There is a photograph that stops even lifelong Billy Joel fans in their tracks. Two young men stand among hanging slabs of meat in a cold storage room, dressed in fur, armour and chainmail, glaring at the camera as if they have just ridden in from a battlefield. One of them is Billy Joel. It is not a joke photograph taken at a fancy-dress party, and it is not a still from a film. It is the cover of a real album, released by a real record label, in July 1970, by a real band called Attila. The band had two members, no guitarist, one album, no hit singles, and a live act so loud that its own singer later said it drove audiences out of clubs. Within months of the album’s release, the band was finished. Within a few years, its singer was one of the most successful songwriters in America, and he would spend the rest of his career being asked, with a mixture of disbelief and delight, how the Piano Man had once been a barbarian.
This article is about that detour, and it stays inside it. It is not a general biography of Billy Joel, and it does not retell the story of “Piano Man” or “The Stranger” in any detail. Those records are the payoff, mentioned here only at the end, because the point of Attila is what it taught Joel before he ever sat down at a piano bar in Los Angeles and became famous. The detour matters because it was not a gimmick imposed on a young singer by a record company. It was Joel’s own idea, pursued with total seriousness, and its failure was total enough to change how he worked. A singer who has once tried to conquer the world with ten amplifiers and a distorted organ, and watched the room empty, learns something about volume, about songs, and about what an audience will actually stay to hear. Attila is the most instructive failure of Joel’s career, and also, if you listen to it with an open mind, a stranger and more interesting record than its reputation suggests.
As with the other stories in this series, a warning belongs at the start. The Attila story survives largely in Joel’s own later recollections, in the album’s original liner notes, and in retrospective articles written decades after the event. Those sources agree on the shape of the story, but they disagree on small details, including how many gigs the band actually played. Where they disagree, this article says so rather than smoothing the disagreement away. And one part of the story is deliberately kept brief: the personal reason the band ended involved Joel’s relationship with his bandmate’s wife, whom he later married. That is a matter of public record, reported in standard biographies, and it cannot be left out entirely, because it is part of why the band stopped. But it is not the subject of this article. The musical story — two men, an organ, a drum kit, and a very loud idea — is the subject, and it is quite enough on its own.
Long Island, the piano, and the Hassles
William Martin Joel was born on 9 May 1949 in the Bronx, New York, and grew up in Hicksville, on Long Island, in the Levittown area. He began piano lessons as a child, at his mother’s insistence, and by his own later account he began playing professionally as a teenager. Like many suburban teenagers of the early 1960s, he learned his trade not in a conservatory but in local bands, playing dances, bars and clubs, and absorbing whatever was on the radio. His first band of any note was the Echoes, later renamed, through a series of name changes, the Lost Souls. He left that group as a teenager to join a Long Island band that already had a record deal and a local reputation: the Hassles.
The Hassles had been formed on Long Island in 1964, built around vocalist John Dizek, guitarist Richard McKenna, organist Harry Weber and drummer Jon Small. By the time Joel joined, in the mid-1960s, the line-up had changed: Weber had gone, Howie Arthur Blauvelt had arrived on bass, and Joel, still a teenager, took over keyboards and, eventually, lead vocals. The band signed to United Artists Records and released two albums, a self-titled debut in 1967 and “Hour of the Wolf” in early 1969. Joel wrote or co-wrote songs on the first album and wrote or co-wrote most of the second. The Hassles were, by the accounts of the Long Island scene, an energetic live band with a loyal local following, mixing rock, rhythm and blues and soul, and then, on the second album, turning more psychedelic. They were not, however, a commercial success. Both albums failed to sell in significant numbers, and the band’s singles did not break nationally.
That failure is the necessary background to Attila, and it is worth pausing on what it felt like from inside a band like the Hassles. A young musician in 1969 could look around and see the rules of popular music changing under his feet. The polite pop and soul of the mid-1960s, the world the Hassles had grown up in, was giving way to something heavier, louder and more self-consciously serious: Led Zeppelin, Iron Butterfly, Blue Cheer, Deep Purple, the first stirrings of what would be called heavy metal. A band that wanted to matter in 1969 did not want to sound like a bar band playing covers. It wanted to sound, in the language of the time, heavy. Joel and Small, the two youngest and most restless members of the Hassles, decided that if they were going to fail, they would at least fail at something they believed in. They left the Hassles in 1969 and formed a new band of their own. It would have two members, no guitar, and a name borrowed from history’s most famous invader.
