John Mulaney, Rock Hall of Fame Enthusiast, Breaks Down This Year's Class — and Snubs!
For example, to the yearly batch of inducted artists who seem deeply uncomfortable with the idea of the ceremony, he says, 'Life is hard, and when someone wants to give you your flowers, don't overthink it. Just accept it. Whatever terrible moment you're imagining with your former bandmate or whoever you might run into there, you're already having it in your head, so you might as well go, and it probably will be better than you think.'
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When Mulaney first broke down all the Rock Hall inductees and snubs for us in 2018, the plan was to make it an annual tradition, à la Billie Eilish's Vanity Fair interview on the same day every year. 'Covid and some personal problems got in the way,' Mulaney deadpans. But now, he's ready to recommit. 'Hey, listen, I'll make this an annual thing now.'
Before we get started, does he have any other big takeaways from following the event each year? 'When you're in your twenties, take as many photos of yourself as possible,' Mulaney says. 'You are so good-looking. You are soooo good-looking. All these photos of the Cure, I was like, 'Look at these early shoegazers, so awkward. But they look great. Everyone looks great.''
Here, what Mulaney has to say about each of this year's honored artists — and the ones that didn't make it.
Mazel tov, Bad Company. A friend of mine read these to me over the phone a week ago and he accidentally said Badfinger and I almost drove off the expressway. I was so blown away by the power of Apple Corps to get Badfinger into the Rock & Roll Hall of Fame. I know the hits and I like a supergroup in [the Hall]. There's certainly other examples.
Who's your favorite supergroup?Let's name some. Traveling Wilburys.
Sure. Blind Faith.Everything Clapton post-Yardbirds feels like a supergroup.
Derek and the Dominos is up for debate.Yeah. Were there even Dominos? My favorite supergroup song is 'Highwayman' by the Highwaymen. It's an excellent use of each person's personality, in a way that [Traveling Wilburys'] 'Handle With Care' is a great song but it feels like they just divvied up… I mean, no, sorry, that's really well-plotted, actually. But 'Highwayman' is like each of those guys is singing the appropriate backstory for their character and I like that Johnny Cash is going to be on a starship.
Bad Company's biggest songs: 'Feel Like Makin' Love,' 'Can't Get Enough,' 'Shooting Star,' 'Rock 'n' Roll Fantasy,' 'Bad Company.' Do any of those songs conjure up any emotion or feeling for you?Well, it's tough. No.
What does 'Feel Like Makin' Love' feel like? It feels like walking into a bar I've never been in, like I have a memory of walking into a large pool hall kind of Dazed and Confused-like bar with that playing, but I think I just saw it in movies. I don't think that ever happened.
But here's my mission statement: More groups in the Hall, not less.
The Mulaney Hall of Fame would induct every group nominated? Why not? Do a whole weekend of ceremony. If it's about the ceremony runtime…
Last year, they went more than five hours. That's pretty typical.Because Steven Van Zandt gets to induct a bunch of 45s? Doesn't he always get a grouping? [Imitates Little Stevie] 'Doo-wop on my corner. Da Moonglows! Da Ink Spots! These were 45 records that changed the way I saw doo-wop that year. This cover of 'Bule Bule' changed the way that block in New Jersey dealt with noise complaints.'
I was already psyched for him. Mazel, Chubby Checker. Knowing that it was part novelty I think is great. I'm a big proponent of novelty music. I'm a big proponent of 'Weird Al' getting into the Rock & Roll Hall of Fame. This is one step closer, though I don't know why they need to be led via steps. 'Weird Al' brought more people to music than is recognized at all.
I will, in fact, greatly devalue my coolness by saying [when I was young], it wasn't until 'Smells Like Nirvana' defanged 'Smells Like Teen Spirit' that I could enjoy 'Smells Like Teen Spirit.' It was scary at first. It just was like, 'I'm pretty happy, I'm a kid.' I needed a way in. And after you laugh at 'Smells Like Nirvana,' you go, 'Oh, this is a really good song.'
Let's talk about the ballot and the nominating process.
So there are 30 people on the nominating committee who draw up all the nominees and around 1,100 people in the industry vote after that.Why aren't I on the committee? Is Boz Scaggs on it?
He is not. I always thought he was in with that, but that's just based on nothing.
Did you have any experience with 'The Twist' or 'Let's Twist Again'?Well, I really appreciate 'Let's twist again like we did last summer.' It's a very funny lyric for a reboot. I really, really like the bald-facedness of 'Let's twist again like we did last summer' — saying, 'Remember we did this song 'The Twist' last year? We're doing it again.' Also, I think 'Let's Twist Again' is a better song than 'The Twist.' I don't think I'm alone in that. Sorry, I didn't mean to make it sound like such a novel idea. Is Chubby Checker still with us?
