Bootleg City: Billy Joel in St. Paul, 1982

HBO's two-part Billy Joel documentary, And So It Goes, has everyone talking about the Piano Man, and for good reason: Befitting Joel's self-deprecating, heart-on-sleeve public persona, it offers a surprisingly unvarnished portrait of his life and times while still skirting a handful of topics that one imagines he wasn't interested in discussing. (The dismissal of the band that was with him for his best albums, for example, is barely mentioned.)

Despite a few minor niggling flaws, I enjoyed And So It Goes a lot more than I was expecting to, and learned more about Billy Joel and his career than I ever would have expected. I subsisted on a steady diet of Billy records in my formative listening years, and have spent a lot of time thinking and writing about the man and his music, but at a certain point, those albums lost a lot of their appeal to me. I don't think it's a case of familiarity breeding contempt; instead, I think Joel's songs often come from a perspective that, for a variety of reasons, becomes less interesting as you get older and life forces you to see nuance. It's a journey he went on himself — from "Angry Young Man" to "Shades of Grey," natch — but that doesn't make it any easier to ride along with his more petulant protagonists.

Billy's most successful records are snapshots of their time, and perhaps none were more sharply focused than 1982's The Nylon Curtain, a sonic masterpiece that does a pretty terrific job of distilling the disillusionment and ennui that Joel's generation grappled with throughout the early '80s. It might be his most mature work overall, so when I thought about sneaking into the Mayor's vault to share a Billy boot, I went looking for recordings from his tour in support of that album. Decent ones are tough to find — portable recording equipment has come a long way — but this set, from St. Paul, Minnesota on November 1, 1982, isn't bad. A little boomy in the way you'd expect a bootleg from this period, but not bad, and it's fun to hear Curtain cuts in an early live setting. Enjoy, and don't take any shit from anybody!

Track Listing:
Allentown
My Life
Prelude/Angry Young Man
Honesty
Don't Ask Me Why
The Stranger
Scandinavian Skies
Movin' Out (Anthony's Song)
Pressure
Scenes from an Italian Restaurant
Just the Way You Are
Goodnight Saigon
Captain Jack
Stiletto
Until the Night
It's Still Rock and Roll to Me
Sometimes a Fantasy
Big Shot
You May Be Right
Only the Good Die Young
Where's the Orchestra?