Billy Joel At Forty

A Collegial Conversation, 1989

The Long Island Music and Entertainment Hall of Fame (LIMEHOF) museum opened a new exhibition over Thanksgiving weekend, "Billy Joel/My Life: A Piano Man's Journey." The museum is at 97 Main Street, Stony Brook, NY 11790. Inductees to LIMEHOF include Joel (charter member, of course), and, as of November 2022, me. This was not on the horizon in 1989.

I had spent nearly 15 years already covering Billy Joel for the only newspaper that matters to him: Newsday, the Long Island newspaper. If you want to know why Billy Joel is so important to Long Island, it's because he's the one star who never left. Bad times during his early career exile in Los Angeles chronicled in the Piano Man album made him say goodbye to Hollywood for good. He's the hometown hitmaker who never left home again.

After reporting on six shows in Russia (three in Moscow, three in the former Leningrad/St. Petersburg) in three weeks in August, 1987, it was agreed I no longer would review Joel's shows, though I would occasiona…