![]() It made history class much more interesting, too: “Oh, THAT’S the ‘trouble in the Suez!'” and “‘Edsel is a no-go’ is about a car!” However, Billy Joel has said that he doesn’t love the song due to its lack of a strong melody. ![]() The song was a surprise hit, and tons of kids who knew nothing about Liberace, Nasser and Roy Cohn memorized every single word. Billy Joel, who grew up in the 1950s, wanted to disprove that notion with a song that went methodically through the era, highlighting all of the crazy things that went on. The 1950s are often considered a period of peace, tranquility and blandness. The best version of the song is found on Billy’s 1981 live album, Songs in the Attic. It’s a beautiful song that Joel has often cited as one of his favorite all-time compositions. It was a period of highs and lows – or “sadness and euphoria,” as the song states. “Summer Highland Falls,” one of the standout tracks from the album, nicely sums up his emotional state at the time. ![]() “Piano Man” was three long years in the past, and his subsequent releases all stiffed. When Turnstiles hit shelves in the spring of 1976, Billy Joel was looking dangerously like a one-hit wonder. The single never rose above Number 56 in America, but it’s since become one of his most popular songs in concert. The result was “Goodnight Saigon” from his 1982 LP The Nylon Curtain. “I realized you don’t have to have lived it as long as you researched it and talked to people that were there.” He didn’t want to write an anti-war song, opting instead to talk about the experience of soldiers. “They said, ‘We’ll tell you what happened to us and you write a song about it,'” Joel recalled. I disagreed with the political reasons for that war.”Ī few years after his friends came home, he had some beers with them and they told their war stories and encouraged him to write a song. He thought about fleeing to Canada when the draft lottery came around, but he snagged a very high number and didn’t wind up getting called. They don’t pay money for you to sit there and be Billy Joel.Billy Joel did not fight in the Vietnam War. You should never lose sight of the fact that you’re there to entertain. A proud entertainer with an almost religious faith in the accessibility of popular music, Joel once reflected on his job as such, to Rolling Stone: “We go into the studio, the song gets mixed and it’s eventually heard through tiny car-radio speakers. Like his friend Bruce Springsteen, Joel has an air of the everyman about him, the megastar somehow intimately in touch with the aspirations and disappointments of ordinary people. (Having returned to Long Island in the mid-'70s, Joel commuted by helicopter.) In the 1990s, Joel shifted his energy to touring, remaining a perennial blockbuster well into the 2010s, performing more than 100 shows at Madison Square Garden, many of them sold out. Raised in the planned suburb of Levittown, Long Island (a model for the postwar building boom), Joel spent his early career in Los Angeles, working briefly as the singer in a bar on Wilshire Boulevard-an experience commemorated in his signature song, “Piano Man.” He went on to become one of the most successful artists in pop, bridging reflective singer-songwriter material (1982’s The Nylon Curtain) with sock-hop nostalgia like “The Longest Time” and “It’s Still Rock and Roll to Me” for a theatrical, particularly American sound whose resonances can be heard not only in piano balladeers, but in pop omnivores like Bruno Mars and Lady Gaga. Broad, earnest, and unreservedly sentimental, Billy Joel remains the quintessential showman of pop music.
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