The 100th: Billy Joel at Madison Square Garden – The Greatest Arena Run of All Time (Enliven Entertainment, Maritime Productions, Sony Music Entertainment, originally aired April 14, 2024; rebroadcast April 19, 2024)

by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2024 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved

Last night (Friday, April 19) CBS-TV re-ran The 100th: Billy Joel at Madison Square Garden – The Greatest Arena Run of All Time, the Billy Joel concert special filmed on March 28, 2024 representing his 100th performance at Madison Square Garden in New York City. Joel had performed at least one concert per month there since 2010 and he’d become such a “regular” that the arena’s technical crew quickly set up the venue for a music concert just as easily as they could for a sports event. The show was originally aired on Sunday, April 14 but, on my husband Charles’s advice, I bypassed it and instead watched the Lifetime movies Killer Fortune Teller and Trapped by My Sugar Daddy. It was rebroadcast on Friday for a rather strange reason: viewers in the Eastern and Central time zones had to watch the concert half an hour later than it was scheduled because the Masters golf tournament lasted a half-hour longer than it was supposed to, and at the end of the show CBS affiliates on the East and Midwest cut it off in the middle of the last song – Joel’s star-making hit, “Piano Man” – to broadcast their local news. If I’d watched it here in California it would not have been affected by this sort of petty vandalism, but once again, even on those rare occasions when the time-zone differences work in our favor, the East Coast-centric media mavens can’t stand it and make it sound like the world is coming to an end. There’s one post on Entertainment Weekly (https://ew.com/billy-joel-100th-residency-special-cut-short-cbs-8631580) that quoted three tweets (or do we need to call them “X”’s now?), including one by Kevin Connolly that read, “You couldn’t produce a worse product than CBS just did on the Billy Joel special. Way too many commercials, didn’t play some of his best songs, went extremely out of order in his set list, and then cuts away to the local news in the middle of ‘Piano Man’?!? A total flop by CBS.”

I certainly didn’t think it was a total flop; I’ve been a Billy Joel fan at least since the late 1970’s (when he released two back-to-back mega-hit albums on Columbia, The Stranger and 52nd Street, which raised him from medium-level music star to pop icon and superstar) and I enjoyed the show thoroughly. I agree with Connolly that there were “way too many commercials,” though that’s part of the price you have to pay for all privately-owned television, and also with Connolly’s comment that he “didn’t play some of his best songs.” His set list didn’t include the ballad “Just the Way You Are,” which was the iconic Billy Joel song from the late 1970’s. Like Stevie Wonder’s “You Are the Sunshine of My Life,” it was heard everywhere – there was even a piano-roll version which the late John Gabrish and I heard at a visit to San Diego’s Old Town in the late 1980’s – and I remember liking it at first, then getting thoroughly sick of it (both from incessant airings of Joel’s version and the equally incessant covers), and after it faded off the airwaves hearing it again in a few years and saying to myself, “You know, that’s a really nice song.” (I had the same reaction to “You Are the Sunshine of My Life” as well.) There were some other Billy Joel songs I’d have liked to have heard on the show – including “Big Shot,” “Zanzibar” (a curious knock-off of Barry Manilow’s “Copacabaña”: the Copacabaña and Zanzibar were both major nightclubs in New York City in the 1940’s), “Allentown,” “Pressure,” “Uptown Girl” and his infamous history lesson, “We Didn’t Start the Fire” – but the songs he did include were quite fine. Joel began his set with “Lights Out on Broadway” and then played an intro based on the “Ode to Joy” finale from Beethoven’s Ninth Symphony to his song “Anthony’s Song (Movin’ Out).”

Then, after a lesser-known song from The Stranger called “Vienna” (I wondered if Joel placed that there because Beethoven’s Ninth Symphony, from which he’d just quoted, was composed and premiered in Vienna in 1824) and a brief speech by Jerry Seinfeld, Joel did “New York State of Mind” and then brought on a guest star, Sting, to sing with him on “Big Man on Mulberry Street.” Sting came out in a powder-blue suit and did what amounted to a Sinatra impression, less vocally than physically – and he was so immaculately turned out Joel’s basic-black outfit seemed blah by comparison. Then Joel confessed to some uncertainty as to whether he could still hit the high notes on the next song he was about to sing – “An Innocent Man,” the title of a quite good Joel album of the early 1980’s in which he paid tribute to doo-wop in general and the Four Seasons in particular. Despite his disclaimer, Joel actually did quite well with “An Innocent Man.” He not only still has those high notes, they rang out clearly and strongly even though without the sheer ethereal power they had in the 1980’s. I couldn’t help but compare Joel to Elton John, whose current voice simply doesn’t have the killer falsetto it had in his prime – something that became painfully apparent when he appeared on a late-night TV show with Miley Cyrus a few years back. He let Miley Cyrus pick whatever song from his catalog she wanted to do, and she chose “Tiny Dancer” – which mercilessly exposed the deterioration in the upper register of John’s voice. After that there was a commercial break and then a gag segment in which people in the audience were allegedly asked what they wanted to hear Joel sing next – and all but one of them said they would like to hear his new song, “Turn the Lights Back On” (was it Joel’s belated answer record to his own “Lights Out on Broadway”?). Joel dutifully performed “Turn the Lights Back On” and then went into the title track from Joel’s final (1993) pop-rock album, River of Dreams.

