Billy Joel’s idea for the greatest-ever farewell concert: “They will never pay to see me again”
Should a legend as influential as Billy Joel one day put on a show-stopping farewell concert, it’s easy to imagine it being one for the history books. But what does he think about the whole idea?
There’s a strange bittersweetness that comes with putting on a farewell show. It’s also something of a luxury, something most artists rarely entertain the idea of and only suited to those of a certain calibre or status to actually pull off successfully. Back to the Beginning, for instance, was an example of a farewell show that more than earned its right to be as mythological and celebratory as it was, coming at a time when nobody knew just how special it actually was for them to have been able to do it at all.
But the idea of someone like Joel one day doing it is strangely difficult to think about. Not just because it’s hard to think about Joel ever intentionally throwing the towel in, but because he’s always seemed so eternally dedicated to music that the idea of him deciphering a definitive endpoint seems a little (a lot) out of character. And that’s not to even mention how much of a permanent fixture he seems to be in pop culture, like he couldn’t even bid adieu if he tried.
But this kind of inexplicable permanence is also only ever really achieved by someone whose career genuinely seems to touch all corners of the industry, beyond the obvious successes of some of his bigger hits like ‘We Didn’t Start The Fire’ and ‘Piano Man’ (which, incidentally, feel anything but representative of his career despite their popularity) and beneath the surface, where all his other skills and interests lie.
Perhaps that’s the real reason why Joel putting on his final concert seems unimaginable: not because he’s the ultimate musical maestro but because there’s just so much that could possibly factor into his hypothetical swan song, from his foray into classical to his more overt experimental projects and everything in between. And would it all have to come together to tell a certain kind of story, or would the setlist be some kind of disjointed effort to bring together all the greatest hits?
Maybe the absurdity of it is why, when he was once asked the question by Vulture, Joel’s answer was anything but serious. Clearly, the whole idea of putting on the greatest-ever farewell concert for him seems to be some kind of joke because it’ll likely never happen in the first place. “I have the greatest job in the world,” he said.
“You get up there, you make a lot of noise, girls scream, and you get shitloads of money. Are you fucking kidding me? Now, I do have an idea for a farewell tour.”
When prompted to elaborate, he continued, “The stage is a living-room set: couch, TV, coffee table, food. And there’s bulletproof glass between me and the audience. Then I come out and lay down on the couch. I grab the remote and start watching TV. The crowd after a couple minutes goes, ‘Fuck this,’ and starts throwing shit at the glass. I’ll have created a bond between me and the audience where I know they will never pay another nickel to see me again.”
In a moment of temporary sincerity, he did also say he’d know the end was near the moment he stopped performing at the standard he holds himself to, but even then, it would take a lot of “throwing junk pitches”, as he put it, to finally face up to making the decision. While Joel has had to adjust some of the songs he wrote when he was younger, there’s no denying that his nightmarish living-room farewell show remains just that: a strange, never-to-be-seen nightmare.
