a quickie divorce in Haiti, a nasty experience he felt was perfectly appropriated given the circumstances, later quipping there's a reason they don't call the place lovey Haiti. Yeah, medium funny, Yes, I get it. Yeah. Even after the divorce, Billy was hopeful that they would reconcile. My god, he bought her everything she wanted, including a four million dollar house. For years afterwards, whenever they sang just the Way You Are in concert, Billy's drummer, Liberty de Vido, one of the all time great rock names and himself a hilarious personage, would sing along, changing the chorus to she got the house, she got the car, She got the house, she got the car. That's great, that's really good. Joel admittedly feels weird playing the song concert these days, and often ends the performance by dead panning and then we got divorced, but which is a great bit. But the story between Joel and the Weber family gets even weirder. In a last didgitch attempt to save their marriage, Billy fired his wife as his manager and replaced her with her own brother, Frank Webber, who remained as Billy's manager after their divorce. Billy's second wife, Christy Brinkley, started noticing that Frank Weber seemed to have an awful lot of houses and horses. She also found it weird that he flew private while they flew commercial. Then, in nineteen eighty nine, Billy discovered that Frank had stole millions from him over the years, committed fraud, made faulty investments in his name, and had given out countless loans. Billy fired him and sued for ninety million, but only made eight million back. Despite this, Billy the SAP tried to make amends with him in later years, and even gave him free tickets to a show he was playing in Florida. My god, that's what I'm saying, dude, there's an element of this guy just like continually stepping into the same rake of his own own volition. You know, come on, Bud, don't do that. Like learn from your mistakes. Back to the bit narrative of Piano Man. Over the course of the six month gig, Billy did, in fact have numerous people coming up to him saying, you're too good for this place. What are you doing here? I can get you a record deal. This was more or less standard fare in LA where everyone, as Billy would note, fancied themselves as an entrepreneur or producer. As he told his audience at Harvard in nineteen ninety four, Hollywood produces producers, and they would say, man, what are you doing here? And I'd say, no, I love it here. I hate the music business. I was lying through my teeth because I didn't want to deal with another shyster, but eventually the music business came knocking. It had been bubbling. What had been bubbling? George the music industry. It had been bubbling ever since the promotional tour for his ill fated Cold Spring Harbor album in nineteen seventy two. Bus. The buzz has been bubbling, the bus. The bus has been bubbling. This buzz, buzz has been building. It bubbles, and it builds, and it bubbles. Does all of these things and more. Billy had played a radio concert for the Philadelphia station WMMR at the legendary Sigma Sound Studios, home to Philly Soul Titan's Kenny Gamble and Leon Huff, the architects of the Philadelphia Sound and also where David Bowie recorded Diamond Dogs. This concert broadcast proved incredibly popular, and his live version of the track Captain Jack became the most requested song in the history of the network, which is ironic because the song hadn't even been properly recorded yet. Billy's aforementioned performance of the Porter and Music Festival Mardi Soul was so well reviewed in the New York Times and witnessed first hands by representatives from Columbia Records including Clive Davis, who probably didn't realize that it was a song about a heroin dealer, but yeah, what are you gonna do? Clive's gonna Clive. While Joel was still all sensibly undercover in LA, he started to get major labels seeking him out. Atlantic Records producer Jerry Wexler schlept out to Billy's Malibu a frame rental with amet Airtegun in tow to hear some of the new songs, including Piano Man. Hilariously, Wexer made fun of the song a playing the chord progression, Walt's time signature and general depressive tone to Mister bo Jangles, which had been a hit about a year earlier for the Nitty Gritty Dirt Band. He also told Billy, you play too much. Quit playing so much. I mean, I.

01:13:51
Speaker 1: Guess Jerry Wexler, who produced you know, Aretha Franklin and all those great Atlantic bills.

01:13:58
Speaker 2: If Jerry Wexler tells you you're playing too much, you might actually be playing too much, right.

01:14:03
Speaker 1: But it's still like, I mean, you know, he's on the shortlist of people who can get away with making those kind of criticisms. But when you just like listen to some guy in his like rental house, play some demos, and you're Jerry Wexler and you're sitting there with Atlantic Records co founder ahmat Urdigan.

