Clown Camp Chronicles - Part 6
Billy Comes to Life
The only known photo of A Billy Joel State of Mind event (unverified)
Dear Editor-in-Chief of the Buffalo Reporter,
Hello! Please permit my lateness in my submission. I have gone ahead and written a review of a summer event that occurred in July 2022. I was busy, okay? My review has ballooned into a piece of cultural analysis, and you shouldn’t need any background to enjoy the ideas presented.
Anyways, with winter rapidly approaching, it might do you Minnesotans some good to be reminded that summer existed. Should you choose to run this uncommissioned and unassigned article venturing into poetics (and a tongue-in-cheek change of pace for your periodical,) I demand compensation above market rate. Thank you and enjoy.
A Buffalo State of Mind
Billy Joel Impersonator Plays the Hits
By Em Haverty
Volunteer reporter & deputy drifter for The Buffalo Reporter
My mind lingers in a malaise brought on by clown-based dysphoria (oh by the way, there is a clown camp here and it’s been a whole thing.) I walk to my car where a pipe of CBD waits for me. It’s been a go-to for anxiety during times of intermittent health insurance. “The flower makes it easier to commune with nature” I convince myself, though all told I think I prefer the tinctures.
In the parking lot, I hear a distant roar coming from the forest. It’s an audience, and a Billy Joel cover band begins “A Scene At An Italian Restaurant” on Buffalo’s amphitheater stage. I’d know that sax from anywhere.
A creek and a steep drop lay beyond the tree line. No matter. Walking along the tree line, I spot a potential path that requires some moderate scrabbling but gives way to an easy walk. What first appears as a straight shot to the park gives way to the grounds of a retirement home.
Folks, have you ever emerged from the woods onto the grounds of a retirement home, following the sounds of Scenes From An Italian Restaurant?
Such is the night you can expect when Mick Sterling’s A Billy Joel State of Mind comes to town!
All of Buffalo came out to the Sturges Park public bandshell for the latest in the city's Concerts In The Park summer programming. The citizens dot the hillside with blankets and coolers, enjoying a night of respectful rocking and rolling sponsored by DeZiel Heating & Air Conditioning, Inc. (“Call the Top Dog!”)
Billy Joel-embodier Mick Sterling personifies the entertainer as we all remember him, with hair! This Billy Joel is a little bit different, in that he doesn’t play piano. Instead, the band features two piano players, giving Sterling a full run of the stage. He swaggers, runs, and stands the way Mr. Joel would if permitted to unmoor himself.
(I should note that Mick Sterling is no fly-by-night Billy Joel impersonator. He is a prolific embodier. He’s been performing around the Twin Cities for 40 years with both his own music and hits spanning the 50s to 80s. A Billy Joel State of Mind is only one of many themed nights he presents. There’s an Elton John show, an Elvis show, a jukebox of Sun Records, Joe Crocker, Barry White, Springsteen, Huey Lewis, The Rolling Stones, and 3 holiday shows: An Elvis Gospel Christmas, An Andy and Bing Christmas, and A Grand Ole Opry Christmas. He’s booked for 18 shows in December 2022. Do you think he changes up outfits?)
Personally, I love cover acts for people who are still alive and performing. Their work is based on a sliver of time of another person's work. No Springsteen cover band is going to play "one off the new album." Mick likely won't sneak in a Huey Lewis pastiche he’s been noodling with and try to play it off as a lost B-side. Mick doesn't need to, because there is still a thrill to the slight variations in translating a song to a new body.
Mick Sterling’s work (in this one performance I saw) is a celebration of a star past their pop-cultural prime. Is it weird to mourn the still living, especially when they go on tour with some regularity?
That's not even questioning the larger "why" of Sterling's work. Beyond sustaining a financially viable career (good get,) is Sterling drawn to impersonation in an effort to embody the zeitgeist of the eras our young could not witness first-hand? Or maybe, by immersing himself into covers, he seeks to catch and release his youth one Billy Joel song at a time?
