FEATURE:
If I Only Had the Words (To Tell You)
Billy Joel’s Piano Man at Fifty
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ONE of Billy Joel’s…
IN THIS PHOTO: Billy Joel in 1973/PHOTO CREDIT: Don Hunstein/CBS Records
most famous and well-known studio albums, Piano Man turns fifty on 9th November. The second album from the master, Piano Man arose from legal difficulties with Joel's former label, Family Productions, and ultimately became his first breakthrough album. Even though it is a minor classic, Piano Man peaked outside of the top twenty on the US Billboard 200. The title track is iconic. I will spotlight that soon. I want to bring in some features/interviews regarding this album. Piano Man was certified gold by the RIAA in 1975. I will start with a feature from Houston Press. They argued that it is the best song of all time. Quite a big claim - though it is a signature song from Billy Joel! In fact, he is nicknamed ‘ The Piano Man’. You cannot deny the quality and legacy of this remarkable song (that was released as a single on 2nd November, 1973):
“The subject of Billy Joel’s breakthrough hit and signature song, and the question of whether it is, in fact, the greatest song ever written, was broached recently by a friend on Facebook. Within minutes of his fun-spirited post (he later admitted he was drunk when he wrote it), he was bombarded with stinging rebukes like “Every track on The Stranger is better” and less diplomatic fare like, “Forever ignorant” and “You fart queen.”
Because I am a good friend with a reasonable command of words and a soft spot for underdogs, I chimed in support of this incredibly subjective notion. It was Friday morning and I was bored at work, so my few paragraphs for the affirmative helped kill an hour before lunchtime. As I finished going Lincoln to the negatives’ Douglas, a weird thing happened: I’d convinced myself that Billy Joel’s “Piano Man,” recorded 35 years ago this fall, is better than any Beatles song, the entirety of Motown’s musical output, whatever 50 million Elvis fans considered right and all the collected works of the classical masters. It is the greatest song ever written.
I realize this sounds absurd. “Piano Man” is not even my favorite Billy Joel song. Nor is it his. Joel appeared on Stephen Colbert’s late night show once and Colbert asked him for his top five Billy Joel songs. “Piano Man” was noticeably absent. (It should be noted that “favorite” and “greatest” are two different adjectives for two different things. Did da Vinci consider the "Mona Lisa" his favorite work? Did James Joyce believe Ulysses was his greatest masterpiece? Let’s book them on Colbert to find out).
I also admit I am laughably biased. I’m an avowed Billy Joel fan. I own every album on vinyl, cassette tape and CD. I know all of the lyrics, even to core-of-the-earth deep cuts like “The Great Suburban Showdown” and “Last of the Big Time Spenders.” I’m convinced Joel wrote “Scenes From an Italian Restaurant” for me and three old friends. I have yellowed clippings from his past Houston shows in a closet upstairs. I’ve seen him live eight times since 1982, seven times with my wife by my side singing along. When he last came to Houston in November 2015, the editors at Houston Press indulged me in a week’s worth of articles about the man, his music and its impact on my own life. He is my favorite musical artist, besides my own kids, who are both musicians, as is his daughter, Alexa Ray. When Joel croaks, if he does ahead of me, I'll be inconsolable. Just leave me to my copy of Songs in the Attic. After a few spins of “I’ve Loved These Days” my broken heart will begin mending.
I know you probably disagree with me. Quoting Billy Joel himself, “You may be right; I may be crazy.” But I truly feel I can set aside my prejudicial leanings and make an objective case. “Piano Man” is the greatest song ever written”.
There are some features worth bringing in, as they give us different aspects to the Piano Man album. As it is fifty on 9th November, many of Billy Joel’s fans will be playing it through anew. It holds a special place in many people’s hearts Maybe not his most successful and loved albums, Piano Man is definitely among his best. The Vinyl District had their say in a feature from 2016:
“Me, I hear the alienation but not the condescension; on “Piano Man” Joel doesn’t seem to be looking down on the customers in that cocktail lounge so much as feeling empathy for them, and the same goes for the reefer-smoking kid who seeks refuge on his “special island” in “Captain Jack.” We all need something to get us through this world, Joel seems to be saying, and while that’s sad, it’s just the way things are.
