Trivia / Billy Joel

• Approval of God: Joel cites Ronnie Spector as the inspiration for "Say Goodbye to Hollywood". Spector recorded a cover with The E. Street Band a year later and continued to perform it live for the rest of her career.
• Breakaway Pop Hit: "Why Should I Worry" from Oliver & Company. Bonus points because he didn't write it. (Dan Hartman and Charlie Midnight did. Didn't chart, though.)
• Breakthrough Hit:
  • "Piano Man", which is also one of his best-known songs. In terms of Hot 100 performance, "Just The Way You Are" was his first top 10 hit.
  • The song that really got him noticed was actually "Captain Jack", which he played live at a special concert for winners of a competition held by a Philadelphia radio station in 1972, before he'd officially recorded it. The radio station kept the recording of the live performance on rotation for a year and a half and it received massive attention, including from Columbia Records, which eventually led to his signing and the release of the Piano Man LP.
• Breakup Breakout: From a '60s rock group called The Hassles. The biggest thing anyone else in that group did was the song "Black Betty". Also not to mention Attila (and Joel certainly would like you not to mention it).
• Cowboy BeBop at His Computer: The Rolling Stone Album Guide write-up on Streetlife Serenade makes you wonder just how closely the author was listening to the album in question. "The Mexican Connection" is cited as an example of a "narrative vignette that strains too hard to be clever" — the song in question is an instrumental which can in no way be considered a narrative vignette. It also cites the "rollicking, jazzy piano" on "Last of the Big Time Spenders"; there is a piano on that song, but the song is a slow ballad with nothing rollicking or jazzy about it. Perhaps the author was thinking of "Root Beer Rag"?
• Creator Backlash:
  • Joel got sick of "Piano Man" for a time and refused to sing it in concert (though he likes the songs's lyrics, he finds the music somewhat repetitive). He got over it, though the audience tends to save him the trouble of singing it when he plays it nowadays. And reportedly, he's not any too fond of "Just the Way You Are", either, because it's a love song to someone he ended up divorcing; he definitely prefers that hit's B-side "Vienna", not only a personal favorite but also a fan favorite and nowadays one of his most popular songs.
  • He doesn't necessarily hate "We Didn't Start The Fire", but he does consider it a "novelty song" and technically not one of his best melodies. He's also claimed it's one of the more difficult songs for him to perform, as he feels if he makes one mistake singing the lyrics, "the whole thing falls apart".
  • He's also admitted that he's not all that fond of "Tell Her About It", saying that it was an attempt to do a song In the Style of The Supremes, but the finished product didn't really work the way he'd wanted it to.
  • He seems embarrassed by the Glass Houses album track, "C'Était Toi (You Were the One)", at least due to his poor use of Gratuitous French lyrics through the song. He often relates a story of his performance of the song in France to a puzzled audience as a major reason he no longer tackled foreign languages in song or performs the song any longer.
  • In a 2019 interview on the occasion of his 70th birthday he admitted he'd gone off "Captain Jack" and didn't like playing it any more, saying "He didn’t age well. Captain Jack’s been demoted to Private Jack. In the verses, there’s only two chords, and it goes on and on, and it’s kind of a dreary song if you think of the lyrics. The kid is sitting home jerkin’ off. His father's dead in the swimming pool. He lives this dull suburban existence until he gets high. One of the last times I was singing the song, I said, “This is really depressing.” The only relief you get is when the chorus kicks in. When I'm doing the song, I feel kinda dreary and I don't like doing the song anymore, although we'll probably do it again."
  • Before launching his solo career, Joel was part of a hard rock duo called Attila. They released exactly one album, Attila, which was critically savaged and which Joel to this day is thoroughly embarrassed by.
  • At least on a technical note, Cold Spring Harbor, his debut, counts too. Not so much due to the material, but to the mastering, which was accidentally done at too high a speed. Even with the remastered/corrected version currently out, he feels it still sounds weird to him.
• Creator-Preferred Adaptation: He has said that he finds Garth Brooks' cover of "Shameless" superior to his own.
