One afternoon while they were sipping some coffee at a shop by the street, Billy Joel sees an elderly woman sweeping the street. Billy feels bad for her and expresses the sentiment to his father. Billy explained the story to New York Times in 2008 Hi father, Helmut Joel, explains that elderly people, too, still can provide something of value to society, as opposed to making them feel like useless people, as does America’s culture. Why did I pick Vienna to use as a metaphor for the rest of your life? My father lives in Vienna now.
I didn’t see him from the time I was 8 ‘till I was about 23-24 years old. He lives in Vienna, Austria which I thought was rather bizarre because he left Germany in the first place because of this guy named Hitler and he ends up going to the same place that Hitler hung out all those years! Vienna, for a long time was the crossroads. During the Cold War, between the Eastern Bloc, the Warsaw Pact nations and the NATO countries was the city of Vienna… Vienna was always the crossroads – between the Ottoman Empire and the Holy Roman Empire. So the metaphor of Vienna has the meaning of a crossroad. It’s a place of inter…course, of exchange – it’s the place where cultures co-mingle. You get great beer in Vienna but you also get brandy from Armenia. It was a place where cultures co-mingled. So I go to visit my father in Vienna, I’m walking around this town and I see this old lady. She must have been about 90 years old and she is sweeping the street. I say to my father “What’s this nice old lady doing sweeping the street?” He says “She’s got a job, she feels useful, she’s happy, she’s making the street clean, she’s not put out to pasture”. We treat old people in this country pretty badly. We put them in rest homes, we kinda kick them under the rug and make believe they don’t exist.
In a lot of these older places in the world, they value their older people and their older people feel they can still be a part of the community and I thought ‘This is a terrific idea – that old people are useful -and that means I don’t have to worry so much about getting old because I can still have a use in this world in my old age.
In an interview with the Howard Stern Show, Billy Joel further explained the meaning behind the song lyrics “It was an observation that you have your whole life to live. A lot of people in their 20s think they have to get it all together by their 30s and they kill themselves trying to get the golden ring. The lyrics, ‘slow down you crazy child’ – in other words, you have a whole life. We tend to put older people away, and it’s all about young people.
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