Man What Are You Doing Here?
The problem with yielding our entertainment choices to faceless corporations is there’s no face to slap when it all goes wrong.
What had been intended as a heavy-rotation, hyped-to-the-point-of-aggravation event was all but undone near the end of Sunday night's two-hour presentation of Billy Joel’s 100thconcert at Madison Square Garden. It was to be a slam-dunk tribute to his umatched run there, as achieved at the second summit of his popularity. Though complaints would issue from fans about the broadcast’s many interruptions for ads—and also that Joel's typical two-and-half-hour setlist was truncated and the sequence rejiggered—it had been a lively, well-captured show, with the man, the band and the crowd in good form. There had been a guest visit from Sting for “Big Man on Mulberry Street,’ perhaps partly to promote their shared billing in big venues this coming summer– and neatly in tune with the jazzbo ethos of their musical leanings. The cutaways to the audience were generally effective, with a seeming emphasis on adult females who knew every word and were happy to shout those words out.
If you were watching from outside the Eastern and Central time zones, you saw the entire unfolding, to the rapturous crowd, of the long-ago-memorized eight verses and the thrice-interspersed refrain of “Piano Man. The crowd’s exultant sing-along at the end– “and you’ve got us feeling all right” and the diminuendo of an outro with a few final notes from Joel’s’ harmonica yielded to his usual casual amble offstage.
Ah, but, many of those who had tuned in missed those last satisfying, climactic moments. From the next day’s abashed press release from CBS: “A network programming timing error ended last night’s Billy Joel special approximately two minutes early in the Eastern and Central Time Zones. We apologize to Mr. Joel, his fans, our affiliated stations, and our audience whose viewing experience was interrupted during the last song. Due to the overwhelming demand from his legion of fans, BILLY JOEL: THE 100TH – LIVE AT MADISON SQUARE GARDEN will be rebroadcast in its entirety on CBS on April 19th at 9:00PM ET/PT.”
The specific blame was still being allocated at this writing, with many guessing that the networks’ national overlords had instructed their local affiliates to simply jam in the tease for their local news programming promptly at 11:30—feasibly due to the supposed urgency of letting viewers know that the four days of devoted CBS coverage of the Masters golf tournament had found a winner.
It played like this:
https://www.yahoo.com/entertainment/cbs-pulls-plug-billy-joel-064335651.html
One poster on social media said, “Direct information from someone at a local CBS affiliate... the network feed gave local affiliates in EDT/CDT time zones the incorrect end time which caused them to switch over to local broadcasts.” Perhaps. But certainly the hypothesis that the trouble came down from above is backed up by a tweet from Evan Closky, sports director of 10 Tampa Bay, as to why “tons” of stations made the move: “As a man who grew up right next to Billy Joel’s hometown...it was my duty to apologize to everyone about cutting off our telecast of Billy Joel tonight...not to get into the weeds, but there was a special report after the Masters and it wasn’t accounted for by the powers that be beyond this building…a mistake by people higher than the local affiliates, sadly.”
Ironically, Joel had a notorious beef with CBS during the network’s broadcast of the 1994 Grammy Awards. when producers cut to an ad breaking off Frank SInatra’s speech accepting an honor as a Legend, Soon after, arriving at the natural silent pause in "The River of Dreams,” Joel halted the music to say (his fingers fluttering), "Valuable advertising time going by, valuable advertising time going by. Dollars, dollars, dollars…”
In the end, it's more glitch than tragedy. The loyal fans got 1:57 of peak Billy—and he'll do more than fine going forward, with a current chart entry with his “Turn the Lights Back On” and a row of big venues he’ll visit this summer. The now years-long PianoManaissance remains in full swing.
As author of “Billy Joel: The Definitive Biography” I’ll just drop what I’ll call an insight here. In the book I termed “Piano Man” just what many of us feel it to be—as the second cut on his debut 1973 album, “Cold Spring Harbor,” “it was perhaps already guaranteed its primacy in his body of work—the indispensable, inescapable, signature song.”
The striking feature that helps assure the durability of the song, as a set closer and his definitively autobiographical track, is that it both depicts his origin story and captures his key conundrum—he’s been loved almost more for his limitations than for the heights he’s achieved. That’s what makes him our pop star for life, someone who realizes the universal comfort of a singable melody wrapped in a candid narrative.
It's nice but hardly necessary to know , as you can read on page 105 of the book, that the waitress "practicing politics” is his lover and soon to be wife Elizabeth, that John at the bar is a nod to Jon Troy, his ad hoc manager when he fled a bad management deal to ride out the problem in the Executive Room as “Bill Martin”. Troy is also cited in “Say Goodbye To Hollywood,” the next chapter in Joel’s musical memorializing of those fledgling days.
Is not the line, “And they sit at the bar and put bread in my jar and say, `Man what are you doing here?” not the humblest of brags? The`Bill’ of the song, and Billy Joel, the record-biz-trapped singer-songwriter, intersect in that line. Then and now, we ask– hat indeed is Billy Joel, superstar to be, doing in this embarrassing scenario?
“After all these years, he told me, “After all the bills it’s paid, and all the concerts it’s closed, and with the realization that the song and I are forever and inextricably linked, it’s hard to know what to say about it. To me, it’s really just a waltz.”
And one, as CBS gets up and dusts itself off, that can be seen in its concert-topping entirely on the network on April 19.
Postscript: Meanwhile, his label recently put out a quite inveigling video of one more autobiographical number, his 1977 “Vienna” from the album “The Stranger”:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3jL4S4X97sQ
