When Controversy Led To A Hit For Billy Joel

Billy Joel was born in 1949. He got an early start in music; as Joel told Uncut in 1998, his first gig was around 1964 in a church. At this first performance he played Beatles covers and Virginia Callaghan, the girl who is the “Virginia” in “Only the Good Die Young,” stared at him throughout his performance. Once he was paid for the show, he was hooked because he recognized that music could bring him both money and girls. This realization led to his failure to graduate with his class. The night before an exam which would determine whether he graduated, he was playing a late-night gig and he missed the exam. He chose not to go to summer school to earn his diploma but instead decided to pursue a career in music. He did eventually earn his diploma in 1992, after submitting essays to the school board in place of the exam. 

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.