Photo credit: Newsday/Bruce Gilbert

By a lucky fluke, Courtney and I got to see Billy Joel at Shea Stadium last night for the first of two concerts billed as the Last Play at Shea. Tickets for both of these final concerts sold out in under an hour, and I wasn’t able to get through online or on the phone.  (Whatever happened to old fashioned camping out?)  So when someone at my office sent out an email saying that she was looking to unload two seats – at face value, no less – I replied as fast as I could.

And I gotta say, the concert was absolutely amazing. The man definitely looks older than he did in his music video days, but ole Billy can still play and sing like he always could. Despite the fact that he’s been playing to sold out crowds for years, he had a look of awe on his face as he stared out into the packed stadium at the beginning of the concert. He comes across as totally humble, even thanking the crowd for allowing him to have the best job in the world.

And man, does he know how to work a crowd, especially in New York. It’s not surprising that any mention of the words “New York,” “Long Island,” “New Jersey,” etc. would get the crowd to erupt in cheers, but Billy kept the banter more lively than just location dropping. He cracked jokes about himself, describing how tall, handsome, and not bald he was to anyone in the nosebleed seats who couldn’t see him. He made fun of himself for not putting out an album in 15 years. Before playing “Root Beer Rag,” he suggested that anyone who needed to use the bathroom go then since that song is an instrumental, and that he was probably going to regret playing it because it is so difficult. Of course, he nailed it.

And though Billy played a few other album cuts like “Zanzibar” and “Everybody Loves You Now,” most of the show consisted of Greatest Hits material. (The full set list is here if you’re curious.) Before the show started, I said that I was hoping to hear “Miami 2017,” and Courtney had her fingers crossed for “Only the Good Die Young.” He played them both, not surprisingly, but it’s funny how excited you get to hear a song live, even when you’ve heard it a million times before. During “We Didn’t Start the Fire,” we could actually feel the stadium shaking under us.

Billy was joined by a few special guests, and while Tony Bennett and John Mayer didn’t excite me too much, seeing Don Henley and John Mellencamp was extremely cool. During “Goodnight, Saigon” soldiers in uniform helped sing the chorus. Even without the ringers, Billy had a great band behind him, complete with horn and string sections that made every song feel complete.

Billy paid homage several times to The Beatles, who played the first concert at Shea, and it was nice to hear someone paying respect to *this* stadium’s history in a year when most of that attention is going crosstown. I get it, Yankee Stadium definitely had a notable past, but even without all of the All-Star Game fanfare, it seems like every sports report mentions something along the lines of how the Yankees won the very last day game played on a Wednesday against a team from the Central time zone that will ever be played at Yankee Stadium. Yawn. The Beatles played Shea Stadium! And for the record, so did Grand Funk Railroad, Jethro Tull, The Who, The Clash, Simon and Garfunkel, The Police, The Rolling Stones, Elton John, Eric Clapton, and Bruce Springsteen. Take that, House that Ruth Built! (Of course, the fact that I have many happy memories of Shea Stadium being a lifelong Mets fan does not bias me in any way.)

Bottom line is that Long Island’s musical pride and joy (no offense, Eddie Money) put on an amazing show last night, and I feel very fortunate to have been there. The crowds getting onto the trains after the show were a nightmare, there were spotlights aimed directly at the crowd throughout the concert while they were filming fan reactions, and there were an awful lot of drunk shirtless dudes singing along to the songs with their arms around each other in the most bro-mantic way possible, but it was all part of an amazing experience and a truly memorable night.