Song of the Day 11/30: Billy Joel, “Only the Good Die Young”

Henry Kissinger was already 54 years old when Billy Joel, a scamp half his age at the time, released this banger in 1977. The third single from “The Stranger,” his best-selling album, it only reached No. 24 on the Hot 100 but has lived on via classic rock radio. He introduces this live performance on the BBC’s “Old Grey Whistle Test” by claiming it has something to offend everybody.

Indeed, the song created some controversy among touchy Catholics, who resent anybody pointing out the hypocrisy of their religion. As an album cut it went unnoticed, but Joel told an interviewer,

“Columbia decided to put it out as a single, and that’s when there were problems. There was a radio station at Seton Hall [a Catholic college] in New Jersey. They banned it. Then it was banned by the archdiocese of St. Louis. And then it got banned in Boston. All these archdiocese areas started putting pressure on radio stations to ban it. The single had been out a short amount of time and wasn’t doing well. The minute they banned it, it starting shooting up the charts, because nothing sells a record like a ban or a boycott.

I wrote letters to the archbishops and the president of Seton Hall, saying, “Please ban my next record.”

In his own defense, Joel said the song “wasn’t so much anti-Catholic as pro-lust.” Earlier this year he told an interviewer from WMMR in Philadelphia, “It’s occurred to me recently that I’m trying to talk some poor innocent woman into losing her virginity because of my lust. It’s kind of a selfish song — like, who cares what happens to you? What about what I want?…But on the other hand, it was of its time. This was written in the mid-’70s, and I was trying to seduce girls. Why bullshit about it?”

The song was originally supposed to have a reggae beat, but Joel changed it to a shuffle because his longtime drummer, Liberty DiVitto, despised it. “He literally throws his drumsticks at me and says, ‘Ugh, I frigging hate reggae! The closest you’ve ever been to Jamaica is when you changed trains in Queens.’ So I said, ‘Yeah, what’s your solution?’ And he played that opening fill and went into this kind of shuffle.” This demo of the original was released on “My Lives,” Joel’s 2005 box set of B-sides and rarities, and it proves DiVitto was right.