Ten months in a wallpaper-store basement
The first thing to understand about Attila is how seriously the two men took it. This was not a weekend joke or a studio prank. According to the album’s original liner notes, written by Tom Paisley, Joel and Small rehearsed for ten months, mostly at night, in the basement of a wallpaper store owned by Small’s family. Sometimes they rehearsed upstairs, near a window in the closed, darkened shop, until, as Joel later recalled in the liner notes, they attracted the attention of passing police officers and retreated to the basement. There was no heating. Rolls of wallpaper were stacked around them. The air smelled of dust and paper. They played to walls and crates, night after night, working out how two people could possibly make a sound big enough to fill a room.
That basement is the key image of the Attila story, more revealing than the meat locker on the cover. Two young men in an unheated room, convinced that the world was not listening to new music, practising a sound that nobody had asked for, is a familiar picture from the history of rock and roll. What makes Attila unusual is the sheer impracticality of what they were practising. A conventional rock band of 1969 had, at minimum, a singer, a guitarist, a bass player and a drummer. Attila had a singer who played keyboards and a drummer. That was it. There was no one to play a guitar solo, no one to hold down the bass line on a bass guitar, and no one to fill the space between Joel’s organ and Small’s drums except Joel himself, with his feet, his left hand, and whatever electronic help he could rig up.
The solution they arrived at was, in its way, ingenious. Joel played a Hammond B-3 organ, an instrument designed for churches, jazz clubs and soul bands, and he rewired it to bypass its Leslie tone cabinet, feeding it directly into amplifiers. The album’s technical notes, again via Paisley, describe the result as “pure raunch”: the organ signal went straight into the amps, with foot-controlled wah-wah and volume effects, and Joel played bass lines on a keyboard of his own design, using unconventional combinations of organ stops. The band’s road manager and technician, Glenn Evans, is credited with connecting the Hammond directly to a Marshall amplifier. The comparison most often made for the keyboard-bass idea is Ray Manzarek of the Doors, who played bass lines on a keyboard while also playing organ. Whether Joel was consciously copying Manzarek or arrived at the same solution independently is not something the sources settle, and this article does not claim it. The point is that the idea was not absurd in principle. A keyboard player can cover bass, and an organ through a stack of amplifiers can sound enormous. The question was whether two men could sustain that sound for a whole evening, in a club, in front of people who had come to dance or to drink, without the variety a larger band provides. Attila would spend its short life finding out that, mostly, they could not.
The name, too, was chosen with complete seriousness, and Joel’s later explanation of it is worth quoting because it captures the teenage logic of the whole project. He said, in an interview reported years later, that if you were going to assault the rock world and crush it under ten Marshall amplifiers, then Attila the Hun, who had plundered Italy and Gaul, seemed a reasonable role model. He added, with the benefit of hindsight, that he was nineteen at the time, and that at nineteen, if you loved heavy metal, it was all about thrash, kill, metal, slash, burn and pillage, repeated. That is not the language of a man who was being ironic. It is the language of a young musician who meant every word of it at the time, and who can now see, with some embarrassment and some affection, how young he was.
The album: eight tracks, no singles, no chart place
Against the odds, Attila got a record deal. Epic Records, a major label whose roster at the time included established rock and soul acts, signed the duo, and the album was recorded and released on 27 July 1970. It was produced by Irwin Mazur with Joel and Small themselves, and it ran for just under forty minutes across eight tracks, all written by Joel and Small together. No singles were released from it, and it did not chart. Those two facts, stated plainly, are the commercial story of Attila in a sentence. But a track listing, read slowly, tells you more about what the band thought it was doing than any review can.
