Las Vegas Sun

March 18, 2024

MUSIC:

Billy Joel: Everyman or nobody?

After the announcement that Billy Joel would play Vegas on Valentine’s Day, debate raged in the Sun newsroom over the merits — and demerits — of the piano man.

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Billy Joel “Uptown Girl”

Billy Joel “Piano Man”

If You Go

  • Who: Billy Joel
  • When: 8 p.m. Saturday
  • Where: MGM Grand Garden Arena
  • Tickets: $78.75-$183.75; ticketmaster.com

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Beyond the Sun

For Billy Joel: Brian Eckhouse:

Musicians envy Billy Joel’s selling — and staying — power, but few aspire to be Billy Joel. He plays the piano and his voice is clear-throated. He’s stocky, weathered and self-aware.

Joel, after all, is from the suburbs crushed onto Long Island, N.Y. He’s never run from that.

“You’re a zero in the suburbs,” Joel told his biographer. “Who gives a damn about you?”

Joel embodies a certain Long Islandness that resonates intensely with us natives: He can write chart-toppers and marry a supermodel but is still the loser who gets busted for driving drunk.

So no, Billy Joel is not cool. He’s decidedly uncool. It’s the very essence of his unlikely greatness: the band geek who actually made it.

He’s the scrappy schmo who wrote so many of our anthems — “Movin’ Out,” “Scenes from an Italian Restaurant” and “Only the Good Die Young” among them — that he’s had to release three greatest hits compilations. I used to time my morning alarm to when a local radio station played “We Didn’t Start the Fire” each morning. I probably learned the chronology of postwar history humming that song.

Joel was the obvious choice to play the final concert at Shea Stadium in Queens last July. When it sold out in 48 minutes, promoters added another final show. That one sold out in 46 minutes.

He still fills the 15,000-seat MGM Grand arena — 35 years after “Piano Man” propelled him to mega-stardom.

This is no accident. It isn’t luck. (So don’t bother likening him to the latest fleeting pop star).

Joel is The Entertainer. He is part-vaudeville, part-Broadway and yes, a darn talented rocker. His emotions, so swollen in his tunes, are earnest, unambiguous and true.

He’s you. He’s me. His story is our story.

Eckhouse Rates Joel

INFERIORITY: Joel so transparently thirsts for praise and bristles at criticism. Joel is like Charlie Brown: Just when he’s finally going to get props or score a victory, something seems to happen — the football gets yanked and he falls on his butt. Who doesn’t root for Charlie Brown?

LYRICS: “Vienna” and “The Ballad of Billy the Kid” are hidden gems. “Goodnight Saigon” vividly — spookily — thrusts the listener into 1960s Vietnam: “Remember Charlie / Remember Baker / They left their childhood / On every acre / And who was wrong? / And who was right? / It didn’t matter in the thick of the fight. / We held the day in the palm of our hand / They ruled the night, and the night / Seemed to last as long as six weeks.”

AUTHENTICITY: Joel’s neuroses are naked in his songs, as in “Angry Young Man”: “And there’s always a place for the angry young man / With his fist in the air and his head in the sand. / And he’s never been able to learn from mistakes / So he can’t understand why his heart always breaks / But his honor is pure and his courage as well / And he’s fair and he’s true and he’s boring as hell / And he’ll go to the grave as an angry old man.” I know this guy. I was him in high school.

POPULARITY: Joel’s popularity is indisputable: He’s sold more than 100 million albums and produced 30 hit songs. From 1976 to 1994, he had a hit in all but three years, according to the Billboard charts. Three of his songs reached No. 1. He’s won six Grammy Awards, earned a Tony Award for the Broadway show inspired by his music and is enshrined in the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame.

THE AMERICAN EXPERIENCE: No singer-songwriter has better depicted — nor for as long — that prevailing American sense of suburban isolationism. In its review of Joel’s classic 1977 album, “The Stranger,” Time wrote: “He is at his best taking unsentimental trips back to home territory, explaining the dead and defects of middle-class life.”

IN CLOSING: After a few years living in SoCal in the mid-1970s, Joel returned home, nostalgic. On the bus ride from the airport, he began tinkering with a tune that morphed into “New York State of Mind” — as true to the rhythms of my hometown as “New York, New York.” Even the most rigorous Joel foe must admit that.

