My parents had eased up on the whole rock music thing, to the point where by my junior year of high school it was a distant memory. I had a growing record collection, and no longer had to be covert with it.
Moreover, it was clear to my parents – my mother, in particular – that my interest in music was skyrocketing, and that I was teaching myself piano and guitar faster than my teachers.35 She suspended my piano lessons.
I had gone from almost a decade of being chained to a piano bench pounding out lessons someone handed me to jumping on the piano bench and rocking out. I was realizing that the biggest rock artists in the world, at that moment, were – wait for it! - piano players.
There was Barry Manilow, an everyman crooner with a goofy look and earnest presence who could just do no wrong on the radio; at that point (1977), he had racked up no less than eight Top 40 hits in just three years, with “Mandy”, “I Write the Songs” and “Looks Like We Made It” going to #1. I bought his albums (three of which were already platinum) and learned the songs by ear, which I think pleased my mom.
There was Billy Joel, very much not an everyman crooner, whose more sophisticated playing and writing drew me in even deeper. I bought The Stranger and the retroactive Piano Man (and, when it arrived, 52st Street) and picked up as much as I could by ear. Joel’s stuff was harder to play, and he had some style tricks that were very distinctive; I found it difficult to reach, but thrilling.
But most of all – most of all!!! - there was... Elton.
While I had become aware of Manilow late in junior high and Billy Joel in high school, Elton had been with me from the beginning – from that moment I first stepped on a Crawfordsville school bus. “Crocodile Rock” and “Goodbye Yellow Brick Road” and “Bennie and the Jets” and “Daniel” and “The Bitch is Back” and “Pinball Wizard” had lived in me longer than any other music.
It dawned on me – I now had the skill to play this wonderful music.
I did play some of it by ear; I was a hit with friends, doing the opening of “Pinball Wizard”, with its lightning rolling triplets, and the opening chords of “Yellow Brick Road” were impressive; but EJ’s stuff was even more carefully rendered than Billy Joel’s and I wanted to be note-perfect – so I bought the music to Elton’s Greatest Hits Vol. I.
And I practiced them. And practiced them. The final recital I ever did, I played an arrangement of “Don’t Let the Sun Go Down on Me”.
Playing Barry Manilow was social currency. Playing Billy Joel made me flat-out cool.
Playing Elton, I was reaching for the sky. This was a music that took me far beyond who might be listening; it was the raucous joy of music for its own sake, of surrendering to something truly bigger than me, joining with a kind of magic that would change me, and change how I felt about music.
And I made a discovery.
I’ve written elsewhere that there was a grand piano on the stage in the school theater. My senior year, I would arrive 45 minutes before first period and go to that piano and just play, play, play. And an amazing thing began happening.
A girl would appear beside me on the bench. I would smile and keep playing.
And another girl would appear on the other side of me, on the bench.
And this kept happening, all my life...
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