It was a miserable night. At 4:30 a.m., the bladder was demanding, the sinuses had a headache working, and after a trip to the head and a glass of water chasing an Aleve, the next thing was tossing and turning. After enough of that, it was time to get up and watch some late night TV.
Flipping through the channels, I came across something very interesting – The Last Play at Shea. I knew it had to be about baseball and the Mets, so I flipped over to the channel. What came on the screen was not baseball, but rather, Billy Joel playing a concert. Then I realized he was playing Shea Stadium.
I started thinking about baseball and Joel. What a great game, what a wonderful musician.
I love baseball; it is the greatest American game. Compared to football, it is a game of finesse.
And Billy Joel! He is the finest and the best composer of recent times.
Maybe of all time.
I have listened and enjoyed a lot of music in my lifetime. Everything from the classics to rock & roll to the blues to show music to country music to bluegrass. I have a very eclectic taste in music; about the only thing I don’t like is head-banging hard metal junk. It is not really music; there is no point to the lyrics, there is no choral construction, and there is no melody. Just rhythm and screaming—not my idea of music.
Billy Joel’s work, on the other hand, is incredible when it comes to the things of which he has written, the timeless melodies he developed, and the supporting background music for his main themes. Joel’s work really comes from places in his heart that he has shared with the American people. From his work, you can sense that he relates to, suffered with, and celebrated life with many different groups of people throughout the land.
Their stories have touched his soul and his soul could not be silent.
Much of his work goes beyond just “being a song.” Take We Didn’t Start The Fire, for example. Therein is contained a whole history lesson in the one song. As the documentary about Joel and Shea plays out on TV, I think the man is a genius when it comes to fitting words together and inserting them into a song.
Another song demonstrating Joel’s ability to see, hear, and write about life in America is his story of Allentown. Again, he captures the mood of the people, their plight as Allentown degrades because of a loss of work; he paints a picture with the music and words describing life in the northeast city.
As I listened to the stories of Mets baseball and the last play at Shea, Billy Joel’s music played both in the background and in the forefront of the story. As I watched, I began thinking about Joel’s work, Piano Man. As I thought about it, I realized I could not think of enough facts about the work. So, living in this wonderful age of the Internet in which you can find out anything about everything through Google, I turned on the computer and Googled “Billy Joel.”
I was shocked! Piano Man was Joel’s first major hit and released on November 1, 1973!
I thought, Naw, that can’t be right! To me, it sounded more contemporary than something that came out in 1973. I thought of many of his other songs, An Innocent Man, She’s Always A Woman, Baby Grand, A Matter of Trust, The Entertainer, She’s Right On Time, Goodnight Saigon, I Go To Extremes, It’s Still Rock And Roll To Me, Last Of The Big Time Spenders, The River Of Dreams, Movin’ Out (Anthony’s Song), All About Soul, and perhaps my favorite, The Downeaster ‘Alexa.’
I think about all these wonderful pieces of work and I am again surprised that Joel has been at it for so long. Then it occurs to me, his hits and my flying coincide. He has spent the last 40 years on stage making wonderful music and I have been airborne, sometimes catching a song along the way, sometimes not.
Again, thinking about it, Billy Joel’s music feels and sounds as though he wrote it—well, just yesterday. All of it. Then it comes to me when I think, yes, the music is timeless—in the truest sense of the word.
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©2011 J. Clark
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