He is. He partnered with New York City two years ago for a with bikers in the lane. Sick. I didn't know we could partner with New York City.
You could. Billy Idol did an with the city right before lockdowns in 2020. And people followed his advice because the whole world shut down.
I do want to tell you about a 750-word letter Chubby Checker wrote to the Rock Hall in 2002 lamenting his lack of inclusion. It read, in part, 'Before 'Alexander Graham Bell'…no telephone. Before 'Thomas Edison'… no light. Before 'Dr. George Washington Carver'…no oil from seed or cloning of plants. Before 'Henry Ford'…no V8 engine. Before 'Walt Disney'…no animated cartoons. Before Chubby Checker…no 'Dancing Apart to the Beat.' What is 'Dancing Apart to the Beat'? 'Dancing Apart to the Beat' is the dance that we do when we dance apart to the beat of anybody's music and before 'Chubby Checker,' it could not be found!'I love this letter. I love every part of it. I love all the examples leading up to it and I trust him.
He ends the letter with, 'Where is my more money and my more fame?'Ohhhh, you buried the lede.
I had to build to it.'Where is my more money and my more fame?' Well, you know what? We have quotes at the beginning of each episode of my show and I think we just found the finale's.
Bizarrely, I knew his cover of 'With a Little Help from My Friends' and I knew 'Up Where We Belong' and I didn't see [the 1971 Cocker documentary] Mad Dogs and Englishmen till I was in my late twenties. Lorne Michaels told me about it. It wasn't streaming anywhere. It was hard to find when I went looking for it.
What did you like about the film specifically?Just how hard that tour was, like Festival Express. Just the hard living of it. And again, this brings me back to Chubby Checker and 'Weird Al.' It's like John Belushi's parody of Joe Cocker brought me to Joe Cocker as well. As a little kid, Cocker was upsetting-looking. He looked like he was in great pain and he looked like he was passing a kidney stone at all times. John Belushi defanging that helped me enjoy it more. And I'm very pro-Joe Cocker.
He's not like Stevie Wonder, but he has a bit of that 'I Just Called to Say I Love You' phenomenon of, I sort of knew 'Up Where We Belong' and 'You Are So Beautiful' just as pleasant wedding music. And then you go back and indeed he was a Mad Dog.
I kinda thought of Randy Newman's 'You Can Leave Your Hat On' in was a little corny.What do you think of the original?
Love the original.You take the laughs out. 'Turn on the lights. No, all the lights,' is a very funny line. I've never seen 9 1/2 Weeks, but I would love to have Mickey Rourke on my show.
He was just fired from a few weeks ago for making offensive remarks toward Jojo Siwa and another housemate.He was? Oh, then I retract saying I want to.
We'll skip the headline.How about, John Mulaney Hasn't Seen '9 ½ Weeks'. But again, here we go and I'm not trying to force a through line but the humor of something [like Newman's original version] is our way in.
And there's a Randy Newman connection coming up.
I know. It's Lenny Waronker.
I thought you might be stumped on that.No, not at all. I met Lenny Waronker when Randy was on Everybody's Live; he came. These dudes have known each other since they were three and he's at the gig with him and he's his guy. Their relationship was incredible to see up close. Then I was talking to John Cale [who did A&R for Waronker in the 1970s] after the taping of our show and he goes, 'I love Lenny. I loved all those guys. Everyone at Warner Brothers was very good back then.'
It's weird to think of John Cale behind a desk.But that's why Cale is so brilliant and is the most relevant, because he produced so many people and was an A&R guy. He didn't do a couple vanity productions. He really invested in new groups and continued to develop and didn't escape into persona.
What's interesting about the record business is they'll be like, 'Well, this is the single and we're pushing the single.' And I'm like, 'Isn't it just like people come to whatever song they come to?' Lenny, Randy, and I were talking about standards and practices and lack thereof on Netflix, and I said, 'Have you ever done 'Rednecks' on TV?' and [Randy] goes, 'No.' And I was like, 'Right, that makes sense.' And I said, 'But that's the big hit from that album,' and he goes, 'No, it wasn't a hit.' And Lenny goes, 'The first hit was 'Short People' [three years later].' If you're in the trenches looking at numbers every week, you don't go, 'Yeah. That a lot of people have come to it over the years, doesn't mean it's a hit.'
But if Randy had asked to do 'Rednecks' on your show, would you have said yes?No. I think everyone would go, 'Let's not do that.' By the way, let me just be clear: No one asked. It wasn't like I said no to something. Everyone involved is smart.
They're incredible and what a great treasure of American music. I love Jack in that way that he has what I love so much about David Byrne: just this desire to innovate and collaborate, be it Loretta Lynn or doing some music for a Maya Rudolph and Martin Short variety show or whatever it is.
