{"id":711872,"date":"2026-06-18T17:19:10","date_gmt":"2026-06-18T17:19:10","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/711872\/"},"modified":"2026-06-18T17:19:10","modified_gmt":"2026-06-18T17:19:10","slug":"the-guitarist-billy-joel-thought-was-out-of-everybodys-league","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/711872\/","title":{"rendered":"The guitarist Billy Joel thought was out of everybody’s league"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"Billy<\/p>\n

Credit: Far Out \/ Columbia Records<\/p>\n

Thu 18 June 2026 16:20, UK <\/p>\n

The role of a guitarist and pianist always seemed at odds. <\/p>\n

In the early days of rock and roll, both managed to fill up the sound whenever a group played, but in terms of the midrange instrument that pumped out the hooks, it\u2019s easy to find a keyboard player stepping on the guitar\u2019s toes and vice versa most of the time. While there\u2019s no debating that most people come to a Billy Joel<\/a> concert for the piano, he has always admitted that the appeal of the guitar is not something that escapes him.<\/p>\n

In fact, Joel\u2019s career began in Attila, an unfortunate prog-metal band that the \u2018Uptown Girl\u2019 has always lived to regret. \u201cWe were going to destroy the world with amplification,\u201d he would quip years later. \u201cWe drove people literally out of clubs.\u201d On reflection, they lacked all the subtlety of Joel\u2019s great guitar hero: Jeff Beck. The British rocker had even inspired Joel to turn away from his beloved piano for a period.<\/p>\n

But back when Beck was first coming into his own, there was still a fairly even split between the guitar and the piano in rock and roll. Yes, Chuck Berry was the man who invented rock and roll with his riffs, and Elvis Presley used it as a prop for every rock and roll fan to aspire to play, but Little Richard and Fats Domino were just as likely to get people interested in tickling the ivories now and again.<\/p>\n

While The Beatles and The Rolling Stones weren\u2019t afraid to put some piano on their songs, there was no debating that The Yardbirds were a guitar band. Since they had one of the premier blues guitarists of all time in Eric Clapton, the group made their living playing blistering hard rock before \u2018Slowhand\u2019 was replaced by Beck and a fresh-faced session musician named Jimmy Page.<\/p>\n

\"Jeff<\/a>Credit: Far Out \/ YouTube Still<\/p>\n

Once both of them decided to make music on their own, though, no one had heard anything like what Beck was doing. There were still blues tropes sprinkled in, but when you listen to how he played every track, you would swear that he was trying to get alien noises out of his guitar half the time.<\/p>\n

Joel was proud to follow in the footsteps of more traditional composers like Beethoven<\/a> and Mozart, but even he had to give it up to Beck for branching out, telling Howard Stern<\/a>, \u201cMy favourite guitarist died very recently, Jeff Beck. My favourite guitarist of all time. He was just a phenomenal natural musician. Kind of like Hendrix. He was a freak of nature. His technique was taboo, but he did his own thing and created his own chord structures. Brilliant.\u201d<\/p>\n

Further reading: From The Vault<\/p>\n

While any guitar instructor who taught by the book would say that Beck was doing everything the wrong way, no one could argue with the results. Sometimes, he may have done things all wrong, but his way of following his muse no matter what means led to him pushing his sound forward on every track, whether he was covering someone else\u2019s tune or trying to squeeze as much emotion out of one single bend.<\/p>\n

\u201cHe was a musician that I always loved. He was the best,\u201d Joel said when Beck passed and he paid tribute to him at a Madison Square Gardens concert. He called him a \u201cgreat virtuoso\u201d, adding, \u201cI was fortunate to meet him recently and I\u2019m very grateful now that I was able to tell him how much I admired his musical skill. This is the end of an era.\u201d<\/p>\n

It was stuff like his searing single bends that prompted Joel to make such a proud proclamation. That unconventional structure probably impacted how Joel approached many of his greatest songs. I mean, if Beck taught everyone that it was okay to think outside the box with their instruments, it wasn\u2019t that hard for Joel to try something new like playing drums on the piano for \u2018Angry Young Man\u2019.<\/p>\n

Because that\u2019s what rock and roll was all about. Above all else, it taught everyone that there were no rules for what constituted good music, and Beck was a master of following the sounds heard in your head rather than what\u2019s laid out in a textbook.<\/p>\n<\/p>\n

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