(Tom: I find it of immense interest how much success comes back to being present and being able to observe.)
The year was 1972 and a young musician found himself trapped in a golden cage. Billy Joel did not exist in the real world. He was a ghost behind a grand piano in a dim Los Angeles lounge called the Executive Room. Beneath the stage lights he looked like just another journeyman piano player but the man behind the keys was actually a burgeoning superstar named Billy Joel.
His debut album had suffered from a mastering error that made him sound like a chipmunk. Even worse he had signed a predatory contract that effectively owned his life. To escape the legal sharks he fled New York for the West Coast. Because of a massive lawsuit he was legally forbidden from recording or performing under his own name. He was trapped hiding in plain sight at a cocktail bar.
The air in the Executive Room smelled of stale cigarettes and cheap gin. For six months he sat on that stool and watched the human parade pass by. He was not just playing for tips. He was observing. He watched the lonely businessmen and the broken dreamers who used the bar as a sanctuary from their own failures. He realized that everyone there was searching for a way to forget the weight of the world.
He began to mentally document the regulars. There was the bartender who claimed he could have been a movie star if he just had the right break. There was the real estate novelist who couldn’t finish a page and the lonely sailor who was just passing through. They were all real people trapped in their own mundane rhythms and they had no idea they were sitting next to a future icon.
When the legal dust finally settled he took those sketches of human desperation and turned them into a masterpiece. He realized that while he couldn’t record he had accidentally written the ultimate anthem for the working class. That smoke filled room became the birthplace of a legend. This is how a legal nightmare gave us the greatest singalong in music history.