"Ladies and gentlemen, here are The Beatles." "The Mets are the world champions." "Jerry Koosman is being mobbed!" "Look at this scene." "Check it out, check it out, the Mets have won it." "And it's hit deep to left center." "This one has a chance." "Home run!" "Shea Stadium has something to smile about." "Baseball fans are crying in their peanuts and saying," ""Shea it ain't so. "" "It's out with the old and in with the new." "The Mets are getting a brand-new stadium." "The ballgame is over and Shea Stadium will close its doors for the final time." "Tonight, Billy Joel will head an all-star show of music heavyweights to end the ballpark's place in rock and roll history." "Ladies and gentlemen, please rise for the singing of our national anthem." "Being the last act to play at Shea is mind-boggling to me." "I mean, I'm a Long Island..." "I'm a kid from Levittown." "I don't even look like a rock star." "Look at me." "We're playing as fans." "We're in the moment right there." "You're not just that moment and that age." "You're every age you've been." "Behind the bag!" "It gets through Buckner!" "And the Mets win it." "Everything you've ever learned, everything you've ever experienced goes into that show." "To sum it all up, holy shit." "I don't believe this." "I don't believe this is going on." "This is incredible." "It was such a thrill to be there doing that." "Every time you'd look up, you'd see this stadium full of people, knowing this was going to be the last show that was ever played in this place, and it was gonna be knocked down, it wouldn't be there anymore." "There was an exhilaration going on." "Like I said, it was a mutual "holy shit."" "There have been magical things that have happened in this ballpark." "All ball players, if they're one thing, they're superstitious." "There's something about Shea Stadium." "There definitely is some sort of spiritual thing going on there." "There's no question in my mind." "It was electric." "It was a buzz that I've never experienced before." "I can't describe it." "It's kind of, like, completely unique." "Thank you." "Good evening, Shea Stadium!" "Is this cool or what?" "You know, this stadium opened up to play baseball in the year 1964." "And that was the first year I joined up with a band and started playing rock and roll in a band, 1964." "Can I start at the beginning?" "I'm English." "I know nothing about baseball." "So Shea Stadium was never this baseball, you know, legend at all." "It was where The Beatles played." "Oh, baby!" "Welcome to what will be probably the biggest concert ever in the history of pop music." "The Beatles are here right now." "Here they come." "Nobody had ever played a big stadium." "We were just at the right time, The Beatles, particularly for America." "Hello, hello, hello." "Hello!" "I called the man who I was negotiating with, John Goldman." ""John, forget Madison Square Garden." ""l think I'm gonna take them to Shea Stadium."" "We couldn't really kind of hear ourselves." "'Cause, you know, the audience was much louder than us." "And when we started singing, it got louder." "So we were, like, just drowned out." "Luckily, we had a real good sense of humor about it." "We just got hysterical." "During the song I'm Down," "John had a piano solo, and now he just ended up..." "With his elbow up and down the keyboard, laughing hysterically." "We just ended up just laughing a lot." "It was just a thrill." "It's that feeling of just..." "I'm a part of this." "I'm one of those people that's cheering." "It really was not about what you could hear." "It was an experience." "They were in the same room as The Beatles." "Didn't matter how big a room it was, they were in the same room." "I've worked with Presley, I worked with Judy Garland," "I've worked with Sinatra." "But I was there." "That topped them all." "The reason that there's an aura around music at Shea Stadium is because of that Beatles show." "There's nothing that competes with the meaning of that show." "That is what is forever associated with that space." "And anybody that's making music in that space, that's what they're thinking about." "I want to thank The Beatles for letting us use their room." "Best band that ever was, best band that ever will be." "One, two, one, two..." "I remember seeing The Beatles on Ed Sullivan." "There was something very, very different about these guys." "They didn't look like Hollywood-fabricated movie stars." "They looked like regular, working class kids." "And there they were, playing their own instruments, singing their own songs." "Girls were screaming." "And at that instant I said, "That's what I want to do." I was 14." "So when we first knew that we were gonna actually play Shea Stadium, the first thought was, "Wouldn't it be great to get Paul McCartney?"" "Billy had always wanted to have Paul play at this show, and had asked him." "I wanted to do it for Billy, you know." "He'd rung me and said, "Can you do it?" And I said, "No, I can't."" "The schedule just won't work." "He is gonna be in England." "I was just glad that he, you know, actually had thought about doing it." "If it wasn't for The Beatles, I wouldn't be doing what I do." "I owe my career and much of my life to The Beatles." "Thank you." "This is where New York meets Long Island." "We're in Queens." "Politically, that's New York City, but geographically, we are on Long Island." "I think that Shea is kind of a flawed building." "I think everybody would say that." "My reactions when I first got there was the enormity of it." "It engulfed you and it felt like you were a little ant, you know, surrounded." "It looks like a nice stadium." "There are 55,000 seats in this ballpark and probably about 3,000 