Welcome to 2017, courtesy of the Piano Man
During my teenage years, my taste in music overlapped with my father’s by precisely two artists: the Beatles and Billy Joel. To encourage my appreciation of the latter, Dad gave me a cassette recording of a radio broadcast of his concert at C.W. Post on Long Island, circa 1977. Thanks to that tape, Turnstiles is still my favorite Billy Joel album — and Miami 2017 (Seen the Lights Go Out on Broadway) my favorite Billy Joel song.
At the time, I’d never been to New York City. I only vaguely recognized some of the landmarks referenced in the song (what/where the hell was “the battery?”). The year 2017 was IMPOSSIBLY far off. I’d be in my thirties. I’d probably have a husband and a few kids — the most distant of futures to a high school sophomore stretched out on her bedroom rug, listening to a scratchy cassette tape and scribbling in her journal.
But I loved Miami 2017’s music box-like introductory bars, frenetic drum fills (better heard on the later live recording from Songs in the Attic, which cranks the tempo up to its rightful breakneck pace), and dramatic imagery painting a nostalgic portrait of a city that went down swinging.
My predictions about my own future didn’t hold up. But the song has proven eerily prescient more than once.
The legend of Miami 2017 starts in the 70s. NYC was in dire economic straits. The federal government had rejected the city’s request for a loan, prompting the infamous Daily News headline “FORD TO CITY: DROP DEAD.” Billy, who was living in L.A. at the time, read that headline and thought: “what if it did?” He wrote a song depicting the apocalyptic demise of New York. And he moved back. And NYC bounced back. And Miami 2017 faded into Billy’s back catalog, eclipsed by chart toppers like Uptown Girl and We Didn’t Start the Fire.
Decades later, 9/11 happened, unfathomable in the scope of its tragedy. Billy Joel played Miami 2017 at the Concert for New York as a tribute to the city’s resilience and spirit, and the will of its people to go on: “they turned our power down/and drove us underground/but we went right on with the show.” And in 2012, after Hurricane Sandy ravaged the city and its surrounding shores, he played it again.
In a bizarre twist of fate, here we are in the year of the song’s title, and we have just elected a president who delights in describing America as a wasteland in a state of carnage, much like the smoldering New York of Miami 2017. But like the city in the song, the country he describes is a work of fiction. America in 2017 is far from utopia, but it’s hardly a wasteland — despite what our commander-in-chief might have us believe.
Of all the predictions I got wrong about my own life in the year 2017, perhaps the most glaring is that I failed to imagine I’d be here, in the very city Billy was singing about on my dad’s bootleg concert tape. This year, I have lived in New York for a full decade. I will earn the unofficial yet universally recognized right to call myself a New Yorker.
I do not believe that the lights will go out on Broadway (or elsewhere in America) in 2017. But if they do, I suspect it will be the president — not us New Yorkers — fleeing to Florida.
