The Great Suburban Showdown
Song: The Great Suburban Showdown
Album: Streetlife Serenade (1974)
No word from Billy Joel or his people on lunch plans but now it’s time to get back to the music.
Of all of the songs I’ve listened to in the course of A Year of Billy Joel, “The Great Suburban Showdown” has me the most conflicted. On one hand it falls back on the tired idea of suburbia as some sort of wasteland, which even in 1974 was lazy writing.
On the other hand, I like a lot of what Billy is selling in this song. I grew up on Long Island and now live in Los Angeles. Over the years I’ve regularly flown from LA back to New York to see my parents and on those trips I’ve frequently felt the same sense of being a stranger in a familiar place. I suppose this is the first Billy Joel song that I identify with.
A few years ago I felt an uncontrollable urge to go back home. This was harmless enough but there was more to it than just homesickness. I was going home looking for solutions to some family issues and to reconnect to my hometown.
This, in retrospect, was dumb because I created more problems than I helped solve. As for my hometown, I also learned something very important:
One morning during that trip I walked down a street I had been down thousands of times, counting every house that I used to be welcome in. Over the years the people had packed up and gone just like I had. As I thought of all of the people I’d probably never see again a car pulled up beside me. The driver asked me for directions to a funeral home. I pointed them in the right direction and expressed my condolences.
As he drove away I thought of the people I had said goodbye to in that same funeral home. I realized shortly afterward that just like the people I could now only see in my dreams, the hometown I remember existed almost completely in my head.
“The Great Suburban Showdown” ends with a vow to leave and never return. I left my hometown at the end of that trip hoping to stay away for a long time simply because my family and neighborhood failed to live up to my arbitrary expectations. I would later regret the way the trip ended as the next time I went home was for my father’s funeral.
The other sticking point in the song has nothing to do with Billy Joel and everything to do with my perceptions. “The Great Suburban Showdown” reminds me of a Warren Zevon song, not a specific one just Warren Zevon in general, specifically his self-titled second record, which is a favorite of mine. It’s not so much the sound as the tone, which is both sad and darkly funny.
I’ve long been a fan of Warren Zevon who is best known for his sense of humor while his best songs are beautifully dark. Billy Joel is best known for his light hits but many people would argue that his darker songs are his best work.
In my mind the major difference between the two is that lyrically, Billy Joel often works in distant broad strokes (at least in the songs I have heard to this point) while Zevon could be achingly specific and personal. However, the argument that is currently forming in my head says that these two are not a different as I had previously thought.
As a point of reference here is The French Inhaler from Warren Zevon (1976),
