The Piano Man in township tavern purgatory
One of the paradoxes of my existence is that I consider myself a wordsmith but the melody of the song catches me ahead of what the song’s about
When Bob Dylan was conferred with the Nobel Prize for Literature in 2016, there was an audible groan from large sections of novelist/writer/ columnist types. We saw him looking like a rabbit in headlights struggling to get the simplest of melodies in that Netflix doccie on We Are The World.
I hadn’t seen Michael Jackson’s jaw reach his knees until that footage. God bless Stevie Wonder for ‘seeing’ the problem. I was raised on Ella Fitzgerald, Billie Holiday, Nina Simone, Aretha Franklin and Nat King Cole, but I discovered Bill Joel all on my own in the early ’80s while shopping for a Brenda Fassie cassette.
“Now Paul is a real estate novelist Who never had time for a wife
And he’s talking to Davy, who’s still in the navy
And probably will be for life
And the waitress is practicing politics
As the businessman gets stoned” Bear in mind, I’m open to the idea that the derangement that’s threatened me since I was nine years old has started to manifest. I believe these lyrics come suspiciously close to my definition of genius.
In Michael Jackson’s language, Billy Joel is a vicious mofo with lyrics. Anyone who’s listened to We didn’t start the fire’ will agree. The Piano Man’ lyrics are right up there with Messrs Felder, Henley and Frey’s Hotel California. This has nothing to do with the fact that Joel saved me from eternal purgatory.
For over a decade, after my realisation that I was agnostic, I had a sense of perpetual confusion because I still loved the smell of incense, Catholic Church architecture the city of Rome.
I read that Joel considers himself “a cultural Jew”, which means that I could explain my whoring, insofar as Catholicism is concerned. I’ ma cultural Catholic.
I enjoyed this song for a full 20 years before I understood the lyrics. One of the paradoxes of my existence is that I consider myself a wordsmith but the melody of the song catches me ahead of what the song’s about.
In the unlikely event that you’re a philistine who hasn’t heard Joel’s Piano Man, the song is a semi autographical account of a starving musician hired to play songs in a dingy bar. I can imagine Joel, Marlboro hanging from the corner of his lip, a tumbler of Jim Beam on the piano lid, making up the lyrics on a slow Tuesday night in an LA lounge bar in 1972, the year I was born.
It’s insane how much this song resonated with me when I heard it. My cousin, Sifiso Ngubane, my favourite aunt Clara’s firstborn who introduced me to James Hadley Chase’s novels and rock music or, as he called it,
‘good white people music’ told me that I’d never listen to music the same way ever again. If life after death exists, he’s beaming with pride right now.
I spent the lions’s share of my 20s and 30s in dingy bars where the bartender-cum-deejay played Joel’s Piano Man and for the next five minutes and 40 seconds I looked around and identified every character he was singing about.
In my Pinetown pub off Main Road, in the mid-’90s I used to hang out with a one-eyed fellow who’d regale me with stories of his time in the SA Navy: he lost his eye in battle against a Soviet vessel that had veered onto our sovereign waters in 1983.
In Durban’s 320 Tavern on Pixley kaSeme Street, a fellow called ‘Mntungwa’ had been at the Battle of Quito Carnavale in the 1980s. According to his stories, Chris Hani, Joe Slovo and Jacob Zuma were behind him as he mowed down the SANDF, SWAPO, Frelimo and UNITA soldiers with his Kalashnikov.
At Jack Rabbits in Glenwood, there was a fellow who nursed his Sedgwick’s Ole Brown Sherry every evening waiting to pounce on any unsuspecting victim to convince them that no man should trust his wife. Later, I discovered that his wife of 13 years, a Durban Metro cop, had moved in with her commander in Phoenix, north of Durban.
A woman we shall only refer to as ‘Pool’ terrorised men from Daveyton by wiping the floor with them at pool, in a pub called ‘Ntyilo-Ntyilo’ in the Benoni CBD. She never played a game without a R100 bet on the table. She never lost.
If the ploy I’ve employed here isn’t sufficiently transparent, allow me to be blunt. This is my way of saying that what I do here every week is important.
I take comfort in the fact that Joel would get me if he read my columns. After all, he managed, in one song, to straddle the line between bringing to life the seemingly mundane and banality.
I hope that I’m succeeding too.