Post by rick on Oct 22, 2014 0:56:47 GMT -5
The New Yorker magazine had a profile on Billy Joel....
Here is the link --
Billy Joel -- Thirty-Three Hit Wonder
He discusses why he has not made any new pop albums (although he does perform a duet of "New York State of Mind" on Barbra Streisand's latest "Partners").
In another passage, he talks about "Just the Way You Are" and mentions Linda Ronstadt and Phoebe Snow --
<snip>
Steve Cohen, who has been Joel’s lighting designer since 1974 and his creative director since the mid-eighties, handed Joel his suggested set list. It doesn’t vary much from show to show, but there are always a few wild cards, and this time Cohen had inserted “Just the Way You Are,” the 1977 ballad that became Joel’s first big hit, propelling sales of the album “The Stranger,” and of Joel’s earlier albums as well, which up until then had languished. (Among those was “Piano Man,” the title track of which became, to his increasing weariness, his signature song; that album, Joel was told, initially earned only seven thousand dollars.) Joel hadn’t played “Just the Way You Are” in five years.
“The set’s a little M.O.R.,” Joel complained, meaning “middle of the road,” the soft-rock category now called Adult Contemporary. He made his way onto the stage and sat down at the piano and knocked out a little Beethoven, before the band members, most of whom have been with him for more than ten years, worked out the backup vocal harmonies to “My Life.” They vamped for a while on “Sledgehammer,” by Peter Gabriel, and ran through the end of “Movin’ Out,” to get the right level for the horns. And then Joel was doing “Just the Way You Are.” He’d written it for his first wife and manager, Elizabeth. When he told her, “This song is for you,” Donna Summer, standing nearby, said, “Does that come with the publishing?”
<snip>
Joel continued to argue against playing it. (He’d wanted to leave it off the album, too, but Linda Ronstadt and Phoebe Snow, dropping by the studio one day, told him he was nuts.) He usually won these arguments. At other sound checks, I’d seen him scrap such mainstays as “Angry Young Man” (the tempo was lagging, and the sentiment felt false) and “Captain Jack.” (“Dreary, dreary, dreary,” he said. “It just goes on and on. I’m sick of the thing. It didn’t age well. It’s been busted down to ‘Private Jack.’ ”) But this time Cohen and Brian Ruggles, Joel’s sound engineer since the early seventies, prevailed.
A few hours later, the arena was full, and he was back onstage with the band, delivering the familiar hits in full voice. He was all in. The cynicism surfaced only between numbers, such as when, after playing “The Entertainer,” he repeated, in a quizzical tone, the line “I won’t be here in another year / If I don’t stay on the charts” and then exclaimed, “Bullshit!” A roar greeted the opening notes of “Just the Way You Are,” and up in Section 106 I could see some women of a certain age singing along and dabbing their eyes. When the song was done, Joel turned to the audience and said, “And then we got divorced.”
Here is the link --
Billy Joel -- Thirty-Three Hit Wonder
He discusses why he has not made any new pop albums (although he does perform a duet of "New York State of Mind" on Barbra Streisand's latest "Partners").
In another passage, he talks about "Just the Way You Are" and mentions Linda Ronstadt and Phoebe Snow --
<snip>
Steve Cohen, who has been Joel’s lighting designer since 1974 and his creative director since the mid-eighties, handed Joel his suggested set list. It doesn’t vary much from show to show, but there are always a few wild cards, and this time Cohen had inserted “Just the Way You Are,” the 1977 ballad that became Joel’s first big hit, propelling sales of the album “The Stranger,” and of Joel’s earlier albums as well, which up until then had languished. (Among those was “Piano Man,” the title track of which became, to his increasing weariness, his signature song; that album, Joel was told, initially earned only seven thousand dollars.) Joel hadn’t played “Just the Way You Are” in five years.
“The set’s a little M.O.R.,” Joel complained, meaning “middle of the road,” the soft-rock category now called Adult Contemporary. He made his way onto the stage and sat down at the piano and knocked out a little Beethoven, before the band members, most of whom have been with him for more than ten years, worked out the backup vocal harmonies to “My Life.” They vamped for a while on “Sledgehammer,” by Peter Gabriel, and ran through the end of “Movin’ Out,” to get the right level for the horns. And then Joel was doing “Just the Way You Are.” He’d written it for his first wife and manager, Elizabeth. When he told her, “This song is for you,” Donna Summer, standing nearby, said, “Does that come with the publishing?”
<snip>
Joel continued to argue against playing it. (He’d wanted to leave it off the album, too, but Linda Ronstadt and Phoebe Snow, dropping by the studio one day, told him he was nuts.) He usually won these arguments. At other sound checks, I’d seen him scrap such mainstays as “Angry Young Man” (the tempo was lagging, and the sentiment felt false) and “Captain Jack.” (“Dreary, dreary, dreary,” he said. “It just goes on and on. I’m sick of the thing. It didn’t age well. It’s been busted down to ‘Private Jack.’ ”) But this time Cohen and Brian Ruggles, Joel’s sound engineer since the early seventies, prevailed.
A few hours later, the arena was full, and he was back onstage with the band, delivering the familiar hits in full voice. He was all in. The cynicism surfaced only between numbers, such as when, after playing “The Entertainer,” he repeated, in a quizzical tone, the line “I won’t be here in another year / If I don’t stay on the charts” and then exclaimed, “Bullshit!” A roar greeted the opening notes of “Just the Way You Are,” and up in Section 106 I could see some women of a certain age singing along and dabbing their eyes. When the song was done, Joel turned to the audience and said, “And then we got divorced.”