Meg White hasn't really been seen at all in more than 15 years. The big question is if she shows up. Just things the Rock & Roll Hall of Fame is made of. This is no surprise. Such re-emergences into public life is the whole thing of the induction ceremony. Standard stuff. Most folks you see at the Rock & Roll Hall of Fame induction you haven't seen in a while. That's the most fun of it.
So do you think she shows up?Yeah, why not? I say 'why not' not trying to cause any controversy. I don't know if there's any issues. I just would say why not.
I think the 'why not' is just having not been in the public eye for so long. Is the Rock Hall enough of an event to get her to come out?Yes, it is. Yes, it is. And I'll make the case. Couple examples: Kurt Cobain's mother said when they were inducted, and I'm paraphrasing, 'Kurt would really love this, but he would act like he didn't.' And at the Radiohead induction, which I was at, I think it was Ed O'Brien who said, and I'm paraphrasing again, but this was the spirit of it, 'I wish the other guys were here to see it, because this is a big fucking deal.' And I think it's one of those things you might appreciate when you get there.
Your first memories of , I assume, are probably in the mid-Eighties?Yep, The Goonies. It's the way the camera lingers on the TV in Goonies. I just remember being like, 'Well, they're making a moment out of this.' I didn't know if it was a clue to the mystery. It was one of those things where just the very fact, the way the camera hangs on her, I was like, 'Well, this must be someone.' I don't remember when I first heard 'Girls Just Want to Have Fun,' but it's obviously Eighties canon. I found her really funny and I found the whole persona fun and funny and still do.
Any other Cyndi songs that you gravitate towards?I love Kinky Boots. I love her whole thing. I can't say I know more than the hits, but they're so singular and were so important for music and music videos that I'm just thrilled.
Talk about people that really care about music. And André's career now is so interesting. What a great choice. It's one of those choices where you go, 'Well, let's do half a dozen of those each year.'
You mean hip-hop or just groups that are universally beloved?Both. I so admire [André's] pursuit of music. It's just in every direction. And someone not taking the easy road is my favorite thing. I think it's like being a Prince fan. Who isn't a fan of Outkast?
Really, really cool. Very cool choice. Very cool to go back and continue to celebrate those early Sub Pop artists and not just look at it as a montage of bands you mention after Nirvana.
Kim Thayil how he was looking at as a possible model for what Soundgarden may do. Who could belt like Chris Cornell?I'll nominate Maggie Rogers just because I just had her on and thought she was so great.
Do you have a favorite Soundgarden song?Again, I'm a hits guy. I think they're going to play 'Black Hole Sun,' so she'd be great at that.
I'm so happy for them. Like Cyndi Lauper, just ubiquitous, especially 'Whatta Man.' Soundtrack of an era. So exciting and a great time in music to go back and revisit and honor. Did they do 'Let's Talk About Sex' on Blossom? Don't even fact-check it.
I'm fact-checking, because I don't know the answer.No, your source here feels they did and let's not even look it up. [Editor's note: He's right. Season Four, Episode 12, in 1993.]
Immensely provocative and groundbreaking at the time.It was. This is Tipper Gore central. And it's a great song, too. They're going to be great.
Not a ton of knowledge. However, I think my senior year of college, he was very ill and his song 'Keep Me in Your Heart' was very popular with my roommate, Matt Albert, and I. [Matt is] now a pediatric doctor in North Carolina. Then I'm at the Mark Twain awards for David Letterman some years ago and Eddie Vedder played that song and it just was a very full-circle moment. Tons of respect for Warren Zevon. I'm surprised he isn't in already. He's someone that the music business loves, deservedly so.
I remember listening to 'Werewolves of London' a lot and thinking about the lyrics and still kind of not understanding what it's about at all and I've never really looked it up. I like that they mentioned Trader Vic's. I always liked that the coolest place was this Polynesian restaurant.
The organ on 'You Can't Always Get What You Want' alone. It's incredible how big [session musicians'] contributions are. It's bizarre the amount they affect the success of a track and their lack — and this isn't meant to be controversial — their lack of credit and, through that, profit participation. I'm not criticizing it, I think it's just what it is.
Sonny & Cher had every verse of 'The Beat Goes On' and it was just this meandering song and then Carol Kaye, like 11th hour, just lays down [imitates bassline] doom, doom, doom, doom, and you're like, 'OK. So I guess she didn't write it, but you wouldn't know it at all [without her].' I am thrilled with Nicky Hopkins. I'm thrilled with the recognition of session musicians.
Andy Samberg and I would really press Lorne a couple of times to have Glen Campbell on. [Kaye played on hundreds of sessions with Campbell.] I'm often wrong, but I thought it would've been great.
I think it was when The Smile Sessions came out [in 2011], and getting into what the Wrecking Crew [the legendary group of session musicians that included Kaye] sounded like and just what they contributed was so amazing. I like the documentary a lot, and it's just night and day. It's just like, 'Well, I'm going to take my songs over to the best band in the world that's ever been assembled.'