During this song Joel gave one of his backup singers and musicians, Crystal Taliaferro – a Black woman who wore a considerably flasher and more flamboyant costume than Joel’s (most stars don’t let their backup singers upstage them in the costume department) and variously played saxophone, timbales (the stand-up drums used in Latin bands) and triangle – a chance to sing solo. Taliaferro responded to the challenge by belting out the first two choruses of “River Deep – Mountain High” with more ferocity and power than anyone since the first recording by Tina Turner with Phil Spector’s backup band. Then Joel came back and reprised “River of Dreams” with an intriguing interpolation of The Cadillacs’ 1954 hit “Gloria” towards the end. (There are quite a few songs called “Gloria,” including Van Morrison’s star-making 1964 hit with the band Them and the 1982 dance-pop hit for the late Laura Branigan.) After “River of Dreams” Joel came back with “Scenes from an Italian Restaurant” – an enigmatic song with a fast middle section about the unhappy relationship of former prom queen and king Brenda and Eddie – and “It’s Still Rock ‘n’ Roll to Me” from the 1980 album Glass Houses (which may feature the sexiest photo of Billy Joel ever published), for which once again Joel got out from behind the piano, stood in front of the band and sang. Then Joel played what is probably my favorite song of his, “Only the Good Die Young,” which despite its title is actually a blistering attack on the Roman Catholic Church and especially what its teachings do to teenage women unlucky enough to be brought up in it. After that Joel played the first track on Glass Houses, “You May Be Right (I May Be Crazy),” during which director Paul Dugdale cut to a man and woman in the audience, both of them wearing black T-shirts, with hers reading “You May Be Right” and his reading “I May Be Crazy.” This song, too, contained an interpolation; Billy Joel’s lead guitarist took the vocal mike and belted out some of Led Zeppelin’s song “Rock ‘n’ Roll.”

The final piece on the program was “Piano Man,” the title song from Joel’s second album (and first for Columbia Records; before that he’d made a little-known album called Cold Spring Harbor for Ampex, the short-lived label started by a well-known company that made tape recorders) and his first major-label hit. It was Joel’s breakthrough song and it’s become part of American culture; I knew one cocktail-lounge pianist who would always make a point of playing it every Saturday at 9 p.m. because the song’s opening line is, “It’s nine o’clock on a Saturday.” That was the song that for some reason got cut off in the East and Midwest time zones when this show originally aired on April 14 so CBS decided to rebroadcast it five days later. It was also a song on which Joel took the omnipresent demand of modern pop-rock performers for audiences to sing along to the extreme of not actually singing the final chorus at all, convinced that his audience will sit shame-facedly through the song’s melody and join it so well the crowd sang it perfectly and without apparent guidance from Joel himself. The song featured Joel simultaneously singing, playing piano and playing harmonica from a Bob Dylan-style rack (which looked constructed to hold a much larger harmonica than the one Joel was playing) and was a worthy close to a quite remarkable evening.

One thing I admired about the telecast was the sheer power of Joel’s band – even though he inexplicably fired Liberty DeVitto, the great drummer on most of his records, just before his 2006 tour (DeVitto sued Joel in 2009 claiming, among other things, that he’d co-written many of Joel’s songs, but the suit was settled out of court in 2010 and DeVitto ended up starting what amounts to a Billy Joel tribute band called The Lords of 52nd Street) – and another thing was the extent to which Joel’s music has been influenced by jazz. Not only does he carry a three-piece horn section (trumpet, trombone, saxophone) but Joel’s own piano playing sounds considerably jazzier “live” than it did on his records. Also, like James Taylor, Joel has long since lost the exciting mane of hair he showcased on his early album covers and he’s now totally bald (either that or he’s responded to male pattern baldness by shaving his head completely). The show was rather awkwardly labeled The 100th: Billy Joel at Madison Square Garden – The Greatest Arena Run of All Time, but it was well worth watching and a showcase for one of the most interesting pop-song catalogues of the late 1970’s and early 1980’s.