The album opens with “Wonder Woman”, a fast, shouting organ rocker, followed by “California Flash” and “Revenge Is Sweet”. The centrepiece of the first side is “Amplifier Fire”, a two-part instrumental of nearly eight minutes, subtitled “Godzilla” and “March of the Huns”. The second side offers “Rollin’ Home”, “Tear This Castle Down”, “Holy Moses” and the closing track, “Brain Invasion”. Even the titles tell a story. This is not the language of the confessional singer-songwriter Joel would become. It is the language of comic books, monster films, medieval warfare and invasion: a young man’s fantasy world, set to music at maximum volume. The songs themselves, for all their noise, are not formless. Listeners who have gone back to the record in recent years have noted, with some surprise, how competently Joel plays the organ, how tight Small’s drumming is, and how the two men hold together a sound that, on paper, should fall apart. The problem was never that they could not play. The problem was what they chose to play, how loud they chose to play it, and for how long.
The cover completed the fantasy. Joel and Small posed in a meat locker, dressed in fur pelts, armour and chainmail, surrounded by hanging carcasses. It is one of the strangest major-label album covers of its era, and it has done more than any review to keep Attila alive in popular memory. It is important to be clear about what the cover is not. It is not a photograph of a concert, and it is not, in any meaningful sense, a document of the band’s live act. It is a studio photograph, staged to look tough and heavy, in keeping with the band’s chosen image. Its strangeness comes from the collision it stages: two suburban Long Island musicians, dressed as fifth-century invaders, standing in a twentieth-century cold room full of dead meat. The image promises a violence and a grandeur that the music, for all its volume, cannot quite deliver. That gap between image and sound is, in miniature, the whole Attila story.
The gigs: about a dozen, and nobody stayed
If the album is the permanent record of Attila, the live shows are the legend, and Joel’s own accounts of them have become the most quoted part of the story. In a 1985 interview with DJ Dan Neer, Joel said that Attila was heavy metal, that the band was going to destroy the world with amplification, and that it had about a dozen gigs at which nobody could stay in the room while the band was playing. It was too loud, he said. They drove people literally out of clubs. Club owners, in his retelling, would tell them that the music was great but that they could not stay in the club while it was being played. In a later interview, with NPR in 2012, he put it even more vividly, saying that the band was so loud you could see blood coming out of people’s ears, and that it was just horrible.
Those quotations need handling with care, because Joel has told the story more than once, and the numbers shift between tellings. The “about a dozen gigs” figure comes from the 1985 interview and is the one most often repeated. Another account, reporting an interview with biographer David Sheff, has Joel saying the band played five or six gigs. This article does not choose between those figures, because there is no independent gig list to settle the question. The honest summary is that Attila played a small number of club dates, somewhere between a handful and about a dozen, and that the consistent memory, across tellings, is not the number but the reaction: audiences left. That consistency matters more than the count. A band can survive a small number of gigs. It cannot survive gigs at which the audience physically leaves the room.
It is worth trying to imagine one of those gigs, because the comedy of the story can obscure how unpleasant it must have been to sit through. A small New York club in 1969 or 1970, with a low ceiling and a bar, is not Madison Square Garden. A Hammond organ fed directly into a wall of Marshall amplifiers, with no guitar to break up the texture and no bass guitar to anchor it, produces a continuous, mid-range roar, with Joel shouting over the top of it. There are no quiet passages to speak of, no acoustic interludes, no change of pace of the kind a larger band can offer by switching instruments or singers. After twenty minutes, the novelty of the noise wears off. After forty minutes, the noise itself becomes the problem. The audience’s departure, in that light, was not philistinism. It was a reasonable response to a sound that had been designed, quite deliberately, to be overwhelming, and that succeeded.
There is also a professional point here. A band that drives its audience out of clubs does not get invited back, does not build a following, and gives a record label no reason to promote its album. The album’s failure to chart, and the absence of any single, follow naturally from the live failure. Attila was not killed by critics or bad luck. It was killed by its own volume, in front of small audiences, until there were no more nights to play.
The verdict: the worst album ever, and the counter-case
The critical verdict on Attila, when it came, was brutal, and it has stuck. Stephen Thomas Erlewine of AllMusic wrote that “Attila” was undoubtedly the worst album released in the history of rock and roll, and, for good measure, in the history of recorded music itself, adding that there had been many bad ideas in rock but none to match the colossal stupidity of Attila. That judgement is quoted here because it is famous, and because it has shaped how the album is discussed, not because this article endorses it. A critic’s superlative is not a fact about a record. It is a fact about a critic’s reaction to it, and about the pleasure critics and fans take in superlatives. Joel himself has done little to dispel the verdict. He has described the album, in his own blunt phrase, as “psychedelic bullshit”, and he has called the project, looking back, a colossal failure. When the artist agrees with the critics, there is not much room left for a defence.
