Captain Jack will get you by tonight, just a little push and you’ll be smiling

English: Billy Joel at the 2009 premiere of the Metropolitan Opera in New York City. Photographer's blog post about event and photograph. (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

Billy Joel, “Captain Jack”
While the lyrics from this song off of Joel’s 1973 album Piano Man appear, at first glance, to be pro drugs (“Captain Jack will get you by tonight, just a little push and you’ll be smiling”), Joel has gone to great lengths to insist that it’s actually an anti-drug medley meant to inspire recovery and show how unglamorous drug use really is. Joel wrote the song in 1971 while sitting in his Long Island apartment and noticing teenagers outside his window who were scoring heroin off a dealer named Captain Jack. "What's so horrible about an affluent young white teenager's life that he's got to shoot heroin?” Joel wrote in his 2007 autobiography. “It's really a song about what I consider to be a pathetic loser kind of lifestyle. I've been accused of, 'Oh, this song promotes drug use and masturbation.' No, no, no. Listen to the song. This guy is a loser.” Joel went on to have over two-dozen top 10 hits and would later wage some addiction battles of his own.

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