Love and Hate on Long Island

my love/hate relationship with billy joel

I was at my junior prom in 1979 at my Catholic high school in Hicksville, Long Island. The night was winding down and the DJ announced the last song of the evening. The first few notes of “Only the Good Die Young” echoed through the school cafeteria-turned-ballroom and everyone ran to the dance floor. As Billy Joel sang “you Catholic girls start much too late” a cheer went up and I thought to myself “My god, I hate Billy Joel.”

This was, in my mind, as grievous a thought as the time I confessed to myself that I don’t believe in God. I was a teenager on Long Island, one whose wayward moments included hanging out at the very Village Green Joel himself sung about. I was supposed to love Joel, our island’s favorite son. I was supposed to revere him. Instead, I had curated such a distaste for his music — music that I knew by heart — and it made me feel guilty.

Billy Joel songs were a part of my life. It’s just the way it was. My older cousins loved him and songs like “Captain Jack” and “Piano Man” were always there, lingering. I wanted to belong, I wanted to fit in and be like everyone else so I listened to the albums in the dead of night but lines like “ah but still your finger’s gonna pick your nose,” or “real estate novelist” made me cringe. I came of age on a steady diet of bands like Led Zeppelin and The Who — Joel’s music was almost foreign to me, or at least felt like something I just couldn’t grasp.

Maybe that’s why I hate him. Because everyone else got him, everyone else loved and understood him and felt a connection with his music. I was missing something, I was sure. So I listened and kept listening, especially to Turnstiles and The Stranger. Occasionally I would get glimpses of genius; songs like “Summer Highland Falls” and “Vienna” were pure poetry, but that just exaggerated my distaste for “She’s Always a Woman,” or, later, “My Life.” His tunes seemed, at times, simplistic or crude. The story of Brenda and Eddie in “Scenes From an Italian Restaurant” made absolutely no sense. I accused him of lazy songwriting. My friends and cousins were aghast. You’d think I desecrated a holy cross. I guess in a way, I had.

I first saw Billy Joel live in 1978 or so, at the Nassau Coliseum. I went because everyone else was going, because I love live music and because seeing Joel in his home turf was supposed to be some kind of transcendent experience. And he was good live. He was engaging and entertaining and the crowd ate up every reference to the Village Green or Long Island. But I was mentally drained by the end of the show, after spending the whole concert straining to have the shared experience everyone else was having. I didn’t have a bad time. It wasn’t the same as going to, say, a Grateful Dead show - something I did get - but I didn’t hate it.

The whole time I was actively hating on Billy Joel — and this went on for years — I was also developing a somewhat cordial relationship with some of his music. It was clearly a love/hate relationship, as I could listen to “Vienna” on repeat a dozen times but eschew “Just the Way You Are” as schmaltzy crap. As much as I postured that I loathed Joel, certain songs alway hung like phantom itches when you think a spider is crawling on you. I’d scratch those itches even though I knew there was nothing there, nothing more to be had. I’d listen to “Ballad of Billy the Kid” or “The Entertainer,” looking for something to grab onto because I so desperately wanted to stop being on the outside of the Joel phenomenon.

I was finally cured of that in 1983, with the release of An Innocent Man. Songs like “Uptown Girl” and “Tell Her About It” put me in the enviable position of being a known Joel hater. Where other people were sheepishly jumping off his bandwagon while top 40 lovers climbed aboard, I stood on the side and welcomed the people who once questioned my lack of Joel allegiance. “I told you he was bad,” I’d say, smugly. By the time 1989 and the horrid “We Didn’t Start the Fire” rolled around, the allure of Billy Joel, Long Island Hero, was mostly dulled. No one cared that I didn’t like him. That albatross was gone.

Oh, there are still diehard Joel fans. I encounter them on twitter every time I mention him. They come out of the woodwork to defend his oeuvre, to offer chart numbers and sales figures as way of saying they are on the right side of musical history. And I don’t fight back much, because I know Joel has a rightful legacy. I know he’s not as bad as I make him out to be. I wonder often if I have some character flaw that keeps me from liking things everyone else likes if I just cast aside anything that’s too popular. But then I’ll attempt to listen to “Piano Man” again and it all comes back, that visceral reaction to just the first few notes.

There are days when I will look at the track listing for The Stranger and think, that’s a really good album. I’ll attempt to listen to it. Then I get impatient, skip to “Vienna,” listen to that a couple of times while I read other people’s ideas of “best Billy Joel songs,” and scream internally when I see “Scenes From an Italian Restaurant” near the top and “Summer Highland Falls” not get the love it deserves. I laugh at myself for caring.

I still feel like there’s a small failure on my part as a Long Islander to not have this reverence for Joel, but that’s a failure I guess I’ll live with.