It’s impossible to count the number of artists influenced by The Beatles in some way. The Beatles were a revolutionary band and continue to impact future generations. Billy Joel is an incredible singer-songwriter, but his life could have gone in a different direction if he hadn’t watched a famous performance by The Beatles.
The Beatles skyrocketed in popularity after appearing on ‘The Ed Sullivan Show’
The Beatles had already become a success story in the U.K. in the early 1960s. When the band performed on The Ed Sullivan Show in the U.S., they became global superstars. The Beatles first performed on the show in 1964 to a record-breaking 73 million viewers. This performance launched Beatlemania in the U.S., along with the British Invasion, which saw other U.K. rock acts dominating the U.S. Billboard charts.
The band performed several of their earliest hits, including “All My Loving”, “She Loves You”, and “I Want to Hold Your Hand”. In Anthology, Paul McCartney said that their hairstyle may have been what made this performance so impactful rather than the music.
“We came out of nowhere with funny hair, looking like marionettes or something. That was very influential,” McCartney explained. “I think that was really one of the big things that broke us – the hairdo more than the music, originally. A lot of people’s fathers had wanted to turn us off. They told their kids, ‘Don’t be fooled, they’re wearing wigs.’”
Billy Joel said his life was changed after seeing The Beatles perform on the show
Billy Joel was born in May 1949, meaning he would have been around 15 when The Beatles performed on The Ed Sullivan Show for the first time. In a CBS retrospective about this performance, the “Uptown Girl” said this was the exact moment he knew he wanted to be a rock star. The fab four looked like normal, everyday people who gave him hope that anybody could be in their position.
“That one performance changed my life,” Joel recalled. “Up to that moment, I’d never considered playing rock as a career. And when I saw four guys who didn’t look like they’d come out of the Hollywood star mill, who played their own songs and instruments, and especially because you could see this look in John Lennon’s face – and he looked like he was always saying: ‘F*** you!’ – I said: ‘I know these guys, I can relate to these guys, I am these guys.’ This is what I’m going to do – play in a rock band’.”
Joel isn’t the only artist who felt this way
The Beatles were an anomaly at the time because they were just four working-class kids from Liverpool who became worldwide stars. Billy Joel is one of many artists who saw The Beatles and were inspired for this exact reason. In his 2012 SXSW keynote address, Bruce Springsteen said the album cover for Meet the Beatles showed him his future because they looked like kids he grew up with.
“It was like the silent gods of Olympus,” the “Born to Run” singer explained. “Your future was just sort of staring you in the face. I remember thinking, ‘That’s too cool. I’m never gonna get there, man, never.’ And then in some fanzine I came across a picture of the Beatles in Hamburg. And they had on the leather jackets and the slick–backed pompadours, they had acned faces. I said, hey, ‘Wait a minute, those are the guys I grew up with, only they were Liverpool wharf rats.’ So minus their Nehru jackets and the haircuts – so these guys, they’re kids.
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