Self-indulgent excesses, crowd testing creative detours, or a setlist comprised of B-sides and lesser-known numbers is not how New York songsmith Billy Joel rolls.
While dabbling in drab psychedelia early in his career as one half of Attila, the ‘Piano Man’ always grounded his solo career with an unwavering appreciation for his fans and a reverence for pop appeal.
From his 1970s easy listening balladry to prickly rock efforts of the early 1980s, and his bona fide pop star chapter wrought from An Innocent Man’s ‘Uptown Girl’ global smash, Joel’s songwriting pen always seems to be guided by a respect for mainstream attention.
It’s this quality that makes Joel’s work stand up. One need not be a huge fan to detect an authenticity to his litany of records, an admiration for a master whileling away at their craft washes over even the most committed naysayer when observing ‘Just the Way You Are’ or ‘She’s Always a Woman’ from afar.
Aside from his 2001 classical album Fantasies & Delusions, Joel remained an adult-contemporary pop monster who never seemed to budge from the charts, scoring massive hits across the years till his last album in 1993, River of Dreams, which shot to the top of the Billboard 200.
Yet, Joel’s still a touring machine. Regularly playing shows right up till 202’4’s Two Icons series with Stevie Nicks, as well as the Face to Face sets with Elton John beginning in the 1990s and last played in 2010, he is well connected to the showman in his artistry. Such live gigs and their pleasingly curated setlists are all born from an astute sympathy with the average concert goer battling ticket prices, rowdy crowds, potential hectic travel, and often dodgy sound blaring out a second-rate PA system. It’s also about not leaving his fans feeling short-changed.
“I went to see Led Zeppelin once, who I loved, and they didn’t do one song that I knew,” Joel furiously recollected to Boston Herald journalist Larry Katz in 1998. “They did this long blues jam. I was really pissed off. I swore if I ever got to a point where I had a repertoire, I wouldn’t do that to people. So part of the show consists of doing things people are familiar with.”
It’s hard to imagine Led Zeppelin honestly playing an entire show without performing some of their signature material, but the hard rock icons were known for lengthy jams that took up a considerable part of their set. Whether showboating or shaking off some much-needed loose experimentation, one wonders how engaged the audiences were, tuning out of Jimmy Page’s frenzied noodling and hoping ‘Stairway to Heaven’ gets dropped at some point. These jams would sometimes serve as extended versions of massive hits, ‘Dazed and Confused’ and ‘Whole Lotta Love’ stretched out as much as 20 minutes, for better or worse.
“This is show biz,” Joel furthered, “A certain aspect of it should be entertainment”. Caring little for rockist pretensions and the egos that dominated the 1970s classic rock age, the artist leaned into his role as entertainer without ever losing the respect of his longstanding fanbase, enamoured with his tales of suburban America and the human condition while also permitting the old ‘Piano Man’ a little razzle-dazzle for good measure.