Come for the politics, stay for the snark.

A tremendous foreign policy asset… to all of our adversaries.

She burned that motherfucker down, and I am so here for it. Thank you, Caroline Kennedy.

Wow, you are pre-disappointed. How surprising.

If you don’t believe freedom is for everybody, then the thing you love isn’t freedom, it is privilege.

At some point, the ability to learn is a factor of character, not IQ.

The next time the wall street journal editorial board speaks the truth will be the first.

The real work of an opposition party is to hold the people in power accountable.

Let’s not be the monsters we hate.

The revolution will be supervised.

Do we throw up our hands or do we roll up our sleeves? (hint, door #2)

So it was an October Surprise A Day, like an Advent calendar but for crime.

The snowflake in chief appeared visibly frustrated when questioned by a reporter about egg prices.

Yeah, with this crowd one never knows.

Not so fun when the rabbit gets the gun, is it?

New McCarthy, same old McCarthyism.

We cannot abandon the truth and remain a free nation.

The lights are all blinking red.

Of course you can have champagne before noon. That’s why orange juice was invented.

“woke” is the new caravan.

Wake up. Grow up. Get in the fight.

Radicalized white males who support Trump are pitching a tent in the abyss.

Trump’s cabinet: like a magic 8 ball that only gives wrong answers.

Teach a man to fish, and he’ll sit in a boat all day drinking beer.

Republicans got rid of McCarthy. Democrats chose not to save him.

You are here: Home / Music / Musical Open Thread: Happy 75th Birthday, Billy Joel

Musical Open Thread: Happy 75th Birthday, Billy Joel

by | 71 Comments

This post is in: 

You may be right, I’m a normie. (Maybe you’re a normie too… )

Reader Interactions

71Comments

  2. 2.

    sab

    Yikes that Billy Joel is that old, but he has been around my whole adult life and I am 70.

  3. 3.

    WereBear

    One surprise when Mr WayofCats and I were merging our CD’s (which lets people carbon-date our relationship, I suppose) there was a lack of Billy Joel because on Long Island, he was a regional hero and one had hot/cold streaming music.

    Like you never bought Beastmaster back in the day, because it was on TBS all the time.

    But good for him.

  5. 5.

    oldster

    Somewhat tangential to Billy Joel per se:

    I just want to say that I deeply appreciate Balloon Juice’s commitment to publishing positive, happy content now and then. A steady diet of doom and gloom is good for no one.

    You folks cover a lot of what’s bad out there — nobody could say you’re Pollyannas — but I think it is very healthy to take occasional breaks from the bad to appreciate the good. So, thanks.

    Also — a BJ post about BJ.

  6. 6.

    sab

    @sab: When I was in law school in the late seventies one of my favorite classmates, an evangelical girl from Chattanooga who had gone to a very Christian college, had a huge crush on Billy Joel. I had not thought that she was part of his fan base, but she was.

  8. 8.

    sab

    @WereBear:  I have a big box of vinyl in storage that I hope hasn’t melted. I love vinyl, but cossetting those needles was a nuisance.

  11. 11.

    sab

    @Baud: Her law school boyfriend was a Jewish guy from Manhatten.  They adored each other, but he always said it was weird dating a girl who was sure that and upset that you were going to Hell.

  13. 13.

    🐾BillinGlendaleCA

    “Play us a song Piano Man…”

    Billy Joel’s first album was butchered in it’s production and he sued to get out of his record contract, so he couldn’t record with anyone else.  So, he and his wife moved to LA and he took a job playing the piano and his wife was a waitress at a dive bar in the mid-Wilshire area(now Koreatown).  After getting a new recording contract, he recorded “Piano Man” recounting his experience playing piano at that dive bar on Wilshire.

    The dive bar is long gone and replaced with a strip mall that includes a Korean restaurant.  About 10 years ago, I had dinner at that restaurant(not at the time knowing the story), seated probably about where Billy’s piano was.

  15. 15.

    Rachel Bakes

    One of the few interests I share with my (almost) RWNJ brother is a love of Billy Joel. He shares a birthday with BJ too (I share mine with Frank Sinatra). My daughter now continues that love.

  20. 20.

    TBone

    I was impressed with his Oscars performance.  It was joyful to me.  I just may be a lunatic.

  22. 22.

    TBone

    Rump’s Mar-A-Lardass solicitation of a $1 billion “deal” with his oil baron donors in exchange for further decimating taxes and regulations is concerning infuriating.  Motherfucker is so blatant.  The oil industry is now writing up legislation in preparation.  I hope all their dicks fall off when we win.

  25. 25.

    Baud

    @TBone:

    Eh, as long as people on our side demand something to vote for, the oil people and their political party don’t need to hide it.

