Review: It took 2 years for Billy Joel to get to BofA Stadium. Was he worth the wait?
For a long while there, it seemed like Saturday night’s show might never happen.
Tickets had gone on sale 932 days earlier and in the time since, Billy Joel’s highly anticipated Bank of America Stadium performance — meant to end a seven-year concert drought at the Carolina Panthers’ home venue — was twice postponed by a full 12 months due to the pandemic.
And in the wake of the second rescheduling, the Rolling Stones stole his thunder by skipping to the front of the line last September, when they played the first show in the venue since 2013.
So, if there were elephants in the very, very big outdoor room Saturday night, Joel wasn’t going to ignore them.
Firstly: “I want to thank those of you who bought tickets two years ago, if you’re here tonight,” he said, to cheers, after opening with the one-two punch of “My Life” and “Pressure.” “Sorry about that,” he said, shrugging, to a smattering of laughter (like, totally not your fault, Billy), before wryly adding: “They kinda screwed up our schedule.”
The Rock and Roll Hall of Famer then addressed the other thing we all had on our minds. Or, at least, the thing he thought we all had on our minds.
“We’re gonna do mostly the hits, I think. You come to see a piano player in a stadium, you want to hear the hits. ’Cause I ain’t gonna be jumpin’ around like Mick Jagger,” quipped Joel, who turns 73 in just over two weeks — and who, for the record, is more than five years younger than the Stones’ frontman. Anyway, he continued, “I know what you’re thinkin’. ‘What the hell happened to him?’ Well, I got old.” (Someone near me yelled back a true statement: “We did, too!”)
Joel wrapped up this parade of punchlines by cracking, “People ask, ‘Well, what do you think is the reason for your longevity?’ And it’s that I haven’t died.” (Credit drummer Chuck Burgi for being right there with a “ba-dum bump.”)
But all jokes aside, if there were those among the roughly 45,000 fans packed into BofA Stadium who had serious fears coming in — about whether Joel was going to be worth the wait, about whether his voice is holding up, about whether he can do anything at this point besides just sit at a piano and play — they almost certainly were put to rest by the time they started heading home.
For 2 hours and 16 minutes, Joel took the crowd on an exhilarating ride through his expansive oeuvre, hitting surprisingly impressive high notes both figuratively and quite literally as he steered the setlist through 23 songs that spanned 20 years of his career.
Contrary to his promise, they weren’t all hits ... although, to be sure, there are Billy Joel songs that weren’t chart successes but that have evolved into live favorites. You should also know by now that Joel has a sense of humor, and taking those two statements of fact into account, it should come as little surprise that ...
- ... just one song after acknowledging that fans want to hear the hits, he introduced “Vienna” by saying, “We’re gonna depart from this particular format and we’re gonna do a song that was not a hit record,” which got the crowd making noise. “Yeah, wait, wait. You don’t know what it is yet. You might want to go to the bathroom.”
- He then teed up the very next song by saying, “This was not a hit single either. This got picked up by —” he paused for dramatic effect “— TikTok? I don’t know, it was played on TikTok for some reason. But it was never released as a single.” Cue “Zanzibar,” which became a viral challenge on the app last year as users posted videos of themselves doing a simple choreographed dance to his 1978 deep cut that involved jazz hands, middle fingers and air guitar.
- “New York State of Mind” needed no verbal introduction; instead, he noodled through a one-minute-long piano solo to set up his ode to the Big Apple. But two songs later he clarified: “Uh, I made a mistake. ‘New York State of Mind’ was not a hit single. So we’ve gotten away with three album cuts already, that weren’t hit singles.”
- He played the opening chords of “Scenes From an Italian Restaurant,” then right before crooning the famous first line (“A bottle of white, a bottle of red”), he stopped and looked out at the crowd, scratching his head: “You know what? This wasn’t a hit single either. It wasn’t!”
Remarkably, that’s true. He did, however, fib about “Piano Man,” which — as it pretty much always does — closed out the main set in extraordinarily crowd-pleasing fashion.
“Now this one was actually not much of a hit single. It wasn’t. It didn’t make any money. They played it on the radio, but it didn’t sell all that much. So calling it a hit single is a little dicey. But I’ll take it.” (The song went to No. 25 after it was released in 1973; it also was certified platinum five times over.)
All of the aforementioned songs, by the way, were performed by Joel as he sat in a dark suit and tie at a grand piano situated on a revolving floor that slowly rotated so he could face stage right, or stage left, or right down the middle. And, particularly these days, him being up there in age, that’s how people probably generally envision a Billy Joel concert: with him sitting down, his fingers dancing away on the keys.
But one of the moments I’ll remember most from concert came when he rose from his stool 50 minutes into his set and moved to the mic stand.
