Pressure: The Unrelenting Underlying Cause | Sober and Unashamed

I attended a Billy Joel concert at Giants Stadium in East Rutherford, New Jersey about 30 years ago. When he played one of his biggest hits, “Pressure,” he had two grand pianos on stage. They were carefully positioned with a precise distance between the keyboards. At one point in the song, there is a brief lull between piano notes — just a few seconds. To illustrate the title of the song, he hit the last note before the lull on one of the pianos, sprinted to the other piano, and arrived just in time to pick up the piano part without missing a note.

Self-inflicted pressure.

That’s something alcoholics like me know a lot about.

The concert was good. The performer was, and still is, legendary. One of the only things I remember about a good concert from three decades ago delivered by a legendary performer is that pressure-packed sprint between pianos. He didn’t have to do that. He could have had the pianos placed a few feet closer, and jogged or trotted the distance, and still made his point. But he is a showman with a complicated relationship with pressure — he needs it at the same time as it tears him apart, slowly, insidiously. Of course, I don’t know that. I’ve never asked him. But he has publicly owned his challenges with alcohol, and he didn’t rise to the top of his fickle…