  26. 26.

    lowtechcyclist

    @WereBear: ​
     

    We joke that we really were the Music Replacement Generation. A lot of cassettes in our past.

    Cassettes were just another stop along the road! My music collection started off with 45s (of course!) and monaural 33-1/3 albums. Stereo was just coming in, and you had to pay an extra buck for it – I bet I’m not the only one here who remembers that. So more than a few of my early albums were in mono.

    So: 45s with the big hole in the middle, mono and then stereo record albums, cassettes (at least I managed to skip past 8-tracks!), CDs, and buying and downloading digital tracks online for 99 cents apiece. (Missed Napster, too.)

  27. 27.

    TBone

    Hubby dropped the toilet seat very loudly first thing way too early.  An auspicious start to this day.  At least he still puts the seat down, even though I have my own bathroom.  Who says you can’t teach an old dog.

  30. 30.

    geg6

    @mrmoshpotato:

    Yes, it was excellent.  He sounds great and seemed like he still has a lot of fun performing.  I have seen Joel live three times.  Once back in the early 80s, once in the early 90s and then in 2022.  Never a bad or even mediocre performance.

  31. 31.

    lowtechcyclist

    @Baud:

    Did she actually listen to the words to Only the Good Die Young?

    I was dating a Catholic girl in the summer of 1978, and she loved that song.

  32. 32.

    BretH

    Not many 45s, although I played quite a few. Sold all my pristine, well kept albums (including several MFSL Original Masters pressings) for high-quality cassettes which I recorded the records on to. 😭

    Have boxes of CDs that I ripped to Apple Lossless that haven’t seen the light of day in 8 years or more.

    Access the music via a NAS drive and a Raspberry pi using a phone app. For car I have an old iPod mini hacked with a 60gb SSD.

    Guess I should move to Spotify or some online service but I don’t listen to music much outside the house and car.

  33. 33.

    Baud

    @BretH:

    I use Spotify and Pandora free ad supported service because I don’t listen to much music these days.  They’ve both really increased the number of ads you have to listen to recently, to the point where it’s becoming less attractive for me to use.

  34. 34.

    Princess

    I’m a fan. So many great songs.

    ”Piano Man” takes on a whole new dimension of you imagine it’s about a slightly obtuse straight guy who doesn’t realize he’s been hired to play in a gay bar.

  35. 35.

    raven

    When I moved to Athens in 1984 my wife at the time was an art professor and one of her colleagues was a lunatic painting prof who had been a chopper pilot in Vietnam in 1963-64. He turned me on to a group called LZ Friendly that held a Memorial Day campout (largely a huge drinking event). We had the Moving Wall the third year and there was a big turnout. There was a woman there who was a night-time DJ and she told everyone to tune into her station and turn up their car stereos at midnight. I had a buddy who had gotten hammered and fell asleep under an RV. She played this  Billy Joel song with the choppers coming in and then the BOOM he was so startled he sat straight up and knocked him self out on the axle of the RV!

    Good Night Saigon

  37. 37.

    raven

    @Baud: I thought he would have listed it. . .oh well.

     

    We had no cameras to shoot the landscape
    We passed the hash pipe and played our Doors tapes
    And it was dark, so dark at night
    And we held on to each other like brother to brother
    We promised our mothers we’d write

  38. 38.

    lowtechcyclist

    They heard the hum of the motors, they counted the rotors, and waited for us to arrive…

  39. 39.

    raven

    @lowtechcyclist: We’re about 200 yards from a hospital and are right on the flight path. My wife still will marvel when I can feel them coming before we hear them.

  41. 41.

    Geminid

    Maryland Senator Chris Van Hollen will be a guest on CBS’s Face the Nation this Sunday. Likely topics: the Gaza War and arms shipments to Israel.

  44. 44.

    Matt McIrvin

    The very first rock concert I ever went to was a Billy Joel show sometime around 1986, a big arena show at the Cap Centre in Maryland. A bunch of people from my college dorm went up there together. It was a good concert–he had a lot of hits to play. “Goodnight Saigon” was definitely in there.

    My daughter has one of his greatest hits albums on cassette now, part of her cassette collecting bug.

  48. 48.

    TBone

    @raven: just this week found previously unseen by me online photos taken by my Dad (Flying Tigers) at Phu Bai in ’69.  Ross’s Rice Runners.  When we were little, he’d never sleep in a tent with us.  He eventually was able to decades later.

  49. 49.

    The I Want Song

    In my misspent yoot I probably saw Billy Joel in concert more times than any other artist. The thing I admired about him most (aside from his impressive catalog, of course) was his indefatigable showmanship: every time I saw him he left it all out there onstage.

    My personal favorite song of his would probably be Summer, Highland Falls

  53. 53.