or 4,000 good ones." "It's a dump." "Shea Stadium was considered as a dump." "Yeah, it was, but it was our dump." "We loved it." "This ballgame is over." "We loved what it meant to us." "That was my home." "The phrase, "It's a dump, but it's our dump, " is a familiar phrase to Mets fans." "The irony is that Shea is literally built on top of a dump." "The borough of Queens was once an ash heap so big that F. Scott Fitzgerald described it in The Great Gatsby as..." "That it became home to the Mets and thousands of hard-working, middle class families is directly due to a man called Moses." "In 1924, Robert Moses began changing the landscape of New York as Parks Commissioner." "He was like the Wizard of Oz." "If it weren't for him, we wouldn't have Jones Beach." "We wouldn't have Fire Island." "We wouldn't have these great parkways." "Kind of beautiful stretches going east out toward Suffolk County." "We're in a park Moses built surrounded by highways Moses built in a building Moses built." "I'm standing on a model Moses built, which is our main attraction at this museum." "And we're sitting right next to a stadium that Moses had a lot to do with building, which brings millions of people to central Queens every year." "The most prolific builder of public works in American history envisioned a renaissance for the Empire State based on Ancient Rome." "But in Rome, wealthy people lived within the city walls on top of one of the seven Roman hills, while the lower classes lived outside of the walls at the foot of the hills." "The Latin roots "sub, " meaning under, and "urb, " meaning city, eventually were combined to describe a group of people who lived beneath the upper classes of the city." "Robert Moses attempted to change what it meant to be from the suburbs." "In New York, instead of the upper classes living within the city, he wanted them to live outside the walls." "To make this happen, Moses had to build a bridge." "He had to build roads, lots of roads." "But he also had to convince wealthy people that their lives would be better if they worked in the city but lived in the vast, open spaces on Long Island." "And that's where his plan fell apart." "The people who ended up moving were the blue collar workers and their families who were struggling to survive in the city." "Families like the Joels." "My father was a very, very good pianist, but he was not encouraged to be a musician." "He was encouraged to go and get a job as an engineer, which he ended up doing." "Which I think ended up frustrating him." "He should've been a musician." "Howard Joel was forced to move his family out of the Bronx because Robert Moses built a six-lane expressway straight through their neighborhood." "The cost of living in the city was out of his reach, so he drove his family across the Triborough Bridge to Hicksville, Long Island, as did thousands of other families in search of a better life." "We lived in a suburban housing development called Levittown." "It was a very famous development." "Every house looked the same." "We were bored out of our skulls." "We just wanted to go back to the city." "Robert Moses wanted to bring the city to Long Island." "He built a park in Queens larger than Central Park." "He built museums big enough to rival those in Manhattan." "And he wanted to build a stadium based on the design of the Colosseum in Rome." "In 1957, the world champion Brooklyn Dodgers announce they need a new place to play ball." "Moses quickly offers to build them a new stadium in Queens." "The Dodgers refuse, scoffing at the very idea of moving to the suburbs." "But Moses insists, and the Dodgers do the unthinkable." "They abandon New York in October of '57 for a new home in Los Angeles." "And at precisely this same month," "Howard Joel abandons his family to return to his birthplace in Europe." "My parents split up, I was not quite 10 years old." "So it was a struggle." "I now have a half-brother who is a classical music conductor who was born in Vienna." "My father always admired Bill as a musician." "I know Dad loves Bill above everything." "He's very, very proud of him." "But he always has trouble expressing that." "My mother actually was the one who encouraged me to play piano." "We ended up being the only family of a divorce in our neighborhood." "And there was sort of a stigma to that at the time." "As the Joels were adjusting to life in the suburbs, the man who made Queens a place to call home was desperate to find a tenant for his new Colosseum." "Robert Moses turned to a lawyer named William Shea to find a baseball team to replace the Dodgers." "Shea's result?" "The worst team in Major League history." "Well, the Mets, of course, got off to a horrible start." "They lost their first nine games." "The next year, they improved tremendously." "They only lost their first eight games." "Played 160 games and lost 1 20 of them." "You don't get any worse than that." "But the stadium was packed and we were more popular than the Yankees." "Because all the old fans of the Dodgers came to become Mets fans." "The Mets were always kind of the poor relatives in New York." "The Yankees get all the headlines." "So the Manhattan point of view is," ""Well, Queens, you have to go to Queens to see the Mets."" "The Mets were kind of working class." "And for the first six years of the franchise, the Mets were almost comically bad." "'62, '63, '64, '65, '66, really not winning, really not mattering." "'69 comes and the Mets come out of nowhere." "Imagine going from being the worst team in baseball to being the best overnight." "Imagine getting really good in the middle of the summer and then going into a terrible slump, slipping down, looking like you