BEFORE: Now that I'm all caught up with Bruce Springsteen and his band (or am I?) except for the fact that he carries over one more time to appear in today's concert film. Let's see, we had David Johansen, Bruce Springsteen & the E Street Band from 1979, so this is Summer Concert Film #3, I think there are two more. (There could have been four more, but I didn't want to re-shuffle everything to cram in Tom Petty & Fleetwood Mac. Maybe next year if the linking allows.)
I didn't realize there is a bit of a time structure here, I started with Joan Baez in the early 1960's and moved forward into the 1970's with Johnny Cash and then Springsteen, now I've kind of hit the current day with Billy Joel's landmark concert, and now I'm going to work my way back in time again, ending with the Beatles and then Elvis. Maybe the whole thing should have been flipped around the other way, I don't know, but this is what the linking that I had suggested.
By the way, there is a new Billy Joel doc, titled "And So It Goes" - I'm aware of it because it screened at Tribeca Film Festival, but it's arriving on HBO too late to qualify for this year. Sorry, Billy, again, maybe next year if the linking allows.
THE PLOT: A concert celebrating Billy Joel's record-breaking 100th consecutive performance at Madison Square Garden.
AFTER: Billy Joel began this run of monthly concerts at Madison Square Garden way back in 2014, and 100 months is actually a pretty long time to do anything, and I should know. According to MSG, he sold out all of the shows, which I'd kind of like to see the paperwork on, I'm thinking maybe there's a loose definition of "sold out", like come on, every single seat? That place holds a LOT of people - but it turns out that he's got a ton of hardcore fans in the NY area, some claim to have come multiple times during that run, others claim to have been at every show, which again, I'd like to see the receipts because I'm thinking that would cost more money than the average person would earn during their lifetime. Did those people spend $500 each time (I'm estimating with meals, travel, merch) for 100 shows, which would be, umm, carry the two, like $50,000?
I don't know if I'd call these concerts "consecutive", because there were other events held at the Garden in between, so they're only consecutive if you ignore all the stuff in-between, and well, that's not consecutive. They're only consecutive to Billy Joel, assuming he didn't go play any other shows between these gigs, and well, I don't have firsthand knowledge of that, either. But I feel kind of sorry for whoever has to change MSG from a basketball court to a hockey rink to a Billy Joel concert every other day, I don't think I could do that job. I'll tell my bosses that I'm not putting ONE TABLE back in the closet because I think the event the next day at the theater needs it, so why not save a bit of effort?
What's important is that there were often special guest performers, and the filmmakers saw fit to include a montage of them (see list below) and most documentarians are not completists, it's almost like they don't have any regard for a guy in Queens who's linking docs together for some reason. By the way, this is my 5,077th consecutive movie over almost 17 years, if you ignore any other movies I may have watched in between, because those don't really count. See, I can mess with the statistics, too.
Also important, this is another concert where there's NO filler - I'll try to post the set list below with some random thoughts on some songs. What's great is that this was 99% a back-catalog concert, and it helps that Billy hadn't released a new album in years, so yeah, if you're going to hit the nostalgia circuit, make sure you hit it big and tap into those hits from the 1970's and 80's as best as you can. Here's the line-up.
1. "Miami 2017 (Seen the Lights Go Out on Broadway)" - damn, my favorite Billy Joel song of all time opens the show. It's a bold move, because it seems to represent the views of people who both love AND hate New York City at the same time. Yeah, that tracks, because if Manhattan did blow up or get burned down or sink into the ocean, it would be a terrible, tragic loss of life and property BUT then I wouldn't have to get up and go to work again, like maybe ever. So I love this song, I love any song like "I'll Sink Manhattan" by TMBG or movie like "Escape from New York" or "I Am Legend" where the island is deemed a lost cause and they blow up all the bridges or something. If liking that is wrong then I don't want to be right. BUT this song kind of found a whole new audience after 9/11 just because it concerned all our landmarks getting blowed up, and then it found even more of an audience a couple years later when we had that big blackout, it was like Billy Joel could predict the future or something. But some of us loved this song before all of that - now it's a little problematic because we're on the other side of the year 2017 and some of that stuff has NOT happened. So now Billy Joel just sounds like an angry old man who also has dementia and is very confused about cataclysmic events from several years ago. Or was this whole song just a metaphor that got taken out of proportion as soon as disasters started happening in NYC?
