BILLY JOEL
Billy Joel (born May 9, 1949) is an American singer-songwriter and pianist. Since releasing his first hit song, “Piano Man”, in 1973, Joel has become the sixth best-selling recording artist and the third best-selling solo artist in the United States. His compilation album Greatest Hits Vol. 1 & 2 is one of the best-selling albums in the US. Joel had Top 40 hits in the 1970s, 1980s, and 1990s, achieving 33 Top 40 hits in the US, all of which he wrote himself. He is also a six-time Grammy Award winner who has been nominated for 23 Grammy Awards. He has sold more than 150 million records worldwide, making him one of the best-selling artists of all time. In 2013, Joel received the Kennedy Center Honors, the nation’s highest honor for influencing American culture through the arts. (More from Wikipedia)
Hiram Bullock, Give it What U Got – Hiram Bullock is a longtime New York session guitarist who played on some of the finest pop albums of the 1970’s, such as Billy Joel’s The Stranger and Steely Dan’s Aja (both released in 1977). He was also one of the bandmembers in the original incarnation of the World’s Most Dangerous Band that Paul Shaffer assembled when Late Night with David Letterman first went on the air in 1982. Beginning in 1986, Hiram Bullock released more than a dozen albums as a solo artist. Give it What U Got (1987), his second album is an enjoyable blend of jazz, rock and funk that he would perfect even further over time. The final track is an instrumental treatment of a Steely Dan song, “Pretzel Logic”, the title song to their third album, Pretzel Logic; “Pretzel Logic” was the follow-up single to their major hit “Rikki Don’t Lose that Number”.
(December 2015)
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For some reason, over the years the 1970’s have gotten a reputation as a poor decade for music. (So do the 1950’s, for that matter, even though that is where rock and roll came from). It certainly cannot be because everything sounded the same. Most of the British Invasion bands were still active. The top American acts were still going strong as well – Elvis Presley, Bob Dylan, Carole King, Simon and Garfunkel, Linda Ronstadt, the Beach Boys, the Band, Johnny Cash, Frank Sinatra, etc. – and major stars who arrived in the 1970’s include Elton John, Michael Jackson, Queen, ABBA, Billy Joel, Aerosmith, Bruce Springsteen, AC/DC, Prince, James Taylor, and Tom Petty. Anyone who says they are a music fan has to be able to find someone, and probably several someones on that list that they like a lot.
(December 2016)