weren't gonna make it, and then suddenly..." "The Cubs tie it in the sixth." "But who's that crossing in front of their dugout?" "It's not lady luck." "This has been the scene of the unexpected." "And at a key moment in the game, out of nowhere, a black cat walks the length of the Cubs' dugout." "There was so much noise and so much energy, and that cat, it ran over here, it ran over there." "Then finally it fled away, you know." "55,000 people gave the cat a standing ovation." "And the hex was on, and that was the start of the Mets' comeback." "And the Mets go on and win the game." "And blow by the Cubs and win the pennant." "We've got a roller." "Yes." "The Mets are the National League Champions." "The New York Mets." "I don't think they believed us." "They didn't believe how good we were, but we believed we were good." "It was so spectacular." "It was like being on a high." "Everything good that could happen happened." "The two-one pitch." "There's a fly ball out to the left." "Waiting is Jones." "The Mets are the world champions." "Jerry Koosman is being mobbed!" "Look at this scene." "Just a moment of a lifetime that you dream about, that happens to other people." "And all of a sudden it's happening to you." "Nothing in life is ever like that." "How many Mets fans are here?" "When they won the '69 World Series, my friend Bill Zampino lost his mind." "He stuck with them." "He was a very devoted guy." "It's why we're friends to this day." "He's loyal." "Billy and me, we met in the first grade." "We were about five or six years old." "You know, before long, when we were teenagers, we had our band." "We started a band together when we were 15." "It was called The Echoes." "And we played whatever was on the radio." "At that time, I said, "Yeah, I want to be a rock and roll star."" "If you couldn't be a baseball star or a football star, or a movie star, let's be a rock and roll star." "The first time I ever met Billy, I was maybe 16 years old, and The Hassles, they were just fantastic." "In my eyes, at that time, I was, like, blown away." "This was, like, so cool." "We instantly became friends." "We were just like two peas in a pod." "All the other band members in my band didn't like him." "My wife didn't like him." "But I loved him." "I thought he was just unbelievable." "Billy and Jon formed this band called Attila." "These guys were playing..." "It was like a hard rock, organ and drum thing, you know..." "You know, it was just incredible, man." "Ladies and gentlemen, the rock house." "This is the house that me and Billy and my wife, Elizabeth, lived in together." "I guess it was a potion for disaster." "We ate together." "We drove together." "We did everything together." "I remember my friend just telling me, "I'm in love with your wife."" "You know?" "And I think I threw a punch and broke Billy's nose and knocked him out, and..." "Just one punch in the nose." "That'll do it sometimes." "It was a turning point in all our lives." "With Elizabeth by his side, Billy would sign his first record deal with a fast-talking, flamboyant producer named Artie Ripp." "I said, "Where is Billy now?"" "He says, "Billy's sleeping on the floor of a Laundromat" ""in Long Island right now."" "Billy's broke, I'm broke." "And I said, "I'm glad you finally wound up at the bottom with me." ""We'll go to the top together."" "This is Cold Spring Harbor, the first album Artie Ripp produced for Billy Joel." "You won't find it in most record stores." "It was recorded at the wrong speed." "It sort of speeded up in the mastering." "The chipmunk record, we call it." "Billy, when he got, you know, his copy, his acetate, he threw it out the window, he was so furious, you know, that he'd been screwed over." "On top of that, the deal I signed was so onerous, it was so terrible, it was so bad, the only way I could get out of it was to hide." "So I moved away from New York." "I said, "l want to get out of here." "I'm moving out."" "Billy and Elizabeth decided that they had to get free of this deal." "So they packed their bags and drove out to the West Coast." "And basically they were gonna wait it out." "They were just gonna wait him out." "They weren't gonna deliver any more music." "I got a job working in a piano bar." "It was in the Wilshire district in Los Angeles." "This place was..." "For me, it was a little universe unto itself." "Billy and Elizabeth hid out there." "Billy played at the piano bar." "And I think Elizabeth actually was a waitress in that bar." "That kind of became my handle, Piano Man." "I only did this for six months." "I mean, some people think I was a lounge piano player for years." "But it was an interesting education." "I was going to UCLA at the time, and I used to come after there and meet him at the bar and watch him play, and then I'd drive him home 'cause he didn't have a car." "Hey, do another one!" "But at the time, he was always..." "He was writing these new songs." "There was a version of Captain Jack they recorded live on the radio in the days when, you know, artists would come in and they would play live and it would be a radio show." "I'm Ed Shocky." "I'd like to welcome you here, Bill, on a Yamaha upright piano." "Make an interesting effect if it were television, wouldn't it?" "I still remember sitting in my house and Billy was going to be live on the radio." "I sat and I listened, and basically just sat there and cried." "Listened to my best friend playing that I thought I should be right next to him playing like I always did, and, you know, just always broke my heart that I wasn't with him anymore." "I was driving down the freeway in Hollywood when I heard him on the radio for the first time." "I went, "That's my