2. "My Life" (with an intro from Beethoven's "Ode to Joy") - this is another song that aged in an unexpected way, because Joel wrote it when he was in his late 20's or early 30's and he was this rebel who wanted to live life like he wanted to, so you know, go ahead with your own life, leave him alone and stop telling him what to do. Now that he's older, phrases like this just synch up with that old man vibe, so by all means, leave him alone, but also get off of his lawn.
3. "Vienna" (OK, I lied, this one is filler. This is a deep cut from the 1977 album "The Stranger", and it was the B-side to the Just the Way You Are" single. I'm not familiar with "Vienna" and having that here only makes me wonder why my second favorite Billy Joel song, "The Stranger", is absent. For that matter, where the hell is "Just the Way You Are"?
4. "Movin' Out" - ah, I get it, we're including all the quintessential "NYC" songs in this show, so we need the one that name-checks all the New Yorkers that he made up, like Mama Leone and Anthony and Sgt. O'Leary, they're all going to be important characters in the Billy Joel jukebox musical, if they aren't already. This is another great classic, and I think the transition from "My Life" to "Movin' Out" would have felt more natural if "Vienna" didn't get in the way. But I get it, you want to show your range and that your catalog has more than just songs about young people working two jobs and changing apartments and trying to afford a Cadillac-ack-ack-ack.
5. "New York State of Mind" - yeah, definitely a theme building here. Is it me or did he really perform this one in a very Sinatra-like fashion? Or maybe he's just getting older and older people sing things a certain way, I don't know. But there's definitely a case to be made for slowly phasing out "New York, New York" as the song they play after every sporting event in this city and phasing in Billy Joel's song instead. It may never happen though, but it should because this is a much better song as far as NYC tourism is concerned, too bad you can't take a Greyhound bus any more, but you can make people want to come and visit the city if they haven't been in a while, it's not just about losing those little town blues and becoming king of the hill any more, or is it?
6. "Big Man on Mulberry Street" - yep, you've got to put the NYC-based songs together, except the one about the Italian restaurant, that comes later. Sting came out to perform this one during the big 100th show, I guess that was the best choice for him to sing. I was never a big fan of this song, but yeah, I get it, a lot of TV shows in the late 1980's discovered this song because of how brassy it is.
7. "An Innocent Man" - an interesting choice, because everyone seems to have forgotten about the Tom Selleck movie with this title that Billy Joel wrote the song for. Joel kind of pre-apologized for maybe not being able to hit the high notes in this song any more, but then I think he did OK with it.
8. "Turn the Lights Back On" - aha, he DID have a new song up his sleeve! I don't know if he wrote this new song specificially for the 100th show or if it was just well-timed, but this song was NEW or relatively new back in 2024, maybe the ticket sales were slowing down a bit and they didn't want to admit that maybe one of the 100 shows might not really be sold out. OK, OK, have Billy write one more new song and then all of his biggest fans will just HAVE to come back to MSG because now there's a song that they haven't heard him perform live yet. Well, it does seem a little fitting that he's got one song about the lights going out, and now he's got one about the lights coming back on. This is really a metaphor, though, about trying to bring the romance back to a long-term relationship. But what would Billy Joel know about THAT? Doesn't he just get divorced and go find a new wife when things get rough? JK.
9. "River of Dreams" (includes a segment of "River Deep, Mountain High" sung by his back-up singer). Well, I'm glad that he kept finding new ways to present his songs. So often we hear the older rock singers who have gotten bored with their own songs, so they speed them up or slow them down or play them with an acoustic guitar just so they can get through their 100th concert without killing themselves. If that means dropping a Motown song in the middle of your own one, by all means, go and do it. Or maybe Joel's voice just needs a break when he's 9 songs in, I don't know.
10. "Scenes from an Italian Restaurant" - well, if you're not going to sing "Just the Way You Are" or "She's Always a Woman", you still have to have at least one song about relationships, and by singing the one about Brenda and Eddie getting married, trying to live together and then getting divorced as "the closest of friends", we can kind of assume how Billy Joel feels about relationships, right? He's been married what, three times? Four? When you're 76 years old, this is probably how you feel about relationships, that nothing is permanent - well, what is?
11. "It's Still Rock & Roll to Me" - another deep cut from the early days, going back to 1980 and the "Glass Houses" album. In case there was any debate about what genre he's been singing all along, and maybe those love songs made things a bit confusing, it's rock, and it's always been rock. Rock accepts a lot of different styles and tempos, but people come to a rock concert because they want to rock out. I remember that Weird Al Yankovic once made a parody of this song, I think he never released it, but it was called "It's Still Billy Joel to Me".