Such questions cannot be answered in this article, and I spare the hardworking people of Buffalo, Minnesota from this heady English Major Chuck Klosterfuck.1 I'll go ahead and get (Didi-)on with it (ha ha.) Starting now.
The entire band consists of 14 members. Three backup singers, two violists who were also backup singers/dancers during their dead air, a full percussion set up both exotic and extensive, a horn section, TWO pianists, TWO guitarists, and, like, I think a flautist? It’s hard to remember. All the musicians pale in comparison to the real stars: three men, ages ranging 35 to 55, all up close to the stage and each dancing alone. They clearly are not associated with the band and dance pro-bono out of the goodness of their Buffalo hearts.2
The harshest criticism one could levy against Buffalo, MN is their utter disregard for dancing in public. A mere three people dancing? As hundreds watch? It reflects poor public health policies and is, frankly, pathetic.
Is it fair to call you out, readership of the Buffalo Reporter?
Yes.
Outdoor summer concerts are for dancing. And you delegate this sacred task to, and I don’t mean this harshly but we live in a society and we’re all thinking it, creeps?
When your humble reporter was studying journalism, they were told by their teacher “don’t become part of the story.” This was a simpler time in the world, where a person could coast through community college based on guile and looks alone. Maybe back then, one could sit back and suffer a dance floor of grooving (hate to say it,) creeps. However, today, we know better. The festivities called for a dancing fool, and so, a fool appears.
Permit this short jaunt into poetics, dear Buffaloians: I feel the music. The music and the world dance through me. I feel the elemental nature of the earth below my feet. Faux Joel’s gifts course through my body. There are no dance “moves,” for that denotes an end to movement. I seek consistent movement. I’m flowing in a jet stream of air, inflating me from the ground up and moving my arms about, a smile on my face. Some of the hillfolk might see this as flailing, but nay, this is communion with the land, the wind, and the people. Interpretative dance? You wish for such a simple joke. This is poetry. My body sings the Piano Man electric.
I join the floor on “Prelude/Angry Young Man,” with much air punching and twirling. “Vienna” and “Miami 2017” require a softer touch, primarily swaying and singing along. Then madness when “It’s Still Rock And Roll to Me” went straight into “Uptown Girl.”
You Buffaloians stare but I’ll be damned if I didn’t notice more people nodding along and permitting themselves a bit of foolishness. The first to dance were the kids, safely near their parents and under the watchful eye of the community (on account of, and I wish there was a more nuanced descriptor of the first dancers, the creeps.) Soon the parents head-bop. “Uptown Girl” proves irresistible to two women who rush to the front of the stage for jumping and shouting, only to depart not a second after applauding the song’s end. After one of the songs, the violinists acknowledged me with eye contact, smiled, and gave a small show of applause which I saw as genuine appreciation. This is great news. Dancing is a reciprocal act of gratitude for the art shared. Their nods helped me feel invited. “Yes, this is okay. This is why we are here. And this is totally normal behavior for an absolute stranger to the Buffalo community.”
Sterling then brings us to the River of Dreams, and together, we embark on a shamanic journey to a spiritual middleworld much like our own waking reality. I close my eyes and soak in the lyrics. He invites us to stand with him on the banks of a river. At the end of the song, he steps in. Stepping over the bank and out of his boundaries, he sets forth toward a mystery that has eluded him his whole life.
In the lyrics, there is now textual proof that he emerges on the other side.
Once the backup singers finished their the last “awoooahAaahaaas,” Mick Sterling did something that made me gasp.
In a stroke of brilliance, Mick Sterling’s A Billy Joel State of Mind follows up “River of Dreams” with “The Stranger.” Tonally different, these two songs bookend the story of a pop musician’s search for meaning. This might appear benign at first, but It’s a powerful juxtaposition: one that shakes the very foundations of today’s Billy Joel scholarship.
River of Dreams was released in 1993 and The Stranger in 1977. By 1977, he had already made a name for himself with Piano Man a few years before, in 1973, but it was a mild hit in the shadow of The Stranger, which cemented Joel as a contemporary musician of note, though still largely seen as “oh, the Piano Man!”
