Billy Joel’s songs were once Lamentations from the suburbs, today they are swan songs from a lost world. He gave a concert in Frankfurt and made the Waldstadion for piano.
Billy Joel’s biggest challenge has always been that his songs that all sound like a piano bar, must also function in a stadium. Therefore, it was amazing how the named after a major bank in Frankfurt Waldstadion has the illusion of the third song “Just The Way You Are” that since about fifty thousand people from all over Europe to sit around a piano and feel at home. What does one hand to do with the fact that Joel wrote a relatively manageable oeuvre of songs 1973-1983, which are not all become hits, but all to standards, and he literally has published anything new since 1993rd There is therefore no risk that mediocre late work is played. On the other hand, are its songs for a basic feeling that many share.
Technically generated Joel this mass intimacy still with the charm of the lounge entertainers , he optimized for large-scale events. This includes not only that he leads a band that can be adjusted perfectly to its dynamism, but also that he told jokes and anecdotes – and that he can pick the audience songs. he has trained as a teenager, when he, the reward of his single mother simply was not enough with nightly performances in a piano bar, at home on Long Iceland, the degree vergeigte This ability. And later, when he played in Los Angeles shortly before his breakthrough half a year in the Executive Room on Wilshire Boulevard. Wherever he turns his song “Piano Man” composed, with which he managed this breakthrough and he played on Saturday in Frankfurt as a last song before the encores. And because he “One Piano” since now 43 years almost always the last number before the encores plays white audiences in Frankfurt, what it means when the harmonica belting himself, with which he plays the theme.
What a bar pianist can: take a sigh from the audience and play around
There are not many pianists who can. And because he only plays pieces from the past, we must declare it with the past. Musically, this is clear. 1973, when “Piano Man” appeared, was the “Peak Rock” -year. 1973 of grand gestures monumental claims. Pink Floyd published the operatic key work “The Dark Side of the Moon”, Led Zeppelin reached with “Houses of the Holy” its zenith, and David Bowie cemented his HyperStar status with ” Aladdin Sane “. On the other hand indicated that the peak would soon be exceeded. The New York Dolls and The Stooges debuted as a precursor of punk, later reggae god Bob Marley released his first international album.
Billy Joel was a counter-model. He did not play riffs and beats, there was no poses, gestures and certainly no Fury. His songs were based on piano motives, how she was used to from the Great American Songbook of the twenties and thirties. you can hear the difference when he plays, for example, the opening chords of “New York State of Mind” or “Always A Woman To Me”. There goes a collective sigh through Waldstadion, which they can take immediate and motives vary once, across the bar pro who still flays with such pirouettes a little time before he gives the audience the eureka moment of recognition. With a guitar riff can not. This is in space and remains. But as was the musical zeitgeist of 1973, when hard rock bands like Deep Purple , Black Sabbath and Aerosmith filled the stadiums.
on the other hand Billy Joel is contrary to the grassroots to claim the rock that technique and virtuosity must not be a criterion. One should not be deceived by choruses that continue to function when they are sung by a stadium full of Europeans. With a little karaoke experience, know that Billy Joel tunes are a cliff just in the verses that you can not take with amateur voice. He himself, however she masters the way also with the matured tenor of his 67 years even with deceptive ease.
For the Pianobarsentimentalitäten his texts was at the time not really a place. Especially not for one who with very traditional gender roles wrote alongside odes to the longing New York and love songs even songs on the oppressive world of suburbia. “Captain Jack” from the “Piano Man” album telling example the story of depressing uneventful Saturday night of a boy who is still living at home with 21st
Never as dramatic as the life of the underclass, never so heroically as the subculture
“Captain Jack” was the prologue of a song catalog, in which there is a lower middle class could find on the rock and pop stars made themselves always funny. In Frankfurt he played almost all of them: “Moving Out”, “My Life”, “Uptown Girl” were anthems for the lost of Suburbia, who had indeed given up hope between soulless Jobs and oppressive conventions, but still were not prepared to to join the counter-cultures. He told his melancholy Verliergeschichten as straightforward as you knew the only of the Country. When he is found a deeper truth anyway, then he packed them in simple words as in “Captain Jack”, “You got everything, but nothing’s cool” – “You have everything, but nothing is cool.”
And no, Billy Joel cool was never. Cool nobody demanded Waldstadion in Frankfurt. The recognition moments rich, knowing that as an also can pack small hardships and fears in songs that are not the same as to reach epic dimensions like Bruce Springsteen, or even shake the world, like Bob Dylan. The Gralshütern of rock that has always been a horror. Robert Christgau of the Village Voice coined the legendary formula, Billy Joel was “a force of nature of bad taste”. To date, American rock critics define their credibility with a hatred of Billy Joel, similar to Europe’s contempt for Phil Collins basis of Rocksnobismus
is. But in America know and the rest of the world they suspect that the lachrymose self-righteousness of a Billy Joel song is a deep expression of their frustrations Suburbia, which are never as dramatic as the needs of the lower classes and never as heroic as the ideals of the Counterculture. And you still feel that this is not a pose. Billy Joel grew up in the Parade Suburbia of postwar America, in Levittown, a beautiful settlement on Long Iceland, just a Pendlerzugfahrt and felt but insuperable distance of New York City.
The concert in Frankfurt was the way the first stadium concert, Billy Joel has ever been in Germany. In fact, he has, after years of financial disasters with fraudulent managers, expensive divorces and the devastating episodes of his chronic illness depression and alcoholism just an enormous age success. In New York he commutes for example once a month from Long Iceland to Manhattan to play at Madison Square Garden a show (he still lives at the Oyster Bay, but in a vast estate in Centre Iceland, and commutes by helicopter). He has since been given 36 sold-out concerts, there is no end in sight.
Surely that has to do with the fact that the age of the rock has been replaced by the era of Pop twenty years ago and thus the cultural criticism interpretation violence of rock critic disappeared. But it’s not retro bliss when they celebrate so fervently in Frankfurt, London and New York songs like “Moving Out” or “My Life”. What was still the lament of Suburbia, today is her swan song. There are, ironically, Frankfurt, London and New York, the cities in which fall the decisions still take the Billy Joels pitiful hero to rest their hope. In 1982, more than thirty years ago, he said: “Suddenly you can no longer consider the quality of life of his parents as a guaranteed inheritance.” This was in view of the bitter realities of America today almost prophetic.
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