And yet a defence, of a modest kind, has been offered, and it is worth recording because it complicates the simple story of a terrible record. Julian Cope, the musician and writer, described Attila as an extremely entertaining joke that Billy was not in on, but added that he dug the trip, and that the record still put him in a good mood every time he heard it. That is not a claim that Attila is a masterpiece. It is a claim that the record is enjoyable on its own terms, as a loud, committed, slightly ridiculous artefact of its moment. More recent listeners have made a similar point: Joel plays the organ well, Small drums well, and the commitment of the performance is entertaining even when the songs are not memorable in the way Joel’s later songs are. The album’s defenders do not argue that it should have been a hit, only that it is fun.
There is a further point to make about the “worst album ever” label, and it concerns what the label conceals. Attila is not incompetent. Incompetent records are common, and most of them are boring. Attila is competent, loud, and misjudged, which is a rarer and more interesting combination. Joel could play, Small could drum, the production, by Mazur and the band themselves, captures the sound the band wanted to make, and the songs, for all their comic-book titles, are structured, rehearsed pieces of music. The failure is a failure of judgement about what an audience wants, not a failure of ability. That distinction is what makes Attila useful as a story. A young musician who cannot play can practise. A young musician who can play brilliantly but chooses the wrong vehicle for his talent has to learn a different lesson: that talent is not enough, and that the vehicle matters as much as the engine.
The end: October 1970, and a friendship that survived
Attila disbanded in 1970, in the October following the album’s July release, according to standard biographical accounts. The immediate cause, as those accounts report it, was personal: Joel began a relationship with Small’s wife, Elizabeth, whom he later married. This article records that fact briefly, as the biographies do, and does not elaborate on it, because the private lives of the people involved are not the subject here, and because the musical story already explains why the band could not have continued for much longer in any case. A band with no audience, no chart record and no single is not a going concern, whatever happens in its members’ private lives. The personal break may have determined the exact month of the ending. It did not determine that there would be an ending.
What happened afterwards is, in its way, as surprising as the band itself, and it redeems the story from simple bitterness. Joel and Small did not become permanent enemies. Small went on to a successful career as a music video director and producer, working with artists including Run-DMC, Garth Brooks, Reba McEntire and Travis Tritt, and he directed a number of Joel’s own videos, including new versions and concert films such as “Live at Yankee Stadium” in 1990 and “Live at Shea Stadium” in 2011. At Harvard University in 1994, when an audience member asked what had happened to his former bandmates, Joel described Small as a very successful video director, as his first ex-wife’s first husband, and, in the same breath, as a very good and close friend. That is a strange sentence to anyone who has not followed the story, and a revealing one to anyone who has. Two men who had once stood together in a meat locker, and then fallen out over a marriage, found their way back to a working friendship. The band did not survive. The friendship, in a different form, did.
After Attila: a solo singer, a wrong speed, and a piano bar
The year after Attila, Joel released his first solo album, “Cold Spring Harbor”, in 1971, on Family Productions. It did not sell well either, and it suffered from a famous technical mishap: it was mastered at the wrong speed, making Joel’s voice sound higher than it should have. That album, too, is a story of failure, but it is a different kind of failure from Attila’s. Where Attila had been too loud, too fast and too much, “Cold Spring Harbor” was quiet, piano-centred and confessional, and its failure was a quieter one. Joel toured behind it, then, after a contractual dispute, left for the West Coast, where he performed in a Los Angeles piano bar under the name Bill Martin. It was there, in the piano bar, that the singer who would become famous finally found his subject: the room, the regulars, the tired musicians and the drinkers, rendered in a song called “Piano Man”.
