Billy Joel on Shea Stadium: "We're Still in the Euphoria Bubble"

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Last month, Billy Joel played to a sold-out crowd of 55,000 fans in the final perfomance at Shea Stadium, which is being demolished after the end of the 2008 New York Mets season. Rock Daily caught up with Joel after the announcement of the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame Annex to see if he has come down yet from his historic performance.

"We're still kinda in the euphoria bubble from that. It hasn't even been a month yet and I'm bone tired from it. They were long shows — three and a half hours with no intermission in hundred degree heat with stage lighting. It took a week or so to realize how tired I was from it."

Joel admits that the appearances from legends like Paul McCartney, Steven Tyler, Garth Brooks and Roger Daltrey were thrilling game-time deicisions. "We didn't know until the last minute they were actually going to be there. Nobody got paid. They just did it out of the goodness of their hearts," Joel said.

McCartney, who played the first concert at Shea with the Beatles in 1965, closed out the final show with a performance of "Let It Be." "I had to let him do the last song. He had to play 'Let It Be' to close the place. They opened it, he should close it. It made sense."

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Song Stories

“Everyday People”

Sly and the Family Stone | 1968

"Everyday People" managed to trailblaze in two different ways -- it was one of the first pop hits to deal with the subject of racial harmony, and it utilized Larry Graham's "slap" technique on the bass guitar, which would soon be copied by countless other bassists. Graham once said about his pulsating style, "I'd never done that before … that's where the freedom of creativity came in for the band, that we'd be allowed to do that." In 1978, the song's line "Different strokes for different folks" would be borrowed for the title of the hit television show Diff'rent Strokes.

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