his touring band from 1971 to 1972 (Larry Russell on bass guitar, Al Hertzberg on lead guitar, Rhys Clark on drums) performed 12 songs, seven from Cold Spring Harbor and five songs he had not yet recorded. Some of the songs were later recorded for the Piano Man LP, including "The Ballad of Billy the Kid", "Travelin' Prayer", and "Captain Jack". "Captain Jack" was immediately embraced by WMMR's audience. For the next year and a half, the station kept its live version of the song in regular rotation. Listeners called in, wanting to know where they could find the song and on what album it appeared. The song was such a big hit in Philadelphia that several New York radio stations got their own tape copies and began to play it as well. Though Columbia Records' then-president, Clive Davis, first noticed Joel at the Mar y Sol festival in Puerto Rico on Easter Sunday, April 2, 1972, the constant airplay of Joel's unreleased song kept the label's attention. Columbia Records did their best to track Joel down. After turning down a record deal from Atlantic Records, Joel signed with Columbia in the spring of 1973. Release and reaction "Captain Jack" was one of the 10 songs recorded in Los Angeles for Joel's Columbia debut, Piano Man. It quickly became a staple of FM rock stations after the album's release in November 1973. This, along with "Piano Man", "The Entertainer", and "New York State of Mind", were the songs that Joel was best known for before the release of The Stranger in 1977. Reception for the song was mostly positive. Jack Breschard of Rolling Stone called it one of Joel's "best efforts". Ira Mayer called it Joel's "signature piece," and Stephen Holden said the song, a "centerpiece" of the album, "compelled attention for [its] despairing portraits of urban fringe life, despite [the] underlying shallowness." Holden also believed that the song had a Bob Dylan feel to it. "As with so many rock stars, one of his most important early influences was Bob Dylan–in fact, 'Piano Man' and 'Captain Jack,' two of his more ambitious early tunes, as well as the more recent and better 'She's Always a Woman,' are practically keyboard parodies of Dylan critiques," Holden says. Author Hank Bordowitz called "Captain Jack" "as bleak a portrait of growing up in the affluent suburbs as anything before L.A. punk hit nearly