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Joshua S. Duchan

It is no secret that Billy Joel counts the Beatles among his strongest influences. Like many Americans, Joel first heard the Beatles on February 9, 1964, when they performed on The Ed Sullivan Show, an encounter that forever changed his musical trajectory. Until that time, he had primarily been exposed to classical music in piano lessons, as well as Elvis and rhythm and blues on records and radio. “By the time of the British Invasion, I’d be defining my musical personality against rather than within classical music,” he told biographer Fred Schruers.¹ Indeed, throughout his career, both critics and scholars have observed the Beatles’ influence on his music.² It appears early in Joel’s catalog, as Ken Bielen hears a “McCartney-like” vocal on Cold Spring Harbor’s “You Can Make Me Free” while in “She’s Got a Way,” from the same album, Thomas MacFarlane perceives echoes of the Beatles’ “For No One” (1966) and “Let It Be” (1970).³

Joel himself is open about the Beatles’ influence, too, linking their arrival in the United States to a profound change in the worldview of Long Island teenagers in the 1960s. That shift was then expressed musically:

Long Island back then was a hotbed of music. The Beatles’ music was leading the way in changing the way we looked at ourselves and our world. . . . It was in a sense a true revolution unfolding through music. Every teen wanted to be a part of it in some way, and as a result an explosion of garage bands sprang up on Long Island. Countless suburban kids were buying guitars, drums, and other instruments and forming groups of their own practicing in basements or garages and expressing themselves musically. For them it became a welcome alternative to the life they had come to know, as well as the dismal future that they saw ahead of them—as represented in the lives that they saw their parents living in their identical houses, with their often-unfulfilling jobs.⁴

Joel points specifically to the Magical Mystery Tour (1967), Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band (1967), and Abbey Road (1969) as albums that affected him: “It gets me,” he said about their music, “and it intrigues me and compels me.”⁵ He calls Sgt. Pepper “symphonic in scope,” adding, “I recall thinking at the time: this was the first time I heard a symphony by a rock band.”⁶

Examples of what music theorist Walter Everett calls Joel’s “Beatlish” compositional style can perhaps best be heard on his 1982 release, The Nylon Curtain. Rolling Stone critic Stephen Holden wrote that the album’s “mixture of brutal directness and tantalizing ambiguity suggests the late-Sixties John Lennon more than [Paul] McCartney,” while citing Lennon’s vocals in “Strawberry Fields Forever” (1967) and “I Am the Walrus” (1967) and calling “Where’s the Orchestra?,” The Nylon Curtain’s last track, a “wistful McCartney-esque curtain closer.”⁷ In 1986, Joel told Rolling Stone’s Anthony DeCurtis that with The Nylon Curtain, he hoped to “go back and pick up” where the Fab Four had left off during the Sgt. Pepper–Abbey Road era, 1967–1970.⁸ “It’s not that I was trying to do another Beatles album,” Joel has said, “but I wanted that kind of texture, that complicated, rich music, so you could put on a set of headphones and just listen to it and listen to it. Discover more and more things. I found that in this record.”⁹

Joel’s words, along with those of scholars and critics, point to some direct connections between the Beatles’ music and Joel’s. Largely lacking in this discourse, however, is a discussion of specific musical details that substantiate these connections and complement the biographical details that often shape an artist’s narrative in music history.¹⁰ The purpose of this chapter, then, is to dig into those details in order to more fully explicate the links between Sgt. Pepper and The Nylon Curtain. Doing so adds musical specifics to the generalizations of Joel’s media interviews and critics’ album reviews. Ultimately, an analysis of the connections between Sgt. Pepper and The Nylon Curtain illustrates how Joel draws on his influences—something for which has been heavily criticized—but also goes beyond them, extending their ideas through (sometimes incremental) technological innovation and an appreciation for post-Beatles social history. At the same time, it offers a model for (re)considering other areas of Joel’s (and others’) output with regard to oft-maligned influences, without simply repeating the trope that one artist’s influence can be heard on another.