"The Entertainer"

Billy Joel was only 22 when he made his first solo record, the 1971 album Cold Spring Harbor.  And the experience turned out to be a nightmare.

According to the biography, Billy Joel:  The Life and Times of an Angry Young Man, the singer had signed a ten-record contract that stripped him of the rights to the master tapes and the publishing rights to not only his current songs, but also to ones he would write in the future.  It was the sort of heinous deal that the music business was legendary for, and Billy suffered from it until his 1986 album The Bridge.

Billy had left New York and relocated to California to see if he could improve the chances for his career by immersing himself in the entertainment industry.  After the flop of his first album, he took a gig in a piano bar to make ends meet while he gave some thought to his next move.  It wasn’t glamorous, but it certainly paid off by providing him with a colorful cast of characters he could write a song about.

Fortunately, another record label started showing an interest in Billy.  And that piano bar inspired song of his got him noticed.  But only just.  You might think of “Piano Man” as the song that made him famous, as Billy Joel’s best known tune, but in actual fact, it was only a minor success.

In a 2008 interview for MassLive.com, Billy called the song a “turntable hit” meaning that even though it got a lot of airplay on radio, it didn’t result in sales.  Far from being his breakthrough single, “Piano Man” only earned him $8,000 in royalties at the time (about $40,000 today).

What’s more, “Piano Man” was originally recorded as a five-and-a-half minute album track.  But in the interest of getting it played on pop stations, Billy’s new record company had release a shorter edit.

As he put it one of his songs,

You've heard my latest record.

It's been on the radio.

It took me years to write it.

They were the best years of my life.

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.

Billy was realizing that the star making machinery just wasn’t a good fit.  It didn’t take long for him to turn his back on California and head back home.