Besides, Piano Man is hardly the album to sit around and contemplate your navel to. In fact it’s full of fast numbers, like the chug-a-lugging “Travelin’ Prayer,” which is powered by the banjo of Eric Weissberg and the violin of Billy Armstrong, and the bona fide funky “Ain’t No Crime,” on which Joel once again tells us that getting fucked up may be the only way to survive in this hellhole of a world of ours. And on the similarly funky and calypso-flavored “Worse Comes to Worst” Joel sings, “I’ll get along/I don’t know how,” which is a despairing sentiment if I’ve ever heard one, and really isn’t so far away from Samuel Beckett’s “I can’t go on. I’ll go on.” As for “Somewhere Along the Line” it sounds like an Elton John song, and on it Joel, sitting in a café in Paris sings, “But in the morning there’ll be hell to pay/Somewhere along the line.” There’s no free lunch on this LP, and that’s one of the things I like most about it.
The best tracks on Piano Man are “The Ballad of Billy the Kid,” “Captain Jack,” and the title cut. “The Ballad of Billy the Kid” is a romanticized recounting of the career of the legendary killer with an interesting twist at the end; after Billy the Kid’s hanging Joel tosses in a final ironic verse in which he cuts to the present day, and sings, “From the town known as Oyster Bay, Long Island/Rode a boy with a six-pack in his hand/And his daring life of crime/Made him a legend in his time/East and West of the Rio Grande.” In the boy’s mind, perhaps. As for “Captain Jack,” it boasts a lovely melody and tells the story of a po-faced young man from “a one-horse town” who goes to Greenwich Village in his “New England clothes” to score some weed. Because, sings Joel, “Captain Jack will get you by tonight/Just a little push and you’ll be smiling.” The chorus soars, the kid plays his albums and masturbates, and he can’t understand what went wrong and why his world is so dead. But in the end it doesn’t really matter. Because here comes Captain Jack to get him high tonight, and take him to his special island.
As for “Piano Man,” I don’t know what to say about it that hasn’t already been said. It’s a great story song, with Joel going from lost soul to lost soul in his cocktail lounge of the living dead; this one is in the Navy and “probably will be for life,” this other one is a “real estate novelist,” whatever the fuck that is, and next to Billy at his piano sits an old man “making love to his tonic and gin.” All of them are, in Joel’s words, “sharing a drink they call loneliness/But it’s better than drinking alone.” Like wounded animals they come to that bar, to lick their wounds and forget about their troubles, but it remains, for all that, a kind of Hell in miniature, despite the piano that “sounds like a carnival.” And finally the song’s narrator acknowledges that he’s no different from anyone else in that lounge, and wow. Played to death or not, great song.
It is interesting reading constructive interpretations of Piano Man. There are some classic moments for sure, although maybe one or two songs that have weaker elements. Brutally Honest Rock Album Reviews, true to their name, highlighted the highs and lows of Billy Joel’s second studio album. One that ranks alongside the best and most important of 1973:
“It’s been nice to listen to the album without dropouts all over the place where my dad recorded over swear words, I’m the kind of music lover who gets a little uptight when something interrupts the listening experience (surface noise on vinyl drives me right up the wall), so hearing the album again has been a whole new experience for me. Gotta say, though, that album cover still creeps me out. I don’t know what Billy was going for with that, but he landed on “scary looking drug addict”. Would you let your daughter date a guy who looked like that? Not me man. I think its one of the creepiest album covers ever that isn’t Blind Faith. I mean really, it’s kind of disturbing, it’s what you’d get if Charles Manson shaved his beard and tried to recreate the album cover of With the Beatles. No wonder the album wasn’t a hit.
One thing that strikes me about the album – other than the somewhat disturbing cover – is that considering this is Billy Joel, how many of the songs aren’t built around piano parts. “Piano Man” is, obviously, and “If I Only Had the Words” is, and the piano drives “The Ballad of Billy the Kid”, and several others. But album opener, “Travelin’ Prayer”, begins with just drums. Piano comes for a minute not long after, but is conspicuously absent from the rest of the song other than a fantastic piano solo. Around the second verse a banjo kicks in, and some hoe-down fiddle playin’ mosies along after a bit – buyers could hardly be blamed if they thought Billy was aiming for the “Hee Haw” crowd. Thing is, I like the song – it’s catchy, it’s got a great melody, and Joel sings with a lot of passion. But considering it was the world’s introduction to Billy Joel albums (the misfire that was Cold Spring Harbor hardly counts in that no one ever bought it, and Attila sure as hell doesn’t count), it’s a little weird. So Billy Joel introduces himself to the world of pop music at a hoe-down, probably not the opening number I would have gone with. “You’re My Home” is another song that isn’t really built around a piano part, and I really like that one. It’s much more standard pop than “Travelin’ Prayer”, with a calm vibe and a catchy melody. That line ”you’re my castle, you’re my cabin, and my instant Pleasuredome” icks me out a little bit, I’m not sure how most women would feel about being called a Pleasuredome, but hey, its better than on “Captain Jack” where he talks about being his own Pleasuredome. Anyway, I kind of see these non-piano songs as Billy’s attempt to make it clear he isn’t just another Elton John – yes, piano is his thing, but it’s like he wants to emphasize that there is more to the Billy Joel package than just that.