• Creator Recovery: Billy Joel's very upbeat and poppy An Innocent Man, a tribute to Joel's musical influences from The '60s, followed the cynical, sociopolitically charged The Nylon Curtain. While The Nylon Curtain was recorded during Billy's divorce from his first wife, An Innocent Man was a product of then-single Billy enjoying life as a bachelor and dating a number of supermodels, most notably his future second wife Christie Brinkley.
• Creator's Oddball: "Root Beer Rag" from Streetlife Serenade (and later the B-Side to "Big Shot"), a jaunty, somewhat novelty-ish ragtime/honky-tonk piano instrumental that doesn't really sound like anything else in his catalog. Despite that, it's long been a fan favorite and has popped up in various odd places in pop culture (and if you didn't already know it, you'd never guess in a million years that it's a Billy Joel song).
• Executive Meddling: Referenced in several songs. The lyrics from "The Entertainer", for example, refers to executive meddling which required him to reduce the length of "Piano Man":
  It took me years to write it
  They were the best years of my life.
  It was a beautiful song but it ran too long,
  If you're gonna have a hit then you gotta make it fit
  So they cut it down to 3:05
• Magnum Opus Dissonance: Though The Stranger is often considered as his masterpiece, Billy has often claimed his favorite album, and the one he is most proud of, aside from Fantasies And Delusions is The Nylon Curtain.
• Production Posse: Since the late 1970s, many of Joel's bandmates from his touring band have performed on his studio albums, including drummer Liberty DeVitto, bassist Doug Stegmeyer, as well as guitarists Russell Javors and David Brown.
• Rarely Performed Song: "You're Only Human (Second Wind) counts as this. Released in 1985 as a single from Joel's compilation album "Greatest Hits - Volume I & Volume II" in 1985. Charting at #9 on the Billboard Charts when it was originally released, the upbeat synth driven song (which itself is a bit of a departure from the piano driven style Joel is known for) heavily contrasts the lyrics, which encourages those struggling with depression not to resort to suicide. Due to Joel feeling that the subject matter of the song is too (understandably) depressing, he did not perform the song in concert once, between 1986 & 2016, performing it then, and only then as a dedication to the people of Orlando (following a nightclub shooting that had recently occurred.) Also appearing in the music video for "You're Only Human", is a young Adam Savage (of Mythbusters fame), playing an extra/friend of the video's protagonist (keep an eye out for the red haired kid with thick glasses - that's Adam!)
• Throw It In!: There's a brief studder and chuckle during a verse in "You're Only Human (Second Wind)". Christie Brinkley and Paul Simon convinced him to keep it in, as it accentuated the song's message of recognizing and accepting personal fallibility.
• What Could Have Been:
  • According to Joel's account, he first wrote "Only The Good Die Young" as a Reggae song. When he brought it into the studio and first played it, his drummer Liberty DeVitto threw his sticks at him, yelled "I fucking hate reggae!" and said "the closest you ever got to Jamaica is when you change trains in Queens!". DeVitto then demanded that the song be changed to a shuffle beat instead of a reggae beat, resulting in the version we know today. Joel also mentions that initially the single stiffed on the charts, and only began selling tons of copies after it was banned for being "anti-Catholic", and claims that he wrote a letter to the Archbishop of St. Louis saying "Thank you very much, please ban my next album as well."
  • Unsuccessful attempts to record Turnstiles would have seen Billy produced by Beatles producer George Martin, while at another point Elton John's classic band (Davey Johnstone, Dee Murray, Nigel Olsson) would have been his studio backing band as his label wanted Billy to have more of an Elton-like sound. Joel rebelled, moving from Los Angeles to New York City, producing the album himself and using his touring band.
  • "You're Only Human (Second Wind)" was supposed to be more melancholy, as he had written it after a bout of depression during which he contemplated suicide. He decided to make the music more upbeat.
• Writer Revolt: "The Entertainer", written in protest of "Piano Man" being edited from 5:38 to 3:05 by his record company for single release.

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