Maybe it’s the fall, or the fact that I’m missing the fall, but every September my heart starts to feel the season change as if it were turning from blood red to golden orange and yellow, like the trees I recall from my youth.

During these months I can’t help but think of my close friend Bob. Ours is a friendship that’s grown into one of the tightest relationships I have. I was the best man in his first wedding, an honor I still hold close to my heart even though that relationship didn’t last. That wedding took place in late summer, 1991, just after I returned from my first California adventure. While I’m not an ardent Billy Joel fan, “And So It Goes” is a reminder of that time in his life, and it conjures images of Bob’s strength against the punches life threw at him when things fell apart.

Bob and I met during my freshman year at Bowling Green; he was the pledge trainer in my fraternity. Since it was the band fraternity, I didn’t take the organization too seriously; I was a cocky freshman who thought he was much better than those other band geeks. Thankfully, I learned what a fool I was, as the men in that fraternity became my best friends. Bob and I wound up living next to each other during my sophomore year; that was the point when things changed, and we began to turn to each other for advice, encouragement, and beer. Throughout the remainder of my college years, whenever Bob came to Bowling Green for a visit, he was sure to stop by our house and hang out, maybe even crash for the night.

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In New York, baseball is akin to religion. To many New Yorkers, Billy Joel is, too. So it was no surprise when it was announced that Joel would play the last concert at the New York Mets’ Shea Stadium.

And so, the themes of the night were, of course, New York and baseball, and Joel delivered a surprisingly long stream of hits that referenced those very things - “New York State of Mind,” “Zanzibar,” “Big Man on Mulberry Street,” “Miami 2017″ and “We Didn’t Start the Fire.” Many of the songs he played also seemed to contain indirect references, those to tradition, the past, or change, like “Allentown,” with its opening line, “Well we’re living here in Allentown / And they’re closing all the factories down.” To really drive the whole baseball theme home, he opened with the National Anthem, and played “Take Me Out To The Ballgame,” during his encore.

Billy Joel, “Zanzibar” (download)

Joel’s facial expressions were somewhere between distraction, awe and stoicism, but in big screen close-ups, his eyes looked occasionally watery. He didn’t choose to slather the audience in overwhelming sentiment, however, only mentioning how strange it was that he saw the stadium being built only to watch it come down soon, and apologizing to those who bought tickets for the evening assuming that it would be the very last show (the Mets could only offer up Friday as the additional date, he said).

The “Last Play at Shea” — or “Last Double-Play at Shea,” as he jokingly referred to it — makes Joel the first artist to have headlined all three major New York stadiums: Giants’, Yankees’ & Mets. He also brings to a close a trend started by the Beatles, when they opened their ‘65 North American tour at Shea on August 15th; which he nodded to with covers of “It’s A Hard Day’s Night” and “She Loves Me.” That show was the first concert at a major stadium and broke records for attendance and profit, proving that rock ‘n’ roll was a major force. (more…)

These days baby boomers, especially women, are in something of a panic. Demographically, professionally, financially and sociologically, they’ve been dominating American culture for nearly half a century now, while succeeding generations have waited, often impatiently, for them to get the hell out of the way. This summer, however, boomers confront the reality that whether they look to the left or the right, neither candidate for the highest office in our land represents their generation. One guy is old enough to be their dad’s little brother; the other guy wasn’t even out of kindergarten when Martin and Bobby were killed. Should Obama win the presidency and hold it until Generation X is fully ascendant in the political realm, the boomers’ entire presidential legacy will likely rest on the shoulders of Bill Clinton and George W. Bush.

I note this fact not (merely) to rub the boomers’ presidential mediocrity in their faces, but because I’m so sick to death of celebrating political and entertainment milestones that perpetuate the boomers’ vision of themselves as the most culturally significant batch of malcontents ever to walk the planet. The most recent of these is among the most egregious: last week’s release of a “30th-Anniversary Edition” of Billy Joel’s breakthrough album The Stranger. The release is timed, no doubt, to coincide with Joel’s pair of sold-out shows this week at the soon-to-be-torn-down Shea Stadium, a facility that (like Joel himself) has been sitting fat and happy on Long Island for far too long. This coalescence of events resulted in a lengthy, at-times humorous profile of Joel in the New York Times yesterday – an article whose accompanying photograph by Damon Winter revealed the full measure of Joel’s advancing age, in a manner similar to Richard Avedon’s iconic image of a dying Humphrey Bogart.

Don’t get me wrong – I don’t really have anything against The Stranger, or Joel in general, and a fresh digital remastering is almost always nice. But if The Stranger is going to be offered up as the latest boomer nostalgia trip, then let’s really think about its significance.

Jason Hare will be the first to tell you that “Just the Way You Are,” the album’s leadoff and biggest hit, is one of the touchstones of ’70s Mellow Gold; in retrospect, it stands in the memory with certain other artifacts of middle-class pop culture in 1978 – The Goodbye Girl, say, or perhaps Barry Manilow’s Even Now album – as anecdotal evidence of a generation starting to go soft. Meanwhile, “Vienna” reflects the boomers’ ’70s-era shift from changing the world to an “I’m OK, You’re OK” self-help mentality, and “The Stranger” (apart from sounding like a perfect theme song for Eyes of Laura Mars or Looking for Mr. Goodbar) seems to warn against the very emotional openness engendered by boomer trends from Flower Power to disco. (more…)

Have you ever felt like a song has the answer you’re looking for? That if you could just figure out what the person is really, truly singing about and saying, then you’d know what to do?

For the past couple crossroads in my life, “Vienna” has been that song.

Billy Joel, “Vienna” (download)

Judging by Billy Joel’s personal life, it’s probably not the safest bet to assume that he’s got the answers to much of anything, but “Vienna” has a certain timelessness. It was released in the ’70s, but sounds like it could have come out yesterday. It tackles the questions that never really go away: questions about what we want and what we need, about getting older, about how we live our lives. But while it may be straight-forward, it’s also somewhat vague.

Slow down you crazy child
You’re so ambitious for a juvenile
But then if you’re so smart tell me why
You are still so afraid?

But couldn’t slowing down be seen as being afraid, too? It all depends on what we’re talking about here.

But you know that when the truth is told
That you can get what you want
Or you can just get old

In a song about the values of slowing down, this seems to contradict his point. It sounds like he’s saying that you can work hard to get what you want or relax and just get old. If he’s advocating the latter, this is hardly convincing. Or, is this a criticism of the former, pointing out that even if you work hard to get what you want, you’ll still get old, just like everyone else? But we’re all going to get old, anyway, so isn’t it better to get what you want in the process? Then there’s that “you know” to contend with. Is this the way the subject of the song thinks, and he’s criticizing this way of thinking? (more…)