Billy Joel isn’t going to make any new music. And gigs are shut down for a long time to come. Never mind, don’t worry about it for now. Join us for a very special ‘one night only’ fantasy show at the TheatRE an der Wien in Vienna.
Billy Joel isn’t going to make any new music. He just doesn’t want to. It’s disappointing but there it is. On the subject of his songwriting, Joel told Vulture online magazine: “I couldn’t be as good as I wanted and that was driving me crazy. I was driving my loved ones crazy. I thought, this is ridiculous. So I stopped”.
Has he got the right attitude? Take a contemporary, Springsteen for example - he makes new records. Bruce is clearly compelled to whereas Billy is not. The Boss’s last album wasn’t bad at all. It received pretty good reviews and allowed Bruce to express himself anew. But was Springsteen’s Western Stars album timeless like his earlier catalogue though? Or was it simply a diversion, largely lost in the constant flow of new music made by millions of others. Billy Joel’s take on new music extends to all music in general - he doesn’t bother to keep up. When asked about which new artists he admired from today’s music scene by Billboard in 2019, Joel replied “I don’t have a fucking clue. I don’t know who’s emerging, or submerging”. Again, contrast this with Sir Elton John, who is well-known for being immersed in the new music scene and a prolific collector of new music, and advocate for new artists.
Billy Joel has seen the murky world of modern music and doesn’t like it one bit. Billy, in the words of one of your own songs, You May Be Right. Joel has made his best work already and enjoyed enormous success with most of it. His 12th and last studio album was 1993’s River Of Dreams which was well received critically and commercially. But his 70s and 80s catalogue stands up to just about anything else in pop’s history. Why add to it with stuff that is just not quite as good?
Contrast this with Joel’s live career, where he enjoys all the accolades and commercial success of a rare precious commodity - which is exactly what he is: “people just keep coming to see me” as he says himself. Recordings are ten a cent (well, less actually) but live performances by Billy Joel are as rare as rocking horse shit. So that’s where the man focuses his attention and his unique talents. Up until recently, a helicopter would land in his garden in upstate New York – one Saturday evening each month - and fly him to Madison Square Gardens, where he would play to a sell-out crowd for a cool $1m. Every month. That marks modern success more than a billion streams, does it not?
Not that Joel doesn’t know something of the struggle. He grew up the poorest kid on the block in Levittown, Hicksville, Long Island. His early records bombed and he put in his time (and then some) on the piano bar circuit including the Bill Martin piano bar in Wiltshire LA. Some years earlier, with his second band The Hassles, he headlined the opening of a branch of Choc full a ’Nuts in Paramus New Jersey. Guesting on Alec Baldwin’s Here’s The Thing podcast in 2012, Joel gives wildly entertaining renditions (as well as a wonderful Bobby Dylan impression) of his early songs and neither is surprised at why it took him a while to get going. But a career in rock & roll is a marathon not a sprint.
A year ago we asked Billy Joel’s pal, Elton John, to play us a one night only show. Our fantasy setlist was Elton at LA’s Chateau Marmont gardens. Would Billy Joel take us up on a similar offer? Apparently so, but the conversation to follow was...where? With Joel’s work so synonymous with New York should it be Radio City Music Hall? Joel’s classic live album Songs From The Attic (for which we source several cuts for this list) was recorded at Bayou, Washington, D.C., sadly closed and raised to the ground back in 1999 - but could we go back to Washington for this one night only set? Then we thought about it. While eschewing modern music, Joel has spent the past decade re-immersing himself in the music he grew up with - classical. He recently told Steinway “I was fascinated with classical music for the first 16 years of my life...classical music was the girl next door”. A Beethoven fan, we felt that perhaps a truly special location for this fantasy show would be the Theatre an der Wien in Vienna, where the famous benefit concert was held for Beethoven, 22 December 1808. We’re so glad that Billy was up for it.
On the night of the show then, where to begin? Well, Vienna of course. Joel’s 1977 album The Stranger was his big breakthrough into the wider music consciousness, but ‘Vienna’ wasn’t one of that album's hits. Stuck between two of his all-time epic songs “Scenes From an Italian Restaurant” and “Only the Good Die Young,” the song was conspicuously modest, but remains a favourite of the man himself. From there, to another of Joel’s own favourites (after all he picked the setlist not us), “Summer Highland Falls.”
After opening with this trio of gems close to his own heart, Joel warms us up with a run of belters from his rockier ‘new wave’ period including one of his favourite live tunes You May Be Right. There is a party going on and you know it. We go through some anthems for the people: Big Shot, Allentown and finishing this first set with The Stranger, the title track from his career-saving, turning point album of 1977.
[Interval - go get yourself a glass of wine]
To kick off the second half of the show, Billy just crushes it - boxing our ears off with a string of laid-back greats, performed with an effortless aplomb: Don’t Ask Me Why, Just The Way You Are and the wonderfully resigned New York State Of Mind.
As if we are not truly entertained, something really special happens with the set in the second half, as Joel breaks into a jazzed up run of album tracks that remain hardcore fan favourites (and doesn’t he know it). The mark of all live shows is the point at which it transcends, porting us to a magical place, worlds away from the humdrum of daily life. As Joel strikes up the band for Zanzibar, Stiletto, Big Man On Mulberry Street and his early ‘science fiction song’ from Turnstiles, Miami 2017 (I’ve Seen The Light) well, yes we have indeed encountered transcendence.
Billy Joel can do anything. He can play faux classical ballads, folk piano songs, new wave power pop, and jazz for christ sakes. He makes all of it bend into his incredible way with a melody. He ends the second set with two of his most recent records - though it seems absurd to say it, since Famous Last Words is 27 years old, and the mellow hymn And So It Goes, the close of 1989’s Storm Front.
From there, an encore, not a complicated thing for Joel really. At almost every show, he must play Piano Man. But we start the encore with the acapella hit (is there any style Joel could not work with?) The Longest Time and the epic An Innocent Man, both from the album of that name, an LP that stands as one of those monster 80s records that found a place on the CD shelf of every single home. With Innocent Man, Joel turned his hand to another musical style - that of 50’s doo-wop and 60’s soul music, done as “a joke” according to Joel but yet again - in his hands, turned to gold - producing his most commercially success record and cementing his global superstardom at that time and, forever.
The encore must contain his classic ballad Scenes From An Italian Restaurant, but on this fantasy set, Joel finds space for two understated beauties to spoil us with: Your My Home and Where’s The Orchestra (his homage to the master, Beethoven himself). In a music landscape where there is an acute FONR (fear of not releasing music) not only have Joel’s songs endured, but his capital increases as the years roll by. His catalogue steadily increases in value. Just Don’t Ask Him Why?
Playback notes: one night only says it all really, find the space and time and play it right through. You’ll feel miles better for it, honestly. Just turn your house into Madison Square Garden for the night, or the Theatre an der Wien.