Live at the Great American Music Hall (2023)
1. Opening
2. Somewhere Along the Line
3. Roberta
4. The Mexican Connection
5. Root Beer Rag
6. James
7. Intro of Band Members
8. You’re My Home
9. Cocker Imitation / You Are So Beautiful
10. Everybody Loves You Now
11. New York State of Mind
12. Benny & the Jets (Vamp/Fragment)
13. Travelin’ Prayer
14. Delta Lady (Vamp/Fragment)
15. The Entertainer
16. The Ballad of Billy the Kid
17. Ain’t No Crime
18. Weekend Song
There was a time—not so long ago—when one could fairly argue that Billy Joel, for all his touring dominance and FM ubiquity, lacked a proper live album. Not a stopgap (Songs in the Attic), not a cultural experiment (Kohuept), not a stadium spectacle (Shea), but a proper, unfussed, honest-to-goodness document of a man and his band in a room with an audience. Then came 12 Gardens Live, and suddenly the floodgates opened. Archive after archive began pouring forth—Joel at various points of his ascent, seemingly timed to fill the void left by his long-standing refusal to release new material.
Among these, Live in 1975 might appear, at first glance, to be the bottom of the barrel. The setlist is deep-cut heavy, the venue anonymous, and the year—crucially—is before the hit machine had kicked into full gear. But don't be fooled. This recording, if anything, captures Joel at his rawest and most vital. Not yet the household name, not yet the piano-wielding patriarch of Long Island lore, Joel in ’75 was still hungry. And it shows.
The show takes place not in the five boroughs but out west, somewhere in California. And while you’d expect some polite confusion from the crowd—this was pre-The Stranger, after all—what you hear is a room full of believers. Joel responds in kind. There’s a looseness here, a joy, even a touch of irreverence that rarely survived into his arena years. He’s not working the crowd—he’s playing with them.
Setlist-wise, it's a lean draw from Piano Man and Streetlife Serenade, with a now-iconic New York State of Mind slipped in before the ink on its sheet music had dried. Ironically, it’s the weakest link here, a sluggish interlude in an otherwise sprightly set. The rest—especially deep cuts like Roberta, The Entertainer, and the wholly unexpected instrumental The Mexican Connection—crackle with life. That last one, often dismissed as a studio oddity, lands here like a dusty Morricone riff through a New York lens—more cinematic than it has any right to be.
The between-song banter is frequent and chaotic. Joel tries on impersonations, riffs on Elton John, and dabbles in Joe Cocker pastiche. It borders on self-indulgent at times, but it’s also immensely charming. You hear a performer still discovering what kind of frontman he wants to be—and testing those limits in real time.
Ultimately, this isn’t an essential Billy Joel release in the conventional sense. There are no grand statements, no chart-toppers performed to a mass choir. What it offers, instead, is something rarer: a snapshot of a young artist, still a little rough around the edges, absolutely owning a stage. For fans weary of polish and production, Live in ’75 is the sound of the street-level scrapper, grinning behind the piano, fully aware that his moment is coming.
And for 55 glorious minutes, it almost feels like you’re in the room with him.
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