Jimmy Page, Leona Lewis Bring Rocking End to Beijing Olympics

The 2008 Summer Olympics finally concluded last night in Beijing, bidding goodbye to Michael Phelps, the Redeem Team and Usain Bolt, but not before handing off the baton to London, England, who will host the 2012 Olympics. Acting as delegates for the U.K. were Leona Lewis and Jimmy Page, who came together to perform Led Zeppelin's "Whole Lotta Love." There was some outcry about the song's lyrics prior to the performance, but Lewis tactfully changed the song's words from "every inch of my love" to "every bit of my love" while singing from a three-story high pillar. Check out the performance at the NBC site, even though it sounds like Lewis is singing from the opposite end of a tunnel.

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Song Stories

“Piano Man”

Billy Joel | 1973

Billy Joel’s first hit, “Piano Man,” was – ironically – an autobiographical lament about how his first album wasn’t a hit. When Cold Spring Harbor didn’t take off, Joel briefly became a lounge pianist in Los Angeles, and this song, about that experience, expressed his frustrations and fears at the time: “And they sit at the bar and put bread in my jar/And say, ‘Man, what are you doing here?’” “It was all right,” Joel said later, about the gig. “I got free drinks and union scale, which was the first steady money I’d made in a long time.”

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