12. "Only the Good Die Young" - another upbeat rocker, we're going to land this plane with the crowd cheering like crazy. Although I've heard it said many times that the good die young, it's only been in the last few years that I've come to agree with it, because that would kind of explain why it seems like there are more assholes alive now than ever before. Anyway, this is kind of like Billy Joel's answer song to Springsteen's "Rosalita", both sung from the POV of an up-and-coming rock star urging a girl he likes to come out and party and probably have sex with him.
13. "You May Be Right" (mixed with a verse of Led Zeppelin's "Rock and Roll") - another young punk song from the "Glass Houses" album (I remember this because the song starts with the sound of breaking glass). Well, if it's a lunatic you're looking for, then I guess you came to the right place. It's another "Hey, girl, come hang out with me" song, but in this one the focus is more on him being a bad boy, riding a motorcycle, walking home through dangerous neighborhoods and such. Remember that NYC was a very different city back in the 1970's, some places like Bed-Stuy were no joke.
14. "Piano Man" - well, you just gotta. I mean, if Billy Joel played a concert and didn't end it with "Piano Man", there would really be a riot. All these 10,000 people payed at least $500 each, you got to give them the song that means nothing to them personally but yet somehow everything to them at the same time. Well, they sat at his bar and they put bread in his jar, but I can tell you it's been a very long time since Billy Joel played a piano in a smoky bar that was populated by a bunch of aimless losers. But I guess maybe some things are just universal.
So many great songs that didn't make the cut - "Captain Jack", "The Entertainer", "Say Goodbye to Hollywood", "The Stranger" of course, "Big Shot", "Don't Ask Me Why", "She's Got a Way", "She's Always a Woman", "Pressure", "Allentown", "Tell Her About It", "Uptown Girl", "The Longest Time", "Keeping the Faith", "The Night Is Still Young", "A Matter of Trust", "The Ballad of Billy the Kid", "You're Only Human", and 'I Go to Extremes". Any collection of Billy Joel songs would be an incomplete list, of course, and I understand that the concert can't be six hours long, but I would expect at least a couple of the above to be played. So I wonder, was the set list for the 100th show the same as for the previous 99, or did he shake it up every so often and pick different songs from the catalog? I'll have to research this.
Anyway, the news is that Billy Joel went on tour again, because it turns out that there ARE other concert venues besides MSG. He was doing shows with either Sting, Stevie Nicks or Rod Stewart, three people who couldn't commit to a full tour so they decided to tag-team it. Well, shows started getting postponed, and it looks like the promoters just kept pushing dates for shows back and back and shows that were supposed to happen in March or April of this year got rescheduled for dates next year, and now the latest update says the whole tour's been cancelled and everybody's getting refunds. So if you missed any of his 100 shows in NYC, you might be out of luck for the foreseeable future, he's got some kind of health issue that is affecting his hearing, vision and balance, which are kind of important if you're going to come out on stage and play the piano. So yeah, health watch on Billy Joel and like I said a few days ago, sometimes you don't know if your last tour is going to turn out to be your LAST tour.
Directed by Paul Dugdale (director of "Elton John Live: Farewell from Dodger Stadium")
Also starring Billy Joel (last seen in "The Greatest Night in Pop"), Jerry Seinfeld (last seen in "Unfrosted"), Sting (last seen in "Wham!"), Chuck Burgi, Tommy Byrnes, Andy Cichon, Mike DelGuidice, Carl Fischer, Mark Rivera, David Rosenthal, Crystal Taleifero,
with archive footage of Tony Bennett (last seen in "Billie"), Jon Bon Jovi (also carrying over from "Stevie Van Zandt: Disciple"), Elvis Costello (last seen in "Dare to Be Different"), Miley Cyrus (last seen in "Drive-Away Dolls"), John Fogerty (last seen in "Mr. Saturday Night"), Peter Frampton, Billy Gibbons (last seen in "ZZ Top: That Little Ol' Band from Texas"), Steve Miller (ditto), John Mayer (last seen in "Vengeance"), John Mellencamp (last seen in 'Clive Davis: The Soundtrack of Our Lives"), Olivia Rodrigo, Howard Stern (last seen in "Scandalous: The True Story of the National Enquirer")
RATING: 7 out of 10 saxophone solos (how you doin', Mark Rivera?)
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