Piano Man and Me

Robin Rowland August 11, 2025August 11, 2025

It’s nine o’clock on a Saturday. I am usually at home watching a streaming movie and getting ready to go to bed just after ten.

This past Saturday at nine, I was watching Part 2 of the documentary Billy Joel: And So It Goes on Crave in Canada (HBO in the United States).

I seldom go out any more, no place to go. There’s also the saying that you know you’re getting old when you go to bed when you used to go out.

Many of my friends are long gone. I never was much of a drinker.

If there is a song that plays me a memory about when I “wore a younger man’s clothes,” It is Billy Joel’s Piano Man.

I really do know how it goes (even without the lyrics on the web).

It was the dark, wet fall of 1982, nine years after Billy Joel first released Piano Man on November 14, 1973.

I had just been laid off from an early 1980s tech start up that went bust. I just had a volatile breakup with my partner of the past two years.

I was hanging out at Dudes, a small gay bar in a narrow back alley in downtown Toronto. The bar was never very crowded, which suited me fine. With what I later learned was Attention Deficit Hyperactivity Disorder, I was never comfortable or successful in a busy bar, the crowd, the noise and in those days the smoke overwhelmed the senses.

John at the bar was a friend of mine. We had been boyfriends for about eight months in 1977, soon after I first came out. For John, there was some place that he’d rather be. He usually worked on Bay Street in the stock industry but he had lost his job in the global recission of 1982.

John really did give me my drinks for free. I never was a drinker, so it didn’t cost the bar much. In those days I always started out with one rum and coke and then usually switched to just cola after that.

The DJ twigged to what was happening. One night, moments after I walked in and John was already pouring my rum and coke, the DJ switched to Piano Man. All three of us burst out laughing.

I’ve always been a Billy Joel fan, but that the memory of that night means Piano Man has always been at the top of my list of my favourite songs from when I am in a mood for melody.

There a couple of other songs related to former boyfriends. They are Simon and Garfunkel’s (1970) and the various musical versions of El Condor Passa and Christopher Cross’s 1979 Sailing .

Rounding out my top four is House of the Rising Sun. The Animals 1964 version (for various reasons which I won’t go into in this post ).

I have always wondered what Joel meant by “Now Paul is a real estate novelist Who never had time for a wife.” The American Songwriter Beyond the Meaning interprets it as “Paul the real estate novelist is a real estate agent who was also named Paul, and each night he sat at the bar and worked on what might become the next great American novel,” which is a likely explanation since Joel was a piano man in the Executive Room tavern in Los Angeles in 1972-1973.

If Paul was real and he could have been, he was one of those who went to Hollywood to make it big in the movies and never made it, in a town where in another song “Weeks turn into years. How quick they pass/And all the stars that never were/Are parking cars and pumping gas” (Do You Know the Way to San Jose 1968 Burt Bacharach and Hal David, first song by Dione Warwick)

There are lessons there. First there are many successful novels that have been written in coffee shops but seldom, if ever, any in bars. To write a book takes long, hard sustained work and a busy bar and smoke (in those days) and alcohol never helps. (Songs that have been written in bars are short). Second, don’t give up on finding a relationship while trying to write. That has never worked out.

Hollywood Note: John at the bar for Billy Joel said “Well, I’m sure that I could be a movie star If I could get out of this place.”

You came down an alley and out of the bleak Toronto November rain into the that hole in the wall bar. There was no piano, just a DJ. The music wasn’t so loud that it drowned out conversations which was good for my ADHD. For me it was a place that when I was lonely the friendly conversation got me feelin’ alright. I did meet a couple of guys.

That hole in the wall bar didn’t last long. Without the crowds and a recession, it eventually closed.

I am also mindful of another song, probably three years earlier when I was 28. I had been dancing the night away on a hot, sweaty summer night. At about 3:30 am after a drag show, I went to a nearby sidewalk cafe was packed with sexy young men. A young woman, a street vendor, showed up in those early hours trying to sell roses to the boys. Some nights she made a sale, most often she didn’t.

For some reason one of those hot sweaty summer nights Those Were The Days popped into my head. I still remember that moment.

Once upon a time there was a tavern
Where we used to raise a glass or two
Remember how we laughed away the hours
Think of all the great things we would do?
Those were the days, my friend
We thought they’d never end
We’d sing and dance forever and a day

John did get out of the place and for a while went on to a successful career in the financial industry.

In 1982, AIDS was just starting to hit. John and the other boyfriends tied to those songs are all gone now.

I did some acting, wrote some radio plays, my first nonfiction book, got a job in television news and later went onto to work in online news for 25 years. I wrote more books, short stories and plays.

So I am still alive at 75, now retired, living in a small town in the wilderness. When I’m the mood for a melody I listen to the old songs and that helps me feelin’ alright.

Oh, my friend, we’re older but no wiser
For in our hearts, the dreams are still the same

(Sony Music has released a digital only album of Bill Joel’s life work to mark the documentary)

In today’s news desert, where it’s harder for interesting items to show up, it was Dan Rather’s substack Steady post Piano Man that alerted me to the documentary. Thanks.

The songs