Although of course, he was always going to be known as a “Piano Man”, and if that isn’t the best song he ever wrote, it’s pretty damn close (Bible swear word, see?). Joel made some interesting choices on the arrangement for this one – he could have had a whole full-on orchestra plus the kitchen sink like he did on “The Ballad of Billy the Kid”, but this is mostly just piano, harmonica, and accordion backed by drums and bass. And I think it was a wise decision – put much more on the song and the piano would have been drowned out, and the piano really needs to be the star of the show on the song. I find the arrangement perfectly suited to the song – good call there Billy. Given the relatively sparse arrangement, he manages a rousing climax in the final verse, its actually remarkable how much mileage he is able to get out of just a few instruments and a powerful, passionate vocal. The song itself, of course, is wonderful, a true classic. Love the melody, the piano solo is fantastic, the story of lonely souls looking to escape the solitude of their existence for a couple of hours in a piano bar is skillfully told – all in all it’s a real triumph. It’s got those cool internal rhymes (“…talking to Davy who’s still in the Navy”, “…quick with a joke or to light up your smoke”). Oddly enough, people don’t realize it wasn’t a huge hit – it topped out at 25 on the Billboard Hot 100 back in 1973, hardly indicative of the stadium filling machine Billy Joel’s career would one day become, where not one of the tens of thousands of fans in attendance would go home happy without hearing “Piano Man”.
I consider “If I Only Had the Words (To Tell You)” the other standout on the album – great piano part, beautiful melody, pretty good lyrics – Joel makes the excellent point that writing a great love song isn’t so easy “when the simple lines have all been taken/And the radio repeats them every day”. Great bridge on this one too – not every songwriter gets the way a bridge can take a song in an exciting new direction for a few seconds, but Joel did it with this one. Excellent ballad.
“Stop in Nevada” is pretty good too, although I’m a little wary of that “And though he never tried to make her/She often thought it would be nice” line, that’s a little iffy. Otherwise, this song cooks, and it’s another song with some great instrumentation along with Joel’s always exceptional playing. When I hear the orchestrations on this song and “The Ballad of Billy the Kid”, it makes me think Columbia must have believed in Billy Joel enough to put a little money into the record. Too bad they probably didn’t make that money back until The Stranger (and then Billy Joel suddenly turned into a very good investment indeed).
There’s a surprisingly low filler quotient, although there is some filler. For some reason “Ain’t No Crime” was one of the songs released as a single from the album, but I have no idea why, to my ears it’s filler. That piano lick that opens the song gets run into the ground, the chorus isn’t all that catchy, it just doesn’t have much going for it. “Worse Comes to Worst” isn’t a great song – everything about it is kind of awkward, the instruments, the melody, Joel’s weird faux-reggae singing. Nothing about the song works – except that cool bridge, the ”lightning and thunder” section, that’s actually pretty cool. And Billy’s piano solo in the middle, that’s pretty great. But the rest of the song falls pretty flat, it doesn’t really have any momentum, there’s no groove, its like the song is swimming upstream against a swift current – filler. But then no Billy Joel album that isn’t a greatest hits album is going to be completely filler free, and this album actually comes fairly close.
Personally I love Piano Man, it’s my favorite Billy Joel album except maybe An Innocent Man, and I like it way better than The Stranger, which for some odd reason became the best selling album of all time up to that point (all I can say is hey, it was 1977, a lot of things didn’t make a lot of sense that year). In a rational world, Piano Man would have outsold The Stranger several times over. But we don’t live in a rational world, now, do we?”.
On 7th November, the wonderful Piano Man turns fifty. It is an album well worth getting on vinyl. I really like it! I wanted to mark its fiftieth anniversary, as it is seen by many as the true debut of a legendary artist. Billy Joel is still performing to this day. I wonder how he sees Piano Man. With its genius title track, it definitely made him more of a household name. He would follow up Piano Man with 1974’s underrated Streetlife Serenade. I guess his first critical and commercial peak was his fourth studio album, 1976’s Turnstiles. Still, Piano Man is a brilliant album that warrants salutes ahead of its fiftieth anniversary. Maybe it did not connect with all critics, yet I feel that Piano Man is a…
TERRIFIC release.