The Last Play at Shea (Billy Joel - The Last Play at Shea)

Ladies and gentlemen, here are The Beatles.

The Mets are the world champions.

Jerry Koosman is being mobbed!

Look at this scene.

Check it out, check it out, the Mets have won it.

And it's hit deep to left center. This one has a chance. Home run!

Shea Stadium has something to smile about.

Baseball fans are crying in their peanuts and saying,

"Shea it ain't so. "

It's out with the old and in with the new. The Mets are getting a brand-new stadium.

The ballgame is over and Shea Stadium will close its doors for the final time.

Tonight, Billy Joel will head an all-star show

of music heavyweights to end the ballpark's place

in rock and roll history.

Ladies and gentlemen, please rise for the singing of our national anthem.

Being the last act to play at Shea is mind-boggling to me.

I mean, I'm a Long Island... I'm a kid from Levittown.

I don't even look like a rock star. Look at me. We're playing as fans.

We're in the moment right there.

You're not just that moment and that age. You're every age you've been.

Behind the bag! It gets through Buckner! And the Mets win it.

Everything you've ever learned,

everything you've ever experienced goes into that show.

To sum it all up, holy shit.

I don't believe this. I don't believe this is going on.

This is incredible. It was such a thrill to be there doing that.

Every time you'd look up, you'd see this stadium full of people,

knowing this was going to be the last show that was ever played in this place,

and it was gonna be knocked down, it wouldn't be there anymore.

There was an exhilaration going on. Like I said, it was a mutual "holy shit."

There have been magical things that have happened in this ballpark.

All ball players, if they're one thing, they're superstitious.

There's something about Shea Stadium.

There definitely is some sort of spiritual thing going on there.

There's no question in my mind.

It was electric. It was a buzz

that I've never experienced before.

I can't describe it. It's kind of, like, completely unique.

Thank you. Good evening, Shea Stadium!

Is this cool or what?

You know, this stadium

opened up to play baseball in the year 1964.

And that was the first year I joined up with a band

and started playing rock and roll in a band, 1964.

Can I start at the beginning? I'm English. I know nothing about baseball.

So Shea Stadium was never this baseball, you know, legend at all.

It was where The Beatles played.

Oh, baby!

Welcome to what will be probably the biggest concert ever

in the history of pop music.

The Beatles are here right now.

Here they come.

Nobody had ever played a big stadium.

We were just at the right time, The Beatles,

particularly for America.

Hello, hello, hello.

Hello!

I called the man who I was negotiating with, John Goldman.

"John, forget Madison Square Garden.

"l think I'm gonna take them to Shea Stadium."

We couldn't really kind of hear ourselves.

'Cause, you know, the audience was much louder than us.

And when we started singing, it got louder.

So we were, like, just drowned out.

Luckily, we had a real good sense of humor about it.

We just got hysterical.

During the song I'm Down,

John had a piano solo, and now he just ended up...

With his elbow up and down the keyboard, laughing hysterically.

We just ended up just laughing a lot.

It was just a thrill. It's that feeling of just...

I'm a part of this. I'm one of those people that's cheering.

It really was not about what you could hear. It was an experience.

They were in the same room as The Beatles.

Didn't matter how big a room it was, they were in the same room.

I've worked with Presley, I worked with Judy Garland,

I've worked with Sinatra. But I was there. That topped them all.

The reason that there's an aura around music at Shea Stadium

is because of that Beatles show.

There's nothing that competes with the meaning of that show.

That is what is forever associated with that space.

And anybody that's making music in that space, that's what they're thinking about.

I want to thank The Beatles for letting us use their room.

Best band that ever was, best band that ever will be.

One, two, one, two...

I remember seeing The Beatles on Ed Sullivan.

There was something very, very different about these guys.

They didn't look like Hollywood-fabricated movie stars.

They looked like regular, working class kids.

And there they were, playing their own instruments,

singing their own songs. Girls were screaming.

And at that instant I said, "That's what I want to do." I was 14.

So when we first knew that we were gonna actually play Shea Stadium,

the first thought was, "Wouldn't it be great to get Paul McCartney?"

Billy had always wanted to have Paul play at this show,

and had asked him.

I wanted to do it for Billy, you know.

He'd rung me and said, "Can you do it?" And I said, "No, I can't."