The Hopkins and the Carol Kayes of the world are like, it's not just a nice nod. They are 100 percent essential to these songs. If you think about how you take music in, they get authorship.
I think about that with Holland-Dozier-Holland, who are not unknown, but nowhere near as big as the artists they wrote for.They get a good shoutout in a Magnetic Fields song.
Do they?Yeah, 'The Death of Ferdinand de Saussure.'
Love [The Spinners'] 'Rubberband Man' [written and produced by Bell]. The audience load-in playlist for my Baby J Tour was a lot of Delfonics, Spinners, Thom Bell-adjacent stuff. The O'Jays' 'Stairway to Heaven' was the big song on the lead-up to my arena tour.
Let's see. I just want to get this right.
Take your time.Who's had more Number One singles than anyone else? They're from Liverpool. Who has the second most? It's a travesty. I wouldn't even call it snobbery. There's a judgmental aspect to it due to aspects of one's life. I think we have all had our ups and downs in life, but her accomplishment is just unparalleled. It's a no-brainer, but the Rock & Roll Hall of Fame frequently doesn't have a brain. Sorry, they have less than one brain.
I don't know much about the Gallaghers. I know what a casual acquaintance of their music would know, which is they're always pissed off about something. I know far more about their constant bitching than I have memories of loving their music. But they get a vote in my mind because they'd be disgruntled during the acceptance speech. You would like to see it just for the theatricality. That is a big part of the Rock & Roll Hall of Fame: people of low character behaving badly.
'That is a big part of the Rock Hall: people of low character behaving badly.'
Is there another group that you don't care about that you want to see in the Hall for the pure spectacle?Oh, man. OK. I mean, oh, my God. Pure spectacle. A lot of them are already in. Help me think a little. Butthole Surfers? Flaming Lips, they're not in, right?
They're not in, no.Yeah. I think [Wayne Coyne] would pop off.
Liam Gallagher did once say, 'It's like putting me in the Rap Hall of Fame and I don't want to be part of anything that mentally disturbed.'Whatever. 'Wonderwall' don't mean shit to me, but I'm not trying to start anything. I remember Soupy Sales' Wikipedia page for a while was just debunking rumors and it was clearly him getting in there and it was like, 'Soupy never told kids to send him a dollar.' I was like, 'Dude, you're teaching me that you've had a lot of difficulties.' When I hear Jimmy Fallon do 'Wonderwall' at karaoke, I don't think, 'Wow, what tortured mind is behind this?' And also, I'll say that I like a difficult public persona very much.
This is a crime.
I haven't read about your Phish fandom. How deep does it run?I come on board around 1997 at age 14, 15. When I started listening to them, people at the shows told me, 'You really missed it. It's over now.' I think it was after A Live One came out, people were like, 'Well, you didn't see the early years.'
How many shows have you been to?My numbers aren't high. Multiple nights at Deer Creek, Alpine Valley, things like that, and then I went two, three years ago. I'd go anytime, I just keep not being able to.
Was it difficult to convince them to do the ? No, they were great. We talked about doing a variety of things on the show, but they were on tour and they had their time in Los Angeles and it was the greatest. I thought of it originally as, 'What if they did a play of Seinfeld?' I didn't know what this would be for and then I thought, 'Oh, it would be through the telescope we'd see them living as Seinfeld.' It was going to be an ad for a Broadway show of Seinfeld starring Phish. We made it more palatable, a little.
So Phish is a no-brainer for you to get in?Yeah. Phish, String Cheese Incident, moe., Disco Biscuits, Leftover Salmon. On every level, this was hugely important music to us. It really kept bands alive. The idea of a band in 1999 playing fucking guitars, piano, and drums was not always easy to find. In that documentary [Between Me and My Mind about Trey Anastasio], Trey said that Tommy Lee saw them on the cover of Rolling Stone and went, 'Finally, a fucking band,' and the excitement of that.
Now, on the business end, these people printed money. They are enormously successful. Most of my life being on the road, I have a real aversion to snubbing people that sell out football stadiums night after night but aren't necessarily propped up by the industry.
It's not that the money's important, but whenever the music business has gone up and down and up and down, they have just consistently brought their music to fans at a huge profit. People pay and travel to see Phish at a time when it's hard to get people to click on Spotify. I wonder what it is [that didn't get them inducted]. So many people like Phish; I'm sure so many people on the committee like Phish. I bet it's oversight more than snobbery.
The music they introduced my generation to as well was hugely important. I learned to be eclectic from them. They were always getting compared to the Grateful Dead, but they had this whole world of influences that was really fun to pick up on and cross-check … Getting back into the Talking Heads. Getting into Zappa. That was all them. They also made you want to go to concerts. They're just good for music and they have been for decades.
