In September 1973, Billy Joel walked into Devonshire Sound Studios in Los Angeles with a song built entirely from people he had been watching for six months in a piano bar on Wilshire Boulevard. He had been living in that bar, professionally speaking, under a false name. The song he brought in was 'Piano Man,' and the circumstances that produced it are almost too on-the-nose: a songwriter in contractual exile, playing piano for strangers every night, writing the whole mess down. The song that came out of it is one of the most precisely observed pieces of portraiture in the FM era, and the reason it works so well is that Joel was writing field notes, not fiction.
The backstory begins with a disaster. Joel's debut album, 'Cold Spring Harbor,' had been released on November 1, 1971, on Artie Ripp's Family Productions label. The album's failure was blamed on Ripp, who produced it and oversaw a mastering error that ran the record at the wrong speed, giving Joel's voice an unnaturally high-pitched effect. Ripp had signed the 22-year-old to Family Productions on a ten-record deal, and the mastering catastrophe left Joel both commercially invisible and contractually trapped. When Joel eventually moved to Columbia Records, Ripp cut a deal to continue profiting from Joel's subsequent albums, which bore the Family Productions logo. The contract with Ripp was, by any measure, one of the more punishing deals a young songwriter has ever signed, and it was the engine that drove Joel out of New York entirely.
'Piano Man' is based on Joel's real-life experiences as a lounge musician in Los Angeles from 1972 to 1973, which he pursued in an effort to escape his contracted New York City-based record company, Family Productions. Since he needed work to pay the bills but could not perform under his own name, he took a job at the Executive Room bar as a piano player using the name 'Bill Martin,' borrowed from his full name, William Martin Joel. The bar sat in the Wilshire district of Los Angeles, and every night Joel played it, he was studying. The song portrays a fictionalized version of his own experience as a piano-lounge singer for six months in 1972-73 at the Executive Room, and Joel confirmed to the Library of Congress in 2017 that every character in the lyrics is a real person: 'All the characters have the same name: there was John at the bar, the bartender; Davy was in the Navy; a guy named Paul, who was a real estate agent and was trying to write the great American novel, and the waitress, who was my girlfriend at the time and then became my wife.' That waitress, Elizabeth, is the woman Joel had moved to Los Angeles with, the person closest to him during the entire period of professional humiliation that the song quietly documents.
The writing itself happened gradually, across weeks. Joel described the process in a Harvard Q&A session: 'I had the idea to write a song about that particular job. I was like, I've got to get a song out of this! So it took place over a period of time. I came up with a melody: Sing us a song, Piano Man, and then, little by little, I filled in the characters, and the scenario.' What he was assembling, character by character, was a song structured less like a conventional pop narrative and more like a short story with a fixed narrator. The piano man of the title is a witness. He watches John the bartender, Paul the frustrated novelist, Davy the ex-sailor, and the old man making love to his tonic and gin, and he plays for all of them. The emotional weight of the song rests on a very specific kind of loneliness: the performer who is invisible to the room, who everyone needs and nobody really sees. Joel was describing himself with clinical accuracy.
What Columbia and producer Michael Stewart did with that material in September 1973 was essentially honor its architecture. Stewart was far from untested: before taking the Piano Man sessions, he had founded the San Francisco folk rock band We Five, whose 1965 single 'You Were on My Mind' reached No. 3 on the Billboard Hot 100 and earned the group a Grammy nomination for Best New Group. He brought that same feel for ensemble texture and melodic clarity to Joel's record, surrounding him with a band of West Coast session players whose credits read like a who's who of the era. The album credits list banjo players Eric Weissberg and Fred Heilbrun, bassist Emory Gordy, drummer Ron Tutt, guitarist Larry Carlton, and keyboardist and arranger Michael Omartian, among others. The harmonica that winds through the title track, the instrument that gives the song its slightly world-weary, folk-inflected texture, was played by Joel himself. It sits in the arrangement as the voice of the narrator: reedy, a little exposed, threading through the piano chords rather than competing with them. Stewart kept the production lean enough that the song breathes, which is exactly what a song about a piano bar needs to do.
Released as a single in February 1974, 'Piano Man' peaked at number 25 on the Billboard Hot 100 in April of that year, and reached number 4 on the Adult Contemporary chart. The album itself peaked at number 27 on the Billboard 200. Neither the album nor the single were massive pop hits in their time, but the song accumulated the way certain songs do: slowly, through repetition and recognition, through the specific experience of hearing it in a bar and understanding exactly what it is describing. The album was certified gold by the RIAA in 1975. In 2013, the song was inducted into the Grammy Hall of Fame. In 2015, the Library of Congress selected 'Piano Man' for the National Recording Registry for its cultural, historic, and artistic significance. Those are the formal honors, but the real measure is simpler: the song has been playing in bars for more than fifty years, and the people sitting in those bars still recognize themselves in it. Joel wrote it as a man hiding from a bad contract under a fake name, watching strangers nurse their disappointments. He got every one of them right.