The schedule just won't work. He is gonna be in England.

I was just glad that he, you know, actually had thought about doing it.

If it wasn't for The Beatles, I wouldn't be doing what I do.

I owe my career and much of my life to The Beatles.

Thank you.

This is where New York meets Long Island.

We're in Queens. Politically, that's New York City,

but geographically, we are on Long Island.

I think that Shea is kind of a flawed building.

I think everybody would say that.

My reactions when I first got there was the enormity of it.

It engulfed you and it felt like you were a little ant,

you know, surrounded.

It looks like a nice stadium.

There are 55,000 seats in this ballpark

and probably about 3,000 or 4,000 good ones.

It's a dump.

Shea Stadium was considered as a dump.

Yeah, it was, but it was our dump. We loved it.

This ballgame is over.

We loved what it meant to us.

That was my home.

The phrase, "It's a dump, but it's our dump, " is a familiar phrase to Mets fans.

The irony is that Shea is literally built on top of a dump.

The borough of Queens was once an ash heap so big

that F. Scott Fitzgerald described it in The Great Gatsby as...

That it became home to the Mets

and thousands of hard-working, middle class families

is directly due to a man called Moses.

In 1924, Robert Moses began changing the landscape of New York

as Parks Commissioner.

He was like the Wizard of Oz.

If it weren't for him, we wouldn't have Jones Beach.

We wouldn't have Fire Island.

We wouldn't have these great parkways.

Kind of beautiful stretches going east out toward Suffolk County.

We're in a park Moses built surrounded by highways Moses built

in a building Moses built.

I'm standing on a model Moses built, which is our main attraction at this museum.

And we're sitting right next to a stadium that Moses had a lot to do with building,

which brings millions of people to central Queens every year.

The most prolific builder of public works in American history

envisioned a renaissance for the Empire State

based on Ancient Rome.

But in Rome, wealthy people lived within the city walls

on top of one of the seven Roman hills,

while the lower classes lived outside of the walls

at the foot of the hills.

The Latin roots "sub, " meaning under, and "urb, " meaning city,

eventually were combined to describe a group of people

who lived beneath the upper classes of the city.

Robert Moses attempted to change what it meant to be from the suburbs.

In New York, instead of the upper classes living within the city,

he wanted them to live outside the walls.

To make this happen, Moses had to build a bridge.

He had to build roads, lots of roads.

But he also had to convince wealthy people that their lives

would be better if they worked in the city

but lived in the vast, open spaces on Long Island.

And that's where his plan fell apart.

The people who ended up moving were the blue collar workers and their families

who were struggling to survive in the city.

Families like the Joels.

My father was a very, very good pianist,

but he was not encouraged to be a musician.

He was encouraged to go and get a job as an engineer,

which he ended up doing.

Which I think ended up frustrating him. He should've been a musician.

Howard Joel was forced to move his family out of the Bronx

because Robert Moses built a six-lane expressway

straight through their neighborhood.

The cost of living in the city was out of his reach,

so he drove his family across the Triborough Bridge

to Hicksville, Long Island,

as did thousands of other families in search of a better life.

We lived in a suburban housing development called Levittown.

It was a very famous development.

Every house looked the same. We were bored out of our skulls.

We just wanted to go back to the city.

Robert Moses wanted to bring the city to Long Island.

He built a park in Queens larger than Central Park.

He built museums big enough to rival those in Manhattan.

And he wanted to build a stadium based on the design of the Colosseum in Rome.

In 1957, the world champion Brooklyn Dodgers

announce they need a new place to play ball.

Moses quickly offers to build them a new stadium in Queens.

The Dodgers refuse,

scoffing at the very idea of moving to the suburbs.

But Moses insists, and the Dodgers do the unthinkable.

They abandon New York in October of '57 for a new home in Los Angeles.

And at precisely this same month,

Howard Joel abandons his family to return to his birthplace in Europe.

My parents split up, I was not quite 10 years old.

So it was a struggle.

I now have a half-brother

who is a classical music conductor who was born in Vienna.

My father always admired Bill as a musician.

I know Dad loves Bill above everything. He's very, very proud of him.

But he always has trouble expressing that.

My mother actually was the one who encouraged me to play piano.

We ended up being the only family of a divorce

in our neighborhood.