bud." "That's him on the radio."" "And it was the first time I ever heard him on the radio, so..." "Have you found anyone that is very exciting for you perhaps to get involved with?" "Probably the last artist that I signed to Columbia was an artist that I think is gonna happen in a very, very big way." "About a year and a half before, he was on another label, the Family Records label." "I'm talking Billy Joel, whom I really think is a very strong, major artist." "Billy then, he did Piano Man, and Columbia Records took over the whole situation." "We started touring and putting things together in clubs." "I was the man that did everything." "I was the tour manager/sound man, lighting guy/accountant." "Then it started to go a little, started to move." "And then we decided to hire a lighting guy." "Thirty years ago, I did my first show." "I go up in the backseat of the rent-a-car with Billy and Brian." "I remember we played a show in New Jersey or Pennsylvania, and we got in the car after the show." "I passed out in the backseat and we went through the Lincoln Tunnel and we came out in New York and it was my first time there." "Leave me in here." "I wanted to write a song for New York, see." "Change the lights." "Make it real sleazy, greasy, dirty New York." "Yeah, come on, get down with the lights." "Yeah, there we go, okay." "By 1976, the city Billy had dreamt about while growing up on Long Island seemed to be in free-fall." "This city was crime-ridden." "The infrastructure had no investment for decades." "And we were broke." "It's not that we didn't have a little bit of money here and a little bit there, that we had to cut back." "No." "We were broke." "The common perception was that New York is over." "I was living in LA at the time, and there was this kind of a mean-spirited attitude in LA from ex-New Yorkers who had moved to Los Angeles." ""New York's going down the drain." ""I can't wait to see New York fall flat on its face." "Screw New York." "We hate New York. "" "And these were ex-New Yorkers." "They were exiles." "And I went the other way." "I got very defensive." ""Damn it, I'm from New York, and if the city's going down the tubes," ""I'm going with it." "I'm gonna move back."" "Ladies and gentlemen, Tony Bennett." "Yes." "During the Summer of Sam, even the crown jewel of the Robert Moses renaissance in Queens became a ghost house." "Back in those days, there weren't even 25,000 there." "There were probably 10,000." "And, you know, being able to get a foul ball 'cause nobody was within 20 yards of you." "The entire upper deck of Shea Stadium, they didn't even try to sell the tickets." "It was off-limits." "It was just cordoned off." "The Mets were not that relevant." "They were not good." "The Mets were terrible." "Tony." "New York." "Tony Bennett, from Astoria." "New York!" "It was time to go, and that's when we all moved back to New York." "The company I'm with now is New York-based." "It's called Home Run." "Nothing to do with baseball." "It's a home-run agency." "Let me introduce the different people in the company." "It's a funny thing, because I actually literally went back to work for Billy and Elizabeth." "That's how crazy this whole scenario really comes to." "Jon." "Jon is our tour coordinator." "He also does artist relations." "Elizabeth." "Elizabeth manages the entire show." "Dennis." "Dennis is our booking agent." "So Elizabeth and I were the new administration." "That was the day it all started." "Billy decided one day, he said, "Well, why doesn't she just be my manager?"" ""Why don't you take over?" "You have my best interests at heart." ""You're pragmatic." "You've got good business sense." ""You manage me." And she started immediately." "I met with Elizabeth." "I don't know what impressed her, because I had no experience, no suitcase, no nothing." "But she was in need of a tour manager and I said I could do the job." "And off I went as Billy Joel's tour manager." "I suddenly found myself with a new suitcase and about 21 guys in rent-a-cars and trucks, you know, driving from place to place, state to state." "And it was all new to me." "I was always getting lost." "That first Christmas, I was given a compass, you know, as a little indication..." "You actually took us to the wrong state once." "Yeah." "Most people would say this guy is crazy." "Why would he ever go back and work with his ex-wife and his friend?" "We were always good friends." "We had this good simpatico between us." "It would probably have taken a lot more than that to have destroyed the friendship." "So all we had to do was just get over the mental part of it." "Then we were fine." "They're really lucky." "I mean, how many people get to work with their best friends and have worked together for so long?" "I genuinely believe that they love each other." "I think it transcends friendship." "I think it's loyalty." "It's very close-knit." "We've all shared the same experiences over a long period of time." "We are protective of each other." "I do feel like it's like a family." "Thank you, Shea!" "The record of the year is..." "Billy Joel, Just the Way You Are." "Phil Ramone, producer." "Just the Way You Are, Billy Joel, songwriter." "52nd Street, Billy Joel." "Billy Joel, Glass Houses." "Thank you." "Hey." "It always surprises me." "Whenever I have a hit, I'm shocked." "That's a hit?" "Okay, Mom, I'm here, all right?" "My mother wanted me to come." "I'd like to thank my mother for paying for the piano lessons for all those years." "I write the way I speak." "I write the way I talk and the way I think." "I don't try to sit down and write a hit record." "I write songs for me." "But there's no guarantee you're gonna make any money." "When