“OK, I’m gonna do this one standing up,” he said. As fans cheered, he chuckled and mocked both them and himself. “ ‘Wow, he’s gonna stand up this time. Can he spare it?’ ” Then he announced that he was about to sing a song that was a hit single, “but I don’t do it that much because when I recorded the song it was back in 1983.
“I was like 33 or 34. And I knew my high notes were gonna go. So ... that album was like me kissing goodbye to high notes. Because I didn’t know when I’d be able to hit ’em again. And I worry about hittin’ the high note when I do this song.
“So bear with me, because I may not hit it. OK? And you will know when I don’t hit it.”
The song? “An Innocent Man,” which we’ve rarely gotten to hear here — the last time he sang it in Charlotte, at the old Coliseum, he was just 44 years old — and which indeed has a chorus that requires him to go high.
Whereas other singers at his age, in his position, might tap out of that scenario and reframe it in a lower octave, he went for it, all three times. And somehow, he nailed it, all three times. As the crowd roared after he got through the first one, he mimed wiping sweat off his forehead, with his eyes bugged out and a big ol’ smile blossoming on his face.
It was a smile that he wore often over the course of the evening.
When he noticed a young woman near the stage holding a sign that read “We skipped senior prom for this.” (“Hey listen,” he told them. “I skipped my prom.”)
When he mashed playfully at the keys in support of percussionist/backing vocalist Crystal Taliefero as she energetically covered Martha and the Vandellas’ Motown classic “Dancing in the Street” (sandwiched in between the first and second halves of his 1993 toe-tapper “The River of Dreams”). When he pounded on them dramatically during the show-stopping rendition of opera classic “Nessun dorma” that rhythm guitarist Mike DelGuidice bellowed to set up “Scenes From an Italian Restaurant.”
When Joel got up from the piano again, to perform “It’s Still Rock and Roll to Me”; when — during the instrumental breaks in that song — he spun the mic stand, twirled the mic stand and threw it up in the air and caught it; and when he long-tossed the mic stand to a stagehand off to his left as the band punctuated the final note.
When he rode his stool as if it were a bucking bronco, playing the piano with just his right hand, during a rollicking rendition of “You May Be Right” to bring the show to a thrilling climax.
He even grinned his way through the show’s one awkward moment: As a large group of fans on the visitors’ side of the stadium repeated a vigorous but frustratingly-difficult-to-understand chant after his first two songs, Joel said, in an exaggerated Southern accent, “I don’t know what you’re saying. Say it with a New York accent.” (FYI: It was “WE CAN’T HEAR YOU!,” because in multiple sections, due to a technical problem, fans could hear the band but not Joel’s vocals. Engineers resolved the issue minutes later.)
And every time he smiled, the crowd smiled right back.
This was the third Charlotte concert in a row for Joel, by the way, that he got to sing “It’s a pretty good crowd for a Saturday” during “Piano Man” on an actual Saturday.
But something felt extra special, extra poignant, extra lump-in-your-throat inducing than usual about that line.
About the whole night, really.
Maybe it was largely due to the setting — the jumbo size of venue and the crowd, and the scale of the sets and the lighting rigs and the video screens — which really did help add to the sense that we were at an Event worthy of a capital “E.”
It helped, too, that the stadium’s new breeze-through security technology at the gates eliminated “we waited for an hour to get in” from fans’ vocabulary; that the 70-ish-degree weather could not have been more ideal; that the sound seemed to have been mixed to perfection no matter where you were sitting.
Most of all, though, it was Billy Joel’s full commitment to his performance. His enthusiasm. His clear desire to make up for lost time, knowing that Charlotte had waited more than a hundred Saturdays to see him.
These days, just getting a pretty good crowd anywhere, for any reason, feels like a small victory.
This particular Billy Joel stadium show, meanwhile, felt like a very, very, very big win.
Billy Joel’s setlist
1. “My Life”
2. “Pressure”
3. “The Entertainer”
4. “Vienna”
5. “Zanzibar”
6. “Just the Way You Are”
7. “Don’t Ask Me Why”
8. “New York State of Mind”
9. “Movin’ Out (Anthony’s Song)“
10. “An Innocent Man”
11. “Allentown”
12. “Keeping the Faith”
13. “She’s Always a Woman”
14. “Sometimes a Fantasy”
15. “Only The Good Die Young”
16. “The River of Dreams”
17. “Scenes From an Italian Restaurant”
18. “Piano Man”
Encore:
19. “We Didn’t Start the Fire”
20. “Uptown Girl”
21. “It’s Still Rock and Roll to Me”
22. “Big Shot”
23. “You May Be Right”
This story was originally published April 24, 2022 at 11:38 AM.
