Billy Joel - 2000 Years Millennium Concert • CDs • Vinyl Records • LPs • Music Albums

reminder of Joel's massively crowd-pleasing way with an arena. 2000 Years opens with quite an unusual one-two punch: a bit of Beethoven's Ninth Symphony going into Joel's characteristically pugnacious Eighties rocker "Big Shot." From then on, the Millennium Concert set list is surprisingly imaginative, including early gems like "Summer, Highland Falls," "The Ballad of Billy the Kid" and "Angry Young Man," as well as more recent, undervalued numbers like "I Go to Extremes" and "Big Man on Mulberry Street." There are also rollicking covers of "Honky Tonk Women" and "Dance to the Music" that prove Billy and the band know how to kick out the party-rock jams -- even if, as Joel has claimed, his future may be more in the Beethoven bag than in the "Big Shot" direction. (RS 840)

DAVID WILD