you're a musician, you're really kind of out there." "And my wife Elizabeth, and thank you." "His own writing he didn't own." "A guy named Artie Ripp in California owned a large part of it." "Artie Ripp, you know, that contract had to be dealt with." "I went to Walter Yetnikoff, who was the president of Columbia Records at the time, and explained, you know, what had happened." "As I remember, I went to see Artie Ripp and I said, "Listen." "I want to buy back Billy Joel's copyrights from you."" "He says, "Well, how much you gonna give me?"" "I said, "I'll give you $400,000."" "Not my own money." "CBS or Columbia's money." "And he said, "I don't want to sell them." ""They're worth far more than that."" "And I said, "If you don't fucking sell me this thing," ""you're gonna have to face me in the record business" ""and you're not gonna do well, 'cause whoever talks to you" ""can no longer talk to me, and you're through." ""You have no compassion." "And then I'm gonna take your head" ""and I'll put it through the fucking wall." "Give me the fucking copyrights."" ""All right, all right, all right, all right."" "I actually took the copyrights and gave them to Billy as a birthday present." "The music business is known for having a lot of nasty people in it." "Unpleasant people, and unscrupulous shysters." "Walter Yetnikoff was a mensch." "A mensch means an upstanding man." "A good human being." "And without any question, he gave me my publishing back." "And I will forever be grateful to Walter Yetnikoff for doing that, because those were my children." "Pete Flynn started tending to the grounds at Shea Stadium the first day it opened." "He's worked here every day since." "Well, I've been with the Mets since '62." "Pete was born in Ireland, you know." "He was one of those people that just kind of lit up your life." "You know?" "Pete was one of the greatest guys around there." "Everybody knew him, you know, you loved him to death." "Love the guy." "Absolutely love him." "After some day games, they'd have the kids go out there, run the bases." "And you could just see him there starting to boil, like," ""Keep off me grass."" "Everything about this place affected everything that he did." "And he loves the New York Mets." "That's like family to him." "He loves this place." "This place, in a way, gave Pete Flynn a family of his own." "His first year, he married the sister of another groundskeeper." "They were together for 40 years." "It's a Shea romance." "When she was sick and when she passed away, we saw how much they meant to each other." "He's stoic." "It's hard to know." "You know?" "He talks about her more now than he ever did." "So you were here for The Beatles." "Yeah, I drove them." "You drove them?" "That's great." "Yeah, I was here when everybody played." "Pete Flynn has seen them all come and go." "From Stevie Wonder to The Rolling Stones," "Grand Funk Railroad to The Who." "I've got good memories of Shea when we played here back in the '80s." "It's always an honor to play with Billy." "The man knows his trade and he does it well." "When I knew I was gonna do Shea, I thought, this is such a large moment," "I wanted to share it with other artists." "Maybe it's an aspect of insecurity on my own part, where I didn't think I was quite enough to pull this off." "So we asked Roger Daltrey, John Mellencamp," "Don Henley, Tony Bennett," "John Mayer, Steven Tyler, Garth Brooks." "They're the ends of the spectrum of music." "Totally away from each other." "I think that speaks volumes for Billy Joel." "I heard about him doing this concert and, you know, I thought to myself, there's gonna be a massive, unbridled enthusiasm." "Because he's from Long Island." "And Shea Stadium's here." "And it's the last gig here." "And I saw The Beatles here." "Too good to say no." "Roger Daltrey." "Steven Tyler." "John Mellencamp." "Garth Brooks." "Since The Beatles, the biggest acts of the day have sought out Shea." "That was really the point where I thought, you know, you can't get better than this." "You can't climb a higher mountain than this." "This is Everest." "I made a decision on the stage." "Said, "Okay, this is it." ""This is where this thing stops, right now."" "At Shea?" "On stage." "The greatest thing was when the Pope came here in '79." "It rained all day, and when the Pope entered center field, the sun came out." "Elizabeth was the businessperson and I was the artiste." "And the relationship suffered because of that." "It stopped being about a man and a woman and it started becoming more of an industry unto itself." "Emotionally, Elizabeth took advantage of him." "She said to me, "I'm gonna leave, and I'm getting 50%." ""l just wanted you to know."" "A little cold." "I was newly divorced on a Caribbean island, first vacation I ever took." "I went to this little club and there was a piano and I just looked and I started playing the piano." "I looked up and there's Christie Brinkley and Elle Macpherson." "At the same moment, leaning over the piano." "And I just looked back down at the piano and I said, "Thank you, man." "Thank you."" "When Christie came into the picture, a new sort of aura was introduced." "He became, perhaps with the videos that were made, he became a celebrity." "Christie was hard to look at." "I mean, really hard..." "I mean, literally hard to look at." "I would look her in the face and it was like, "You're not supposed to be that beautiful."" "It was fun on so many levels, because I had no idea that this guy that I really thought was so much fun to be with was really beloved." "I mean, everywhere we went, people were like, "Go, Billy!"" "I remember the first time I met Billy." "They were sitting in that front row and there's