don chaffer's meditation on human greatness.

This is from the waterdeep blog.

Flirty Fishing With Fame (Or a Meditation on Human Greatness, Volume Three)

Regarding the conundrum of waning greatness in our pop heroes as they age, I saw this same thing present in Billy Joel the other day when he came to town and performed. "Piano Man," which Billy wrote very early in his career, is as good a song as there is, and he saved it for the very end of the show. Like a really big magic trick... and I mean big. Think David-Copperfield-makes-the-Statue-of-Liberty-disappear, not How-Did-David-Blaine-Make-A-Piece-Of-Paper-Show-Up-In-That-Beer-Bottle-Over-There. Big. Big scale. And this is the trick: Billy transports an entire audience to New York in the 70's. Billy's in the bar as the piano man, longing for something much greater, and the regulars ask him "Man, what are you doin' here?" They're all bleary-eyed, but Billy's pounding on a piano that sounds like a carnival, and wailing into a microphone that smells like a beer, and everyone in that little puke-and-urine-smelling place can tell he's channeling something that could lay the walls of the tavern flat if it were only to show itself in the visible realm. Meanwhile- and this is the second half of the big magic trick- back at the arena, we're all on our feet. All of us. And we're sharing a drink we call loneliness cause it's better than drinking alone. And Billy is galvanizing us: in the row in front of me, the pudgy self-restrained woman in her forties bites her lip and thrusts her head back and forth with oblivious abandon to the mug-swinging 6/8 rhythm of the piano; her husband pumps his fist in the air- his first visible expression of enthusiasm of the night; and the six-foot-four-inch-tall distinguished gray-haired gentleman to my right lets loose a single tear which cuts a path down his dry cheek, as he is visibly lost in some thought or memory that he had come to regard as a stranger until he finally recognized its aging face again in the pale blue light of the Sprint arena.
And now what? What's Billy doing now? He's inviting some whiny pop-kid named Cody on stage to sing Billy's Hey-did-you-know-there's-a-war-going-on anthem "Christmas In Fallujah". It's not that I begrudge Billy the idea of commenting on the war being under-covered by the media (which it is) and absent from the American communal mind (which it is), or even his everyman patriotism about it (which reminds me of my Dad a bit, and I kind of like it), it's that the song doesn't bear any of the real insights that we love about most of his really good songs. He seems to have lost touch with whatever it was that made him great.
When it comes to people who were great in their youth, but have gone stale in older age (certainly you can invite Stevie Wonder and Elton John to this party) I've always assumed it was that loss of common-folk surroundings, the loss of connection to regular people that dimmed the genius of these heroes, but now I'm wondering if I've got the right theory. Maybe it's about getting to the top of the mountain only to find that the top feels like a more comfortable version of the bottom. No great revelation. No great accomplishment. All you have are the things that people tell you you've done. Music, after all, is ephemeral. There is no arriving within it; there is only the ongoing moment-ness of it. So after the show is done, and the record, finished, you're left with other peoples' analyses, and they are not the music. They are not the greatness you longed for, and achieved.
So, people may call you great, and you really want to believe them, but secretly you doubt that it's true. Secretly, you hide in your closet and wonder where it all comes from. In the end, I think greatness must be left for others to attribute, and maybe the great people themselves are incapable of facing it. Maybe it's elusive, and maybe it only brushes against us, but refuses to reveal itself, and if we had pinned our hopes on meeting it face to face we will be nothing but crushed by our fling with it, because it is loose, and wild, and unpredictable, and was never really ours to begin with. We mistook our own hunger for its presence, but really it's in the meeting of the two (the intersection of desire and inspiration) that the sparks fly. It's not an affair that's ever intended to consummate. It's an eternal flirt. And this is as it should be.

Don Chaffer.