01:14:18
Speaker 2: Like, maybe go easy on the kids. Eh, he's a big boy. He can handle it. That's what he's getting out there. He obviously can't handle anything. But you know again, Jerry Wexler is probably someone I'd listened to anyway. This is neither here nor there because Billy decided to go with Clive Davis and Columbia Records, although he would later say that it was because Columbia had recorded Bob Dylan. They were a career label, he would say, which is a nerdy loser thing to say it is. However, Columbia was very good to Billy. Not only did they stick with him through three albums that weren't hits, but they eventually got him out of the nightmarish situation with Artie Rip and the hilariously named Family Productions. It ended up being fairly easy. They simply appealed to Rip's natural avarice by saying, hey, your label is so dysfunctional that can barely distribute albums, let alone promote them. How do you think you're going to make a sale? Let us do that and will cut you in for a percentage. In exchange for releasing Joel from his contract, Rip agreed to receive about four percent or twenty eight cents of the retail price of each sale of Joel's first ten albums released with Columbia. That's what we call passive income, folks. Clive Davis would depart the label soon after Billy came aboard after becoming embroiled in a controversy for allegedly using corporate funds to renovate his apartment and throw a barb vinza for his son, something he still denies, eh seven. It was the seventies record industry. Let the man throw a bar mitzvah for his kid? On the company dime Volatile New Columbia Records head Walter Yetnikoff threatened Rip with industry banishment and bodily harm if he didn't play ball regarding the Billy situation. Ultimately, Yetnikoff bought back Billy these publishing rights and gave them to him for his twenty ninth birthday. By the time the business relationship between a Lady Rip and Billy Joel was finally severed. Billy had sold some eighty million records, netting his nemesis already Rip a sizable fortune. But at least Billy was able to get out of his creatively inspiring but ultimately dead end gig at the Executive Room, which has sadly since been demolished and replaced by the Wilshire Grammercy Plaza shopping center. However, the piano Billy played there still exists in the home of former owners Roy and Jill Hill, who now live in Florida. And this concludes, are it belongs in a museum segment of the day? I'm so glad we got that in there.

01:16:39
Speaker 1: We're going to take a quick break, but we'll be right back with more. Too much information in just a moment.

01:16:50
Speaker 2: Wow.

01:16:56
Speaker 1: The fine folks of Columbia got Billy out of the Executive Room and to the studio to record a new album. They paired him with producer Michael Stewart, who's best known to me at least as a singer in the mid sixties folk group The We five of You were on My mind Fame.

01:17:12
Speaker 2: Woke up this morning. You were all my ma No okay.

01:17:19
Speaker 1: The album featured top La session players like banjo legend Eric Weitzberg, who had his own hit with Dueling Banjos a year or so earlier, as well as Ronnie Tutt, an incredible drummer who played dates with the likes of Elvis Presley, the Carpenters, Roy Orbison, Neil Diamond, and Jerry Garcia.

01:17:36
Speaker 2: We don't want to go too deep.

01:17:37
Speaker 1: On the Piano Man album since this episode is about the song and not the LP, but it has some good stuff on it and I think that you would enjoy it. As Billy himself would say, a lot of different influences went into this. There are some country and Western influences and bluegrass the Roy Rogers band.

01:17:53
Speaker 2: Was playing on this album.

01:17:55
Speaker 1: I am assuming he's talking about the track The Ballot of Billy the Kid, which is an extremely well done Western Pestiche with a cute bit of self mythology at the end as he contrasts the similarly named outlaw with himself. The song opens with the lines from a town known as Wheeling, West Virginia wrote a boy with a six gun in his hand, and the song closes with the lions from a town known as Oyster Bay, Long Island wrote a boy with a six pack in his hand.

01:18:23
Speaker 2: It's cute. It's a good song. It's a really good song.

01:18:25
Speaker 1: It kind of rips like it goes, do you know, burn down the mission, the Elton Johnson long.

01:18:30
Speaker 2: It sounds like something off a Tumbleweed connection. Basically, Billy didn't really get into the gospel thing that much, which you mean.

01:18:37
Speaker 1: I guess it's probably for the best. But yeah, this gets kind of close and it's good. It might be a little too like on the nose for you.

01:18:46
Speaker 2: But you can just say two white. It's a cowboy song.

01:18:49
Speaker 1: He would describe it as a completely made up movie scenario. I wanted to write a movie soundtrack, but nobody was offering me a movie to write a soundtrack to, so I made up my own. That's a standout, alongside the title track, of course, and Captain Jack, which is the other big song on the record. I'm also a fan of album cuts like Stopping Nevada and travel in Prayer. You're My Home, which a broke Billy wrote as a Valentine's Day gift to his wife in nineteen seventy three, is especially cute and meaningful to me because it shouts out the Pennsylvania Turnpike, which my parents would be driving on when they'd listen to this album on eight track in their nineteen sixty two Ford to Conoline Van dubbed Marigold, the Octopus, the Seventies Ladies and Gentlemen, and that would have been probably not long after this album was released on November fourteenth, nineteen seventy three. The album was certified goldbo the RIAA in nineteen seventy five, but due to all the contractual issues, Billy only received eight grand in royalties or forty five thousand dollars in contemporary money, a far cry from his fifty thousand dollars advance for that site.

01:19:58
Speaker 2: Rock Abomination.

01:20:00
Speaker 1: Piano Man was released as a single on November second, nineteen seventy three. The original album cut was deemed too long at five minutes and thirty seven seconds, so they trimmed it down to four minutes and thirty three seconds, a move that would piss off Billy so greatly that he would complain about it in the lyrics to his follow up single The Entertainer, singing, it was a.

01:20:21
Speaker 2: Beautiful song, but it ran too long.