Christie Brinkley." "I don't care if you're right before playing a game." "You're gonna take a glance." "Let's go, Mets!" "Let's go, Mets!" "Queens baseball was back." "Everybody was talking about the Mets." "It wasn't about the Yankees in those days." "They owned this town in the '80s." "What a play by Hernandez." "The ball came up, they got him." "Oh, boy, Keith Hernandez." "Hernandez had arrived in a trade." "Strawberry'd come up in '83." "Darling came up the end of '83." "1984, Dwight Gooden arrives on the scene and is the most spectacular thing that anybody had ever seen." "Ground ball to Gooden." "To home, to first." "Dwight Gooden with a 1-2-3 double play to end the ballgame." "By the time '86 began, it was pretty obvious that they were the class of the league, and got to the World Series that year." "Game six in the '86 World Series against Boston is probably the greatest comeback in World Series history." "Here's Keith Hernandez." "Flied to center, fouled out, singled to center, walked intentionally." "One for three." "Keith Hernandez, after making out in the bottom of the 10th in game six..." "And the Mets are down to their last out." "... went back to the clubhouse, grabbed himself a beer, put his feet up on the desk in the manager's office to watch the last out." "And Roger Clemens hoping for that last out." "Lined into left field, base hit for Carter, and the Mets are still alive." "Remember, we're one out from elimination." "We're done." "Curveball, and that's gonna be hit to center." "Base hit." "And now, suddenly, with two out in the 10th inning, the tying runs are aboard and Ray Knight will be the batter." "All this stuff started transpiring." "Consecutive base hits." "Gary Carter at second." "Two out." "And that's gonna be hit into centerfield." "Base hit." "Here comes Carter to score." "And the tying run is at third in Kevin Mitchell." "I've sat down here and we've got three straight hits." "I'm not leaving this chair." "And it's gonna go to the backstop." "Here comes Mitchell to score the tying run." "And Ray Knight is at second base." "I was inside." "It was just like an earthquake." "But we were underneath." "So I hope this old ballpark can withstand this." "So the winning run is at second base." "Three and two to Mookie Wilson." "Little roller up along first." "Behind the bag!" "It gets through Buckner!" "Here comes Knight, and the Mets win it!" "Can you believe this ballgame at Shea?" "Oh, brother." "In the seventh game with Boston, they won the game after being behind and won that game and were the World Champions." "Got him." "No visiting player ever wanted to come to Shea." "It just was a creaking, old haunted house, and that's what made us love Shea even more." "It's like, no one wanted to be there except us." "There was a championship in New York." "Any time you win the championship here, you're remembered forever." "Billy's career was becoming meteoric at that point." "I thought he was so cute, and of course I did a little work." "I had to mess up the hair, 'cause he did have kind of, like, this kind of Long Island hairdo." "It was a little too smooth." "And I got it, like, a little spiky." "And put a little stuff in it and broke it up." "And I, you know, I thought he looked great." "They became an item on Page Six." "Billy really didn't like having his picture taken." "I am not a matinee idol type of guy." "I'm not a movie star." "I'm a piano player." "Being Billy and Christie, Christie and Billy, the couple, the item, the marriage, the life, all of that stuff meant cameras." "And I was aware that this woman was impossibly beautiful and I was impossibly not good-looking." "I think he was very much in love with Christie." "And above all, he has Alexa." "You know, his daughter, who he loves above everything else." "And Alexa meant everything in the world to him." "It was a unique upbringing." "And in certain ways it was very healthy and very normal." "In certain ways, it was very alternative." "Because as normal as they tried to make it, they're not normal people." "And what they do is not normal." "It's a recurring theme in a lot of my songs." "I'm expecting something dark to happen after something good happens." "I don't know why that is." "It's been a hell of a year." "So long." "Ten, nine..." "The most important question I think an artist has to answer is who do they listen to, business-wise?" "And if they get the right person to listen to, then they'll end up in good shape." "Billy's manager was his ex-wife's brother." "He kept him in his life because he felt like he could trust him." "And when you look at it on paper, you'd say how could Billy wind up with Frank Weber, who's Elizabeth's brother, who's his ex-wife, but Frank ran his life." "I kept seeing little things," "Like we always fly commercial and he's always on a private jet." "I don't get that." "Why does he have, like, a million racehorses?" "Fancy cars, all of this?" "You've had a successful career." "Where's your money?" "My dad really, really trusted this man." "And I remember my mom saying she used to try and warn him about it." "And Billy's first reaction was," ""Hey, I've known him a lot longer than I've known you." ""You don't talk bad about him." ""He's a loyal friend."" "I don't know where all the money went, but it went away." "The discovery I think was eventually through Christie, when they wanted to buy a piece of property and they found out they had no money." "I came back again with more evidence." "And then he was, like, devastated." "He was really devastated." "That's a betrayal." "And when that happens, everything's changed." "All bets are off." "You're not even in the family anymore." "It was a dark time." "I