People that keep it at arm's length and didn't want to get into it because they thought it was their friend with the hemp choker in high school or whatever, we're not dumb. They fucking rock. It's not all Gamehendge [the fictional setting for numerous Phish songs], if that bothers you. I love it, but if that bothers you, it's not all Gamehendge. It's not all mythology and everyone in the crowd knows when to yell. The songs are great, we're not stupid people.
Do you have a preference between Joy Division and New Order?Both are extremely personal to me. During my worst drug times, I remember very bad moments and there's two lines in 'Disorder' [that go] 'Lights are flashing, cars are crashing, getting frequent now.' I remember just thinking about those lines when it was at its worst. That song, when I listened to it, I'm like, 'This is what it feels like when something you might've set in motion is accelerating out of your control.' So that's a little dark tangent.
But then 'Atmosphere.' What's funny about 'Atmosphere' when I listen to that is, I was born right as this was coming out, and I always wondered if I was ever an infant in a taxi cab in Chicago when 'Atmosphere' was released.
'Leave Me Alone' is my favorite New Order song and that song, 'Ceremony,' and the rest are just songs I've listened to for 20, 30 years all the time. And I think about [my wife] Olivia with that line in 'Temptation,' 'Oh, you've got blue eyes / Oh, you've got grey eyes / Oh, you've got green eyes' because Olivia has really beautiful eyes.
I have no opinion on the Black Crowes.
Are you being diplomatic? No. I genuinely have no opinion.
Do you remember when their big album came out or this was not in your wheelhouse at all?What's fun about music is you can be obsessed with a genre and not know a band at all. My blind spots are significant.
That's fair. Maybe we just keep the one line, 'I have no opinion,' and that's it.I have no opinion on the Black Crowes. If that's the pull quote, we've got a viral story.
'I have no opinion on the Black Crowes. If that's the pull quote, we've got a viral story.'
So Fred [Armisen] is a big Billy Idol fan and I've been trying to get more into it. I know 'White Wedding,' and he has real significance for me as this sort of MTV thing, but I'm ignorant of the rest of him. I think he means a lot to a lot of people. I think a big [thing] is some of the Hall is [about] teaching the audience and some of it is honoring the audience. But it should never be honoring the nominating committee.
I am ignorant of them.
Well, those are all the snubs. We haven't gone through the biggest snub.
Who's that?The standing snub.
The standing snub?Sonic Youth. Once again, It's been a pleasure to talk about all these inductees and nominees. Once again, the Rock & Roll Hall of Fame has completely disappointed the universe and all music fans by not inducting Sonic Youth. I think Smashing Pumpkins not being in is also a crime.
Actually, you did mention that in 2018. You said the Hall had an 'anti-Chicago bias.'[Laughs hysterically.] Did I?
with the headline, 'Is the Rock & Roll Hall of Fame Anti-Chicago?' and subhead, 'John Mulaney thinks so, but in reality, we may just punch below our weight as a rock town.''But in reality.' A lot of things I said in 2018 could be buffeted with, 'But in reality.' 'But in reality, John's a little off.'
They said, 'Is it possible there's some truth to Mulaney's charge?'I like that they don't say, 'Well, John's just misguided and might be on speed.' They're like, 'Is there some truth? We won't say no,' but there's a ton of Chicago bands that have been inducted.
A great way to clear this up would be to give the Musical Excellence Award to Steve Albini. Let's just give that to him next year. I actually think that would be a great decision all around. I doubt they really have an anti-Chicago bias. They're very blues-friendly. And white people loving the blues is, I think, the mission statement of the Rock & Roll Hall of Fame, and that's most of Chicago.
I think we've gone through everything.Let's do it next year. This will be called our annual Billie Eilish conversation.
