Coast To Coast: Billy Joel’s “Stop In Nevada”

by Kevin Burton

   On the Billy Joel portion of our rock and roll road trip you could have reasonably expected “New York State of Mind” or even “Allentown.” Instead we swing west to look at “Stop In Nevada.”

    This song fits very well into our road-trip theme.

   Today’s tale includes one of the more hilarious, ridiculous cases of misheard lyrics in my personal rock and roll journey, as well as a sincere much-belated apology.  First here’s some info about Stop In Nevada.

   “In 1973, Joel released his second studio album Piano Man. The singles “Piano Man” and “Captain Jack” rocketed up the charts,” wrote Suzanne Van Rooyen on the SongFacts website. “But it’s the second song on side two of the album that speaks to the soul about letting go of an unsatisfying life to embark on an interstate journey towards a brighter future.”

   “Stop in Nevada  tells the story of a woman who leaves her husband with nothing but a little letter before she heads out west to California. This echoes Billy Joel’s own migration from the Bronx where he was born, to music lounges in L.A. where he sought fame and fortune, and found it with his nostalgic “Piano Man.”

   “It was perhaps the Beat generation and the likes of Jack Kerouac who romanticized the epic road-trip,” Van Rooyen wrote. “There is nothing quite like being in a car with the tires gobbling up the asphalt, the road snaking through ever-changing vistas while the wind whips through your hair and a favorite song blasts on the radio.”

   “Years after Kerouac made his controversial journey across the United States documenting his odyssey in what would become the literary classic On the Road, Billy Joel also sang about the great trek west, which so many people make: searching for themselves, for a dream, for something different, if not better.
   “Stop in Nevada” may not be the first song people think to include on the iPod when planning a road-trip, but the sentiment of the song is an enduring one as every new generation embarks on the search for adventure, for self and for a better life.

   The whole journey west thing resonated with me back in the day, as a child of divorce shuttling between Ohio and Kansas.  These days I hear the song and can’t get past the trashed wedding vows of the protagonist. It holds a very different spin.

   But when I was young I had a job as a teacher of English as a Second Language in Puebla, Mexico. As a big Billy Joel guy, when it came time on my school’s  curriculum to transcribe a song in English, I bypassed popular demand for some Whitney Houston song and picked this quite obscure Billy Joel tune.

   There were some phrases I wanted to teach. I though the lyric “it never quite got off the ground” would be helpful to know and understand as students tried to master idiomatic American English. Also, “she’s a rocket on the Fourth of July” was a good word picture I wanted to break down.

   The first chorus is “Oh, and now she’s headin’ out to California. It’s been a long time comin’ but she’s feeling like a woman tonight. And she left a little letter said she’s gonna make a stop in Nevada. Goodbye, goodbye.

   But what I heard was “and she left a little lettuce and she’s gonna make a stop in Nevada.”

   Lettuce is a slang term for money (see also, cabbage). I thought Joel’s female character had left some money with her husband before leaving him.

    I totally stood up in front of that class and taught the song with lettuce in it.

   OK, you people who are laughing at me now, I’d like to look into some of the things you heard but didn’t hear over the years!

   Understand, Billy Joel is a New Yorker. He did not enunciate the R in letter. The next word started with an S sound and it all ran together.

   So this is all somewhat understandable at least.

   Nevertheless I feel compelled to issue my profound apology to those students who trusted me with their language instruction.  Though I didn’t know squat about teaching, I should have been better versed in Billy Joel.