Founded in 2004, the Long Island Music & Entertainment Hall of Fame (LIMEHOF) has for two years occupied the former site of the Dogwood Hollow Amphitheatre, where Louis Armstrong performed in 1958. A New Orleanian by birth but longtime resident of Corona, Armstrong was inducted in 2008 alongside the Ramones, Simon & Garfunkel, Walter Becker, Aaron Copland, Neil Diamond, Arlo Guthrie, Barbra Streisand, Carole King, and other artists with less tenuous connections to Long Island (Mariah Carey, LL Cool J, Public Enemy) than these outer-borough natives.
On the morning I arrived, traffic slowed on the outskirts of Stony Brook as rubberneckers stopped to survey the damage from a storm that had reduced Mills Pond to a heap of slathered mud, bursting a dam and flooding surrounding properties. Safe from the wreckage were guitars played by Steve Vai and Sam “Bluzman” Taylor, DMC’s sneakers and Perry Como’s loafers, a glittery Debbie Gibson cocktail number, and an unnervingly humanlike bone from the cover of Twisted Sister’s 1984 LP, Stay Hungry—all in the custody of LIMEHOF, two miles up the road. Joan Jett’s first car, a 1983 Jaguar XJ, was also left unscathed, secure in offsite storage.
One-and-a-half stories of LIMEHOF’s 8,800 square feet currently house a shrine to Mr. Long Island himself—an exhibit called Billy Joel: My Life, A Piano Man’s Journey. Tucked inside the lid of the Kurzweil grand he played on tour with Elton John, where “Long Island Boat & Piano” is emblazoned in cursive, handlers found a pair of black Ray-Bans, a harmonica, and a songbook (Joel’s “Old and New Testament”), all of which now spin prominently atop a turntable by Kevin O’Callaghan, designer of the MTV Movie Awards popcorn trophy displayed upstairs. Copious ephemera that would make any Hard Rock Cafe curator drool circumscribe a narrow trail through the lucrative past of a working man’s multi-millionaire in his fourth decade of semiretirement: vintage instruments, gold and platinum records, chintzy merchandise (much of it baseball-adjacent), and an olive green Harley-Davidson, presumably on loan from 20th Century Cycles, Joel’s bike shop in Oyster Bay.
Does Billy Joel suck? A valid question, but not one that I would recommend asking too loudly around these parts. “Billy’s music,” board member Jeffrey James told me, “appeals to the middle class.” This was more or less confirmed by visitor Gene Backis, who as keyboardist of the Division of Sound once shared a stage (and equipment) with Joel’s early band the Hassles at a church in Queens. As for my Lou Reed T-shirt, worn in measured, city-slicker solidarity, James said, “We love Lou,” a class of 2010 inductee, “but he may not appeal to guys from Levittown—even though he’s from Freeport.”