"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.
It is considered by some to be the most important and pivotal of his early compositions because his performance of the song at an April 15, 1972, live radio concert at Sigma Studios on WMMR in Philadelphia, and the subsequent airplay this live version received on the station, brought him to the attention of major record labels, including Columbia, with whom he would sign a recording contract in 1973.
Composition
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."
Pre-release
To promote his debut album, Cold Spring Harbor, Joel undertook a tour that lasted through most of the spring and into the early summer of 1972. One of the people who noticed and liked the LP was the music director of Philadelphia radio station WMMR-FM, Dennis Wilen. He arranged to have Joel perform a concert for radio-station listeners who won tickets. On Saturday night, April 15, 1972, Joel performed an hour-long concert in front of these contest winners at Sigma Sound Studios in Philadelphia. Joel and his touring band from 1971 to 1972 (Larry Russell on bass guitar, Al Hertzberg on lead guitar, Rhys Clark on drums) performed 12 songs, seven from Cold Spring Harbor and five songs he had not yet recorded. Some of the songs were later recorded for the Piano Man LP, including "The Ballad of Billy the Kid", "Travelin' Prayer", and "Captain Jack".
"Captain Jack" was immediately embraced by WMMR's audience. For the next year and a half, the station kept its live version of the song in regular rotation. Listeners called in, wanting to know where they could find the song and on what album it appeared. The song was such a big hit in Philadelphia that several New York radio stations got their own tape copies and began to play it as well. Though Columbia Records' then-president, Clive Davis, first noticed Joel at the Mar y Sol festival in Puerto Rico on Easter Sunday, April 2, 1972, the constant airplay of Joel's unreleased song kept the label's attention. Columbia Records did their best to track Joel down. After turning down a record deal from Atlantic Records, Joel signed with Columbia in the spring of 1973.
Release and reaction
"Captain Jack" was one of the 10 songs recorded in Los Angeles for Joel's Columbia debut, Piano Man. It quickly became a staple of FM rock stations after the album's release in November 1973. This, along with "Piano Man", "The Entertainer", and "New York State of Mind", were the songs that Joel was best known for before the release of The Stranger in 1977.