That song, released on his second solo album, “Piano Man”, in 1973 on Columbia Records, became his first major success, reaching the top twenty as a single and giving him his enduring nickname. The album that followed the breakthrough, and the ones after it, do not belong in this article except as a measure of distance. The distance between Attila and “Piano Man” is only three years, but it is the distance between two different ideas of what a song is for. Attila used songs as vehicles for noise, volume and fantasy. “Piano Man” used a song as a way of looking closely at a room full of real people. Joel did not arrive at the second idea by accident. He arrived at it by trying the first idea, watching it fail in front of small audiences, and then trying something almost opposite. That is the sense in which Attila, for all its absurdity, was necessary. It cleared away an idea that had to be tried and discarded before the real work could begin.
It is also worth noting, for readers who want to hear the evidence for themselves, that Attila has not entirely vanished. One track, “Amplifier Fire, Part 1 (Godzilla)”, appeared on Joel’s 2005 box set “My Lives”, and two more Attila songs, “Wonder Woman” and “Holy Moses”, were included on the soundtrack to the 2025 documentary film about Joel’s life, “Billy Joel: And So It Goes”. Those reappearances do not rehabilitate the album as a lost masterpiece, and Joel has never claimed that they do. They do, however, show that the record has a place in his own account of his career, as a chapter he is willing to acknowledge rather than erase. A musician who truly wanted to forget Attila could have left it off every compilation. Joel has not done that. He has let it stand, in small doses, as evidence of where he started.
Why the barbarian matters
It is tempting to treat Attila as a footnote, a funny story to tell at a dinner party about a famous man. That reading sells the episode short, and it sells Joel short. Attila matters for three reasons, each of which is about the career that followed it rather than about the record itself.
First, it matters because it shows Joel learning, in public and at his own expense, that loudness is not the same as power. A Hammond organ through ten amplifiers is loud. A song sung quietly, with a piano and a story, can be more powerful, because it leaves room for the listener to enter it. Joel’s later records are full of that kind of room: verses that build slowly, choruses that arrive rather than assault, arrangements that know when to stop. That restraint did not come naturally to the nineteen-year-old who wanted to destroy the world with amplification. It came from watching amplification fail.
Second, it matters because it shows Joel learning what his instrument was for. In Attila, the organ was a weapon, a substitute for a guitar, a way of making a two-man band sound like an army. In his solo career, the piano became something else: a storyteller’s instrument, a way of accompanying a voice rather than competing with it, a piece of furniture in a bar as much as a piece of equipment on a stage. The shift from organ-as-weapon to piano-as-companion is the single biggest change in Joel’s musical identity, and it happened, in effect, between 1970 and 1973. Attila is the before picture. “Piano Man” is the after picture. Without the before, the after is harder to understand.
Third, and most simply, Attila matters because it is evidence that Joel’s career was not inevitable. The standard story of a famous musician often runs backwards from success, as if every early step led logically to the hits. Attila breaks that story. Here is a young man of obvious talent, with a record deal, making a record that nobody bought, playing gigs that nobody stayed for, and ending up, a year later, with a solo album mastered at the wrong speed that nobody bought either. At that point, in 1971, there was no reason to suppose that Billy Joel would become Billy Joel. The career that followed was built, not predestined, and it was built by a man who had already failed twice, in two very different ways, and who kept going. That is a more encouraging story than the standard one, and a truer one.
The barbarian, in retrospect
Looking back from the vantage point of a long career, Attila looks less like a mistake and more like a necessary experiment. Every young musician has a version of it: the band that was too loud, too fast, too serious, too committed to an idea that the world did not want. Most such bands leave no record behind, and their members can pretend they never happened. Joel’s version left a major-label album, a meat-locker cover photograph, and a paper trail of interviews in which he has, with remarkable candour, described his own failure in his own words. That candour is part of why the story endures. Joel does not blame the label, the critics, or the audience for Attila. He blames the idea, and himself for believing in it, and he tells the story as a joke at his own expense.
There is a final, quieter point to make, and it concerns the two men in the photograph. Attila was a partnership, not a solo project with a hired drummer. Small was not a footnote to Joel’s career. He was a collaborator who rehearsed for ten months in a basement, who helped design a sound that had never been tried in quite that form, who stood beside Joel in a meat locker and believed, for a time, that two men and an organ could conquer the rock world. His later career as a director of Joel’s videos is a reminder that partnerships in music do not always end when bands do. They change shape. The duo that could not hold a club audience went on, in different roles, to make films of concerts in stadiums. That is not a bad ending for a band that once drove people out of rooms. It is, in its way, a vindication: the two men could hold an audience after all. They just needed a bigger room, a different instrument, and a song worth staying for.
