Billy Joel - Piano Man

Released - November 1973

Genre - Rock

Producer - Michael Stewart

Selected Personnel - Billy Joel (Vocals/Piano/Keyboards/Harmonica); Larry Carlton (Guitar); Eric Weissberg (Banjo); Wilton Felder (Bass/Keyboards); Emory Gordy, Jr (Bass); Michael Omartian (Accordion); Dean Parks (Guitar); Ron Tutt (Drums)

Standout Track - Piano Man

Billy Joel's breakthrough second album is almost certainly the deserved winner of the dubious accolade of "Most Incongruously Terrifying Album Cover Ever." It's a shame, as this is an album with plenty of great music to recommend it, but that terrifying, soft-focus, dead-eyed portrait with its lank hair will always be the most stand-out, memorable thing about this album. It might be understandable if the horror movie menace of that shot were mirrored anywhere on the album's actual content, but given that this is an album of upbeat, jaunty country rock, it's an astoundingly weird choice of artwork. Anyway, when one gets over the unsettling elephant in the room of Joel's weird face, this is an early classic from a man who would go on to be one of the finest singer-songwriters of the 70s, a sort of American counterpart to Britain's Elton John, similarly making hugely well-crafted piano-based rock that might not have pushed many musical boundaries but more than delivered in its undeniable sense of innate musicality and catchiness. I've been a big fan of Billy Joel since I was about twelve or thirteen, although as is so often the case with artists I've known about for a long time, my full interest in the whole scope of his career was a more recent thing. My brother sang a rendition of Joel's beautiful 80s ballad "And So It Goes" in our school's House Music Festival one year and it was a song that had a huge impact on me and drove me to discover something called Billy Joel Greatest Hits Volume Three, the only Billy Joel record I could find among my stepdad's collection. Essentially a compendium of Joel's later hits from the 80s, they became a part of the soundtrack to my teens and I devoured them, somehow never being curious enough to try and find out what Volumes One and Two might have contained. So it was to my surprise a couple of years ago when my friends Emily and Paul recommended an album called The Stranger to me as his finest work, considering the fact that none of its songs were on the greatest hits collection I was familiar with. As any Billy Joel fan will be able to assume, I was blown away by that album and am now well aware that it represents the pinnacle of his career, and was quickly spurred into finding more of his work. Before long I found myself listening to Piano Man, which would become the album to really launch his career due to the success of its title track and the wonderful "Captain Jack."

First of all, Piano Man is nothing compared to The Stranger and anybody familiar with that album hoping for something similar will be disappointed, particularly by the album's second half, which is mostly fairly flat. Not only is the quality not as good, it's a very stylistically different album. Whereas that later classic would be frequently mining a jazzier aesthetic, the focus here is more on country and folk music, albeit all distilled via Joel's inherently jazzy piano acrobatics. Joel himself had already released one album at this point, entitled Cold Spring Harbor, which had failed to draw much critical notice or commercial success. He responded by doing what he could to evade the stifling terms of his recording contract and to set himself up anew with Colombia Records so that he could effectively start from scratch (the result of this evasive action was many years of legal wrangling between the two labels, which wouldn't be resolved until much later in the 70s). I've actually never got round to listening to Cold Spring Harbor, but Piano Man, despite its shortcomings, showcases an undeniable talent obviously destined for great things. While Joel would later experiment more with full band arrangements, the focus here is rightly kept tightly on Joel himself, his voice and piano. Joel's voice is again reminiscent of Elton John's in the fact that it's not particularly unusual or remarkable, but is assured and confident and pleasant enough for the listener to easily overlook the fact that there such voices were hardly difficult to find on the contemporary music scene. I've always loved voices that bleed with character, from the bluesy whine of Randy Newman to the nasal twang of David Bowie or the raspy growl of Tom Waits, but sometimes when a voice is as strident and clear as Billy Joel's it doesn't rob the music of any character as some other overly "perfect" voices can.

As I mentioned earlier, it's a terribly top-heavy album, with its first side consisting of some of Joel's very best early songs. "Travellin' Prayer" is a playful country-infected classic, propelled by the galloping percussion and Joel's frenetic vocal performance as he prays for the loved one he's travelling home to see to be kept safe. Like Newman, Joel has a knack for writing in character and for imbuing his songs with a sense of story that goes beyond the typical confessional singer-songwriter approach - whether it's the sense of a road-weary but homeward bound traveller on that opening track or the world-weary wastrel of "Captain Jack," these songs feel like snapshots of a particular array of desert characters. Perhaps the greatest snapshot of all is the timeless "Piano Man," perhaps Joel's signature song even to this day. Written as a heartfelt tribute to the years he spent as the piano player in a bar to pay his way, its infectiously joyous melody and harmonica riff belies the sense of unease in its portrayals of lives lived through desperation or routine. Rather touchingly, the song even finds time to include a brief sketch of a woman who would come to be Joel's first wife, Elizabeth, who is the "waitress practising politics." It might be difficult for a song to follow such an upbeat classic, but "Ain't No Crime" does an admirable job, sounding like one of the bluesier cuts from Elton John's Tumbleweed Connection, and then follows "You're My Home," one of the most simple and affecting love songs Joel ever penned, and also a rare song for him in that it's built around a simple acoustic guitar riff rather than piano. It's a beautifully understated and heartfelt song, but from that point onwards the album struggles to keep up its momentum.

"The Ballad Of Billy The Kid" is a Western epic (again featuring echoes of Elton John in its musical and thematic similarities to Madman Across The Water's "Indian Sunset,") that feels suitably dramatic and cinematic, but after that is a series of fairly by-the-numbers country rock songs that don't do much to get the pulse racing or to tug at the heartstrings. Thankfully, just as a sense of fatigue begins to set in, things are rounded off in spectacular fashion by the beautiful "Captain Jack," another of Joel's early masterpieces. It sketches in lurid detail the lifestyle of a young teenager whose lack of ambition or passion has driven him to a meaningless lifestyle of drug-dealing and masturbation, and its slow, melancholic tune oozes with desperation and pity. The vaguely triumphant mood of the chorus is all the more tragic in its biting irony, as the only semblance of any excitement or hope in this teenager's life is the promise of more drugs from the dealer "Captain Jack." It's a wonderfully poignant and well-crafted epic, and perhaps Joel's most acute and incisive character sketches.

That masterful song does a lot to erase the feelings of vague boredom that begin to set in prior to it, but there's no denying that Piano Man is an album with drawbacks and plenty of filler. No matter for Joel, as a radio broadcast of a live performance of "Captain Jack" would soon see a huge amount of critical notice around Joel slowly propelling him towards the solid gold greatness he would achieve later in the decade. For the time being, he had more than proven himself as an enviable talent to watch out for, and it would only be a few years before he truly capitalised on the obvious potential showcased on this album. Of course, there would be misfires before then - he would make the fairly disappointing Streetlife Serenade before delivering anything else truly essential - but one can't deny listening to Piano Man that, filler aside, this was somebody who would go on to make some truly remarkable music.

Track Listing:

All songs written by Billy Joel.

1. Travellin' Prayer

2. Piano Man

3. Ain't No Crime

4. You're My Home

5. The Ballad Of Billy The Kid

6. Worse Comes To Worst

7. Stop In Nevada

8. If I Only Had The Words (To Tell You)

9. Somewhere Along The Line

10. Captain Jack