Sing us a song - for free

Billy Joel
Scottrade Center
St. Louis, MO
Wednesday, April 25th, 2007
Section 315, Row M, Seat 18
$0.00

I like a lot of Billy Joel's songs. And I hadn't been to a big arena concert in a while. I'm on the mailing list for Scottrade/Savvis/Keil Center. I got an e-mail for a Billy Joel pre-sale. Tickets were $85, just more than I wanted to pay to see him. Roy and I decided to wait until the regular sale and pick up tickets in the cheap seats.

"Cheap seats" is a relative term, since the seats were $50, and they all seemed to be behind the stage. I didn't want to do that. I was mildly frustrated with myself - I would have bought $50 tickets if they were better seats, I could afford another extra $30, I've easily paid that much for concerts before, I wanted to see the show, but I just didn't want to pay that much for this concert. So we didn't get tickets.

A lot of other people must have thought the same thing. A few weeks before the show, the local paper started giving away tickets. Two people won per day for two weeks. I registered on-line. I wasn't one of the published winners, but I got an e-mail saying the following:

Congratulations! By submitting one of the first entries last week into our Billy Joel ticket promotion, your name has been randomly chosen in our special "early-bird entrants" drawing as a winner of four (4) tickets to the Billy Joel concert Wednesday, April 25, 8:00 p.m. at the Scottrade Center!

I went down to the Scottrade Center to pick up my tickets. There was a multi-page printout of winners. I'm pretty close up in the alphabet, but my name was several pages back. Did we all win 4 tickets each? These were the $85 seats, so that's $340 worth of tickets. In March alone, we spent over $1200 on concert tickets, so I think this is good concert karma coming back to me. (Tickets were for the Police, Genesis, Crossroads Guitar Festival, Asia, Jon Anderson, a prog festival in Montreal, and the Bears. These are for concerts through September, but they all went on sale in March for no reason. (Did anyone get that reference?!))

Roy and I asked Roy's cousin Roger and his wife Debbie to go with us. Roger is Roy's closest friend and was best man at our wedding. We met up for dinner beforehand at Union Station and went to the concert. Debbie sent us a handwritten thank you card which was really sweet. The sections near us were only about 2/3 filled. I wonder if they were all filled with freebies. Our seats were really high up and the section was steep. I got into my seat and sat - no dancing or standing ovations from me this night.



The concert started with Angry Young Man, a song with fast piano playing. Good sound for a big arena. The light show was great, and made the stage look different with every different set of lights. We discovered that Joel's keyboard player was David Rosenthal, who is also a member of Happy the Man, and played at our wedding! Small world.

The setlist was pretty comprehensive, missing my favorite songs of his - The Stranger and Summer Highland Falls - but playing lots of others. Some lesser known songs too; Roy was really excited to hear Zanzibar from 52nd Street.

I was impressed with Billy as a frontman too. He was pretty funny. He also gave good introductions to songs, often giving what album and year they were from. For a lot of artists, the years all blur together, and they couldn't give detailed info like that. His piano was facing one side of the stage, so his back was turned to people on the other side. But every couple songs, they'd rotate the piano so he'd be facing the other side. Later on in the show, he stood up at the front of the stage and sang from there. He could still hit the high notes in An Innocent Man, but had a backing singer do the high parts of River of Dreams.

What is the last song you'd expect to hear at a Billy Joel concert?

There was an "American Idol" portion of the show. Billy brought up a roadie who was going to sing a "religious song" for us. The roadie comes up, and the bands breaks into Highway to Hell from AC/DC! Roy just cracked up at the incongruence between this song and the rest of them. The crowd really seemed to enjoy rocking out for a song.

I enjoyed the show, but didn't get the feeling that I needed to see it again the next night. Actually, this was my third time seeing Billy Joel in concert. I hadn't seen him in over ten years, and it was good to see these songs again. But this will probably be the last time I go.

Roy and I took the Metrolink light rail train to the Scottrade Center. Even though the concert and a Cardinals game were taking place that night, there was still only one train running every half hour. The train was beyond full when it got to our stop, but I didn't want to wait another half hour, so we squeezed in. The crowd was taking this in good spirit, and it was friendlier than it would have been if it were less crowded.