“You see that boat out there?” Billy Joel asked, pointing beyond the dock and the helicopter pad in his backyard to Oyster Bay Harbor. “That’s an oyster boat — a dredge. I worked on one of those, when I was 17 or 18. I used to look up at these big houses and say, ‘You rich bastards!’ I remember looking at this house and cursing. Now I own the place.”
Joel and Springsteen, both born in 1949—these fresh new talents were the defining figures of the age.
Fifty years after their 1973 debut albums on Columbia Records, Bruce Springsteen and Billy Joel have had dozens of top 10 hits, sold hundreds of millions of records, and continue to fill arenas and stadiums. Their success is undisputed and their legacies secure. What doesn’t often receive attention is how, a half-century later, the suburban roots of both men still play a key role in shaping the contours of those legacies.
But while they certainly found inspiration and ideas from beyond New York, the two future stars were fundamentally rooted in the booming music landscape of the greater New York area.
This sprawling New York landscape with its culturally diverse roots shaped Joel and Springsteen as the two teenagers—who had lived remarkably similar lives—forged careers in the late 1960s. Both men grew up on the metropolitan periphery: Joel in Hicksville, Long Island, and Springsteen in Freehold, N.J. They were born into worlds where potato farms were still common features of the local landscape, rapidly replaced by the new crop of cheaply produced mass housing.
In 1973, Springsteen and Joel signed with Columbia Records and released their first albums for the label. Within months, the music industry labeled both commercial disappointments. In the next few years, they also both had serious conflicts with their managers that imperiled their careers. In the late 1970s, however, Joel and Springsteen achieved breakthroughs, and by the 1980s—the age of MTV—both were superstars.