01:20:23
Speaker 1: If you're gonna have a hit, you gotta make it fit so they cut it down to three to zero five.

01:20:29
Speaker 2: Classic bitch, Bitch.

01:20:31
Speaker 1: You know. I didn't realize this until researching this episode. Billy turned down working with The Beatles producer George Martin on The Stranger a few years later because Martin wanted to use session players and not Billy's own band. He's principled to the point of self sabotage. Good for him, although George Martin also didn't want to use Ringo when Ringo first showed up, and he used the session drummer for the first beats recording.

01:20:56
Speaker 2: So that's true, and good lord, can you imagine what wait, Old George gets a load of Liberty to Vito? Baby? Is Liberty Divito a good drummer? I don't know. I just love his name and the fact that didn't he sue over piano man or was it a different song? I know they had some kind of falling.

01:21:16
Speaker 1: Out that went unresolved until very recently. I forget exactly what it is, but.

01:21:22
Speaker 2: I thought it was over piano man or a different like huge hit, and he was like, well, I changed the drum feel on that song.

01:21:29
Speaker 1: It probably was just the way you are because that song was originally almost like a calypso or like like samba type beat, and then they put the weird.

01:21:38
Speaker 2: Oh my god, do you know what? Liberty is a nickname for no Liberta, Torri, Liberta, Torri de Vito. That's his name, that's our name. His dad was in the NYPD car slain View Long Island Man, what a Long Island legal issues. He just sued over royalties, but they resolved it like it was just I'm assuming Billy Joel just cut him a check and gave him his pink slip. I don't know what song it was over specifically, anyway, who cares well.

01:22:12
Speaker 1: In keeping with something of a TMI theme, this beloved classic was not a world beating smash when it was first released, at least not right away. As Billy would later say, it was a turntable hit. It didn't really sell through. It just got played a lot on the radio, so the perception was that it was a hit record, but it really wasn't. Piano Man peaked at number twenty five on the Billboard Hot one hundred. Yeah, it's hard to remember, but Billy Joel didn't really get huge until nineteen seventy Seven's The Stranger.

01:22:42
Speaker 2: Before that, like the album before the.

01:22:44
Speaker 1: Stranger was Turnstiles, which is the one with New York State of Mind, and I forget a lot of other huge songs too, and that album I think peaked at one hundred and twenty six, I want to say, yeah, So, I mean he was very close to disappearing forever, which is wild that a major label gave.

01:23:04
Speaker 2: Him that many chances. I mean, again totally by gone era. Yeah, I mean I always think about Tom Waits too, who was on asylum for like most of his stuff when his bit basically broke down to a drunker Billy Joel. He had like five records that didn't produce any hits. The one thing that kept him going was that he wrote Jersey Girl and Springsteen covered that and that probably saved his ass. But then they, you know, after like five records of that, that's how much rope they gave him. And then he got he met his wife and became like the Tom Waits we now know.

01:23:43
Speaker 1: You know the hotel that Billy and his soon to be wife and their young son or her young son lived in when they first got to La It was called the Tropicana, and that was also I think a hotel that Tom Waits lived in for a long time. Yes, yeah, is that big in his Laura? I don't know them, Yeah, I.

01:24:05
Speaker 3: Think it is it the club that's the Tropicana too, that he was the doorman working at for he worked or for it right when he moved out to LA And I think that a lot of the La people that he knew stem from that time period.

01:24:20
Speaker 2: God, I love Tom Waits. We should do a Tom Waits record. Man, sure, I want to do bone Saw bow Machine. Yeah, I would do bow Machine. I would do rain Dogs, but bow Machine has an anniversary, right, everything has an anniversary. Yeah, let's just let's do bow Machine. Cool? All right? As you were so.

01:24:38
Speaker 1: Pian and Mamm wasn't a huge hit in the charts, but it earned warm reviews, including lots of comparisons to the rambling yet evocative story songs of Harry Chapin, whose six plus minute epic Taxi was in the charts around this time. Case in point review in cash Box read the soft, tender narrative tune reminiscent of the material being spun by Harry and is going to attract a ton of folks looking to sink their teeth into an equal blend.

01:25:05
Speaker 2: Of music and lyrics. This was one of the last positive reviews Billy Joel would get for decades. Oh you should talk about why the structure of this song is weird? Yeah, I mean I was looking ahead and I was like, there's a lot of songs in Walt's time that have been hits.

01:25:24
Speaker 1: Well it's more than that though, I mean, it's just there are lots of things about the song Piano Man that make it an unlikely success, and Billy Joel's been puzzled by why people like it for I mean fifty years now.

