Captain Jack - Billy Joel (Revisited Drum Cover)

This was one of the first songs I did with a RockBand drumless track in my early YouTube days. This version is closer to the original, but by no means exact! The original drummer was Ronnie Tutt on this studio version. The song has an amazing uplifting feeling for being such a downer lyrically! I found some commentary on what the lyrics mean below!

“Captain Jack" is a song by Billy Joel featured on his 1973 album Piano Man as its closing track with a live version on his 1981 album Songs in the Attic.

Joel wrote "Captain Jack" in late 1971, while sitting in his apartment in Oyster Bay, Long Island, looking out the window, trying to find inspiration for a song. Across the street was a housing project, and he observed suburban teenagers going into the project and obtaining heroin from a dealer known as "Captain Jack". “It's about coming out of the New York suburbs," Joel told John Kalodner in 1974. "But in my travels I have seen a lot of the same suburb all over the country. The song is sort of brutal, but sometimes it is good to be brutal and offend people—it keeps them on their toes.

The song, according to Joel, is an anti-drug song. He says, "What's so horrible about an affluent young white teenager's life that he's got to shoot heroin? 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." In writing about the song in the liner notes of his Songs in the Attic album, Joel once again emphasized the point: "...so many friends shoveled under the Long Island dirt. The miracle of modern chemistry killed them if Vietnam didn't.”

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Gretsch - 14x22
Ludwig Black Beauty - 5x14 Snare Drum
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