When Controversy Led To A Hit For Billy Joel


The Beginnings Of His Career
After a brief period playing in bands, Joel started his solo career. He released his first album, Cold Spring Harbor, in 1971. In 1973, he released his third album, Piano Man. He found some success with Piano Man, but his subsequent recordings did not do well. He was on the verge of being dropped by his label when he released The Stranger in 1977. The album included “Scenes from an Italian Restaurant,” “Just the Way You Are”, “Only A Woman,” and “Only the Good Die Young,” the song that would stir a bit of controversy.

"Only the Good Die Young" Almost Had A Reggae Sound
When Billy Joel wrote the song, it originally had a reggae sound. He shared the song with his drummer, Liberty DeVitto, who was Catholic, to get input about whether the narrative about the Catholic girl who was holding out rang true. According to DeVitto it did, but DeVitto did not like reggae, and he convinced Joel to get rid of the reggae sound. Instead, he used a shuffle. That sound was a success, as Cash Box said, “Billy grabs the fun with a rollicking, handclapping beat.” It was not the sound of the song that led to the controversy though, but the lyrics.

The Lyrics Were Pro-lust, Not Anti-Catholic
“Only the Good Die Young,” which begins “Come out Virginia, don't let me wait” was written from the perspective of a young man who was trying to convince a Catholic girl to have sex with him. The narrator of the song believes that she is refusing because she is saving herself for marriage. He tries to convince her that even though he seems to have a bad reputation because of the crowd he hangs out with, it’s just that they “might be laughing a bit too loud, but that never hurt no one,” he says, “I might as well be the one.” Despite the narrator’s attempts to persuade Virginia, you have the sense that he is fighting a losing battle. He tries to convince her that waiting for a reward in heaven is not worth it because he’d “rather laugh with the sinners than cry with the saints,” but in the end, she doesn’t succumb. The intent of the lyrics may have been misunderstood; as Joel told Performing Songwriter magazine, “When I wrote ‘Only the Good Die Young,’ the point of the song wasn’t so much anti-Catholic as pro-lust.”

Banning The Song Helped To Make It A Hit
When The Stranger was released, the song hadn’t attracted much attention. Once Columbia released it as a single, the problems started. WSOU, the radio station at Seton Hall College in New Jersey, which was affiliated with the Catholic Archdiocese in Newark, banned the song as the president of the college took exception to some of the lyrics. After that, it was banned by the archdiocese of St. Louis, followed by Boston, and the Catholic Church started pressuring other stations to ban it. Before this, it hadn’t sold very well, but once it was banned in multiple places, it started to climb the record charts. During the 1978 Stranger tour, at his stop in St. Louis, he received death threats to stop him from singing the song, but he defiantly performed it twice, getting the audience to sing along. He ended the show with “Don’t take any shit from anybody.”
According to Joel, after the success of the single, he wrote letters to the archdiocese asking them to ban his next album.