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2 hours ago
- Los Angeles Times
All 43 of Billy Joel's Hot 100 hits, ranked from worst to best
If a musician's legacy can be judged by which of his peers are willing to show up and sing his praises in a documentary about him, consider Billy Joel's in good standing: Among the A-listers in HBO's new two-part 'And So It Goes' are Paul McCartney, Bruce Springsteen, Garth Brooks, Pink, Sting, Jackson Browne and Nas. Directed by Susan Lacy and Jessica Levin, the doc goes over Joel's life and career at a moment when he's received just about every award a pop musician can receive, including the Gershwin Prize for Popular Song, the Kennedy Center Honors, induction into the Rock & Roll Hall of Fame and the Songwriters Hall of Fame and five Grammy Awards on 23 nominations. Less happily, it also comes as Joel has been forced from the concert stage after being diagnosed this year with a brain disorder called normal pressure hydrocephalus. Yet the 76-year-old singer and songwriter remains a much-talked-about pop-culture fixture, not least on TikTok, where his oldie 'Zanzibar' never seems far from cropping up on one's scroll. Ahead of Friday's premiere of the HBO documentary's second installment, I've ranked all 43 of Joel's singles that have charted on Billboard's Hot 100, starting with the worst and ending with the best. (Due to Joel's choices and/or Billboard's methodology, that means that some of his best-known tunes aren't here: 'Scenes From an Italian Restaurant,' for instance, and 'New York State of Mind.') Feel free as you read to open a bottle of white, a bottle of red — or, perhaps, a bottle of rosé instead. In the middle of the night … I'm still haunted by this mawkish pileup of gospel signifiers. This widely interpreted ballad about a lover's steadfast devotion only works when it's sung extremely well (as in the case of Adele) or when it's sung extremely terribly (as with Bob Dylan, who wrote it). Joel's take lands somewhere in between, which means he just sounds like somebody's drunk uncle. For decades after 1993's 'River of Dreams' — still his most recent pop album — Joel insisted he'd run out of things to say as a songwriter. 'You need inspiration to create good new music,' he told me in 2023, 'and if you don't have it, don't bother.' Inexplicably, he found a spark in an unfinished tune presented to him by a younger musician named Freddy Wexler; together, the two completed this would-be OneRepublic song, which Joel premiered live at the Grammy Awards last year. 'Turn the Lights Back On' spent a single week on the Hot 100 before dropping off the chart — the shortest stay of any of Joel's hits. No surprise that a guy long characterized as a mere imitation artist would nail Elvis Presley's vocal delivery in a cover recorded for the soundtrack of 'Honeymoon in Vegas.' Turgid midtempo rock with a lyric that defines soul rather pitifully as 'knowing what someone is feeling.' Features backing vocals by the sex-you-uppers of Color Me Badd. Six months after 'Piano Man' put him on the map, Joel was already straining against the brutal market economics of pop stardom: 'If I go cold, I won't get sold / I'll get put in the back in the discount rack, like another can of beans.' Yet his kvetching about the creative constraints of the pop song are pretty rich coming from a master of the form. Perhaps his most strained vocal performance. In the watery pantheon of rock songs about boats, this maudlin fisherman's lament ranks well behind 'Sailing' and 'Southern Cross' (to say nothing of 'Proud Mary' and 'Sloop John B'). The right idea; the wrong execution. From the weirdly stacked soundtrack of 'Ruthless People,' which also featured Mick Jagger, Bruce Springsteen and Luther Vandross. Very stiff singing atop a very funky groove. Are those steel drums I hear? 'It's almost like a dying man singing to his child,' Joel told his biographer Fred Schruers, which may or may not have been the approach his then-9-year-old daughter Alexa was hoping her dad would take. Still, the elegant harmonic movement demonstrates his lifelong devotion to classical music; seven years later, he'd make his debut as a composer with the solo-piano 'Fantasies & Delusions.' Among those who've sung 'Lullabye' since Joel introduced it: Celine Dion, Rufus Wainwright — and John Stamos. One surely gratifying endorsement for this banjo-driven country shuffle: In 1999, Dolly Parton cut a version of 'Travelin' Prayer' to open the first volume in her acclaimed trilogy of bluegrass albums. Having split with producer Phil Ramone after 1986's 'The Bridge' LP, Joel hired Mick Jones of Foreigner to oversee his next album, 'Storm Front,' which opened with this delightfully trashy ode to a woman with little interest in mink coats or satin sheets. (Call it 'Downtown Girl.') Jones' production, with its stabbing synths and boxy drums, echoes the steroidal rock of Robert Palmer's 'Addicted to Love.' Wrote Robert Christgau of Joel in the Village Voice: 'Even in arena mode he's a force of nature and bad taste.' An OK song ranked this high only because it so strongly evokes a perfect one (in this case, 'Wedding Bell Blues' by the 5th Dimension). Consider that this jittery New Wave rocker about the pros and cons of phone sex arrived on an album ('Glass Houses') that also featured 'I Don't Want to Be Alone' and 'Sleeping With the Television On.' Imagine if he'd had Tinder. Possibly the purest distillation of Joel's romantic pessimism — 'Some love is just a