Music
Billy Joel Doesn’t Take Shit From Anyone
In A Legendary 1987 Concert, He Tried To Convince Some Communists To Do The Same
In 1987, singer Billy Joel was one of the first American rock stars to be invited to play concerts in Communist Russia.
Russian President Mikhail Gorbachev loved rock and roll music. He had just signed a cultural agreement in Geneva, with US President Ronald Reagan, which was designed to open up new lines of communication between the two countries.
“I’m not a politician,” Joel said in a May 1987 press conference. “I’m going there as a musician. I want to get more communication going between us. People over there like pop music, they like rock and roll.”
The Russians had never seen a real US style stadium rock concert, and everyone was unsure how they would react to the spectacle.
Joel brought a documentary crew with him to record the entire Russian trip. As the crew began filming the concerts, they noticed something very strange.
When Joel began to play, the crowd went wild — they danced, they sang, they screamed. Joel told the Today Show “By the end of the show, the crowd looked like it could have been Detroit, it could have been Philadelphia, it was the same thing”.
