Billy Joel in Hot Water

Joel christened The Show at Agua Caliente, and though it wasn’t a last Event Ever at Shea Stadium ordeal with 125,000 New Yorkers sentimentalizing it all into context—New York can keep him, for all I care—it was still Billy Joel who was so deeply ingrained in my pop radio history. Just like being born, I didn’t ask for it—it just was. 

But there’s always a fantastic curiosity in seeing somebody like Billy Joel perform, which is easily more about self-legacy and shared nostalgia than any one thing to do with him. If you think about it, for the kind of sustained success Joel’s had—having sold 150 million albums, the Rock & Roll Hall of Fame, Christie Brinkley, endless global touring, wealth, depression, alcoholism, fame, rotating beds, Italian motorcycles, pain—the common threads are relatively black and white. I’ve never had access to Elle Macpherson. His music is it, and his music is completely okay. Dad Rock, say some—but unless dad’s are MILF’s or narrow-hipped cougars, I don’t get it. Even though he stopped writing pop music when Kurt Cobain was still alive, people simply never tire of the toothless standards.

Even when he was most vital, he perplexed the best rock critics of our day. 

Take storied critic Robert Christgau, who has never written a warm word about Joel dating back four decades—instead opting for phrases like “eternal teenager,” “nasty,” “egotism,” “pretentious” and “yuck”—and even he showed signs of a crush. The worst Christgau ever graded any individual Joel album was a kissing cousin C. Cumulatively, factoring the dozen albums Christgau’s reviewed of Joel’s since 1973’s Piano Man, Joel is earning a 2.83 GPA on the Dean of Rock Critic’s report card. 

Christgau flunks Joel only theoretically. And that’s because Billy Joel is just one of those weird American phenomena that just stays lodged in your subconscious. It’s like nothing he’s about really matters, but some of it sort of matters (profoundly).  

So on the night of the grand opening of The Show in Rancho Mirage—a ridiculously intimate $76 million dollar room where he played a first-name-basis sort of performance for about 2,000 people—it was somewhat alarming to see how a man with lively fragments of so many histories in his every arrangement could look so fucking old. He sat in profile, and the two screens flanking the stage didn’t do him any favors. Joel turns 60 in May, and isn’t holding up—there’s a pork chop in his ashen jowls, and his gray goatee isn’t distinguished, it’s merely caught up to his tired eyes. The ordinarily dropsical features are now dire. Strangely, his voice is as strong as ever, better even, sort of a reverse Dorian Gray effect.

Stranger still, while he was vaguely aware of his surroundings—“where is this again, Rancho Mirage? Oh yes”—he is fully aware of how he looks. “I’m Billy Joel’s dad,” he said to the crowd after the set-opener, “My Life.” “Billy couldn’t be here tonight, he’s busy, and he requires all that money . . . I know all his shit anyway.” 

And there again, he didn’t seem to care about how he looked, either. He used a throat spray continuously between and even during songs, his mouth stretching like he’s trying to pop his ears at an overpass. It was like watching somebody unaware that they’re being watched, seeing them pick their nose. 

“It’s really dry here . . . I seem to remember drying out here once back in the day.” When he says things like this, the mood becomes immediately light and further reverent, and the crowd laughs—only a handful of them, after all, have guzzled furniture polish in attempt to off themselves. There’s no denying that people enjoy totally unrelatable stories with miraculous pieces of brutal nonfiction they’ll never experience. 

Or maybe it was just our California state of mind.

Every song of Joel’s is an event—an epochal event to his fans, who might affix a certain reverie to what they were doing when “Uptown Girl” came out in 1983; a personal triumph/heartbreak to him, like when he wrote “Just The Way You Are” for his first wife, Elizabeth Weber, whom he ended up hating the way she became. Joel made his way semi-chronologically through 1974’s “The Entertainer,” to 1977’s “She’s Always A Woman” from The Stranger, to 1976’s “New York State of Mind” from Turnstiles to 1980’s “Victim of Desire” from his Glass Houses, and so on. Though none of these songs are even remotely current—the freshest of the 16 song-set being 1993’s “River of Dreams”—he doesn’t dick around in singing them, no intonation boredom, none of the typical ennui that comes from night-in-night-out repetition. 

At least not on this night.

“I apologize to you people back here,” Joel said at one point, swiveling around after playing the lone dud in a pack of lady fingers, “Zanzibar,” which still delighted a room full of quinquagenarians. “All you’re getting is head.” He waited a beat as a dawning chuckle broke over the room, and then added, “I guess . . . that’s not necessarily a bad thing.” And just as playfully and nimbly, he addressed the people he’d been facing, “but then again, you people get to see my face, so it’s a toss up.” 

It’s known that part of Edna St. Vincent Millay’s allure was her ability to make the person she was talking to feel like the only one in the room. Exclusivity, see? Ditto that for the Piano Man.

(About halfway through “We Didn’t Start the Fire” I thought, what would you say to somebody like Billy Joel that would be even of mild interest to him? He loves pussy, so that’s a topic, and Ray Charles. He married Katie Lee in 2004, so pussy-problems are personal now. He doesn’t necessarily like fame, but he needs fame—always an unsettling dilemma. Your envy means everything and nothing to him, conflictively. He wrote all his good material young and mostly in love or hurt—at any rate, when anguished—and those things report but diminishingly after he built up tolerances to them . . . thus gotta be the reason he doesn’t write pop songs no more. No, there’s nothing to say to Billy Joel other than “yes, yes, important not to forget our second wind—the first one goes too often uncherished,” to which he’d just say “you’re frickin’ right,” in a very self-deprecating way).

In the end, Joel gave up (almost) all his charms, including “It’s Still Rock and Roll to Me,” which is always a thumping bit of momentum, and “You May Be Right” in the 16-song-set. This was a sprint, of sorts, not a marathon. At one point he brought out his longtime roadie, Chainsaw, to fracture the Joel experience with “a religious song”—AC/DC’s “Highway To Hell”—and he did this to keep the bored boyfriends in the audience alive. It almost like Billy Joel thinks like the everyman, and that might be the single biggest key to his success. At the same time, he thinks like a slot machine.

The penultimate number that he pulled out in his encore was “Only the Good Die Young,” which of course is the admission everybody knows anyway, at least when you’re reading into things in Rancho Mirage—Billy Joel is bad, but because he’s still full of life nobody seems to mind.