Billy Joel

"People who just know Billy Joel from Top 40 singles may not like Billy Joel, and I can't say I necessarily blame them. I don't think that really represents the sum and substance of my work."

So says Joel in the liner notes to My Lives, a comprehensive four-CD/one-DVD box set that uses rarities, B-sides, soundtrack contributions, demos, album tracks, and the occasional hit to draw a musical biography of one of the more successful recording artists of the rock & roll era. In essence, the box is an argument for Joel's statement that his hits do not represent his work accurately (thereby, it also acts as an antidote to his previous box set, which just stuck the three volumes of his greatest hits together). The fact that this is a clearing-house for non-LP cuts, something that has been long awaited by hardcore fans, is almost beside the point -- this is intended as defense of Joel's work as a whole, an argument for his strengths as a writer and a musician, with the rarities being offered as Exhibit A. While it cannot be argued that Joel's unreleased material is on the level of either Bob Dylan or Bruce Springsteen -- quite frankly, he's not nearly as prolific a songwriter as either -- My Lives does act as a counterpart to Tracks or The Bootleg Series in how it fills in the cracks within the catalog. But since this doesn't add much to the official record, the way that those two landmark sets did -- for the abundance of rarities here, there are only five brand-new, unfamiliar songs hauled out of the vaults; the rest are alternate takes and early versions of familiar songs -- a better comparison is the Band's A Musical History, which traced the group's career using a wealth of rare material to illustrate the band's growth and depth.

Here, the unreleased material, oddities, and overlooked tracks are used to illustrate the truth within the set's title -- that Joel did indeed have several musical lives during his long career. To that end, My Lives is indeed a success, since it's the first Billy Joel release to acknowledge that he was in bands prior to launching a solo career in 1971, offering two songs apiece from the Lost Souls and the Hassles and just one monstrosity from his legendary heavy metal organ-n-drums duo, Attila. It also goes out of its way to emphasize Joel's latter-day classical work; not only does it contain three selections from his Fantasies & Delusions album, but Anthony DeCurtis' liner notes linger so long on Joel's classical pieces, it seems like a justification of sorts. But that's fine -- having the lesser-known psychedelic and garage R&B bands bookend classical compositions performed by Richard Joos not only offers a nice contrast, it tells the story and in a way no other Joel compilation has, even if 2001's Essential did end with a few classical cuts. And if the intention was to help build the case for Billy Joel, songwriter and musician, opposed to rock star, this box is successful, at least partially.

For the first two discs, My Lives is flat-out terrific, even when the music is somewhat less than perfect. The Lost Souls were generic '60s garage pop, and while the Hassles were better, they were a bit too close to the Rascals, yet all this works in the greater context of the box -- it provides context for what Joel did next. And after the aptly titled "Amplifier Fier" from Attila, the set goes into a great series of rarities, starting with the organ-driven precious pop of "Only a Man" and continuing through "Oyster Bay," the best previously unheard song here, and then a bunch of Western-themed Piano Man demos, including the title track with different lyrics and mind-bendingly distracting echo, "The Siegried Line," an early version of "Worse Comes to Worst" called "New Mexico," and the unreleased "Cross to Bear." Soon, album tracks start to be woven into the greater fabric of the set, but the rare material keeps flowing throughout the second disc. And there are a bunch of highlights he