The Billy Joel song about his only experience with heroin
Heroin has plagued the music industry since its earliest days, tragically claiming the talents and lives of many. Fortunately, Billy Joel managed to avoid falling into the grips of addiction, although he did have one encounter with the drug. Thankfully, he resisted any further temptation to experiment with it.
Tragically, one taste of heroin can be enough to derail a life and make somebody shift the entire focus of their existence on securing that next high. Joel’s story is an anomaly as he was capable of not allowing his curiosity to get the best of him and leave it behind after one experience, which years later proved to be the inspiration for his track ‘Scandinavian Skies’.
While heroin is a drug that should be avoided at all costs, Joel succumbed to temptation during a trip to Amsterdam. The Dutch capital is a place where all traditional rules are out of the window, but instead of smoking his body weight in marijuana like most tourists, he went a step further.
Joel made the admittance in 2014 when Howard Stern ran a live broadcast of his radio show on Sirius XM at the Cutting Room in New York. “This was back in the late ’70s I think. We were in Amsterdam, and there was all this stuff going on, so I said, ‘Let me see what this is like,” he told the legendary radio host.
The singer-songwriter continued: “It got me so high, I don’t know how to deal with it. You just get way out, just go to another place, and you’re into the blues. All you want to hear is the blues. You start drooling, and you get sick.”
It was a frightening ordeal that was significant enough to stop Joel from ever putting his body through the same again. However, when he sat down a few years later to make 1982’s The Nylon Curtain, the hellish experience inspired him for the lyrics on ‘Scandinavian Skies’.
On the track, Joel describes losing himself within the “sins of Amsterdam” and admits to “flying” while in the Netherlands. The references to drugs in the song aren’t highly concealed, and at one stage, the singer-songwriter admits to being “so paralysed” due to the substances consumed.
‘Scandinavian Skies’ discusses Joel’s plane journey with his band to Sweden while still feeling the chilling effects of their Dutch shenanigans, as he sings, “On the plane, We were mainly sound and lights, In the veins, We could play the blues all night.”
Heroin has been the contributing factor to the demise of countless artists, and Joel can count himself among the lucky ones. If his first experience was different, perhaps the New Yorker would have been another addition to the fatalities list. Instead, he fortunately escaped with hazy memories of a night to forget and an idea for a pop song.
