Happy 75th Birthday, Billy Joel!

May 9, 1949, 75 years ago: William Martin Joel is born in The Bronx, New York. It was a Monday, not a Saturday, so I suppose it doesn't matter if he was born at 9:00.

He grew up in Levittown and Hicksville, Long Island, about 30 miles east of New York City. He was blue-collar Jewish. His parents split up when he was a kid, and his single mother struggled.

He had a mind and a talent bigger and tougher than the suburbs, and he knew it. But it wasn't enough. He was desperate, searching. Music became his lifeline. When Hicksville High School told him, shortly before he was supposed to graduate in 1967, that he didn't have enough credits, and would have to take English over again in Summer school -- because he had missed too many classes due to sleeping late, due to having gigs the night before, where he was actually making money -- he told them to take their demand of him and shove it: "I'm not going to Columbia University, I'm going to Columbia Records!"

In 1972, his first album was released, Cold Spring Harbor. It showed a couple of flashes of brilliance, but there was no indication that he was going to become a star. But in 1974, on, yes, Columbia Records, Piano Man made him a star, its title track becoming legendary.

In 1977, The Stranger made him a superstar, with "Just the Way You Are" becoming one of the most popular "adult contemporary" songs of all time, "Only the Good Die Young" infuriating the Catholic Church, and "Scenes from an Italian Restaurant" showing that Freddie Mercury of Queen wasn't the only guy who could take 3 separate songs and make 1 epic song.

I didn't like him at first. Apparently, the only person he was able to convince, with his 1980 album Glass Houses, that he was a seriously hard rocker was me. And, at the age of 10, I believed all the crap my parents' generation was saying about hard rock, punk rock, and heavy metal.

In 1982, while in the latter stage of recording his album The Nylon Curtain, he had a nasty motorcycle wreck. Had he died, at the age of 33, it would have been a hell of a way to go out -- especially with songs like "Pressure" and the haunting tribute to Vietnam War veterans, "Goodnight Saigon" -- but it would have left perhaps his best work never done.

In 1983, he and I had one big thing in common: We discovered Christie Brinkley. I only saw her in Sports Illustrated. He began seeing her in real life, and they would be married from 1985 to 1994. I hated him for "taking her away from me." As if I ever had a chance.

But things began to change. I got sick of current music, and switched to songs of the 1950s and '60s, which were being called "oldies." Billy had tapped into that on his 1983 album An Innocent Man. "Tell Her About It" sounded like Dion, "Uptown Girl" sounded like the Four Seasons, "The Longest Time" was an a cappella doo-wop song, and so on. His 1986 album The Bridge included "Baby Grand," a piano duet with Ray Charles, Billy's all-time musical hero.

This shift happened as the days wound down on high school for me. I didn't go to my senior prom -- there was no "Brender" willing to go with this "Eddie" -- but our senior class chose a song from The Bridge, "This Is the Time," as our class song:

This is the time to remember

'cause it will not last forever.

These are the days to hold onto

'cause we won't, although we'll want to.

Wasn't that the truth. After graduation, I had a great Summer. But after that, for reasons I won't get into here, things went downhill for me. And Billy's music, all the way back to his start -- almost my entire lifetime to that point -- began to resonate with me more. I never had a musical figure who meant everything to me when I was a teenager. Billy became that for me in early adulthood. I was ready. You know the saying: When the student is ready, the teacher will appear.

Early in 1989, a teenager told Billy, "You were lucky: You grew up in the Fifties. Nothing happened in the Fifties." Billy flipped out, and reminded the kid of the Korean War, McCarthyism, the Suez Crisis, and the Hungarian Freedom Fighters. Pairing that with his impending 40th, he wrote "We Didn't Start the Fire."

Lots of people, including some big Billy fans, hate that song. I love it, and think there's only 2 things wrong with it: Having to rush through the last 20 years, 1969 to 1989 -- my entire life to that point -- and that atrocious, out-of-temporal-synchronization video. (Why was a never-aging Billy in their kitchen from 1949 to 1989, anyway? Was he a friend of the family?)

After River of Dreams in 1993, Christie left Billy. Times had really changed: Now, I hated her, for leaving him, although that didn't last. Their daughter, Alexa Ray Joel, also went into the music business, though she wisely plays more jazz-like material, lessening the comparisons with her father.

