(Credits: Far Out / Columbia Records)
Sat 28 March 2026 4:00, UK
Billy Joel has been around long enough to see the rock and roll scene change more than a few times.
‘The Piano Man’ was never considered to be the coolest artist in the world, but even if he was kept out of the same clubs that his fellow legends were welcomed into, none of the tastemakers of the time could really discount the amount of passion that was put into all of those records. Joel was capable of doing whatever he needed to do to get the sounds he heard in his head, and that came from listening to some of the greatest musicians that came on his radio at any given time.
But the beauty of Joel’s music is how malleable it is to a certain degree. There are many songs that wouldn’t sound the same if they were coming out of anyone else’s mouth, but the fact that someone like Garth Brooks could turn a song like ‘Shameless’ into a hit is all thanks to Joel’s way around a hook. It could be like pulling teeth for him, but he could still admit when he wrote something that was going to last a lot longer than he ever would.
Because if you look at the way that he constructs melodies, it’s not like the typical rock and roll form of songwriting. Some of the best tunes that he ever wrote are good enough to be played on a solo piano as a classical piece of music and still sound great, and when you look at the way that he performs a lot of his songs, there’s a good chance that Beethoven would have approved of how the melodies interweave with each other whenever he performs his tunes.
Not everyone had that kind of upbringing, but it turns out that not all of them needed to when Joel was a kid. This was the age of ‘The Summer of Love’, and while Joel could have done without the hippy side of rock and roll, he could appreciate when bands were doing something different. The world had already been through years of the blues, but if people couldn’t match someone like Ray Charles, everyone from The Beatles to Cream were going to make a legacy for themselves.
And listening back to records from that time, everyone needed to have a bit more going on than having a cheap gimmick every time they played. There would be The Rolling Stones reinterpreting the blues, the Fab Four showing us musical colours that we had never seen before, and Jimi Hendrix creating some of the greatest guitar lines ever made by human hands.
That’s before even getting to bands like Led Zeppelin, but Joel felt that his era was the prime time for what great rock and roll was supposed to be, saying, “I grew up in a certain period of rock and roll. I thought it was the golden age of rock and roll. You had The Beatles, you had Hendrix, you had The Stones. Even around when Elvis Presley was a star. [It was] one phenomenal musician after the next. It just went on and on. I’m not saying we witnessed the death of rock and roll, but it hybridised itself to the point where I didn’t feel a part of it.”
But what Joel is getting at in that last comment feels like the dividing line between where ‘rock and roll’ ended and where ‘rock’ began. There were still rock bands throughout the 1970s, but when you think of pure rock and roll acts that were indebted to the classics, the last one that seemed to satisfy both the adults and the kids in equal capacity was probably a band like AC/DC, who sounded like they had gone back and listened to all of the great albums that Elvis Presley did and applied their own Australian spin to the whole thing.
So while Joel might consider that period to be considered the greatest rock and roll music ever made, it’s not like the genre completely went away. If anything, it was evolving, and if he managed to leave a part of himself behind on some of his songs, that wasn’t going to stop people like Jack White from proving why the genre was still alive and well in places where it would be appreciated.
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