Billy Joel: The Greatest Solo Artist of All Time Vol. 3

I recently recieved the elaborate five disc box set “My Lives” as a gift, and I had only one thing on my mind: How much Attila is it gonna have and how much is gonna fucking rock. Needless to say I was disappointed to find only one tune by Billy Joel’s prog-metal, drums and organ duo. A band (aptly named after Attila the Hun) that came and went so fast in 1970 it’s a wonder anybody even knows it existed.

All you really need to know about Attila is this: http://www.mp3.com/albums/823/summary.html. Don’t download any of the music, just take a look at that album cover. It’s hard to imagine that this is the same guy who in the few years before was singing sweet soul in bands called The Hassles and The Lost Souls and in the year following would release his tender singer-songwriter debut, “Cold Spring Harbor”.

And while the Attila album cover is all bullshit, the Attila sound is no bullshit (so long as you consider all instrumental jazz infused early metal played by a drummer and keyboardist with the occasionally cameo of Billy Joel playing bass to be NO bullshit). “Amplifier Fire”, the only Attila song on the boxset, sounds like Mahavishnu Orchestra and Traffic had a baby together, named it Bruno, neglected and beat it as a child, and when that kid became a teenager he started taking drugs, and secretly listened to Phish while rocking out to Tool with the goth kids smoking cigarettes in the parking lot. And the song doesn’t even really kick in until the 1:51 mark, when the “Egyptian Funeral March” riff kicks in. Ladies and Gentlemen, Attila.

Joel never returned to the form of Attila in any subsequent albums, but some of his early work embraced the progressive nature of late 60’s and 70’s bands like Yes. I understand that alot of people hate bands like Yes, the first version of Genesis, Jethro Tull, King Crimson and even Emerson, Lake and Palmer (who I admit mostly suck). But those people are stupid and if you are one of them, well, just stop reading right now. Billy Joel never really put out any prog records per say (although he himself called “Streetlife Serenade” an experimental album, a claim I can only 45% agree with- “The Mexican Connection” is his oddest album closer ever).

He did, however, sprinkle bits and peices of songs with prog-like elements; something singer-songwriters never do (See James Taylor). The most obvious example of this, to me anyway, is the song “Angry Young Man”. It has various complicated parts and a synthesizer solo that somehow emcopasses four decades of Yes in 30 seconds (but that’s enough about Yes). A few others that come to mind are “The Ballad of Billy the Kid” (An Aaron Copland ripoff perhaps, but a great composition that is about Billy the Kid and Billy (Joel) the Kid), “Miami 2017” (The drone at the beginning is the same tone that the subway makes when it starts up), “Goodnight Saigon” (BJ’s Vietnam ode, the helicopter noises scared me when I was little), “Root Beer Rag” (“Root Beer Rag” is just awesome) and “Scenes from an Itialian Restaurant” (Maybe too mainstream to be prog, but it has three distinct parts and I like how he pronounces Brenda, “Brender”).

For some reason Billy stopped quoting the prog influences circa “The Nylon Curtain”. It seems he spent alot of the latter part of his career trying to reproduce the innocence of his pre-Attila groups in the same way he had spent the beginning trying to justify Attila and himself as an artist. It’s no shock to me why Attila was a colossal financial failure; it was way ahead of its time, it still is.

But his prog-past will never go away and now I think it’s just another justification of how great his music was. Real adamant punk rock people will always tell you how excessive and unnecessary progressive rock was, but they will always be way off. Progressive rock is important for all the same reasons that Puff Daddy, and an unfortunate amount of rap music, is unimportant. It is the continuum of classical music in a modernized popular setting. Billy Joel got this and The Sex Pistols didn’t. “Big Shot” is kind of a punk song with saxophone.

In the end, no matter what Billy Joel has accomplished in the past or will accomplish in the future that Attila album cover still exists. And I guess what I’m trying to say is that we all have to realize what lives inside the Hun outfits in the meat lockers of our hearts.