lie of the soul / A constant battle for the ultimate state of control' — with the twist that he's assuring a lover that everything that always happens won't happen to them. (It happened to them.) A slow-rolling R&B ditty where the object of the dude's affection isn't a woman but a piano (except it's actually Ray Charles, who shows up to duet with his eager admirer). One of two new tracks added as consumer bait to Joel's 23-times-platinum 'Greatest Hits — Volume I & Volume II,' this deeply spooked synth-rock joint might be the strangest entry on this list: horny-frustrated lyrics, no real melody, just straight burnt-to-a-crisp Willy Loman vibes for 5½ meandering minutes. It's great! (It's also, as of this writing, the second-least-streamed of these 43 tracks on Spotify, with fewer than 2 million plays.) The peppiest single Joel ever made might get even closer to Motown's classic Holland-Dozier-Holland sound than Phil Collins did a year earlier in his punctilious remake of the Supremes' 'You Can't Hurry Love.' Yet 'Tell Her About It' has no fan in its creator, who said in Schruers' biography that the song is 'a little too bubblegum' — one reason Joel appears not to have played it in concert since the early 1990s. For this nearly a cappella doo-wop number, Joel sang every vocal part himself when a group he and Ramone had brought into the studio couldn't stay in tune. Four years after 'The Longest Time' charted, Bobby McFerrin topped the Hot 100 with the instrument-less 'Don't Worry, Be Happy'; three years after that, Boyz II Men got to No. 2 with the a cappella 'It's So Hard to Say Goodbye to Yesterday.' Billy at his breeziest. With half a dozen Top 30 singles, including this homage to the Drifters, 'An Innocent Man' became Joel's fourth consecutive LP to be nominated for album of the year at the Grammys. (He lost, reasonably, to 'Thriller.') The title track is a showcase of vocal flexibility as he moves nimbly from a croon to a belt to a falsetto. Rooted, as he told Schruers, in 'the realization that Elle Macpherson and I were not meant for the ages,' this tense and brooding song is Joel's finest contribution to the soulful-white-guy rock of the mid-1980s; it belongs up there with Don Henley's 'The Boys of Summer' and Steve Winwood's 'Higher Love,' thanks in no small part to a spidery guitar solo by David Brown (who died last year). When Joel played 'This Is the Time' at New York's Shea Stadium just before the Mets' home was demolished in 2008, he brought out John Mayer to do the solo — an experience you can bet Mayer channeled as he cut 2021's soulful-white-guy 'Sob Rock.' Picture Huey Lewis doing Natalie Cole's 'This Will Be.' A decade after he released the studio version, Joel charted with a concert recording of the lead single from his 1971 debut — the LP notoriously mastered at the wrong speed so that his voice sounded higher and squeakier than it really was. Here, onstage at the Paradise club in Boston, his singing has a courtly charm that makes 'She's Got a Way' feel like Joel's version of Paul McCartney's 'Maybe I'm Amazed.' Joel's most Dylanesque lyric, meanwhile, comes across as his version of 'Just Like a Woman.' An unsparing ballad about how nobody tells the truth anymore, 'Honesty' earned a song of the year nod at the Grammys but lost to the Doobie Brothers' 'What a Fool Believes,' which is narrated by a guy who can't accept the truth he's being told. Covered later — and quite convincingly — by Beyoncé. Written as Joel returned to New York following his early-'70s sojourn in Los Angeles, this Ronettes-inspired confection first appeared on the 'Turnstiles' LP in 1976. But 'Say Goodbye to Hollywood' didn't blow up until five years later, when he put a slightly rowdier live rendition on 1981's 'Songs in the Attic' LP — by which time Ronnie Spector herself had taken a crack at the song with help from Bruce Springsteen's E Street Band. A febrile Cold War freak-out with a hideous, Cronenberg-lite music video. Joel told Schruers he could envision his survivors playing this very pretty ballad at his funeral, which is certainly one place for a song about the inevitability of pain. Was 'Glass Houses' truly Joel's punk album? Take it from no less an authority than the Chipmunks, who performed the LP's driving opener on 1980's 'Chipmunk Punk.' To my ears, 'You May Be Right' sits at the precise midpoint between the Beatles and the Rolling Stones — a testament to Joel's absorptive powers and his stylistic aim. 'You can speak your mind but not on my time' probably isn't the sickest burn in Joel's catalog. But enlisting Peter Cetera to trill sweetly behind him as he sneers is A+ record-making. Mr. New York's signature song documents the six months he spent entertaining the patrons — the real estate novelist, Davy in the Navy, the old man sipping tonic and gin — of L.A.'s long-shuttered Executive Room near the corner of Wilshire Boulevard and Western Avenue. (His handsome pay, as he told me in 2017: 'I got tips and made union scale.') Joel's first single to chart on the Hot 100, 'Piano Man' can be hard to hear today as a work of detailed storytelling; that's what half a century of sloppy sing-alongs will do to a narrative. But then, of course, Joel has no one to blame for that but himself. Tell me you're not a wimp without telling me you're not a wimp. 