Chapter 1: Hicksville to Hollywood - The Early Years (1949-1976)
The Piano Student
William Martin Joel was born on May 9, 1949, in the Bronx, but his musical education began four years later when his family moved to a modest split-level house at 20 Meeting Lane in Hicksville, Long Island. The move was prompted by his father Howard's business failures and mounting debts—a pattern of financial instability that would haunt Billy's early years and fuel the commercial anxiety that drove much of his later career.
"My father was a dreamer who couldn't make dreams pay the bills," Joel told biographer Hank Bordowitz in 1993. "I learned early that talent without discipline was just expensive noise."
The discipline came via classical piano lessons, imposed by his mother Rosalind when Billy turned four. His first teacher, Morton Estrin, was a Juilliard graduate who specialized in the punishing technical exercises of Carl Czerny and Frederic Chopin. The choice would prove prophetic: Joel's adult playing style, with its emphasis on elaborate arpeggiated runs and dense harmonic clusters, bears the unmistakable stamp of classical training filtered through popular sensibility.
"Billy had natural rhythm, which you can't teach," Estrin recalled in 1978. "But he was lazy about reading music. He'd rather figure out songs by ear than practice scales. I spent five years trying to break that habit."
The battle was ultimately lost—and won. By age nine, Billy could play Chopin's "Minute Waltz" with reasonable accuracy, but he was more interested in dismantling Top 40 hits on the family's upright Wurlitzer. His method was systematic: buy the 45, play it until he understood its harmonic structure, then attempt to recreate it from memory. The process taught him arranging, composition, and the commercial architecture of popular music—skills no classical conservatory would have provided.
The Wurlitzer itself became Joel's first serious instrument, a 1952 spinet piano that his parents bought secondhand for $500. The instrument was hardly professional quality—the action was uneven, several keys stuck, and the tuning drifted constantly—but its limitations forced Billy to develop the heavy-handed technique that would later serve him well in rock contexts.
"That old Wurlitzer was like learning to drive in a pickup truck," Joel explained to Piano Today magazine in 1988. "When I finally got to play real pianos, everything felt easy by comparison."
The Hassles and Early Bands (1964-1970)
Billy's first serious attempt at popular music came in 1964 when he joined The Echoes, a local cover band that played teen dances and school functions around Nassau County. The group's repertoire focused on British Invasion hits—Beatles, Rolling Stones, Dave Clark Five—with Billy handling keyboards and occasional vocals on a rented Farfisa organ.
"We were terrible," admitted Jon Small, The Echoes' drummer, in a 1995 interview. "But Billy was already writing original material. Little piano instrumentals, mostly. They sounded like movie soundtracks."
The movie soundtrack quality wasn't accidental. Joel was consuming film music voraciously during this period, particularly the work of composers like Ennio Morricone and Henry Mancini. The influence would surface decades later in songs like "Scenes from an Italian Restaurant" and "The Longest Time," with their cinematic scope and sophisticated orchestration.
In 1965, The Echoes evolved into The Hassles, a more ambitious outfit that managed to secure a contract with United Artists Records. The deal seemed promising—UA was home to major acts like The Beatles and Traffic—but the label's interest in The Hassles was primarily as a vehicle for publishing songs written by other writers.
The Hassles recorded two albums for United Artists: The Hassles (1967) and Hour of the Wolf (1968). Both were commercial failures, selling fewer than 10,000 copies combined, but they provided Joel with his first professional studio experience and introduced him to the realities of record industry economics.
"The label spent more money on the photo shoots than they did on recording," Joel told Mix magazine in 1986. "I learned that good songs without good production were just expensive demos."
The production quality of The Hassles' recordings was indeed primitive by contemporary standards. Both albums were recorded at United Artists' New York studios using basic 4-track equipment, with minimal overdubbing and a stark, almost demo-like sound quality. Joel's piano, when it appeared at all, was recorded through a single microphone placed several feet from the instrument, resulting in a thin, distant sound that bore little resemblance to his natural playing style.
More significantly, Joel was barely featured as a lead vocalist on either album, despite his growing confidence as a singer. The decision reflected United Artists' uncertainty about his commercial potential—a hesitation that would plague his early career and contribute to his lifelong anxiety about vocal performance.
Attila: The Heavy Metal Experiment (1970)
The failure of The Hassles led directly to Joel's most notorious early project: Attila, a two-man heavy metal band featuring Billy on keyboards and organ alongside drummer Jon Small. The concept was audacious for 1970—keyboard-driven heavy metal was virtually unknown—but the execution was problematic from the start.
Attila recorded a single self-titled album for Epic Records in early 1970, a collection of instrumental pieces that combined classical organ techniques with distorted amplification and thunderous drumming. The result was unlike anything else in popular music, but not necessarily in a good way.
"We thought we were inventing progressive rock," Small recalled. "Instead, we sounded like a church organist having a nervous breakdown."
The Attila album is essential listening for understanding Joel's later development, despite its obvious flaws. Songs like "Amplifier Fire" and "Brain Invasion" showcase his willingness to experiment with extreme dynamics and unconventional song structures—qualities that would resurface in more palatable forms on albums like The Nylon Curtain and Storm Front.
Technically, the album was groundbreaking in its use of the Hammond B-3 organ as a lead instrument in heavy rock contexts. Joel employed classical pedal techniques learned from his church organist training, creating bass lines that were far more sophisticated than typical rock fare. The approach would later influence keyboard-heavy bands like Deep Purple and Uriah Heep.
But Attila's commercial prospects were doomed by timing and presentation. The album was released in July 1970, just as the hippie movement was waning and audiences were growing suspicious of overtly theatrical rock acts. More damaging was Epic Records' marketing strategy, which positioned the band as a novelty act rather than serious musicians.
"The label wanted us to wear Viking costumes," Joel told Rolling Stone in 1974. "We refused, but the damage was done. Nobody took us seriously after that."
Attila's failure was compounded by personal drama when Joel discovered that Small was having an affair with his girlfriend, Elizabeth Weber. The betrayal effectively ended both the band and Joel's friendship with Small, while beginning his complicated romantic relationship with Weber—who would later become his first wife and business manager.
The Los Angeles Exile (1972-1974)
The collapse of Attila left Joel professionally and personally devastated. His recording contract with Epic had expired, his band was finished, and his girlfriend had left him for his best friend. Worse, he was nearly broke, with no obvious prospects for continuing his musical career.
The solution came from an unexpected source: Herb Gordon, a West Coast promoter who had seen Attila perform and believed Joel had potential as a solo artist. Gordon offered to pay for Joel's relocation to Los Angeles and help him develop a solo career. Desperate, Joel accepted.
"Los Angeles in 1972 was supposed to be where you went to make it," Joel reflected in 1989. "For me, it was where I went to hide."
Joel's eighteen months in Los Angeles were among the most difficult of his career. He lived in a series of cheap apartments, played piano bars for tips, and struggled to develop a solo act that could encompass his classical training, rock experience, and growing interest in singer-songwriter material.
The breakthrough came at The Executive Room, a piano bar in Wilshire Boulevard where Joel developed the performance persona that would eventually make him famous. Playing six nights a week for audiences of businessmen and tourists, he learned to read crowds, tell stories between songs, and adapt his material to different moods and settings.
"The piano bar taught me that songs aren't just music—they're communication," Joel told Performance magazine in 1981. "If you can't make fifty drunk strangers care about your song, you don't have a song."
More importantly, the piano bar experience convinced Joel that his future lay in piano-driven popular music rather than organ-heavy rock. He began writing material specifically for solo piano and voice, developing the melodic sophistication and lyrical directness that would characterize his mature...
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