    Trivia Man

    @BretH:

    My problem is you dont “own” that music. They could go out if business tomorrow. Or start charging per play or anything else. Completely disproportionate to actual risk, in the back of my mind i wonder about a dystopian future where physical objects rise again in importance. My mental shorthand is “zombie apocalypse “ but i think “unrestrained capitalism” is the more likely culprit.

    CDs, DVDs, books on paper… i have enough stashed for my expected life time if the spigot gets turned off. And enough to pass on to future generations.

    I no longer live a block from lake michigan so i need to think about fresh water supply.

  54. 54.

    JML

    Billy Joel’s version of Storytellers that was included on the box set I got a number of years ago is great. (Greatest hits Vol I-III plus what was basically an episode of Storytellers? done.) Some fun insights to how he wrote a bunch of songs, pretty good sense of humor attached with it. Made me want to hear the full version of River of Dreams as a 12-bar blues song, lol.

  56. 56.

    frosty

    Fun fact: the opening piano chords for the Shangri-la’s Remember (Walking in the Sand) were played by a 16-year old Billy Joel.

  57. 57.

    Another Scott

    @raven: Our dear Sophie hated thunderstorms (would even try to escape the house through the window blinds when a bad one was nearby).  I once noticed that she could hear them coming when they were still miles and miles away on a seemingly clear and sunny day…

    Yeah, the brain is really good at paying attention to sounds after priming by trauma.

    :-(

    Hang in there.

    Cheers,
    Scott.

  58. 58.

    Enhanced Voting Techniques

    “When you’re competent, and you live in an age where there’s a lot of incompetence, it makes you appear extraordinary,” Billy Joe

    Everything I have heard about the music industry is there is a lot of gatekeeping based on stupid stuff like will the singer have sex with the correct people and the shear amount of great music on the Internet proves that.

    Also, why hasn’t there been a “Me Too” moment with music?

  61. 61.

    UncleEbeneezer

    My Mom grew up in Massapequa so she was naturally a huge Billy Joel fan.  52nd Street and Glass Houses were two of my first LP’s and I loved pretty much everything on those, The Stranger and his Greatest Hits.  We got tickets to see the Storm Front shows at Yankee Stadium, driving down from Boston and sitting in the nose-bleed sections.  One of my first major concert experiences and the last and only one with my Mom.  His music had such a huge impact on my own songwriting and love of music.  Over the years I’ve done covers of Vienna, Movin’ Out and Zanzibar (playing guitar, not piano).  I still maintain that Movie’ Out is one of the funkiest, non-funk songs ever.  My musical tastes changed/evolved after Storm Front and I mostly moved on to other bands and musical styles, but Joel’s music will always be a huge part of my own musical story.  I was somewhat but pleasantly surprised when jazz pianist Brad Mehldau (one of my other musical Gods, probably even more so than Joel) mentioned being a huge Billy Joel fan in an interview he did with Rick Beato.  Mehldau is famous for his love of the Beatles, Beach Boys, Nick Drake, S&G, Bowie etc., so he obviously loves pop/rock from the 60’s-90’s but the fact that he mentioned Joel made me happy.  My first real job as a bus boy at a really grody restaurant which kinda sucked because it was still smoke-filled, late nights and I was only 15(?), the only upside was that there was a DJ so every night I requested Piano Man and he would play it.  Nowadays I always hit “skip” on it, because I’ve just heard it too many damn times (even though it’s a great song).  So glad Joel isn’t a Trumper and seems like a genuinely cool guy.

  62. 62.

    UncleEbeneezer

    @Enhanced Voting Techniques: There has to some extent in hip hop.  R. Kelly has faced trials, Russell Simmons is living in exile to avoid prosecution and Drake is currently fighting a huge PR nightmare because Kendrick Lamar has done several “diss tracks” reminding the world that Drake has a whole history of creepy behavior with girls who were just about to turn 18.  Sean (Diddy) Combs is also caught up in an investigation by DOJ for under-age/trafficking of women.

  65. 65.

    bluefoot

    @raven: ​
      God, I love that song. It gets to me every time I hear it, no matter where I am.

    I had kind of forgotten how much I like Billy Joel’s music – my musical tastes have broadened and changed in the intervening decades – then a couple of months ago my BIL (born and bred in the NYC area) was telling me about the Billy Joel special. So I listened to a few old albums and remembered how much the music meant to me and how it so much marks a period in my life.

  68. 68.

    Captain C

    @Baud: I once had someone try to seduce me by singing a very earnest and yet out of tune ‘Only the Good Die Young.’  It did not work at all.

  71. 71.

    Paul in KY

    Saw Mr. Joel close Bonnaroo back in 2016. Great set. Played all his hits (and boy were there alot of those). Played the whole Glass Houses album (his best album, IMO).

    Hope to see him again someday.

Comments are closed.