Billy Joel surveys the damage done by a rock-throwing hoodlum
 
If you’re like me, you can’t hear the Billy Joel song “All for Leyna” without wondering whether Leyna would have benefited a solid grounding in tort and accident law. And Brenda and Eddie, from “Scenes from an Italian Restaurant,” who “got a divorce as a matter of course,” who represented them in that legal matter? Well,  wonder no more.

In Central Islip, NY, legal scholars from all over North America gathered to honor Long Island’s foremost bard, Billy Joel with academia’s most esteemed form of celebration: the academic conference. Yes, that’s right: the Touro Law Center hosted a two-day conference called “Billy Joel and the Law” at the Jacob D. Fuchsberg Law Center on March 22 and 23.

The program promised the following: “Speakers at the conference will include judges, lawyers, law professors, and music scholars, who will discuss ways in which Billy Joel’s work relates to American law, society, and culture.” The brainy festivities included “a wine and cheese reception with musical performances related to the educational content of the program.” No, in case you were wondering, Billy Joel did not supply the music for the conference. 

There were the usual paper titles that played on Joel’s song and album titles, such as “Downeaster Alexa: a Perfect Storm of Regulations,” “Behind the Nylon Curtain: Billy Joel, the Reagan Revolution, and the Unraveling of the ‘Me’ Generation,” and “The Minstrel Testifies or How the Rules of Evidence Handcuff the Piano Man.” How did they neglect to do anything with “You May Be Right.” And not a single mention of “Lawyers in Love”!! (Oh wait, that’s Jackson Browne.)

Here’s my best guess as to what Billy Joel would have looked like had he not become a rock and roll troubadour but instead had decided to become a law professor:
 

 
via Lawyers, Guns, and Money

 
I always argue that Billy Joel should be embraced as an artist of masculine, heterosexual camp—like a Broadway Bruce Springsteen, perhaps (not that Born to Run: The Musical isn’t going to happen one day, but I digress). As far as pop music goes, you’d be hard-pressed to find a more earnest chanteur, but finding that radio-friendly voice has been a strange journey for ol’ Billy. Prior to becoming the piano man, he was in Attila, a short-lived (1969 to 1970) two-piece hard rock band (or heavy prog metal duo if you prefer) with drummer Jon Small.

In Billy’s own words:

End of the sixties, I was in a two-man group. We were heavy metal, we were going to destroy the world with amplification, we had titles like ‘Godzilla’, ‘March of the Huns’, ‘Brain Invasion.’ A lot of people think [ I ] just came out of the piano bar… I did a lot of heavy metal for a while. We had about a dozen gigs and nobody could stay in the room when we were playing. It was too loud. We drove people literally out of clubs. ‘It was great, but we can’t stay in the club’

Attila’s intense amplification was achieved a result of running Joel’s Hammond organ directly into Marshall amplifiers.

Perhaps even more fascinating than the sound (or those nutty outfits) is the love story behind Attila’s demise. Billy began an affair with his drummer’s wife Elizabeth, and though Small was a philanderer himself, he and Elizabeth had a small son together, and she told Billy if he confessed, she’d leave both men. Racked with guilt, Joel attempted suicide by drinking furniture polish, putting him in a coma. After a brief stay in a mental hospital, Billy eventually told Jon, Jon broke Billy’s nose, and Billy and Elizabeth ended up together (married for 10 years, actually—she’s the waitress “practicing politics” in “Piano Man.”)

Needless to say, Attila didn’t make it through all that drama, but I’m gonna go out on a limb here and say it’s not as bad as critics have made it out to be (though even Joel himself called it “psychedelic bullshit”). Think Deep Purple, Wolfmother, Iron Butterfly, etc, though not really as good. However, if you’re looking for something new to listen to in the back of a carpeted van under a blacklight, you could do worse! There’s also just something compelling about the experimental line-up—this is a two-piece acid rock outfit with a heavy sound despite having absolutely no guitars!

Considering they posed with carcasses on their album cover—just like the Beatles—it’s sad that there is no documentation of the group’s live act. The two men actually made up later and Jon Small produced one of Joel’s live videos.
 

 
This is what it took to make me finally appreciate the genius of Billy Joel. Fucking glorious !
 

 
Much thanks to Gregory Ward via Wonder Tonic