Piano Man (song)

"Piano Man"
Single by Billy Joel
from the album Piano Man
B-side "You're My Home"
Released November 2, 1973
Format 45 rpm single
Recorded September 1973
Genre
Length 5:40 (Album version)
4:30 (Single version)
Label Columbia
Songwriter(s) Billy Joel
Producer(s) Michael Stewart
Billy Joel singles chronology
"Piano Man"
(1973)		 "Worse Comes to Worst"
(1974)
Music video
"Piano Man" on YouTube

"Piano Man" is a song written and performed by American singer-songwriter Billy Joel. His first single in North America, it was included on Joel's 1973 album of the same name and later released as a single on November 2, 1973. The song is sung from Joel's point-of-view working as a piano player at a bar, reminiscing on his experiences working there and the people that he encounters. "Piano Man" is based on Joel's real-life experiences working as a lounge musician in Los Angeles from 1972-73, in an effort to escape his contracted New York-based record company at the time, Family Productions, following the poor commercial performance of the album. Various different characters, including a bartender named John and a real-estate novelist named Paul, are introduced from Joel's perspective as he describes them, and are all based on real-life individuals that he encountered at the bar.

Joel's first major hit and his signature song, "Piano Man" peaked at #25 on the Billboard Hot 100 chart in April 1974.[2][3] Following Joel's breakthrough as a popular musician with the release of The Stranger, it became one of his most well-known songs. It is now a highlight of Joel's live shows, where he usually allows the audience to sing the chorus in place of him. In 2016, the Library of Congress selected "Piano Man" for preservation in the National Recording Registry for its "cultural, historic, or artistic significance."[4]

Overview

Song background

"Piano Man" is a fictionalized retelling of Joel's own experience as a piano-lounge singer for six months in 1972–73 at the now defunct Executive Room bar in the Wilshire district of Los Angeles.[5] In a talk on Inside the Actors Studio, Joel said that he had to get away from New York due to a conflict with his then recording company and hence lived in Los Angeles for three years with his first wife. Since he needed work to pay the bills, but could not use his better known name, he worked at the Executive Room bar as a piano player using the name "Bill Martin" (Joel's full name is William Martin Joel).[6]

Joel has stated that all of the characters depicted in the song were based on real people.[7] "John at the bar" was really the bartender who worked during Joel's shift at the piano bar. "Paul is a real estate novelist" refers to a real estate agent named Paul who would sit at the bar each night working on what he believed would be the next great American novel. "The waitress is practicing politics" refers to Joel's first wife Elizabeth Weber, with whom he moved to Los Angeles from New York in 1972 and who worked at The Executive Room as a waitress while Joel played the piano.[8] Joel had moved from New York to L.A. to record his first album, Cold Spring Harbor, which was marred by a mastering error by the album's producers at Family Productions, the first label that signed Joel. After this bad experience, Joel wanted to leave his contract with Family Productions for Columbia Records, but the contract that he had signed made this very difficult. So Joel stated that he was "hiding out" at the bar, performing under the name Bill Martin, while lawyers at Columbia Records tried to get him out of his first record deal.[9]

Content

The verses of the song are sung from the point of view of a bar piano player who focuses mainly on the “regular crowd” that “shuffles” into the bar at nine o'clock on a Saturday: an old man, John the bartender, the waitress, businessmen, and bar regulars like "real estate novelist" Paul and US Navy sailor, Davy. Most of these characters have broken or unfulfilled dreams, and the pianist's job is to help them "forget about life for a while", as the lyrics state. The pianist makes money when the patrons "sit at the bar, and put bread in my jar, and say, 'Man, what are you doin' here?'" The chorus, in bar-room sing-along style, comes from the bar patrons themselves, who say, "Sing us a song, / You're the piano man; / Sing us a song tonight. / Well, we're all in the mood for a melody, / And you've got us feeling all right." As for the lyrics, Joel admitted that with their five-line grouping, they were more in the form of a limerick than a typical poem.[10]

Releases

It was first released as a single on November 2, 1973, and then as the second track on Joel's Piano Man album and was later released on several greatest hits collections.

When originally issued as a single, the song was deemed too long by Columbia Records executives (5 minutes and 38 seconds), so two verses were cut in half and spliced together for the release as a 45, clocking in at 4 minutes and 33 seconds. A promo 45 had an even shorter edit, clocking in at around 3 minutes. These single edits were also remixed – bringing out a lot of the instrumentation like acoustic guitars and harmonicas. Later, Joel's song "The Entertainer" refers to the editing of the "Piano Man" single by commenting, "It was a beautiful song, but it ran too long / If you're gonna have a hit, you gotta make it fit / So they cut it down to 3:05."

Composition

Joel wrote and originally performed the song in the key of C major. It has a 3
4 waltz time signature and begins with a jazzy piano solo before moving into its famous piano and harmonica introduction. The verses and the chorus feature a descending walking bassline in C that ends with a D – G turnaround. Instrumentally, Joel's 1973 version features piano, harmonica, bass guitar, acoustic guitar, accordion, mandolin, and drums. As of 2017, Joel now performs the song in B-flat major, a whole step down from the original. When Joel received the Gershwin Prize in 2014, he performed "Piano Man" in the original key of C major for the first time in approximately a decade.

Joel acknowledged on Inside the Actors Studio in 1999 that each of the characters in the song was based on a real person, either a friend of his or another stranger at the bar. For instance, Joel claimed that the waitress "practicing politics" was actually his first wife, Elizabeth Weber. Joel also criticized the fact that the verses and the chorus of the song both use the same chord sequence and a similar melody, stating that the melody "doesn't go anywhere [musically]." Nevertheless, Joel also included minor harmonic variation and a different melody in the song's bridge section.

