Before Billy Joel was known as the Piano Man, he was singing an entirely different tune.
The musician, who celebrates his 70th birthday on Thursday, has gone on to win six Grammys throughout his legendary career, bringing joy to millions with classics like “Just the Way You Are,” “She’s Always a Woman,” and “Scenes from an Italian Restaurant.” But fans of his later work might be surprised to know that, early on in his career, Joel released a heavy metal album.
Seriously.
In the mid-’60s, Joel and drummer Jon Small played together in a Long Island-based band called the Hassles. By the end of the decade, as groups like Black Sabbath, Led Zeppelin and Iron Butterfly became popular, the pair decided to form a duo and pursue a harder kind of sound.
“We wanted to be a heavy band and we decided we were going to get heavy…somehow,” Joel told biographer Fred Schruers in 2014. They hooked Joel’s electric organ to a massive guitar amplifier cabinets to create a terrifyingly huge shriek.
“We were going to destroy the world with amplification,” Joel told Dan Neer in 1985. “We had titles like ‘Godzilla,’ ‘March of the Huns,’ ‘Brain Invasion.’ A lot of people think [I] just came out of the piano bar.”
https://www.youtube.com/embed/L7s8PHnCTGI
The results netted them a $50,000 advance with Epic Records. When it came time to name the project, Joel and Small turned to a particularly brutal figure from history: Attila.
“If you’re going to assault the rock world and crush it under ten Marshall amps, wouldn’t Attila the Hun, who plundered Italy and Gaul and slaughtered quite a few innocents along the way, work as a role model?” Joel later said. “I was 19, and at that age, if you’re loving your heavy metal, it’s all about thrash, kill, metal, slash, burn, pillage, repeat.”
Taking that idea quite literally, Joel and Small shot their album cover in a meat locker wearing fur-and-breastplate barbarian getups while surrounded by slabs of beef.
Issued in July 1970, their-self titled debut would prove to be their only release. Joel himself doesn’t recall the music fondly, later dubbing it “psychedelic bulls—” and “a colossal failure.” During an interview with Alec Baldwin for NPR in 2012, Joel said that “people went fleeing from the place” when they performed gigs.
“We were so loud,” he said. “You could see blood coming out of people’s ears. It was just horrible. Thank God it didn’t happen because I would’ve screamed myself right out of the business.”
Soon, Joel decided to take a different approach to music. “I decided I no longer want[ed] to be a rock and roll star,” he said. “I got that out of my system. I was about 19 or 20. I want to write songs now.”
Today Joel is married to his fourth wife Alexis Roderick, with whom he shares daughters Della Rose, 3, and Remy Anne, 1. Joel also has a daughter Alexa Ray, 33, from his previous relationship to ex-wife Christie Brinkley.
In celebration of his 70th birthday, Joel will play to a sold-out crowd at New York City’s Madison Square Garden on Thursday night.
“On the one hand, I’m happy to be alive,” Joel recently told Rolling Stone of reaching the milestone. “On the other hand, I don’t know how much of a party I deserve just for making it to 70. I mean, it’s a work night — you can’t have birthday cake, you can’t do any of that stuff.”
“This is a Peter Pan kinda job,” he added. “You start out, and you’re young, and you’re rockin’ and rollin’, and that’s what you do all your life. You become a little myopic about how old you actually are. I see pictures of myself at the Garden recently, and I go, ‘That don’t look right.’ I got old, I lost my hair. I was never a matinee idol to begin with, and there I am onstage still doing the same job I was doing when I was 16.”
Source: Read Full Article