A waltz for people who came to forget
The harmonica comes in sideways, a little sharp with barroom air, and the piano answers in a slow waltz, as if the room had asked for one more song before last orders.
Billy Joel was hiding in Los Angeles in 1972, playing under the name Bill Martin at the Executive Room, a piano bar near Wilshire and Western, trying to slip a bad contract. He did not play his own songs. He played standards, current hits, whatever would fill a forty-minute set and keep the tips moving, and the woman working the floor was Elizabeth Weber, later his wife, the waitress practising politics. Piano Man, recorded in 1973 at Devonshire Sound Studios in North Hollywood with producer Michael Stewart, turns that gig into a census. John is at the bar because John was at the bar. Davy was in the Navy. Paul was trying to write a novel between real-estate calls.
The arrangement stays close to the room. Joel’s left hand keeps the waltz, the harmonica returns like a regular who will not leave, and the chorus invites the crowd to sing a song they already know, which is the oldest trick in a piano bar and still the truest. Columbia put it out as his first real single, long for radio, and it reached No. 25 in America, enough to stop him being anonymous. He has said he hoped the people in the lyric would like being celebrated, even if the place was not the happiest room in the world. When he went back, the bar was gone.
All the characters in that song were real people.
(Billy Joel, Harvard University, 1994)
The song outlived the building. It became the last number of the night, the one that makes a stadium lean forward as if it were still a dozen stools and a jar of bills. Joel straps on the harmonica rack, the lights warm, and a chorus that began as rent money turns into a civic anthem for anyone who has stayed too late somewhere. The novelist, the sailor, the businessman slowly getting stoned are no longer local. They are whoever is listening.
What remains is the courtesy of the writing. He does not mock the room. He counts it. A story song, he later called it, the kind that lasts because it has people in it rather than a slogan. The Executive Room is a condominium or an office block now, depending on who remembers the corner. The waltz does not care. It is still asking, gently, and with a harmonica that smells of spilled beer, for one more request. Call for it in a stadium and the room, however large, remembers how to be twelve stools and a jar of bills.
