Lounge Lizard Man Spotted Crooning in Columbia
February 19th, 2007
Billy Joel gets a rough review on the Columbia City Paper Blog
Lounge Lizard Man Spotted Crooning in Columbia
By Coleman St-Genesius
Several months back, I had a terrible nightmare. I dreamed my partner was begging me to attend a Billy Joel concert. I emphatically declined, as I had no desire to spend two hours packed in an elevator, which is the only place I’ve heard Billy Joel tunes in the past decade.
However, my incubus was real: My partner had purchased tickets online for himself and several other Billy Joel fanatics at 6 a.m. on a Saturday. A week later I learned that the concert was on Valentine’s Day. Geez, if I had known the event was on our national day of love, I probably would have been willing to succumb to several hours of tepid lounge music just to be with my valentine sweetie. So I told my partner to get me a ticket, which he did: three sections away from his B.J. posse. If that’s not love, I don’t know what is.
If you took all the piano entertainers the world over, from John Tesh to Liberace, and put them in a blender, the result would be Billy Joel. That’s not necessarily a bad thing. We’re not talking Kenny G-level entertainment. But it’s not Green Day, either.
Except for the Colonial Center staff, there wasn’t a single person of color in attendance. Being surrounded by 8,000 middle-aged WASPS is a rather odd sociological experience, especially when one witnesses thousands of Caucasians attempting to clap in unison.
Mr. Joel hardly strayed from his standard of collected hits, including the extraordinarily annoying, but historically-motivating, “We Didn’t Start the Fire” and “The River of Dream,” which has always struck me as plagiaristic knockoff of the ’50s hit “The Lion Sleeps Tonight.”
When the pianomeister fired up “The River of Dreams,” I found it necessary to leave my seat and wander the Colonial Center. (To be honest, I didn’t want to barf on the two teenage bimbos in front of me, whose banshee screams reminded me of something from The Simpsons’ annual Halloween episode.) Like a Dante in music Purgatory, I stumbled in circles, passing cotton candy booths and $50 T-shirt vendors, wiping the drool from my mouth that was caused from a barely audible rendition of “My Life,” when I heard the unexpected opening riffs of a truly classic rock-and-roll tune.
I rushed back to my seat and found myself shouting insanely for an unknown, fat Joel groupie named Chainsaw, who torched the stage with a white-hot cover of AC/DC’s “Highway to Hell.” This was far and away the highlight of the night, but things quickly returned to their lukewarm state, as Mr. Joel followed with a ludicrous rap version of “Big Shot,” wherein he nearly decapitated his saxophonist with his microphone stand. (Joel might be a New York Jew, but he’s certainly no Beastie Boy.)
Actually, one has to give Billy Joel some credit. Most lounge lizards would slough their skins at the thought of being upstaged by a groupie. But Mr. Joel is impressively comfortable with himself: He spent half his concert making self-effacing remarks about his panus and balding pate. Of course, he made no excuses for his music.
Don’t get me wrong: How many pop musicians credit Aaron Copland, Beethoven and Chopin as inspirations? Billy Joel is an accomplished pianist, and despite the fact that he has some amazing musicians on the stage—especially the trumpeter, whose solo on the Joel attic song “Zanzibar” was pure music heaven—I’d have found the whole evening more tolerable if the stage was just a piano and piano man…and a wet bar.
As expected, the concert concluded with “Piano Man,” which, no matter what you think of Billy Joel, is an American classic lounge song. Of course, for my money I would have rather seen Sammy Davis Jr. belt out “Mister Bojangles.”
Did I mention Harry Connick Jr. is playing at the Township Auditorium in March?
Where have all the Sammy’s gone?
Billy Joel appeared in concert at the Colonial Center on February 14.
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