By putting these two opposing songs side by side in chronological order, Sterling and company lay bare the Piano Man’s 16-year meditation in search of an unknown and unattainable self. He is an entertainer who dragged a river searching for his soul, only to be met with the shadow he left at the bank.
It was only CBD, I swear.
Once you see this theme of seeking (and struggling to find) an authentic self in Joel’s pop oeuvre, you can’t unsee it.
In “Piano Man,” he never refers to himself as the Piano Man. The name is hoisted onto him by people at the bar, who are similarly defined in the song by the weights they carry and dreams unrealized. The Piano Man, a two-dimensional simulacrum of a person existing for the benefit of an audience in suffering, is not Billy Joel. It’s too simple to paint Billy Joel as a snob, judging and defining others for their unrealized aspirations from his ivory bench. In actuality, he is the piano man because that is how others see him.
“The Entertainer” grapples with who he is beyond being defined as an entertainer, painting a picture of a conflicted artist celebrating the life of an artist who’s also subjected to the whims of the industry.
“Pressure” further captures the manic loneliness brought on by being unable to top himself or whomever his audience defines as “a hyper-successful artist Billy Joel.” No one’s well-meaning “cosmic rationale” could begin to contain or explain his pain.
“Movin’ Out (Anthony’s Song)” echoes the restlessness that comes from powerlessness in an environment we do not choose. Notice “Anthony” exists in parenthetical in his own song. His name is auxiliary, shadowed by his deep desire of “Movin’ Out” toward self-actualization from “momma.” When he peels out on his motorcycle, he leaves us and his song behind. Perhaps he leaves “Anthony” behind with us?
This is not an exhaustive list of applicable songs. Notice all these songs are bangers, through and through. Even though each song is about not wanting to do what people expect him to do (even writing pop songs,) his protest songs are well-crafted hits, further raising the audience’s expectations of “Billy Joel.” Each song is a beloved mainstay in our cultural jukebox. Billy Joel is inescapable. In an interview with The Telegraph in 2013, he reflects on feeling pigeonholed for the majority of his songwriting career, saying “I just got tired of writing in the same format: it can’t be too long, it’s got to be played on the radio. It’s a box, and after a while, that box becomes a coffin…”
Following the album River of Dreams in 1993, Joel’s took a break from new music and remerged with a full album of classical movie in 2001, Fantasies and Delusions. It’s a wild departure. Seemingly unprecedented in pop music for a star of this stature. (Maybe a fruit born from his exploration across the river?) Fantasies and Delusions would be his last new album of new songs, widely receiving a lukewarm response from critics. He would spend the larger part of the 20 years since playing the hits and continues to this day.
In The Telegram interview published 12 years after Delusions and Fantasies, Joel reflects “I opened up my soul. What else do you want?”
On The Telegram’s website, the interview is listed under the category “Rock & Pop Features.”
Anyhoo, I dip out at the beginning of “The Stranger.” A famous clown has a show back at camp starting in 15 minutes and it would be bad form to miss it. It’s kind of a bummer, since I like Billy Joel.
From the sliver I watched, I have full faith that Sterling brought it home. He certainly brought me back to my own body. After a day stuck in gender dysphoria brought on by clown paint, I have returned. How funny. Like my first unstructured days in Buffalo, I felt more connected to foolishness playing in a public forum than within the structures and “safe container” of camp.
Mr. Billy Faux, come back again soon. Buffalo waits for you!
⭐️⭐️⭐️ 1/2 out of ⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️
Let me know if your paper needs any more information.
Best,
Em
Thank you for reading! Comment with your favorite Billy Joel song and I’ll reply with what it says about you. If you like this issue, that’s always great to hear.
If you’d like to support me in my day-to-day, send alms through Venmo - @EmHaverty.
Not sure about your swearing policy. I assume I get one f-word? Like a PG-13 movie?
If this was a U2 cover band, they would dance pro-Bono.
love you, friend!! <3 piano man's my favorite :) good luck at clown camp this week!