Before he was the Piano Man to millions, Billy Joel really was one.
In 1972, his career seemed to be going nowhere. His first album had not done well, and he was trying to get out of a record deal he regretted signing.
So he moved to Los Angeles and took a job playing piano at a bar called the Executive Room, in the Wilshire District. To stay out of sight, he worked under the name Bill Martin, taken from his own first and middle names.
For about six months he played standards and pop hits for tips. As he later told the Library of Congress, he never played his own songs there. He was “hiding out.”
But he was paying attention.
The people he saw night after night went straight into a song. John really was the bartender. Davy really was in the Navy. Paul really was a real estate agent trying to write a novel. And the waitress was Elizabeth, his girlfriend at the time, who later became his wife.
Joel said the song took a couple of weeks to finish. He started with the melody of the chorus, then filled in the characters little by little.
Released in late 1973, “Piano Man” only reached No. 25 on the Billboard chart. Joel admitted he was “flabbergasted” that a long, sad story song in waltz time was treated as a hit at all.
Yet it never went away. It became his signature song, the one audiences still sing back to him, and the Library of Congress later added it to its National Recording Registry.
Watch the official video and listen for those people from the bar. Half a century later, a lonely room full of strangers still sounds a lot like home.
