Michael Jackson at 50: His Four-Decade Career in Photos

Michael Jackson turns 50 years old today. Jackson has spent most of those years under heavy scrutiny in one of the more intense public spotlights in music history. Click below for an in-depth gallery of Jackson images, including little or never seen early shots of Michael and his siblings care of the Getty-owned Michael Ochs archive.

• Michael Jackson at 50: A Look Back at the King of Pop's Four-Decade Career

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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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