“Seen the lights go out BroadwayI saw the Empire State laid low.”—Billy Joel, “Miami 2017 (I've Seen The Lights Go Out On Broadway),” from his Turnstiles LP (1976)
This is one of those albums that I nearly wore out during my high-school years. Its inexplicable lack of mass appeal (stalling at #122 on the charts) left Billy Joel one remove (The Stranger) away from the beginning of his truly significant commercial success.
But song for song, Turnstiles--released on this date 35 years ago--ranks very nearly at the top of his entire discography. While “New York State of Mind” probably has the greatest potential for becoming a standard, other songs have also been covered by other artists, including “Summer, Highland Falls” (Peter, Paul and Mary) and “Say Goodbye to Hollywood” (Ronnie Spector).
The singer-songwriter wrote this, the concluding song of the LP, after seeing the famous New York Daily News headline: “Ford to City: Drop Dead.” But, to an extent, it also reflected his own circumstances.
“Miami 2017 (I've Seen The Lights Go Out On Broadway)” is a song about desperation and defiance, two attitudes that Joel was getting to know all too well. He had been forced to fire the original producer of the album, James William Guercio (famous for his work with Chicago and Blood, Sweat and Tears) and take the producing chores into his own hands. Coming five years after twin career disasters (an onerous contract, a mastering error that left his first album, Cold Spring Harbor, a bit too fast and his voice a bit too high), this latest setback undoubtedly left him reeling.
In a way, this personal adversity made Joel bond even closer to the beleaguered New York area when he returned from the West Coast and formed a new backup band for himself. His rallying cry for the city is, in fact, expressed in entertainment terms: “They turned our power down/They drove us underground/But we went right on with the show.”
“Miami 2017” becomes an anthem of a metro standing tall, no matter what the disaster—bankruptcy, blackout, or bombing. Even at the song’s end (the year 2017, of course: a date that, astonishingly, now seems right around the corner from us), there is one voice--the singer’s--to, if nothing else, “keep the memory alive.”
A nice positive spin on a song written from the perspective of post-apocalypse NYC. ("There are not many who remember/They say a handful still survive...")
ReplyDeleteIt's as if my wife's grandfather talked about the great time he and the other litvaks had in Romania, instead of pretending he was from France all along.