I came of age in the Seventies – and given my family background, there could not have been a more perfect time for it, where my musical evolution was concerned.
I write this note as a matter of personal history, but surely there are many members of my generation with whom it will resonate. It sets forth a premise that I feel I can ably defend: in the Seventies, for a brief march of years – playing the piano was cool.
It sure didn’t feel cool in 1967, when my mother first began sitting me on that bench every evening for 30 minutes or so to plunk my way through Teaching Little Fingers to Play, soaking up classics like “From a Wigwam” and “Blue Bells of Scotland” and “Song of the Volga Boatmen”. And five years later, when I’d moved on to Beethoven’s “Für Elise” and Mozart’s “Rondo Alla Turca” and Chopin’s “Raindrop Prelude”, I may have found the music more interesting, but the 30 minutes was still a drag.
Then, on the school bus radio, I heard some real piano...
“Goodbye Yellow Brick Road”... “Bennie and the Jets”... “Rocket Man”... “Your Song”... “Don’t Let the Sun Go Down on Me”...
This Elton person... almost overnight, he took over rock radio completely. And he did it, not with a wailing guitar or a glass-shattering rock yowl, but with... a piano!!!
I wasted no time buying the sheet music book from his Greatest Hits album with my accumulated allowance, and started digging into the piano with gusto.
And just about that time, another guy pops up on the radio – and gets just as much airplay as Elton. A Barry somebody...
“Mandy”... “Weekend in New England”... “I Write the Songs”... and “Could It Be Magic”, which was... wait! Damn! That’s Chopin’s Prelude in C minor!!!
To be sure, Manilow’s radio stuff was way schmaltzier than Elton’s by about 10 light years, but his piano was gorgeous...
So I start soaking up Manilow, too.
Before you know it, I’m in my mid-teens, and I’m spending a couple of hours at the piano, and digging it.
Oh, and I noticed something else...
My high school theater had a grand piano just sitting there, which hardly ever got played. When I arrived early at school, 45 minutes before first bell, I could go into the empty theater, sit down at the piano, and play Elton and Barry to my heart’s content. And an interesting thing happened...
A girl appeared next to me on the piano bench.
And then another appeared on the other side of me on the bench.
Okay, then! This piano thing is working out well!
And then, on the radio... another piano man!
This other piano man, he explodes onto the radio with a song called... well... “Piano Man”, a marvelous piece that I rapidly mastered, a joy to play. And then another, “She’s Always a Woman”... and “Angry Young Man”... and “Scenes from an Italian Restaurant”... and “My Life”...
If I was in heaven before... wow. The gods were smiling on me.
Of course, these weren’t the only decent piano licks out there on the radio. There was “Cool Change”. And “Come Sail Away”. And “Desperado”. And “Hold the Line”. And "Saturday in the Park". And “Rikki Don’t Lose That Number”.
But Elton, Barry and Billy had made it cool. They made Jerry Lee Lewis look like a goofy spazz.
And what worked for me was that the three of them served as rock’s first major post-Beatles segues.
Consider: Elton was there first. Born in 1947, he came to the radio just as the Beatles were breaking up. The Beatles, whose delicious piano – mainly played by bassist Paul – had served up “Hey Jude” and “Lady Madonna” and “Let It Be” and “The Long and Winding Road”. Those songs had nudged Britain’s young Reginald Dwight to set down “Your Song” and “Skyline Pigeon” and “Border Song” and “Take Me to the Pilot” and “Burn Down the Mission” and "Tiny Dancer" and "Levon".
His radio reign began in 1970, when he hit the Top 10 in the UK for the first time with “Your Song”, continuing into the Seventies with all of the above plus “Saturday Night’s Alright for Fighting”, “Candle in the Wind”, “The Bitch is Back”, and his cover of the Beatles’ “Lucy in the Sky with Diamonds” - which went to #1. Then came “Philadelphia Freedom” and “Someone Saved My Life Tonight” and his explosive reinterpretation of “Pinball Wizard” for the movie version of The Who’s Tommy (being able to blast out those staggered rolling triplets Elton-style was serious currency for me with other musicians).
