Everybody wants to be Mick Jagger.
The Rolling Stones frontman is a true cultural icon, and he has been for the past 60 years; his songwriting laid the groundwork for virtually every future rock musician, his act continues to resonate with stadiums of people around the globe today, and he encapsulates the feeling of sex, drugs, and rock and roll perhaps better than anybody else.
There is nobody else quite like Jagger, but that hasn’t stopped legions of artists from attempting to emulate his unique power. Even somebody as successful as Billy Joel, who is already iconic in his own right, cannot resist the allure of the frontman.
Joel owes a lot of his musical inspiration to The Rolling Stones, finding inspiration in the mid-1960s during the British invasion period. In fact, his teenage outfit, The Echoes, regularly performed covers of those invasion tracks, including the early work of The Stones in their repertoire. By the mid-to-late 1970s, however, Joel had fostered such an all-encompassing reputation that he was able to rub shoulders with figures like Mick Jagger, which must have been a quite odd full-circle moment for the songwriter.
One of the reasons why Billy Joel has been afforded such an enduring career within the music industry is that he can seemingly find inspiration in virtually any situation. It is no surprise, therefore, that his encounters with Mick Jagger produced a song or two, even if The Rolling Stones frontman was blissfully unaware.
That is just what happened in the late 1970s, when Joel met up for a dinner with Jagger and his then-wife Bianca Jagger. It was in 1970 that the actor met Jagger for the first time, after a Stones gig in France, and the pair were married the following year, with Bianca pregnant at the time. Being married to a rockstar is rarely a harmonious affair, and the pair certainly experienced their fair share of difficulties, which Billy Joel got a glimpse into during his dinner with the couple.
As the songwriter recalled to Howard Stern, “I went out to dinner with Mick Jagger, and he was with Bianca at the time, he was married to her, and he was writing a song, ‘Working so hard, to keep you in the luxury,’ and she was putting on the ritz a little bit.”
He continued, “I think he was kind of bugged with the whole bit.” For anybody else, this experience might just have been written off as an awkward dinner, but Joel used it as the basis of a song, ‘Big Shot’.
Released in January 1979, by which time Mick and Bianca Jagger had divorced, following the singer’s extramarital affair with Jerry Hall, ‘Big Shot’ became one of Joel’s most beloved hits. Within the song, Joel’s protagonist is essentially berating a woman for her drunken antics the night before. As it turns out, Joel was attempting to emulate Mick Jagger at the time.
“I was thinking of him singing that to Bianca Jagger,” he revealed.
Even Joel’s performance on the song is very Jagger-esque when you revisit the track. Complete with the Rolling Stones frontman’s signature sneering vocals, ‘Big Shot’ gave Joel a chance to revisit his early days covering The Rolling Stones, but in a pretty bizarre new context.
Still, the songwriter never revealed this inspiration to Jagger himself, but then having a song about his ex-wife trend towards the top of the US charts while dealing with a divorce might have been a bit of a kick in the teeth for the singer.