01:25:37
Speaker 2: Sure, so, Billy Joel is admittedly was puzzled by the song becoming the classic that it was. It's got a lot of things working against it as far as something in the popular market. It's a long song about depressing people, drinking away their wasted lives and coping with the crippling disappointment that comes more and more at every stage of life. Do you ever see did you see that Norm McDonald bit that was going around where he's like, uh, yeah, you know, and uh, you know, when people kill themselves, people say I don't know why, I don't know why you did it, And I always say, you don't you live in a cotton candy house. You don't know about you don't know about life. It only gets worse and worse. Anyway, it's a waltz. It's in six eight time hit waltzes do include Iris by the Googoo Dolls, Kiss for Rose by Seal Joe Cocker's version with a little help from My friends, uh, and the rest Hallelujah. Oh yeah, House of the Rising Sun. There's a Lincoln Park song in six ' eight which kind of rules. Let Me Roll You're beloved, Let Me Roll It by Paula Carte in Wings Nothing Else Matters by Metallica, m oh, we are the champions, your precious Norwegian wood Call Me, Call Me by the Belondi is in in a six eight.

01:27:01
Speaker 1: I thought you were gonna say call me when you try to write about things and mixed meters.

01:27:05
Speaker 2: Okay, yeah, I mean it's anyway. So it's the melody is just the same the entire way through, which is funny. Actually that's interesting because maybe it was. Max Martin talked about how Prince would make the chorus melody the same as the verse melody and just change the under change what underline because it reinforces the strength of the melody while recontextualizing it. That's cool. Wow. I think I think I was hearing that from someone else, like an interview where someone was like, oh yeah, Max Martin talks about anyway. As Billy Joel said on a nineteen ninety nine appearance on Inside the Actors Studio, it always amazes me how popular that song is. Musically. It's the same melody over and over again. I just jump an octave for the chorus. I don't think it's that great a melody. It's a good enough sing along melody. He often tells the story of going to pianos and getting noticed by the guy behind the keys, who will often start to whip off an impromptu version of Piano Man, only to realize that the melody simply repeats over and over. I walk into a place and there's a piano bar guy, and he sees me, what does he do? Start playing Piano Man? Now, even if he's never played the song before, it's pretty easy to figure out. It doesn't hit the guy until he's into the song for a bit that it doesn't go anywhere. And about that time our eyes meet and I go, yep, that's all there is. Sometimes you need words. I mean, think about it. It's like, I mean, it's the way you the way you do it make it sound like an Irish jid. No no no no no no, it's the Kucaracha. Actually anyway. He's also spoken disparagingly about the lyrics uh, describing them as more of a limerick. Uh. He says he starts with the music for his songs before writing lyrics, and the only one that he started with lyrics was we Didn't Start the Fire, which we all know how that went. Piano man does have the harmonica parts a nice little hook. Joel's inspiration for seeing the harmonica brace the little thing that hangs around your neck so you can just wheeze and blow away on a harmonica. Yeah, hon ko on some bobo, as Aerosmith would say, he got that from Bob Dylan. He assumed that Bob Dylan had been in a car accident. Ladies and gentlemen, please feel sorry for Bob Dylan. But yeah, overall, Billy is and billin and still and somewhat critical of his signature song, telling audience members at a Fairfield University seminar in nineteen ninety six, is Billy Joel being invited to so many hallowed halls of higher education and the arts to talk about piano man, he's inside they student.

01:29:58
Speaker 1: Many tours, he's he's done many seminar tours over the year. Like he would literally go on tours of colleges and do q and as all Like his YouTube channel is like because he hasn't a song in thirty one years. It's like half excerpts from these q and as that he would do, you know, some in like Vienna, some in Harvard, some it was just all over the country, Vassar, I'm gonna say it was one of them.

01:30:24
Speaker 2: Yeah, it's funny though he's the librick.

01:30:27
Speaker 1: Thing is funny because he demonstrates that like the rhythm and cadence a piano man, I'm done at the bars a friend of mine.

01:30:33
Speaker 2: And da da da da da thie da da da da da da da da da da da da da da da da da da da.

01:30:37
Speaker 1: I mean, it's he's right. It sounds like you know, there once was a man from Nantucket.

01:30:41
Speaker 2: Anyway, he told the audiences at Fairfield University in nineteen ninety six, I don't have a negative feeling about that song. I don't regret always playing it at concerts, but I'm just constantly surprised at the success of it. I know that people like the story and the image of this guy playing the piano, which was me, But it always amazes me that if you take it apart, well, maybe you shouldn't dissect something. Well, it's still alive. That's a good line, tremendous quote.

01:31:05
Speaker 1: Well, most of the time, Billy's his own harshest critic, but he's had some real harsh critics too, And this leads us to a section that I like to call critics. I hate these guys quote citation Billy Joel.

01:31:20
Speaker 2: For a long time, I didn't.

01:31:22
Speaker 1: Really think about contemporary critical appraisal of Billy Joel much as I don't think of the contemporary critical appraisal of Elton John or the Beach Boys, or Paul Simon or any other beloved titan of classic rock, because, as far as I'm concerned, their outside status and the popular pantheon of music tends to outshine whatever critics said forty plus years ago. But in Billy's case, it's important to remember that he was regularly maligned and truly hated my most mainstream musical critics, and I guess that's would make sense during his eighties MTV era, when his ubiquity with songs that frankly weren't his best made him almost a press of presence. But it seems like the music press really had it in for him, basically since the jump when he released Piano Man.