Billy Joel spent 1969 and 1970 as a barbarian. He dressed as one, he posed as one, and he tried to sound like one. The barbarian failed, completely and publicly. The Piano Man who followed succeeded, completely and publicly, by doing almost the opposite of everything the barbarian had done: singing quietly, telling stories, and letting the piano do the work that ten amplifiers could not. That is the story of Attila, and it is worth telling not because the record is great, but because the failure was honest, the lesson was learned, and the man who learned it went on to write songs that millions of people have stayed, quite happily, in the room to hear.
Sources
- Wikipedia — “Attila (rock band)” (formation 1969, organ-and-drums instrumentation, keyboard bass lines, album released 27 July 1970 on Epic, no singles, did not chart, producers Irwin Mazur, Billy Joel and Jonathan Small, Glenn Evans technical credit, track listing and length, Joel’s “psychedelic bullshit” description, Dan Neer 1985 interview quotation, “Amplifier Fire, Part 1 (Godzilla)” on the 2005 “My Lives” box set, “Wonder Woman” and “Holy Moses” on the 2025 “And So It Goes” soundtrack, AllMusic one-star rating and Stephen Thomas Erlewine quotation, Julian Cope quotation).
- American Songwriter — “Bet You Didn’t Know About That Time Billy Joel Did a Metal Album” (Hassles background, 2014 Fred Schruers interview quotation, Dan Neer 1985 quotation, Harvard 1994 remarks on Jon Small, “Cold Spring Harbor” 1971 and “Piano Man” 1973, Small’s later video direction).
- Ultimate Classic Rock — “50 Years Ago: Billy Joel Goes Heavy Metal With Attila” (Hammond B-3 organ, Marshall stack, meat-locker cover, late July 1970 release, partnership ending after Joel’s affair with Small’s wife, solo career from 1971 with “Cold Spring Harbor”).
- Long Island Music and Entertainment Hall of Fame — “The Hassles” (formed 1964, Joel joining in 1966, debut album 1967, “Hour of the Wolf” 1969, band disbanding later in 1969, Joel and Small forming Attila).
- uDiscover Music — “The Hassles: Remembering Billy Joel’s Early Rock-Soul Band” (Hassles origins 1964, Joel joining aged 17, debut November 1967, second album early 1969, split with Joel and Small forming Attila).
- Wikipedia — “Billy Joel” (born 9 May 1949, Bronx, grew up in Hicksville, Long Island, Echoes, Hassles and Attila, disbanding in October 1970, Family Productions, “Cold Spring Harbor” 1971, “Piano Man” 1973 on Columbia).
- Billy Joel official site — Timeline (Attila formed 1970 with Jon Small, one album on Epic, solo contract and “Cold Spring Harbor” 1971, Columbia signing and “Piano Man” 1973).
- Far Out Magazine — “The band that made Billy Joel check ‘into a nut house'” (five-or-six-gigs account, Sheff interview reference, used here only to note the gig-count disagreement; the article’s health-related episode is deliberately omitted).
- YouTube — “05 Rollin’ Home” – ATTILA (ATTILA – 1970) (1970 Attila recording, Joel on Hammond B-3 organ, Small on drums, Epic Records manufacture, Tom Paisley liner notes on ten months of basement rehearsals and the organ-to-amplifier technical setup).
Image credits: Urban street scene — photo by Lesli Whitecotton, Pexels free licence (thematic image only, not a photograph of Long Island or of Billy Joel). Microphone on a dark stage — photo by Michael DO, Pexels free licence (thematic image only). Illuminated control panel — photo by Daniel Ponomarev, Pexels free licence (thematic image only, not Attila’s organ or amplifier rig). Close-up of microphones in a studio — photo by Clement Lepetit, Pexels free licence (thematic image only). River at dusk — photo by Ehsan Haque, Pexels free licence (thematic image only). All images are thematic illustrations; none is a photograph of Billy Joel.