The most important show Billy Joel ever played: “They went crazy”
Whenever Billy Joel comes up in conversation, there’s usually a strange moment when people try to squash everything he’s about into three different songs: ‘Piano Man’, ‘We Didn’t Start The Fire’, and ‘The Longest Time’. Now, these are in no way actually representative of Joel’s artistry or skill as a contemporary storyteller, but honestly? We might be onto something here.
After all, on the surface, these three songs couldn’t be sonically further apart, and were all conceived by different means (one was a response to the snootiness of John Lennon’s son, and another represents probably one of the most eye-opening times in Joel’s entire career). But maybe those dichotomies are what actually makes Joel one of the most interesting artists in the contemporary age, and why his strange ability to appear here, there and everywhere makes him one of the most versatile too.
Because, really: there’s absolutely nothing he hasn’t done. Those three songs aside, Joel has tried his hand at almost everything under the sun: doo-wop classics, pop tunes, rock ballads, generational anthems, protest songs, and everything in between. There’s no shortage of Joel doing this or Joel trying that; if he’s interested in something, he’ll see if he can do it too. And one of the best examples of this is The Nylon Curtain.
It doesn’t take long to figure out why – even without having listened to the record, it’s labelled everywhere as his “most ambitious ever” and the one that saw him really pushing himself to achieve a new level of greatness. While this is all true and feeds into why Joel later reflected on it as his “masterpiece”, there’s also another aspect there that represented another one of Joel’s quintessential traits: not knowing how something’s going to land until it’s out there in the wide open.
Weirdly, however, another of these moments wasn’t actually a record, or any sort of charting success, for that matter. Instead, it was when he toured the then-Soviet Union in the 1980s, something that went down in history not because he was first American artist to do so since the construction of the Berlin Wall or because he had a breakdown somewhere along the way from the stress of it all, but because of the strange euphoria that came with being a singer from Long Island in the fires of an audience who didn’t know or care who he was.
As a result, Joel’s answer to the question about his most notable career moment was right there, in the heat of one of the most surreal moments of his entire life. “When we played what was still the Soviet Union, back in the ’80s. They went crazy. I don’t think they gave a damn who it was. We had a huge PA system, lights and staging, and we blew their heads off,” he told Malcolm Mayhew in 1999.
Adding: “And I’m not exactly Nine Inch Nails, you know, we played some ballads. But someone came up to me and said that this was the most important event there since the Russian Revolution.”
This is also probably why it doesn’t bother Joel that much when looking at the ways in which others view his artistry, or, god forbid, try to place it all in the contexts of just three popular hits. It’s also probably why he’s able to brush off the extensive compilation records put out without his knowledge or the incessant need for people to pin him down to one genre.
None of it matters when all he’s focused on is how his music impacts in the moment, with memories to last a lifetime. Even if people are looking around aimlessly, wondering who the hell this strange musical figure is or where he’s come from. Maybe even especially then.
