News Ticker: Phish, Ray Davies, Bone Thugs-N-Harmony, Janet Jackson

• Late Night With Jimmy Fallon's salute to the Rolling Stones' reissued Exile on Main Street will feature a song by Phish, their first network TV performance since their reunion, Billboard reports (they performed at the Rock Hall induction on Fuse as well). Phish performed Exile in its entirety on Halloween at Festival 8, which will hit theaters as the live doc Phish 3D starting April 20th.

• The Kinks' Ray Davies has joined the lineup for the U.K.'s Glastonbury Festival. Fest organizer Michael Eavis says Davies will occupy the "legends' slot" and promises "Ray Davies with his friends and with a choir and all those Kinks songs are going to be absolutely unbelievable," Yahoo U.K. reports.

• Bone Thugs-N-Harmony's Flesh-N-Bone (real name: Stanley Howse) was arrested backstage after an Ohio show on charges dating back to 1998 that he struck his mother with a gun, the AP reports.

• Janet Jackson will headline the first night of the 2010 Essence Music Festival on July 2nd in New Orleans. Mary J. Blige and Alicia Keys are also booked to the play the event, which runs through July 4th.

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  MUSIC Exclusive Live Chat With Linkin Park and Incubus
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  MOVIES & TV Peter Travers: 'The Avengers' Has it All
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  POLITICS Matt Taibbi: Jon Corzine Is the Original Zimmerman
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  VIDEOS Exclusive Premiere: Tenacious D's 'Tinnitus'

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.”

More Song Stories entries »

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