So last night I got my early birthday gift from my wife: tickets to see Billy Joel in concert at the Bell Centre!! What a great show that was! I know it’s somewhat hard to think about what kind of concert to expect when the main guy is “tied” to his piano, but I found it to be intimate and a lot of fun.
Billy is a lot funnier than I expected him to be; making quips like thanking us all for going out to see him especially as “…I haven’t released a new album in 15 years!” 🙂 As someone I spoke with today stated, you know he’s out there for the love of it and not because he needs the money or needs to promote an album.
It wasn’t sold out but that didn’t matter. The light show was very well done and timed extremely well to the music. Billy sounded great and the whole band, actually, was dead on perfect. We had great shared moments of sharing song and I only wish those bloody seats were larger to allow for better dancing in the aisles 🙂
Billy’s age jokes continued throughout the sets (in terms of not remembering when a song was first released, or noting them as being from nineteen-twenty-something 😉 ). He apologized to the audience behind him with, “sorry about my back… head is all you’ll get tonight… then again, sometimes just head is great” 🙂
What really freaked me out was that near the end of the night, Billy introduced a member of the crew who supposedly had been with him for 30 years who was going to come on stage and sing a song – one not sung or written by Billy. This older, tattooed man wearing Doc Martens and dressed all in black came on and literally stomped all around the stage while he belted out (in a PERFECT rendition and sound) Highway to Hell!! Seriously! The band played an exact copy of the song, sounding exactly like AC/DC and the crew member (“Chainsaw”) was an exact match. What a freaking hilarious and exciting moment! The crowd loved it!! 🙂
The songs that came after that were all the really kick-ass Billy Joel hits and ended up with 3 encores – the last one being Piano Man. Wonderful, wonderful ending to a really great show! 🙂 I must admit to being especially thrilled to hearing “Big Man on Mulberry Street” as it’s a song I’ve loved since I first heard it on an episode of Moonlighting! (Of course, the fact that Billy looks pretty much like an older and heavier Bruce Willis now made the moment especially funny 🙂 )
All in all, a really great evening and a fantastic birthday gift! Extra thanks to my amazing wife who had driven down to Ottawa to pick up her sister for babysitting and then drove her back today. Well and surely “above and beyond” did my wife go to make this a memorable event!! 🙂