Billy Joel Pulls the Curtain at Shea
This article is from the archive of The New York Sun before the launch of its new website in 2022. The Sun has neither altered nor updated such articles but will seek to correct any errors, mis-categorizations or other problems introduced during transfer.
There is some suitable symmetry in Billy Joel giving the final musical performance at Shea Stadium. As a budding singer-songwriter in 1964, Mr. Joel looked out at the American music scene and despaired. The charts were full of soul hits, which left him cold.
“I was a kid from Levittown, so how much soul did I have at that point?” he once said of his childhood. Then one evening in February 1964, like much of the rest of America, he watched on television as Ed Sullivan ushered the Beatles into the American consciousness. The brief history of pop music was about to take a step change and nothing would be quite the same, not least for Mr. Joel.
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