Your Thursday Regret: Billy Joel

For a very little while back in college I ran with this girl who loved Billy Joel. Like, LOVED Billy Joel. She had the whole shebang going: posters on the wall (odd, when one considers that he isn't that attractive), concert tickets alongside clumsy, blurred photographs matted and framed together under glass, and the entire top rack of a particle board CD shelving unit devoted solely to the complete Billy Joel discography and then some.

"And then some" meant cassette copies of every CD and a bunch of cassette mix tapes. Even in the deepest, darkest days of my obsession with the music of Bruce Springsteen (i.e. last week) I never had tape AND compact disc copies of his albums. Hell, since my music collection went all-digital back in like 1998 I haven't had a Springsteen CD (or any CD, for that matter) for more than a couple hours - buy it, rip it, and toss it was the name of the game, and I stopped buying CDs altogether in 2003 when I went 100% ITMS for music. But even back in college owning lots of CDs and displaying them proudly was something of an alien idea to me. Some people had trouble fitting their CD collections into their dorm. I had trouble fitting mine on my computer.

I was with this woman for a (thankfully) very short time, and her birthday happened to fall inside that (thankfully) very short time. While not as front-and-center as some of its contemporaries my psychosis about gift-giving is well-documented and I spent inordinate hours trying to determine what would be the perfect gift. Eventually I came to the conclusion that The Perfect Gift was a bootleg Billy Joel CD, but not just any old concert recording with terrible sound quality from the Indianapolis Coliseum, no, this one would be GOOD. One of those "import" bootlegs of a famous Billy Joel show, with high-quality sound (we used to call these "soundboard" recordings) and a real CD insert in the jewel case and everything.

I spent almost an entire afternoon canvassing used record shops for such a thing, and when I finally found one I deemed acceptable - I bought it at the old Record Castle on Cottman Avenue, which may or may not still be there, though ten-plus years on I have no memory whatsoever of what album it actually was - I paid a king's ransom of fifty dollars for it, an absolutely OUTRAGEOUS sum of money for me to spend on a gift at the time. Nowadays I feel like a heel if I don't spend at least that much on a gift (for someone in Gift Tier 1, at least: the parents, close friends, women I want to sleep with more than once), but back then, fifty fucking dollars! Great googly moogly. That was like a week's pay, and all for a woman who, looking back, I don't think I even liked that much.

Say it with me, folks: I was drunk.

But, in another phrase we should all be well-versed at saying along with me: I was right. It was, in fact, the perfect gift. It went over big. Huge.

So huge, in fact, that about a week later we stopped seeing each other. I was as distraught as one would expect from such a thing, though an alcohol intake as consistent as mine was back then tends to take all your emotional experiences, highs and lows, and just sort of smear them into one flattish line a few ticks below normal. I wish I could say I was so upset over the breakup - which really hardly could have been termed even that, the entire thing from start to finish went something like four and a half weeks - that I went and drank myself stupid, but I was already doing that on a regular basis to begin with.

In fact, the only unusual effect of the entire ordeal was that I couldn't listen to Billy Joel music for something like a year and a half afterward. It was the strangest thing. I wasn't the rabid stalker-person this woman was, but I had the double-CD greatest hits album and listened to it with some small regularity. I was a fan. But after the "breakup" (such as it was) I couldn’t bring myself to listen to a single song of his. I would change the channel on the radio when "Piano Man" came on. I would skip past "Scenes From An Italian Restaurant" when it came up on Winamp. (Oh, god, remember Winamp? In the immortal whine of Luke Skywalker, "what a hunk of JUNK.")

And now, a decade on, when my musical tastes overall are essentially the same as they were in college - Bruce Springsteen, house music, and Frank Sinatra - now I still change the channel on the radio when "Piano Man" comes on (after cursing myself for leaving my iPod at home and being forced to listen to the radio in the first place), and I don't have to worry about skipping past "Scenes From An Italian Restaurant" on iTunes (which thankfully replaced Winamp) because when it came on about 6 months ago, listening to it for the first time in years - with 6000 songs on your computer you can go a LONG time between plays - I had the sudden realization of, "this song fucking BLOWS," and deleted it along all the other Billy Joel songs on my computer. I've got 58 hours of Paul Oakenfold to listen to, I don't need this treacly, sentimental, overwrought shit.

Since this epiphany took place I have wondered a couple times if my current distaste for Billy Joel is really just a buried subconscious referent of the trauma - he said, with a snicker - from back then, or if I have actually grown somewhat and my tastes have experienced some small measure of maturing.

Then I remember a drunken conversation I had with a good friend of mine a couple days after the whole thing went pear-shaped:

"The only good thing to come out of all this," I said, "is that you know how much she loves Billy Joel? Right, well, now she's got that bootleg I got her for her birthday, and that is supposed to be some kind of historic shit or something, so she's never gonna get rid of it. And every time she listens to it, for the rest of her life, every time she listens to that CD, every time she hears a SONG on that CD, every time for the rest of her life, she's gonna think of me."

I took a long drink of vodka and said, "you know what that means? That means I win."

I still smile when I think of that little pearl of wisdom, so maybe there isn't so much maturing taking place after all.