Billy, Alexa, Christie

Since then, he's never released another album of new material. But he still sold out concerts, from Madison Square to Leicester Square to Red Square.

In 2014, he became the 1st performer to have a Las Vegas-style "residency" in a sports arena: He began playing a concert at Madison Square Garden every month, for the next 10 years, except for during the COVID lockdown. He announced that this year, he's hanging that up, although he's not retiring from performing. He's even written a new song, "Turn the Lights Back On."

Billy with 4th wife Alexis Roderick,

and their daughters, Remy and Delia

Sports connections? The cover of The Stranger showed a pair of boxing gloves on a nail in the wall, as Billy had been an amateur boxer. On October 2, 1978, mere hours after the Yankees beat the Boston Red Sox at Fenway Park in a Playoff for the American League Eastern Division title, in what's become known as the Bucky Dent Game and the Boston Tie Party, Billy played a concert 3 miles away at the Boston Garden. I wonder if he played "New York State of Mind." Or "Miami 2017": "They sent the carrier out from Norfolk, and picked the Yankees up for free."

Before Game 3 of the 1979 Stanley Cup Finals at Madison Square Garden, Billy, by then one of the biggest music stars in the world on the back-to-back successes of The Stranger and 52nd Street, sang the National Anthem. When he was done, Ranger Captain Dave Maloney skated up behind him, and swatted him on the rear end with the blade of his stick. The Rangers lost to the Montreal Canadiens, 4-1, and won the Cup in Game 5, although I don't think Maloney's childishness with Billy had anything to do with it.

Before Game 1 of the 1986 World Series at Shea Stadium, Billy, on the success of a new album, The Bridge, sang the Anthem. The Mets and Red Sox players left him alone. The Sox won a thriller, 1-0, but, of course, we all know how that Series turned out, don't we? 

On June 22, 1990, Billy became the 1st non-festival music act to play Yankee Stadium without a game preceding the show, hosting the 1st of 2 sold-out concerts. On Millennium Eve, 1999 into 2000, he played Madison Square Garden, which he has sold out more than any other performer. On July 16 and 18, 2008, he played the last 2 concerts at Shea.

In 2015, Billy sang the Anthem before Game 3 of the World Series at Citi Field. In the middle of the 8th inning, as they had all season long, the Mets played "Piano Man," and the fans sang along, looking at Billy in the owner's box. He had a puzzled look on his face, as if to say, "No, no, you don't get it. This is not a happy sing-along song." Actually, the Bronx-born, Long Island-raised Billy is a Yankee Fan, so the real question to ask was, "Man, what are you doing here?" Oh la, da, da-dee-da, la-da, da-dee-dah, da-dum.

He has never been invited to perform at halftime of the Super Bowl, but he sang the Anthem at numbers XXIII (1989) and XLI (2007) -- both in Miami. On New Year's Eve, 2016 into 2017, he played the BB&T Center (now the Amerant Bank Center) in Sunrise, Florida, home of the NHL's Miami-area team, the Florida Panthers, and, indeed, sang "Miami 2017," even though New York avoided the apocalypse he suggested in that song written at the depth of the City's financial and crime crises in 1975.

"Miami 2017." On September 10, 2001, it looked like the apocalypse he'd predicted for The City in 1976 had been prevented. But on the 11th, it came far too close to reality: "I watched the mighty skyline fall" -- although it was the World Trade Center, not the Empire State Building, that he saw "laid low." Of course, in 2017, we entered the Trump era, and, like so many other old ex-New Yorkers, Trump now lives in Florida -- and drug cartels, if not the American mafia, have taken over Mexico, as Trump keeps reminding us. (But he couldn't do anything about it the last time.)

Despite also being with Columbia Records, Billy did not perform at The Garden for the tribute concert that the label threw for Bob Dylan in 1992. But he did play there for The Concert for New York City in 2001, to raise money for 9/11 victims; and the 12-12-12 concert on December 12, 2012, to raise money for the victims of Hurricane Sandy. He has so often been compared to Bruce Springsteen, who grew up on the other side of the Tri-State Area, in Freehold, New Jersey, and is just 4 months younger. But the 12-12-12 Concert was the first time I could remember them playing the same show, let along the same songs at the same time. It's good to know that they're friends.

Happy Birthday, Billy. It's a pretty good crowd for a birthday party, and all of us give you a smile. 'Cause we know that it's you who's helping us muddle through, and forget about life for a while.