mean, the people that he trusted had really, you know, sold him down the river." "And it was more..." "As much emotional as it was, you know, financial." "He was broke and everything was being done on credit because he was in the middle of this financial disaster with his ex-manager." "The result, ultimately?" "It made Billy a road warrior." "Because now Billy went out on the road and started to make back his money." "That's when it starts to change." "When your child has a life at home and isn't as portable and packable and, you know, easy to just drop it all and follow Billy." "I think he knew that it was better for me, but I think that it was harder for him, being away from me and my mom more." "When he was back, it was quality time, but he was huge at that point." "He was touring all the time." "He was in demand." "That's when the marriage started to fall apart a little bit." "She didn't like that we were out at night." "She didn't like that you went back and had a drink after a show." "You can't just turn it off, you know, and run back to the hotel room and go to bed, it's not that kind of job." "I come from a pub culture." "At the end of the day, in my neighborhood, everybody ended up at the pub." "It was just a drinking culture." "You just drank." "That's what you did." "And I suppose if you do that long enough, you're gonna have a problem with it." "There were arguments, and I think it definitely got in the way of that relationship." "It was a hard time for me, too." "And I don't want to think about that." "By the time they got divorced, I was about eight years old." "And I remember a lot of arguing before that point." "So I was heartbroken, as any child is when their parents get divorced." "But I wasn't shocked." "Billy's one of my oldest friends." "I really just want what's good for him." "And I just want to see him thrive." "I kind of hit the wall." "Maybe a wall of my own mediocrity." "I realized I was not gonna be writing better stuff," "I was not gonna be growing anymore, because I was no longer interested in pop songwriting." "I was interested in another kind of songwriting." "That's why I stopped." "I just stopped." "When 9/11 happened," "Shea Stadium had been used as a staging area for supplies for people working on the pile, for taking care of a lot of the rescue workers, and the victims and their families." "When baseball began again, it was not a sign that life was returning to normal." "But it was a sign that life could return to normal." "When baseball returned to New York, it wasn't at historic Yankee Stadium." "The first game was played in Queens, at Shea." "I have to say, that was probably the hardest thing I've ever had to do as an athlete, that night." "Ken Caminiti, he hits a ground ball." "And Chipper Jones is rounding third." "They're sending him." "The throw to the plate..." "Off Piazza's glove, and Chipper Jones scores." "So it's one-nothing in favor of the Braves." "And here's the man the Mets want up in this spot." "Down a run late in the game." "The first pitch, I remember that." "I went, "Man, why did I let that go?"" "It was right down the middle and I took it." "I just was in this daze." "Emotionally, I was done." "It's weird how you will link a catastrophe with something as unimportant as a ballgame." "And a guy will do something that is extremely difficult but not uncommon in a baseball game and it will take on deep, deep significance." "And it's hit deep to left center." "Andrew Jones on the run." "This one has a chance." "Home run!" "Mike Piazza, and the Mets lead three to two." "Piazza hits a home run and for a moment it seems as though the home run is some kind of emphatic response." "Shea Stadium has something to smile about." "Thank you." "And thank them." "On September 28, 2008," "Pete Flynn prepared Shea Stadium for a baseball game." "Just as he had every game for 46 years." "Let's go, Mets!" "Let's go, Mets!" "For the second time in as many seasons, the Mets' playoff hopes have come down to the very last game." "We are hoping that this year will be different." "Maybe one more day, one more night." "You'll be in Shea Stadium and thinking, you know, maybe this is the year we win a World Series." "After two straight end-of-season collapses," "New York headed into the bottom of the ninth two runs down." "And now, this grand old ballpark is down to its final strike." "Three and two to Easley." "Ball four, and the Mets are alive." "And Church will come to the plate as the tying run." "The Mets faithful were looking for one more miracle out of the old Colosseum." "The haunted house known as Shea." "First pitch, fastball outside." "1-and-0." "We can see flashbulbs going off." "Knowing that any pitch now might be the last one ever thrown at Shea Stadium." "Lindstrom sets." "Easley leads from first." "He's not being held." "The 1-0 ripped in the air, pretty deep to center." "Going back Nathan, but he has a play at the edge of the track." "He makes the catch." "The ballgame is over and Shea Stadium will close its doors for the final time, as the New York Mets' season has come to a disappointing conclusion." "It's a bit surreal right now to look out at this ballpark and realize that we will not see baseball here again." "For the final time, from the Bob Murphy Radio Booth here at Shea Stadium, the final score today the Florida Marlins four, and the New York Mets two." "For the Mets, it seemed that Shea had run out of luck." "The stadium's last magic moment was destined to be much like its first, on a stage in centerfield before a standing-room-only crowd." "This great stadium was sold out in one or two hours." "He should just spend the rest of his life just on a daily basis, on