'I'm probably the most proud of that album as a sonic work of art,' Joel says in the HBO doc of 'The Nylon Curtain,' on which he and Ramone deployed the whoosh and crunch of a steel mill to juice the beat of this Rust Belt threnody. Yet 'Allentown' also poses a pretty sophisticated critique of the social and political forces converging on a generation of Americans promised prosperity only to find a flag thrown in their face. With its head on fire and its eyes too bloody to see, 'Big Shot' imagines a morning-after quarrel between Mick and Bianca Jagger, Joel told Howard Stern, amid the excesses of what he described with disgust in Schruers' book as the 'coked-out, disco-drenched New York club scene' of the Studio 54 era. 'I shouldn't put it down, because I don't really know much about it,' he added. OK, Bill. Joel's most-streamed song on Spotify (with more than 1.2 billion plays) is an ouroboros of simpler-times nostalgia: a pitch-perfect Four Seasons rip that looks back at the early '60s from the early '80s — then became the longed-for totem at the heart of Olivia Rodrigo's 'Deja Vu.' 'It's the only song where I wrote the words first,' Joel said in 2017, 'which it sounds like, because the music sucks.' Demonstrably untrue — those timbales! Even if he were right, though, the rapid-fire historical roll call of 'We Didn't Start the Fire' deserves our respect as a crucial artifact of a pre-internet America. Your Wikipedia could never. The guy's asking for a lot: do this, don't do that; amuse me but not too much; listen to what I say instead of what I do (although sometimes I'll forget to say it too). But then there's that gently insistent groove and that pillowy electric piano. And that singing! Showy but intimate, talky yet supple, it's murmuring assurances to rebut the very doubts he's raising. Joel's first No. 1 offered him early proof that sometimes haters win. Think about the way Joel starts this song: 'Come out, Virginia, don't let me wait / You Catholic girls start much too late / But sooner or later it comes down to fate / I might as well be the one.' Two opposing worldviews colliding in four little lines against music trembling with the shared sense of anticipation that unites both the narrator and Virginia. Pop gets no richer. What other Billy Joel song could top a list of Billy Joel songs? 'Movin' Out' wants us to believe that success is for suckers, which is somehow a credo he's continued to sell — and we've continued to buy — through his ascent to the uppermost reaches of pop culture. These days Joel isn't Anthony or Mama Leone or even Mr. Cacciatore — he's the big shot who owns the medical center, not to mention whatever else is available on Sullivan Street. Yet his glorious bridge-and-tunnel music — proud, wounded, defensive, ambitious — keeps asking: Is this all I get for my money?
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15 hours ago
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IN CASE YOU MISSED IT: Elton John, Yungblud and more pay tribute to Ozzy Osbourne
Elton John shared a pic of himself with Osbourne, writing on Instagram, "So sad to hear the news of @ozzyosbourne passing away. 'He was a dear friend and a huge trailblazer who secured his place in the pantheon of rock gods - a true legend. He was also one of the funniest people I've ever met. I will miss him dearly. To Sharon and the family, I send my condolences and love.' Jason Momoa posted a pic of himself with Ozzy and his wife Sharon Osbourne. 'Love you @ozzyosbourne All my aloha @sharonosbourne and ohana. So grateful. RIP.'

16 hours ago
Ozzy Osbourne was a dad of 6, grandfather of 10: What to know about his family
For years, the late Ozzy Osbourne built a reputation as the Prince of Darkness" and the frontman of the heavy metal rock band Black Sabbath. But after his family's reality TV show "The Osbournes" premiered in 2002, fans got to see a different side of the Rock & Roll Hall of Fame inductee – that of a funny and doting dad of six and grandfather of 10. "I love you all. I love you more than life itself," Osbourne once said on "The Osbournes," which only featured two of his children – daughter Kelly and son Jack. Get to know Ozzy Osbourne's family and children below. Ozzy Osbourne and Sharon Osbourne Ozzy Osbourne married his second wife, Sharon Osbourne, in July 1982. Sharon Osbourne's father, the late Don Arden, had been the manager of Black Sabbath. Louis Osbourne Louis Osbourne is Ozzy Osbourne's son with ex-wife Thelma Riley, to whom he was married from 1971 until their divorce in 1982. Louis Osbourne, a DJ, producer and music artist manager, was born in 1975. Jessica Osbourne Ozzy Osbourne and Riley also welcomed a daughter named Jessica in 1979. Jessica Osbourne is a producer and actor. Elliot Kingsley During their marriage, Ozzy Osbourne adopted Riley's son Elliot Kingsley from a previous relationship. Kingsley has stayed out of the spotlight and maintains a private life. Aimee Osbourne After Ozzy Osbourne and Sharon Osbourne married, they welcomed their first daughter -- Aimee Osbourne -- in 1983. Aimee Osbourne is an actress and singer with the band ARO. Kelly Osbourne The following year, in 1984, Ozzy and Sharon Osbourne welcomed daughter Kelly Osbourne. Both Kelly Osbourne -- now a TV personality, singer and actress -- and her younger brother Jack Osbourne agreed to appear on four seasons of "The Osbournes" with their parents. The siblings also teamed up with their parents and co-host "The Osbournes Podcast," which launched in 2018. Jack Osbourne The youngest Osbourne, Jack Osbourne was born in 1985. He is a media personality and produced a documentary about his father in 2011, titled "God Bless Ozzy Osbourne."