01:32:09
Speaker 2: In his seminal New York Times profile of Billy Joel from two thousand and two, which we talked about earlier, the great Chuck Clausburan writes that Piano Man.

01:32:16
Speaker 1: Was both quote Billy's first defining moment as a musician and probably the moment that marginalized him forever. Billy himself would say, I was tagged right after Piano Man. I was a balladeer. I didn't write some substance of music. My records were overproduced. I played too many ballads. Oh and of course my favorite he studied the piano. I had never realized that one of the prerequisites for being critically acclaimed was not knowing how to play your instrument. That stuff bothered me for a long time, and we touched on this earlier. There were some who took offense to what they believed to be a condescending attitude towards the patrons of the bar and Piano Man. And this, of course wasn't helped by his follow up single, The Entertainer, which we also touched on earlier, which sniper various aspects of the record business. As Billy himself would later note, it caused DJs to think, what's this guy bitching about? He just had a hit with Piano Man, and already he's bitching about being a rock star. The criticism would be correct, The criticism would become more pointed with time. Billy's been pretty constantly accused of being a phony. As Nick Palmgarten wrote in his incredible twenty fourteen New Yorker piece The thirty three Hit Wonder, quote one slam on him used to be that he was derivative aping other voices or styles or else mercenary, a soul of craftsman, exploiting his technical melodic agility to churn out insidious confection for the purposes of making money.

01:33:45
Speaker 2: Kind of a bogus criticism is called being a musician. Right, yeah, I don't know that's I don't buy that.

01:33:53
Speaker 1: Billy responded with an excellent point during a Rock and Roll Hall of Fame speech in nineteen ninety nine, shortly after being in did by friggin Ray Charles, which is pretty cool, Yeah, he said, I've been referred to as derivative. Well, I'm damn guilty. I'm derivative as hell. He went on to say that if the Hall of Fame just qualified candidates on the basis of being derivative, quote, there wouldn't be any white people here.

01:34:20
Speaker 2: He said it on stage at the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame.

01:34:22
Speaker 1: It's it's good for him, right, Yeah. Other people just think Billy Joel's laying slick and glib. His work was described as quote self dramatizing kitch by writer Dave Marsh and Billy himself was labeled as quote a force of nature and bad taste by the self appointed Dean of rock critics, Robert Chris Goowe. I hate Robert christ Gow not just because I a Joel head.

01:34:48
Speaker 2: I just I don't. I don't uh whatever, man, he writes Schmaltz, like, let him write Schmaltz, let him let him play piano. I don't care. But for some reason to me, it seems like, yeah, I do think he got unfairly tagged, and I'm hard pressed to say why. Like they were just jealous that he was banging supermodels looking the way he did is what it was before that. It was long before that.

01:35:11
Speaker 1: A nineteen seventy eight New York Times writer reviewed his live concert by sniffing, mister Joel's concert reaffirmed his stature as a craftsman like pop composer, but he falls short of the commuted passion of great rock. I mean, I'm gonna once again borrow from Chuck Closterman's incredible piece in which he argues that Bruce Springsteen's lines from Born to Run weren't any less puerile than Billy's words, and these sex pistols punk posturing wasn't any more authentic than.

01:35:43
Speaker 2: Billy's rock star poses.

01:35:45
Speaker 1: True, But as Klosterman writes, guys like Bruce Springsteen and Johnny Rodden have a default credibility that Joel will never be granted. And it's not just because he took piano lessons. The problem is that Joel never seemed cool, even among the people who like him. He's not cool in the conventional sense like James Dean, or in the self destructive sense like Keith Richards, nor is he cool in the Kitchie campy He's so uncool, he's cool way like Neil Diamond. The bottom line is that it's never cool to look like you're trying. And Joel tries really, really.

01:36:17
Speaker 2: Hard, that's the yeah, exactly.

01:36:23
Speaker 1: And Clusterman argues he tries hard because he's not content with being merely a commercial success. He deeply wants the respect that he feels he's been denied by the rock establishment, and that's that's not a good look. And of course, Billy Joel did himself zero favors by going on stage at concerts and reading his bad reviews in front of rabid crowds before angrily ripping them up and trashing the writers by name.

01:36:50
Speaker 2: Yeah, I mean, come on, dude, Like living well is the best of revenge, right, Like shut up. That's the thing. I think. The thing that really bothers me is like he is vexed to the point of not becoming sympathetic anymore. Like, yeah, he has a legitimate gripe with everything that he kind of does, but like, shut up, dude, Like this is the world in which you live, and this is the business we've chosen, Like come on, man, I don't know. He would sometimes call critics up on the phone and yell at them personally and say things like you can't know what I was thinking when I was writing that song. Yeah, I mean, in so many ways he's he's kind of like that's like stand behavior, you know, he's like an He's like the er Stan just for himself, like personally attacking critics that he he disagrees with. Robert Chrisky I was further quoted as saying if he wanted to be a humble tunesmith, a piano man, if you will, he would be a lot better off. But he's not content with that.