every heartbeat of his life, counting his blessings that that many people love him." "That show just put it all together." "We're New Yorkers." "You know, Billy's a New Yorker and we're New Yorkers, and that's why it means a lot to us." "John Mayer!" "Thank you." "You know, I'm amazed that I'm able to still keep doing this job." "I haven't put out an album of new material in 15 freaking years." "And here we are at Shea Stadium." "Man, this is..." "To be at that piano, it's part of his life force." "As much as he wanted to turn that off for a period," "I think he realized there was no way that he could." "It is such a part of who he is that it was calling him." "And he had to answer it." "I've had all kinds of jobs, but this is the best job I ever had." "I want to thank you for letting me do this." "My generation of Long Islanders connect with Billy Joel because he speaks to the place." "Do you know what I mean?" "Shea Stadium, that was Robert Moses' baby." "This was his thing." "He opened up Long Island to hundreds of thousands of people." "So now, you're gonna tear the thing down." "Well, who do you want to say its eulogy, in a way?" "Well, it's Billy Joel." "Because in Shea Stadium, those seats are packed with Brendas and Eddies." "I know people like this." "John at the bar, he wants to be a movie star." "Sergeant O'Leary, Anthony," "Brenda and Eddie, the king and the queen of the prom." "It's easy for me to identify with these people." "I know Brenda and Eddie." "I'm telling you, I know them." "I'm related to them." "Out of high school she gets pregnant, they get an apartment right off the train line." "You're going to a low-level job in Manhattan, maybe." "But you're doing something where there's action." "There's forward movement, you think." "And, of course, within a few years they realize," "Brenda and Eddie, that they're really children still." "And they're not gonna make it." "Everybody fails, everybody falls." "Everybody has something bad happen." "It's how do you recover?" "How do you deal with it?" "And how do you move on?" "Thank you!" "In music, there's a lot of magic in what we do." "There's a lot of mystery." "There's stuff you can't just explain." "Get here!" "I'm on my way to Shea Stadium and I get a phone call on my cell phone." "It's Paul McCartney." "I was on the plane heading there and I said, "I'd love to do this thing, but I can't even get to JFK until 11:00."" "It's just logistically impossible for him to get off a plane, go through customs, immigration, get his luggage, drive all the way across the island to get here by the end of the show." ""l don't think there's any way I can do it." "Do you?"" "Well, somebody put in a call who knew some flight controllers." "They cleared airspace for his plane to be able to get in earlier." "It's about 10:.30." "Someone comes on the headsets and says, "The eagle has landed."" "Got off the airplane faster than anyone's ever got off a plane before." "They just whisked me through." "It was like, "Don't worry about that." "You're coming with me."" "Like, "I'm with the state," "I'm with the thing," you know." "It was like customs, "Just go through."" "It's Paul McCartney." "Let him in." "There was a police escort set up to meet him." "It was like..." "It was like the best ride ever." "I said, "l want to travel like this all the time."" "From the minute we left the airport, I think I made it in 11 minutes to Shea." "Waiting for him behind the makeshift stage, out of the spotlight, was a man whom he had met in this very spot once before." "Nice to meet you." "Hey, good to see you." "I drove you the first time you were here." "I heard." "Was it you?" "I don't believe it." "I re-met the guy who drove us out there on that night." "So, it was so cool." "He's really there." "It's really him." "I don't believe this shit." "When McCartney showed up, that just tore the house down." "Ladies and gentlemen, please welcome" "Sir Paul McCartney." "I'm a fan, so here's Paul McCartney playing with my band at our show." "And I'm looking at the band, and everybody's got this big, shit-eating grin." "Like, this is so cool." "Can you believe this?" "And I'm just gonna sing harmony and just take this in." "Paul McCartney!" "The original." "Thanks for letting us use the room." "So that was it, that was really the thing coming full circle." "Paul McCartney, he just got off a plane from London." "The fact that that happened when it happened, how it happened, there's an element of spirituality to it." "It was almost karmic." "How do you follow that?" "Usually, when there's that many people, it all blends into this faceless mass, but as the night went on, I could see individual people making efforts to connect with me in one way or the other." "We were all trying to pull each other together." "We were all there together." "Thank you, New York!" "Thank you!" "All of my life came into play that night." "It was very emotional." "It lasted for weeks afterwards." "I was intoxicated by it." "We were dizzy from it." "Still to this day I think about it and I get exhilaration from it." "Thank you!" "Don't take any shit from anybody." "The audience probably assumed, okay, that's the end of the show." "But I wanted Paul to end the show with a Beatles song because it was..." "It's poetic." "We walk off after Piano Man, I grab Paul, I go, "Let's do another song. "" "He goes, "What about Let It Be?"" "This is the end of an era for Shea Stadium, you know." "Shea Stadium was built the same time The Beatles came to America." "It was exactly the same time." "So, for him to do that song, to call that one, it was just perfect for the..." "Again, the end of something." "Let it be, New York." "Good night, Shea!"