Reaction To Song in Allentown
The song was met with mixed responses in Allentown. Some criticized the song as degrading and full of working-class archetypes. But when Joel returned to the area following the album's release and the song became a hit record, he was awarded the key to the city by Allentown's mayor, who praised it as "a gritty song about a gritty city."
Before a sold-out crowd at Stabler Arena in neighboring Bethlehem, People magazine reported that Joel was greeted enthusiastically with a five minute standing ovation as he closed his third encore with "Allentown." At the end of the song and extended ovation, Joel was greeted with even more sustained applause when, in an apparent defense of the song's meaning, he pointedly told the Allentown crowd, as is his wont at the end of every one of his concerts: "Don't take any shit from anybody."
Read more about this topic: Allentown (song)
Famous quotes containing the words reaction to, reaction and/or song:
“In a land which is fully settled, most men must accept their local environment or try to change it by political means; only the exceptionally gifted or adventurous can leave to seek his fortune elsewhere. In America, on the other hand, to move on and make a fresh start somewhere else is still the normal reaction to dissatisfaction and failure.”
—W.H. (Wystan Hugh)
“In a land which is fully settled, most men must accept their local environment or try to change it by political means; only the exceptionally gifted or adventurous can leave to seek his fortune elsewhere. In America, on the other hand, to move on and make a fresh start somewhere else is still the normal reaction to dissatisfaction and failure.”
—W.H. (Wystan Hugh)
“There’s something wonderfully exciting about the quiet sing song of an aeroplane overhead with all the guns in creation lighting out at it, and searchlights feeling their way across the sky like antennae, and the earth shaking snort of the bombs and the whimper of shrapnel pieces when they come down to patter on the roof.”
—John Dos Passos (1896–1970)