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More Liner Notes…
Love, Hate, and Growth on Long Island With Billy Joel
by editor Michele Catalano
I was at my junior prom in 1979 at my Catholic high school in Hicksville, Long Island. The night was winding down and the DJ announced the last song of the evening. The first few notes of “Only the Good Die Young” echoed through the school cafeteria-turned-ballroom and everyone ran to the dance floor. As Billy Joel sang “you Catholic girls start much too late” a cheer went up and I thought to myself “My god, I hate Billy Joel.”
This was, in my mind, as grievous a thought as the time I confessed to myself that I don’t believe in God. I was a teenager on Long Island, one whose wayward moments included hanging out at the very Village Green Joel himself sung about. I was supposed to love Joel, our island’s favorite son. I was supposed to revere him. Instead, I had curated such a distaste for his music — music that I knew by heart — and it made me feel guilty.
Billy Joel songs were a part of my life. It’s just the way it was. My older cousins loved him and songs like “Captain Jack” and “Piano Man” were always there, lingering. I wanted to belong, I wanted to fit in and be like everyone else so I bought the records and listened to them in the dead of night but lines like “ah but still your finger’s gonna pick your nose” made me cringe. I came of age on a steady diet of bands like Led Zeppelin and The Who — Joel’s music was almost foreign to me, or at least felt like something I just couldn’t grasp.
Maybe that’s why I hated him. Because everyone else got him, everyone else loved and understood him and felt a connection with his music. I was missing something, I was sure. So I listened and kept listening, especially to Turnstiles and The Stranger. Occasionally I would get glimpses of genius; songs like “Summer Highland Falls” and “Vienna” were pure poetry, but that just exaggerated my distaste for “She’s Always a Woman,” or, later, “My Life.” His tunes seemed, at times, simplistic or crude. The story of Brenda and Eddie in “Scenes From an Italian Restaurant” made absolutely no sense. I accused him of lazy songwriting. My friends and cousins were aghast. You’d think I desecrated a holy cross. I guess in a way, I had.
I first saw Billy Joel live in 1978 or so, at the Nassau Coliseum. I went because everyone else was going, because I love live music, and because seeing Joel on his home turf was supposed to be some kind of transcendent experience. And he was good live. He was engaging and entertaining and the crowd ate up every reference to the Village Green or Long Island. But I was mentally drained by the end of the show, after spending the whole concert straining to have the shared experience everyone else was having. I didn’t have a bad time. It wasn’t the same as going to, say, a Grateful Dead show - something I did get - but I didn’t hate it.
The whole time I was actively hating on Billy Joel — and this went on for years — I was also developing a somewhat cordial relationship with some of his music. It was clearly a love/hate relationship, as I could listen to “Vienna” on repeat a dozen times but push away “Just the Way You Are” as schmaltzy crap. As much as I postured that I loathed Joel, certain songs alway hung like phantom itches. I’d scratch those itches even though I knew there was nothing there, nothing more to be had. I’d listen to “Ballad of Billy the Kid” or “The Entertainer,” looking for something to grab onto because I so desperately wanted to stop being on the outside of the Joel phenomenon.
I was finally cured of that in 1983, with the release of An Innocent Man. Songs like “Uptown Girl” and “Tell Her About It” put me in the enviable position of being a known Joel hater. Where other people were sheepishly jumping off his bandwagon while top 40 lovers climbed aboard, I stood on the side and welcomed the people who once questioned my lack of Joel allegiance. “I told you he was bad,” I’d say, smugly. By the time 1989 and “We Didn’t Start the Fire” rolled around, the allure of Billy Joel, Long Island Hero, was mostly dulled. No one cared that I didn’t like him. That albatross was gone.
As I age, I find myself softening some of my stances. I find myself being less of a hater. I am 62. I don’t have time in my life to viscerally hate things anymore; it wastes energy, it wastes precious minutes, it wastes your heart away if you let it. I’ve been very lenient with music lately, going back to the bands from my youth that I swore off in the mid 80s. I’m reconnecting with music I thought I left behind for good. And I’m forming a bond with music I passed on in high school.
And so it goes with Billy Joel.There are days when I will look at the track listing for The Stranger and think, that’s a really good album. I’ll take out my Piano Man vinyl and close my eyes and be instantly transported to the party we had in an abandoned house where we sang Billy Joel songs all night. I listen to “The Ballad of Billy the Kid" while I read other people’s ideas of “best Billy Joel songs,” and scream internally when I see “Scenes From an Italian Restaurant” near the top and “Summer Highland Falls” not get the love it deserves. I laugh at myself for caring. How did I get here?
I got here because I let my musical defenses down for a change. I implore, I challenge you to listen to something you passed over years ago for whatever reason. I ask you to listen to something your fourteen year old self laughed at and examine it now, under the weight of years. You’ll be surprised at how much more you let into your life when you get older. I’ve embraced Joel’s records again because they take me back, but they’ve also taken me forward, into an era where I embrace what I once eschewed.
Welcome to my “now playing” stand, Billy Joel.
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