The Billy Joel song he called “the vision of the apocalypse”
No great song comes without a fair amount of passion behind it. As much as songwriters like to talk about having the greatest songs fall out of the sky, it takes a lot for someone to have their songs resonate with people, and Billy Joel felt that he was bracing for the end of days midway through his ascent to the top of the charts.
But looking at Joel’s career trajectory, it’s always been interesting seeing him work on different albums without having a major hit to his name. ‘Piano Man’ may have been a staple of karaoke bars all across the country, but compared to the other hitmakers of the day, Joel was under the radar for the longest time before albums like The Stranger started to get the ball rolling with singles like ‘Just the Way You Are’.
Even though Joel has had various themes that come and go throughout his albums, there’s no doubt that he is a New York artist through and through. He could be singing about the horrors of the Vietnam War on ‘Goodnight Saigon’ or having fun in the sun on the other side of the country, and yet the minute that his voice starts off a tune, you’d swear that you were listening to a kid from Long Island talking about the pleasures of what it was like going to Time Square when he was little.
Right as Joel was starting to gain traction, though, Manhattan wasn’t exactly the greatest place to be. The myth of ‘The Big Apple’ was still the thing everyone was chasing since the days when Frank Sinatra was the biggest star in the world, but with businesses being dealt a heavy blow and the infamous headline coming out where President Gerald Ford allegedly told the city to ‘drop dead’, Joel’s home was looking a lot more dire.
He had already spent the last few months woodshedding songs on the other side of the country, but he knew that he wanted to be there for his home if it really was going downwards. And when Turnstiles came out, you’d swear that he had never left when listening to him tearing through songs like ‘New York State of Mind’ and ‘Say Goodbye to Hollywood’.
Out of all the songs on the record, Joel felt that ‘Miami 2017’ reflected those dire times the most, saying, “I was in LA and I said, ‘I’m going home. If the city’s going down, I’m going down with the city. It’s a very New York City-oriented album. ‘Miami 2017’ is the vision of the apocalypse in New York City.” And while there are some highlights on the record, there are more than a few times when things could get even more dire.
‘James’ was a more introspective song trying to talk down someone who’s letting life pass them by, but ‘Angry Young Man’ may be most indicative of what Joel was feeling at the time. There were already a lot of people that were reading the city its last rites, and hearing Joel tell a story with a kid with a fire in his belly and felt that the world turned its back on him was a lot more realistic considering the temperature of the times.
But even though Manhattan did survive and Joel would even write another apocalypse song later in his career, ‘Miami 2017’ is more of a snapshot in time than anything. It was pointing a way to a particularly dire future, but even if Joel’s home was going down the tubes, he would have been dead in the ground before he abandoned it.
