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Last night was AMAZING!

I found out from the Chimp the night before that JM was sitting in for a song and I actually had no plans prior to attend. Pretty randomly, a few hours before the show, I received an invite to go and there was pretty much no way I was going to turn it down. So to those of you claiming "lucky," I'd say that's a pretty fair statement here.

I won't claim to be an ardent Billy Joel fan, but I am definitely a fan. I own records of his and have seen him live before. I've heard (by the ardent Billy Joel fans) that his shows have been hit or miss ever since he went into his long battle with alcoholism. Don't know if that's true or not, but last night was the best I had seen of him. Maybe it was the "Last Show at Shea" moniker, maybe it was because of the history there with the Beatles, maybe it was the 50,000+ people, maybe it was the special guests or some other reason, but it was a fantastic show. All the guests that came out were really fantastic. I was really interested to see how the crowd would react once BJ announced JM was coming out. The crowd went absolutely nuts when Tony Bennett came out and not that I expected anything negative, but you figure the reaction is probably going to be different for JM than it was for Tony Bennett. Billy Joel, and I'm paraphrasing, introduced John as a really great guitar player.

Once "These Are the Times" began and after John had played the first few riffs of the song (with his own touch of course), Billy said something along the lines of it being great and that he wanted John to play it again, which John obviously did. You've probably seen the video clips by now so you can get a good feeling for the song. The solos were amazing and it's always interesting to see JM in a different role on stage. I thought he appeared a little nervous (who wouldn't be in that situation though). The crowd definitely was into it and JM was well received before and even better after. It was a good song choice because it lended itself to JM adding his own flavor to the song.

At any rate, a fantastic evening!

-RY