01:37:59
Speaker 1: He wants some grander and that pretentious side infects not only his bad and mediocre work, but also his best work. He and Don Henley are really notable for how resentful they are about their lack of respect. You don't catch Celine Dion complaining about a lack of critical respect, and she's a lot worse than Billy Joel, but she doesn't care. Billy Joel cares deeply about that respect and he wants it bad.

01:38:24
Speaker 2: Yeah. Man, I mean, if you're getting compared to Don Henley, maybe check your attitude.

01:38:27
Speaker 1: Yeah, in many ways, Billy Joel still doesn't have that critical bona fides. Even as late as two thousand and nine, the writer Ron Rosenbaum wrote a piece for Slate called the worst Pop Singer Ever, and It's all about Billy Joel. The even handed assessment includes lines like he was terrible, he is terrible, he always will be terrible, anadyne, sappy, superficial, derivative, fraudulently rebellious. Billy Joel's music elevates self aggrandizing, self pitying, contempt for others into.

01:39:01
Speaker 2: Its own new and awful genre mock rock. Yeah, man, it's complicated. You know, we're all weird to be people in our own way, you know. And I think knowing so much of his background, like descended from Holocaust survivors, his parents left, his family, got tired with a bunch of anti Semitism, He had learned how to box all his record first records bombed, like. He has a lot of legitimate grievances, but he is also, unfortunately, seems to be obsessed with the fact that he has a lot of legitimate grievances and rather than shouldering it in any kind of world weary way. He's just become this like belligerent, red assed baby, just lashing out at people when it's like, yeah, dude, you know you hired your insane ex wife's brother to be your manager, Like you walked into you stepped on the brake knowing what was going to happen at that point. Like and just like a lot of this stuff where he's like he's like, wow, I may mean they missed up my record, Like yeah, it is the music industry. I don't know what do you want? What do you want? Do you want people to write only nice things about you? I've been a journalist, writer, I've been a writer for eleven years, and I stopped reading the comments long ago. You just don't read them. Just know what you're making enough money to not what is that obsession with? Good Lord?

01:40:26
Speaker 1: Well, on some level, Billy might even agree with some of these harsh assessments, because in a lot of ways, he's his own worst critic, and that's part of the reason why until very recently, he mostly stayed out of the pop songwriting game. I couldn't be as good as I wanted to be, he told CBS Sunday Morning correspondent Anthony Mason. It was driving me crazy. It was wrecking my personal life too, not being able to be satisfied, and drinking became a problem because of that. To try to drown my frustration with it, I could look at twenty five percent of what I wrote and throw it out and not miss it at all. Pretty high padding average. In the same segment, Billy talked about an interview with Neil Diamond where he said I've forgiven myself for not being Beethoven. Billy doesn't share the sentiment that's my problem. He says, I've never forgiven myself for not being Beethoven.

01:41:17
Speaker 2: Okay, Bud.

01:41:20
Speaker 1: That he claims to have never stopped writing music, has output since nineteen ninety three's River of Dreams has been famously anemic. There's a two thousand and one album of classical compositions called Fantasies and Delusions, played by Korean pianist Young Key Jew. There's a song called All My Life, which was released as a promotional single on Valentine's Day two thousand and seven. That's a gift for then wife Katie Lee. And then there's a song called Christmas in Fallujah, also released in two thousand and seven and sung by an unknown singer named Cass Dylan. I think it was written in response to veterans who appreciated what he had done for Vietnam vets by writing good morning Vietnam, good night, saigone, and so he.

01:42:04
Speaker 2: Did the same for Iraq vets. You think that helped?

01:42:08
Speaker 1: I don't know. He didn't sing it himself because he felt that he needed a young voice to impart the message, you know, as a young a young vet.

01:42:19
Speaker 2: So yeah, did that work? I will say, you know what, those two songs.

01:42:27
Speaker 1: One of them was purely designed as a gift for his then wife, and then the other one was meant to give hope to veterans.

01:42:36
Speaker 2: I would say that. I mean, maybe if you donated your publishing from it to like the VA I think he might have. I think he might have. I think he actually kaid good. Then I withdraw my snark, but yeah, that that album of classical pieces that he didn't play on, that song that he didn't sing on, and the song that he sang for his wife at the time. That's basically the sum total of Billy's artistic output in the last thirty one years. There were other odds and ends.

01:43:02
Speaker 1: There were covers on a Paul McCartney tribute album, and I think he was on one of the Tony Bennet's duet CDs.

01:43:07
Speaker 2: But that's it.

01:43:09
Speaker 1: And among the many people to give him grief about this is his one time touring partner and current friendemy rival Elton John Billy would say over the years, Elton would say why don't you make more albums?

01:43:21
Speaker 2: And I'd say, why don't you make less sickburn? Yeah yeah.

