“Follow Tony”: the Billy Joel song that almost turned into a train wreck
The live stage has been home to Billy Joel for years. Even though he has started to re-enter our lives in the studio with ‘Turn the Lights Back On’, the piano legend always seemed more at home when he’s working the crowd every night and engaging with his band. The stage also leaves room for a few unexpected moments, and when Tony Bennett arrived at one of Joel’s concerts, the pianist was forced to remain firmly on his toes throughout the song, like Danny DeVito at a urinal.
But, really, did anyone need to be worried about two legends coming together? Bennett had been a veteran of the music scene before Joel had even thought about putting a melody together, so singing a song like ‘New York State of Mind’ was bound to be a walk in the park, or at least in theory.
When you think about it, Joel’s Ode to The Big Apple is one of the more complex songs he had that became a hit. Apart from the incredible piano intro from Joel, a lot of the piece goes through various twists and turns with the chord progression, which gets especially challenging when the tempo starts changing, almost like Joel is playing with the rhythm to fit the meter of what he’s singing.
There were certainly more appealing songs for the masses, but when you have a track that mentions New York in the title and captures the spirit of living in Manhattan, there’s no debating that it’s going to go over well in The City That Never Sleeps. So when Joel played some of the final shows at Shea Stadium, there was no question that the song needed to be in the setlist somewhere.
When Bennett came out, this was the kind of performance that even fans’ grandmothers could love. Even though younger audiences have known his work with Lady Gaga as of late, Bennett’s track record for standards was one of his greatest strengths for years. Once they got to the end of the song and everything seemed completely wrapped up, Joel remembered everyone getting nervous the minute Bennett started going off-script halfway through the outro.
After going back and forth, Joel remembered Bennett doing his own thing, telling Stephen Colbert, “When we get to the live show, we go ‘I’m in a New York…’ and [he goes], ‘New York, New York, the greatest city in the world. You’re the best town, the best people.’ And we’re sitting there like, ‘Where’s he going? Just follow Tony’. Tony does what he wants to do, and that’s where he’s going to go, so you just follow Tony, and we got out of it okay.”
Then again, that kind of chemistry doesn’t happen unless bands have been playing together for years, and Joel has practically turned his backing group into a machine behind the scenes. Even outside his traditional softer rock circles, Joel’s group got the respect of fellow rock legends, who remembered being put through their paces when they saw him live on his most recent tours.
But that’s the kind of magic that every live show is built on. It’s one thing to be able to rip a song out that everyone loves, but the little moments where everything seems to be hanging in the air are always what keep people on the edge of their seats.
