Songbook #6: Piano Man

Mar 11, 2012 21:13

Sing us a song tonight
Billy Joel
Piano Man

Not all of the songs in the songbook have positive associations. For example, take Billy Joel's signature song, Piano Man. Whenever this song come to mind, which is often, I mentally grind my teeth. I blame my roommate from my freshman year of college.

Kevin didn't adjust well to college. A few weeks into fall semester he basically opted only to leave the room for food and the bathroom and the occasional party. He did go to fraternity events; he pledged to PhiKap the same semester as me, and in fact was instrumental in dragging me to the only rush event I attended. Anyway, note the lack of classes in that list. Instead he spent the vast majority of his time on his computer and listening to music. I occasionally hassled him about going to class, but in the end that was his own business so I didn't care too much. The music, on the other hand, often did get on my nerves. This wasn't because his taste in music was terrible; it was pretty much on par with my then mainstream tastes. The problem was that he'd get hooked on a single song and put it on continuous loop for hours. The main tracks abused in this manner by him freshman year were something from Jewel's Pieces of You (I've managed to suppress which one, thankfully) and Piano Man, both of which were heard on continuous loop for seemingly days or weeks at a time.

After doing extraordinarily poorly in his fall semester classes Kevin came back in the spring semester and announced that he wanted to be known as Rob (his middle name) and that he'd learned his lesson and was going to class now. Nowadays I'd have been fine with calling him Rob, but I was a lot less mature back then (or just less tolerant of weirdness) so I and everyone else ended up calling him K-Rob. After a few weeks of attending class he backslid and rarely left the room again. Unsurprisingly this didn't go well. When sophomore year rolled around he was out of school for a semester, during which he lived in the fraternity house. His most notable act here was destroying the Chumbawamba song Tubthumping for everyone by playing it on continuous loop. Thankfully, I no longer shared a room with him. Shortly after that he dropped out of school and moved back home*.

The real shame of it is that I like Billy Joel quite a lot. Actually, the very last date of the River of Dreams tour was in Fargo in 1994, and it was the very first concert that I went to by myself. I bought the ticket for something like $30, which today is insanely cheap for a stadium show but back then was a veritable fortunate, especially at my $4.75/hour minimum wage job. The concert was at the Fargodome and his divorce from Christie Brinkley had just recently been announced. I know because Billy Joel said something along the lines of "Well, it's the last night of the tour, and after this we all get to go back to our homes. Those of us who still have homes, anyway." Ouch.

On the way home from the show I realized that all the other people driving back to Grand Forks were blowing past the speed limit of 65mph, so I decided to floor it. I figured as long as people were still passing me it was still ok to accelerate, and that's how I buried the needle at 120 mph on my family's 1985 Honda Accord for the first time. I haven't the faintest idea how fast I was really going, but I can tell you that the car shakes like crazy at that speed, and that inexplicably quite a few people were still passing me. At that speed the trip back from Fargo doesn't take very long at all.

But I digress. Billy Joel certainly played Piano Man at the show, and I enjoyed it. However, that college experience of hearing the damn song over and over again ruined it for me, as well as most of Billy Joel's other stuff. I'm not sure how I kept myself from killing K-Rob somewhere along the way.

*I haven't been in touch with him since, but I heard that after graduating from a small college near his hometown he went through Air Force ROTC and was commissioned as a Lieutenant. I hope that this is a sign that he matured and got his act together, and not a sign that the Air Force has really low standards.

Tracklist
#1 - Welcome to the Jungle
#2 - Runnin' Blue
#3 - Cryin'
#4 - Mr. Jones
#5 - Blinded by the Light
#6 - Piano Man

concerts, songbook, fraternity

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