Track listing

7" US single (1973)

  1. "Piano Man" – 4:30
  2. "You're My Home" – 3:08

Music video

The first music video for this song was released in 1973. It features Joel portraying a bar act Bill Martin performing the song, and shows a typical American bar as a setting. A new version of the video was shot in 1985, with new extras, and was more or less the same as the original. The original video used an alternate take of the song but it was at the same length as the album version, while the new video used said album version.

Popularity

The single broke into the Billboard Top 40 in April 1974, but the single fell considerably short of the top 10 in the US (Billboard #25). "Piano Man" fared better in Canada, where it peaked at #10, and established Joel as a star there. (From 1975 to 1980, every one of Joel's charting singles peaked higher in Canada than in the US, except for songs that reached #1 in both markets.)

Because "Piano Man" was at the time only a moderate hit in the US, the song was not played often on American radio during the next three or four years. However, after the 1977 release of Joel's album The Stranger and Joel's quick subsequent rise to superstardom, the song would soon become one of his most well-known and loved songs. It has been, since 1977, a big "oldies" radio hit, and is considered Joel's signature song, partially due to its title. Today it remains popular, and ranks as Joel's #1 song on the iTunes Store as of February 2014. The song is so well known that during Joel's concerts, he usually lets the audience sing the chorus. In concert, Joel often performs "Piano Man" as a finale.

During the first Face to Face tour featuring Elton John and Joel, ads promoted the event as "Rocket Man meets Piano Man".[11]

"Piano Man" was ranked #421 in the 2004 list of Rolling Stone's 500 Greatest Songs of All Time.

As part of his 2003 album Poodle Hat, "Weird Al" Yankovic created a parody of the song titled "Ode to a Superhero" which recounts the plot of the 2002 Spider-Man film.

This song was released as downloadable content for Rock Band 3, along with 11 of Joel's other songs.

During the 2015 and 2016 seasons, it was played during New York Mets home games in the middle of the 8th inning.[12] If the Mets were ahead at this point in the game, or if the game was tied, a smiling image of Mets manager Terry Collins popped up briefly on the ballpark's video boards when the song got to the line "And the manager gives me a smile". This song will be replacing Lou Monte's "Lazy Mary" as the Mets' seventh inning stretch song following the 2018 season.

"Piano Man" was selected as one of 25 sound recordings in 2015 to be preserved by the Library of Congress National Recording Registry for being "culturally, historically, or aesthetically significant".[13]

"Piano Man" has been used in a TV commercial from the Railway company NS in The Netherlands in 2017.

Chart history

Weekly charts

References

  1. ↑ "200 Greatest Soft Rock Songs". entertainment.expertscolumn.com.
  2. ↑ Billboard. Nielsen Business Media, Inc. April 20, 1974. p. Front cover. Retrieved October 8, 2016 – via Google Books.
  3. ↑ "Billy Joel: Chart history". Billboard. Retrieved October 8, 2016.
  4. ↑ ""Piano Man," "I Will Survive" and Wilt Chamberlain's 100-Point Game Receive Designation". Library of Congress. March 23, 2016. Retrieved March 23, 2015.
  5. ↑ Joel, Billy. "Billy Joel Interview". CBS This Morning (Interview). Interviewed by Charlie Rose. Retrieved September 9, 2016 – via YouTube.
  6. ↑ "Major 7th chords: a talk with Billy Joel". The Actors Studio, USA. 1999.
  7. ↑ Bordowitz, Hank (2011-03-01). Billy Joel: The Life and Times of An Angry Young Man. p. 73. ISBN 9781617130786. Retrieved January 1, 2018.
  8. ↑ Getlen, Larry (January 26, 2014). "How Billy Joel Became 'The Piano Man'". New York Post. Retrieved January 17, 2016.
  9. ↑ Bordowitz, Hank. Billy Joel: The Life and Times of An Angry Young Man.
  10. ↑ "Billy Joel – Q & A with the Press Club, 2015". The Press Club., USA. Retrieved September 9, 2016 – via You Tube.
  11. ↑ "Rocket Man". plantcity2.tbo.com. Archived from the original on September 23, 2011. Retrieved July 1, 2018.
  12. ↑ "New York Mets Ballpark Music". New York Mets. January 20, 2016. Retrieved October 8, 2016.
  13. ↑ "Billy Joel 'Piano Man' to Be Inducted in Library of Congress National Recording Registry". Billy Joel Official Site. March 23, 2016. Retrieved October 8, 2016.
  14. ↑ "Item Display – RPM – Library and Archives Canada". Collectionscanada.gc.ca. Archived from the original on January 10, 2016. Retrieved October 8, 2016.
  15. ↑ "Item Display – RPM – Library and Archives Canada". Collectionscanada.gc.ca. Retrieved April 16, 2017.
  16. ↑ Flavour of New Zealand, August 10, 1974
  17. ↑ Whitburn, Joel (2002). Top Adult Contemporary: 1961–2001. Record Research. p. 127.
  18. ↑ Cash Box Top 100 Singles, April 27, 1974
  19. ↑ "IRMA : Irish Charts – Singles, Albums & Compilations". Wayback.archive.org. Archived from the original on January 5, 2007. Retrieved October 8, 2016.
  20. ↑ Steffen Hung. "Billy Joel – Piano Man". Dutchcharts.nl. Retrieved October 8, 2016.
  21. ↑ "Forum – 1970 (ARIA Charts: Special Occasion Charts)". Australian-charts.com. Archived from the original on June 2, 2016. Retrieved December 26, 2016.
  22. ↑ Bac-lac.gc.ca
  23. ↑ Whitburn, Joel (1999). Pop Annual. Menomonee Falls, Wisconsin: Record Research. ISBN 978-0-89820-142-0.
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