01:43:27
Speaker 1: Billy says that fear isn't the thing that's keeping him from getting back to pop songwriting. I don't feel like I have anything to prove anymore. What I do have at this point is a horror of celebrity. It's easier to write more personal stuff when you're not as well known. And once he became famous, he told The New Yorker, you can't create something that's an independent entity made out of whole cloth. They know who you're in a relationship with, what your past is. They tend to draw their own conclusions. Your image becomes more powerful than the things you create. I was seeing it begin happened when I was doing River of Dreams back in nineteen ninety three. I'd gone through the celebrity craziness with Christy's wife at the time, Christy Brinkley and the divorce, I felt like there was a proctoscope up my butt. Everybody interrogating, analyzing everything I wrote was fraught with meanings, and I said, wait a minute, I don't want to rip myself open and let everyone see everything.

01:44:20
Speaker 2: I was the longer comfortable enough. I gave you enough. Yeah, And he winks, like, how much does he make from his residency? I don't. I don't know. I don't want to know. Yeah, I mean, I get it, dude, you don't like people saying mean things about you, so you just go and play a show every month to people who would never say mean things about you. Like, fine, that's a perfectly fine way to retire. Much has been made about the fact that Billy Moore or Less Abandoned Life is an active pop star slash artist following his split from Christy Brinkley after the release of River of Dreams in nineteen ninety three. Billy has commented on this himself, saying, Christy likes to joke that the end of the marriage spelled out the end of my songwriting career. At least I think it's a joke to Joel Heads, Christy is generally portrayed as the love of his life. We are not in any position to comment on that, but there is one story that we'd like to share with you. Christy lived in Paris during the late seventies, the period when Billy's star was on the rise. She knew nothing of him or his music when they first crossed paths at the aforementioned piano bar in Saint Bart's in the early eighties. In fact, Joey's referred to him as Joe because she felt he looked like more of a Joe than a Billy or even a Bill. The only piece of his music that she knew was the whistling intro of the Stranger, a haunting piece of music that serves as a prelude to a track about the Jungian concept of the shadow personnel or the side of ourselves we keep hitting. Christy, meanwhile, only knew it because it was used by a Parisian radio station as the intro to their evening traffic report That is a hilariously tragic Billy Joel image, unaware Billy had written it for her, It became synonymous with the sound of Paris at night makes you think about what you put out in the world and who may be tuned into your frequency. But despite the romantic take, Billy was likely veering towards commercial abdication even before they're split. The last track on River of Dreams is called famous Last Words, and Joel Heads the world over have parsed its meaning for thirty one years. More than just the end of an album, It seems like a very literal sign off. These are the last words I have to say. That's why it took so long to write. There will be other words some other day. Ain't that the story of my life? These are the last words I have to say before another age goes by, with all those other songs I have to play, Ain't that the story of my life? Getting in one last bitch on record?

01:46:43
Speaker 1: Well, it's fair to say that Billy went through a bit of a rough patch in the late nineties and early two thousands, since he struggled with substance abuse, struggled to find happiness, struggled with romantic relationships, and just generally struggled. This period was vividly depicted in Chuck Klausterman's New York Times profile, which he publed expanded form and the best selling books Sex, Drugs and Cocoa Puffs, one of my favorite books, one of the books that maybe want to be a writer.

01:47:06
Speaker 2: Honestly, I love that book. Same yeah, Billy trying to work on that ever since. And I got to I got to meet him, actually signed my my my copy at one of the Barnes and Noble things in Union Square. He's very kind, good and here I am. Billy would come to loathe this profile, but I actually think it went a long way and rehabbing his reputation from PC pretentious tunsmith to torture genius, a sort of piano playing Norma Desmond of Long Island.

01:47:39
Speaker 1: Klosterman writes, whatever subject we touch on, the conversation.

01:47:43
Speaker 2: Inevitably spirals back to the same thing. Women. He says, the happiest times of my life are when.

01:47:49
Speaker 1: My relationships were going well, when I was in love with someone and someone was loving me. But in my whole life, I haven't met the person I can sustain a relationship with yet, So I'm dis content about that.

01:48:01
Speaker 2: I'm angry with myself. I have regrets.

01:48:04
Speaker 1: Our conversation continues in this vein for most of the afternoon, and after a while I find myself in the peculiar position of trying to make Billy Joel feel better. I point out that many things in his life have gone amazingly well. I remind him that he's in the rock and roll Hall of Fame. That's a cold comfort. At the end of the day, he tells me, you can't go home to the rock and roll Hall of Fame. You don't sleep with the rock and roll Hall of Fame, you don't get hugged by the rock and roll Hall of Fame, and he don't have children with the rock and roll Hall of fame. I want when everybody else wants, to love and to be loved and to have a family.

01:48:36
Speaker 2: Being in love was always the most important thing in my life.

01:48:40
Speaker 1: As Clousterman continues, this sentiment is so universal that it's a cliche.

01:48:45
Speaker 2: But that's not a criticism.

