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Joel gets to sing the ballad ''Just the Way You Are,'' one of his biggest hits. ''Scenes From an Italian Restaurant'' provides an excuse to open a bottle of wine for on-stage consumption. "He and his musicians even use stage props at times.

With ''Pressure,'' however, one of his latest hits, he gets up and begins moving slowly about the stage." Joel sits at the piano, playing and singing with verve, but with the kind of distance that audiences usually associate with Perry Como. "The session, cheered on throughout by an unflaggingly enthusiastic audience opens with ''Allentown,'' a recent composition about youthful years with fathers who served in World War II and summer visits to the Jersey shore.

He gives the feeling that he is never completely what he seems. But then, as at this concert, there is always the unusual detail: he is wearing white sneakers. He wears a tie and is partial to sports jackets that have an air of squareness about them. He can be surprising, no more so than when he turned out to be the smash hit of an American concert in Cuba a couple of years ago. His songs range from ballads to driving rock and a kind of patter routine speaking to the anxieties of growing up in suburbia. Joel has over the last 12 years won a parcel of Grammy Awards and posted sales of some 35 million albums. Joel is something of a perplexing performer, especially for those who prefer the more hard-edge rock of, say, Bruce Springsteen. Joel and his band, and it can be seen Sunday at 8 P.M. This is the first solo television appearance for Mr. "THE big special this weekend on Home Box Office, the pay-cable channel, is the premiere of ''Billy Joel in Concert,'' taped at the Nassau Coliseum in Long Island at the close of a 36-city tour of the United States. O'Connor in The New York Times from 1983, also below: ​ Read a reviewof the HBO concert special by John J.

You can read the positive review of the televised concert from The New York Times ("a super show") at the Reviews tab, above. There is an energy and ebullience to Live from Long Island that exudes from the video, more so than in the other ones. Many Billy Joel fans consider Live from Long Island to be Billy's best concert video, even better than the later-released Kohuept, Live at Yankee Stadium and Live at Shea. There is also a short promotional clip for the concert video as well. You can watch the video concert on the same tabbed page above. But you can listen to a re-constructed version of the complete concert here (YouTube) and on the Video & Audio tabbed page above. Again, there is no corresponding music album. It was broadcast on HBO and then later released on VHS and laserdisc, but was never released on DVD. Although the video does not contain much of the humorous dialogue that Billy was known for in his concerts, it does show him dancing and mugging to crowd-pleasers like "Sometimes A Fantasy," "Pressure," and "Only The Good Die Young." The band gets involved too, raising a toast to the audience with a bottle of wine during the opening of "Scenes from An Italian Restaurant."Īlthough the actual concert featured 22 songs, the video concert only had 16 of those songs. The concert video showcased that Billy was not just a top musician and songwriter, but was also a first-class performer who could entertain audiences with his actions and antics. The addition of keyboard player David LeBolt to the band, himself an energetic performer, freed up Billy to leave the piano bench and roam the stage more than ever before. Unlike in his earlier concert video Billy Joel Tonight (1976) where Billy stayed perched behind his piano for most of the night, in Live From Long Island Billy scrambles across the stage like a virtuoso musical madman, entertaining the audience, the band, and even himself. At the time Billy and his band were at or near the peak of their popularity and performing prowess (notwithstanding that Mark Rivera had replaced Richie Cannata on saxophone, both excellent musicians). The concert video was recorded on Decemat Long Island's Nassau Veterans Memorial Coliseum during The Nylon Curtain tour. Although the concert video Billy Joel Live From Long Island was never released on CD as an album, I have included it here because of its popularity among Billy Joel fans.