On the Bus With Paolo Nutini: Kid Rock Stories, Drinks, "Guitar Hero" Battles

After Amy Winehouse called her tour off due to that pesky exhaustion problem, twenty-year-old Scottish singer-songwriter Paolo Nutini forged ahead alone for what is now a headlining tour of North America. "New Shoes" Nutini (who is now booked for the Led Zeppelin-headling tribute show to his record label mentor, Ahmet Ertegun) let Rock & Roll Daily take a look inside his tour bus before his show at the Fillmore in New York last night. Twelve people are packed onto the bus for a tour that already seen Nutini playing with Elvis Costello and Feist, and partying with VMAs lightweight champ Kid Rock. Unfortunately, Nutini insisted that the band had "obviously hidden the drugs and guns" before we hopped aboard, but take a look at our photo tour to get a taste of the singer's drinking philosophy, Guitar Hero insecurities and tales of buses that keep moving without drivers.

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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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