"Piano Man" is the first single released by Billy Joel. It was released on November 2, 1973, and has been included on several subsequent albums. Joel's first major hit and his signature song, the song peaked at #25 on the Billboard Hot 100 chart in April 1974. In 2016, the Library of Congress selected "Piano Man" for preservation in the National Recording Registry for its "cultural, historic, or artistic significance."
Video Piano Man (song)
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. 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).
Joel has stated that all of the characters depicted in the song were based on real people. "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. 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.
Content
The verses of the song are sung from the point of view of a bar piano player who focuses mainly on everyone else at the bar, who are said to arrive 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 5-lines grouping, they were more in the form of a limerick than a typical poem.
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, Billy 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."
Maps Piano Man (song)
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 several years.
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)
- "Piano Man" - 4:30
- "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 version used the standard 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 1975-80, 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 '77, 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".
"Piano Man" was ranked #421 in the 2004 list of Rolling Stone's 500 Greatest Songs of All Time.
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. 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."
"Piano Man" has been selected as one of 25 sound recordings in 2016 to be preserved by the Library of Congress National Recording Registry for being "culturally, historically, or aesthetically significant."
Chart history
Weekly charts
Other versions
"Weird Al" Yankovic performed a parody of "Piano Man" entitled "Ode to a Superhero" (detailing the plot of the 2002 Spider-Man film) on his 2003 album Poodle Hat. To parody the song, Yankovic got permission directly from Joel, whom he earlier spoofed in "It's Still Billy Joel to Me" (which was never put on any Yankovic album), per the results of a minor 1996 controversy surrounding another Yankovic parody, "Amish Paradise".
Glee star Darren Criss performed "Piano Man" in the episode "Movin' Out," which is based on the songs of Billy Joel.
The Spanish singer Ana Belén made a very popular version in Spanish, named "El hombre del piano".
Phil Vassar does his own version of "Piano Man" at the end of every show he performs.
References
External links
- "Piano Man" Music Video on YouTube / (c)1985 Sony BMG channel
- Lyrics of this song at MetroLyrics
Source of article : Wikipedia
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