megotelek

So since I have dress rehearsal for the Dream of Gerontius on Friday night (John's birthday), I took him to the Billy Joel concert at Arco last night. It was AWESOME. Some highlights...

Ok, first of all, we got there about an hour early and got food and sat in our seats, and there was this weird guy sitting next to John. Who starts talking about how he took BART and the bus from San Francisco to get there and it only cost him $5.10 or something like that. So John's making conversation with the guy, and he starts talking about concerts he's been to, but as if we had been living in a cave or something and would have no idea who he was talking about ("So I saw this band called Styx....there was this group called Yes, you ever heard of them?"). Culminating in a story about how he went to a club once and there was this guy in a crushed velvet suit and a giant pink hat...who turned out to be Stevie Ray Vaughan. Who he had never heard of.

It turns out, the guy's ticket isn't even for the seat he's sitting in, as he starts explaining to John that he's going to work his way down to the floor as the concert goes on. Oookay...good luck, guy. He FINALLY left, and the concert started.

It opened with 'Prelude/Angry Young Man', and the grand piano and Billy came up from under the stage! Playing furiously, with the lights super-choreographed to the music. Awesome. Then he introduced himself as "Billy's dad. Billy, uh, couldn't make it tonight." John leaned over to me and said, "Wow, he looks like Peter Gabriel now!"

So he plays a couple more (older) pieces, but including "My Life" (yay! And yes, I will always think of that song as the Bosom Buddies theme song, so?). Then, he started talking about how we were missing the presidential debate, so we should have some sort of political process of our own.

He says we get to vote on the next song and he'll give us three choices, one for each of the major candidates. Okay, the Hillary Clinton song choice is "Summer, Highland Falls", the Barack Obama song is "Vienna", and the John McCain song is "The Ballad of Billy the Kid". Overwhelmingly, the vote went to....Billy the Kid! Yay!

A little ways into the concert, he played "Captain Jack". Then, he told us a story about how when Hillary Clinton was running for the New York Senate, she had a 'Greatest Hits' album and wanted to play "New York State of Mind" (it being New York and all) but accidentally, ended up playing "Captain Jack" instead.

(Some lyrics:
So you play your albums, and you smoke your pot
and you meet your girlfriend in the parking lot
Oh but still you're aching for the things you haven't got
What went wrong?

And if you can't understand why your world is so dead,
why you've got to keep in style and feed your head
Well you're 21 and still your mother makes your bed,
And that's too long

Captain Jack will get you high tonight
He'll take you to your special island
Captain Jack will get you by tonight
Just a little push, and you'll be smilin'
)

So her opponent at the time, Rudy Giuliani, seizes this opportunity to talk about how Hillary Clinton...approves of drug use and pornography. Billy was laughing as he was telling the story.

The song for his first wife was, of course, "She's Always A Woman". After the song was over, he said, "Yeah, we had some issues..." You think?

She can kill with a smile
She can wound with her eyes
She can ruin your faith with her casual lies
And she only reveals what she wants you to see
She hides like a child,
But she's always a woman to me

Oh, also, throughout the concert, the grand piano kept rotating; it would start facing stage left, then all of a sudden it would be facing stage right, and back again. It was surreal! But not as surreal as when the piano went away and Billy Joel is standing onstage...holding an electric guitar. That's just....wrong.

Then, he introduces one of his roadies, Chainsaw, who's going to sing a "religious song". Which turned out to be "Highway to Hell". That wins my vote for "least likely song you would expect to be performed at a Billy Joel concert"!

He closed the show with "Scenes From an Italian Restaurant", "Only The Good Die Young", and "Piano Man" (of course). It was truly an awesome show...I'm glad we were able to go!