Against Billy Joel: Michael J. Mishak

Few things in life can ruin my day like Billy Joel.

An empty pack of smokes, a parking ticket, a bounced check, a death in the family. None of these comes close to the despair I feel when I hear the sound of the piano man’s fingers on the keys.

Then there’s that voice, lulling me gently into a soft-rock coma. I just don’t get it. Joel looks so angry in the early photos. How can he spend all those words saying nothing?

I can only guess he knows deep down what I know instinctively: He’s terrible, an insidious blight on pop music.

But by some metrics, the guy had the raw ingredients to be great.

Joel grew up, as he once put it, “blue-collar poor” in Hicksville, part of cookie-cutter suburbia out on Long Island, joined a street gang and still got beat up as a kid. A self-described “cream puff,” he took up boxing, got his nose broken, earned a respectable 22-4 record and then got serious about music, in no small part to get the more well-to-do girls on the North Shore.

The fledgling musician and high school dropout painted houses, mowed lawns, worked an oyster dredge and inked typewriter ribbons to stay afloat. But with a career going nowhere fast, Joel decided to end it all. He drank a bottle of furniture polish.

Yes, furniture polish. The suicide attempt failed and, as legend has it, Joel was renewed.

I would say ruined. Whether it was the furniture polish or the blue-eyed soul that dominated the Long Island of Joel’s youth, something rubbed any remaining edge out of the piano man.

But people loved it and, as New York Times critic Robert Palmer put it nearly three decades ago, “Joel has won a huge following by making emptiness seem substantial and Holiday Inn lounge schlock sound special.”

Mishak Rates Joel

INFERIORITY: Joel fanatics love to link the piano man and his catalog of poor-schmuck-makes-it-big to Long Island, a place with a big inferiority complex. But I’m from Philly, that left-for-dead city between New York and Washington. Our hero was a fictional character, Rocky Balboa. We threw snowballs at Santa Claus. And when the Phillies finally won last year, we celebrated — by looting, flipping cars and setting fires. In other words, we’re more of a Springsteen town.

LYRICS: At least Elton John had the good sense to hire a lyricist. New York Times critic Robert Palmer had Joel’s number back in 1980, after he had a half-dozen albums to prove himself: “He has mastered the art of making lyrics that are banal — and when they are about women, frequently condescending — sound vaguely important.”

AUTHENTICITY: Joel seemed to get it from the start: He’s just another serenader who’s only as memorable as his latest hit, he sings on “The Entertainer.” But clearly the angry young man thought much more of himself, often reading bad reviews aloud onstage — and then ripping them up. (You show ’em, Billy!) As critic Ron Rosenbaum noted in Slate recently, Joel’s music is filled with contempt for the phonies who populate his songs, though he’s beloved as some sort of workingman’s bard. In truth, he’s simply Holden Caulfield without the charm.

POPULARITY: Numbers don’t lie. According to the Recording Industry Association of America, Joel is ranked sixth among top-selling artists of all time, behind the Beatles and Elvis Presley but ahead of fellow piano man Elton John and Barbra Streisand. He sold out Shea Stadium — twice. But selling records and selling out arenas doesn’t mean it’s art. To date, Britney Spears has sold 32 million albums in the United States alone. Oh, and No. 3 on the RIAA list: Garth Brooks. (Wonder whatever happened to that country rocker Chris Gaines.)

THE AMERICAN EXPERIENCE: “There’s city music and there’s country music, but there’s no suburban music,” Joel once said. There it was. Joel had found his sound, only it was more Tin Pan Alley than rock ‘n’ roll. His breakthrough album, “The Stranger,” hit stores in 1977, dropping the dreadful “Scenes From an Italian Restaurant” in the red-hot summer of punk rock — the Ramones, the Clash, the Sex Pistols. Joel’s fellow New Yorkers were rocking CBGB’s while he was busy rocking elevators.

IN CLOSING: If Joel was saying anything about the suburbs in his tired tunes, it wasn’t very interesting. In fact it was mind-numbing, which is a shame because Levittown America has inspired great art. At 59, he finally seems to have realized this, telling The New York Times last year, “I’m just this shlubby guy who plays the piano.” Amen.

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