If you did an online search for Worst Albums of All Time, this one is likely to end up on several of them.
That’s Billy Joel on the cover, dressed as a hun and posing with meat. The entire album features just drums, keyboards, and Billy Joel’s 20 year old vocals.
We’ve all heard of movies being so bad they’re good. Can music be so bad that it’s good? Clearly it can, if you listen to Attila’s lone album. We’d like to think that Billy Joel and Jon Small wrote, recorded, and posed for that album cover with tongue planted firmly in cheek, but even Billy Joel has gone on record as calling the album “psychedelic bullshit”.
But then again, in a 1985 interview with Dan Neer, Billy said:
End of the sixties, I was in a two-man group. We were heavy metal, we were going to destroy the world with amplification, we had titles like ‘Godzilla’, ‘March of the Huns’, ‘Brain Invasion’. A lot of people think [I] just came out of the piano bar… I did a lot of heavy metal for a while. We had about a dozen gigs and nobody could stay in the room when we were playing. It was too loud. We drove people literally out of clubs. ‘It was great, but we can’t stay in the club’
According to Allmusic.com (1 out of 5 stars): Attila undoubtedly is the worst album released in the history of rock & roll – hell, the history of recorded music itself. There have been many bad ideas in rock, but none match the colossal stupidity of Attila.
Worst album of all time? Aw, c’mon! It’s fun! It’s made even more fun when you know that it’s Billy Joel! It’s not one you’d likely listen to more than once or twice a year if you owned it, but it’s so bad, it’s kind of good.
