The drug dealer that inspired a 1973 Billy Joel classic: “Everybody would just get their brains wasted”
In the grand tradition of rock and roll bad boys, Billy Joel tends not to get brought up all that often.
Compared to the bigger names in the business, like Mick Jagger or Robert Plant, Joel was more interested in being a pure musician and playing the best songs that he could, and that was more than enough for the rest of the world to get on board with what he was singing. But there would be a few instances every now and again where he would get into some more nefarious behaviour in his songs.
If we’re being completely accurate, one of Joel’s first huge hits came courtesy of him stirring up controversy. ‘Only the Good Die Young’ is one of the most quaint songs about sex that anyone has ever written, but for someone who was growing up in the mid-1970s, ‘The Piano Man’ talking about a Catholic girl was going to land him in hot water. Conservatives were pissed, the religious folks were a bit on edge, and Joel was riding high over everyone now buying his records.
But when looking at Joel’s body of work, not all of his songs had to be about the simple side of life. There are plenty of love songs in his catalogue, and he’s not half bad at writing them either, but when looking through the first few albums of his career, he did have more than a few times where he seemed to be talking about anything that came into his head. And on the first few records, there was some dark material in there.
Well, “dark” for Billy Joel is practically tame for Metallica, but a song like ‘Tomorrow is Today’ was practically a suicide note in Joel’s mind. He was looking at his life and thinking that he was going absolutely nowhere, but things did start to turn a corner with Piano Man. The title track is still one of the most enduring songs that he ever made, but the rest of the album did have more than a few strange twists and turns.
There’s already a travelling atmosphere to the whole record, but ‘Captain Jack’ was the first time he overtly talked about drugs. The rest of the album was all about the kind of gunslingers that he heard about when he was a kid, but whereas ‘The Ballad of Billy the Kid’ was a bunch of bullshit that he made up about the famous gunslinger, the drug dealer in ‘Captain Jack’ actually did have a face.
Joel never indulged in any of what he had to offer, but he did say that he saw more than a few people in his neighbourhood that turned into story beats in the song, saying, “I used to live near the projects in Long Island, and there were drugs going on, and the dealer was called Captain Jack. There was also smack. They used to use the rhyme for smack, Captain Jack.”
Adding, “So I didn’t mean it to be any specific drug, it’s whatever people had to take to escape reality. It was drugs in general. I was just looking out there and seeing all my friends, everybody would just get their brains wasted and fried, and I thought it was kind of stupid.”
While Joel’s own experience with heroin didn’t come until the song ‘Scandinavian Skies’ on The Nylon Curtain, he admitted that his initial first step wasn’t the greatest. He liked the idea of telling this elongated story song, but since the entire thing was based on two chords, he didn’t have the same kind of storyteller that Bob Dylan had when it came time to carry these kinds of songs.
Still, for a kid who was still trying to make everything work when he was just figuring out what life as a musician was supposed to be, ‘Captain Jack’ was a sign that he was moving in the right direction. ‘Piano Man’ was the acknowledged hit, but this was the song that showed everyone that there was a bit more to him than a bunch of catchy tunes and complex chords on the piano.