01:48:47
Speaker 1: In fact, that's probably why Joel's be able to connect with people in a way that even he doesn't completely realize. He musically amplifies mainstream depression. He never tried to invent a new way to be sad. Of course, is the paradox Joel's art is defined by his life, and his best music is his most morose. Thus he can achieve greatness only through despair. But for Joel at fifty three, at the time, that artistic transference seems to be failing. There was a time when sadness spawned genius. Now it just reminds him that he's alone. He talks like a guy who's conquered every goal he dreamed about as a teenager, only to discover that those victories have absolutely nothing to do with satisfaction.

01:49:32
Speaker 2: Who what do you think of that? Incisive? Yeah, it's an incredible piece. Yeah, I know, thankfully.

01:49:41
Speaker 1: Though, in recent years, Billy's life seems though stabilized. Following a relatively brief marriage to a woman named Katie Lee, who I believe was roughly the same age as Billy's daughter Alexa, He's now happily married to a former risk manager at Morgan Stanley named Alexis Roderick, whom he.

01:49:59
Speaker 2: Is nicknamed a rod.

01:50:03
Speaker 1: So Long Island, and it's fitting because they met at a Long Island restaurant in two thousand and nine while they were both out with their respective friends. He got her number and then called her moments later from across the restaurant asking for a ride home. She drove him back to his house, where he asked her if she wanted to hear him play.

01:50:25
Speaker 2: She said no.

01:50:27
Speaker 1: I'm sure that scored her major points with him. He played anyway, showing off a rockmaninov concerto, which is almost certainly a reference to a comical seduction scene in the Marilyn Monroe movie The Seven Year Itch. He's such a cornball, I love it. They got married in twenty fifteen and lived together in a massive Long Island estate that once belonged to Rosalind Walker, a socialite who'd been one of the models for Rosie the Riveter, which I'm sure he loves because he's a huge World War two in history. BUFFI a walk around the house and make believe I don't live here, Billy told The New Yorker. I think, Wow, this must be a cool place to live. I find out adorable. Yeah kid from a Levittown track house.

01:51:13
Speaker 2: Yeah.

01:51:15
Speaker 1: In his backyard was a tennis court that he eventually transformed into a helipad for many years. That was his point of departure for his ten year monthly Madison Square Garden residency as a helicopter picked him up in the backyard and whisked him above the harbors and neighborhoods immortalized in f Scott fitzgerald novels Door to Door.

01:51:35
Speaker 2: The journey took him sixteen minutes.

01:51:38
Speaker 1: In recent years, though, he's opted for the Long Island Railroad after some bumpy flights made him a little jumpy good move.

01:51:46
Speaker 2: Years ago, Billy quit selling the first few rows of.

01:51:48
Speaker 1: His concerts because he got sick of seeing bored looking rich people staring back at him as he played. Instead, he sends his crew into the cheap seats just before showtime the handout tickets to those they deem worth.

01:52:00
Speaker 2: I do love that. Yeah, well they.

01:52:02
Speaker 1: Usually go to young, attractive women, but I think it's a sweet gesture all the same.

01:52:06
Speaker 2: Yeah.

01:52:07
Speaker 1: The show goes on nearly always concluding with a recitation of his signature song, the one.

01:52:13
Speaker 2: That started it all, Piano Man. Of course, how could it not.

01:52:18
Speaker 1: It's like a kid, Billy told Vulture of Piano Man. Sometimes it pisses me off, but I always love it.

01:52:25
Speaker 2: I wrote the thing you know, and together, all ten thousand plus in Madison Square Garden share a drink, they call loneliness, but it's better than drinking alone. What do you think good stuff? Hmm? I really thought this was going to go the way of Margueritaville for you or an American pie. I'm glad that that uh. I Like you said, man, I have a begrudging I find his personality fascinating, fascinating even when I'm telling him, even though he as a whiney little bitch baby. But you know, what are you gonna do? Aren't we all? At the end of the day, I reckon, I can smell my own That's what. Yeah. I mean. That is the kicker to the Chuck Clauster and piece. If I recall, I'll never be able to see.

01:53:19
Speaker 1: Billy Joel as cool because all I'll ever see when I see Billy Joel is me.

01:53:30
Speaker 2: Well. On that note, folks, this has been too much information. I hope you all live a life free of seeing yourself in Billy Joel, not malex Idel. And I'm Jordan Runtog. We'll catch you next time. Too Much Information was a production of iHeartRadio. The show's executive producers are Noel Brown and Jordan Runtog.

01:53:55
Speaker 1: The show's supervising producer is Michael Alder June.

01:53:59
Speaker 2: The show was research, written, and hosted by Jordan Rundgg and Alex Heigel.

01:54:03
Speaker 1: With original music by Seth Applebaum and the Ghost Funk Orchestra.

01:54:06
Speaker 2: If you like what you heard, please subscribe and leave us a review.

01:54:09
Speaker 1: For more podcasts and iHeartRadio, visit the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to your favorite shows.