And with 1977’s “Sorry Seems to Be the Hardest Word” and “Don’t Go Breaking My Heart”, Elton’s classic period ended.1 He continued to live on the charts throughout the Eighties, but just as a presence – no longer the guy at the top.
Barry, who was actually four years older than Elton, slipped into the world early in Elton’s rise, scoring a #1 almost out of the gate with “Mandy” in 1974 and following it up with a staggering 19 Top 20 singles - “Looks Like We Made It”, “This One’s For You”, “Ready to Take a Chance Again”, “Somewhere in the Night”, “Can’t Smile Without You”, “Daybreak”, “Ships”, “Copacabana” - through 1980, when he became passé, and drifted off into Broadway and old-school standards territory.
It turns out that Billy Joel is the baby of this trio, born in 1949, making him 21 around the time Elton was in the studio laying down “Your Song”. This staggered age positioned him to pick up where Elton left off, around 1977, when he released The Stranger, which snatched him a Grammy for “Just the Way You Are”.
He finished out the decade climbing right up Barry’s coattails, leaving Elton in the dust, with nine Top 20 singles - “Movin’ Out”, “Only the Good Die Young”, “Big Shot”, “Honesty” - and another multiplatinum triumph of an album, 52nd Street.
And then he did something that guaranteed him life beyond Barry, life beyond Elton (who was hanging in there, but not as the driving force of anything): rebelling against his reputation as a balladeer, which “She’s Always a Woman” and “Just the Way You Are” and “Honesty” had understandably established, he fired off Glass Houses, a fiery rock manifesto that kept him on the charts with “You May Be Right” and “Don’t Ask Me Why”, but tapped into the emerging fake zen New Wave vibe that greased the skids of rock before the onslaught of the MTV era with “It’s Still Rock and Roll to Me”, a scathing intellectual screed against the music industry’s manipulative repackaging of the grand music of his youth, masquerading as danceable minimalism. Oh, and excuse that out-of-the-blue screaming sax solo.
Then he actually out-nostalgia'd Barry (you wouldn’t think that was possible), who happily trundled off into Adult Contemporary with the magnificent 2:00 AM Paradise Café, a jazz-blues masterpiece based on unscored Johnny Mercer lyrics, set to music by Barry, in a one-take, recorded-live session featuring Mel Tormé and Sarah Vaughan. As the younger man, Billy indulged a more recent nostalgia, celebrating his Bronx doo-wop youth with the splendid album An Innocent Man in 1983.
Joyously authentic, bursting with hooks so tasty that not even the sparkle of Van Halen and Duran Duran could compete, Billy’s fifth multiplatinum salvo kept him hot on the radio with its title track, “Uptown Girl”, “Leave a Tender Moment Alone”, “Keeping the Faith”, and the pitch-perfect a capella street corner glee-fest, “For the Longest Time”.
And so it goes. Billy kept going, with “A Matter of Trust” and “We Didn’t Start the Fire” and “River of Dreams”. Barry served up Swing Street and Singin’ with the Big Bands and brought Broadway back to suburbia with and “I’ll Be Seeing You” and “Luck Be a Lady” on Showstoppers and “Memory” on Live on Broadway.2
And Elton? He hadn’t spent the Eighties as the rock god he’d once been, but he managed to produce ”Little Jeannie" and "Empty Garden" and “Blue Eyes” and “I’m Still Standing” and “Sad Songs (Say So Much)” and “Sacrifice”. Oh, and over there in the Nineties – The Lion King.
Well, the Lord giveth and the Lord taketh away. I had my perfect window of opportunity, there between 1971 and 1978, when my three idols launched their stellar careers at the 88 keys - and launched me, too, into four decades of joy. There had never been such a time before, and in the synth-bathed Eighties and keyboard-bereft Nineties, no time since.
And I’m okay with that.
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