A teenager then known as William Martin Joel lived in the working-class suburb of Hicksville -- his family so limited that they didn't own a TV. He took a tiring minimum-wage job dredging oysters.
The dredge crisscrossed the waters of Long Island Sound, including a bay that curves like a comma and faces some of the most expensive real estate in the United States. From the boat, he could see a stately brick mansion.
"Rich bastards," he thought to himself. "I'll never live in a house like that."
Several decades and dozens of Top 40 hits later, Billy Joel -- the oysterman turned piano man -- bought that very mansion on Centre Island in 2002.
Joel, 75, has told that story many times, right down to throwing in the vulgarity, maybe because it's so unbelievable: "The word that applies is 'absurd.' I grew up in a quarter-acre lot house in Hicksville. And I would ride my bicycle up here and take a bike ride and look at all the rich people and cuss them out," he says.
On Wednesday, a team of real estate agents and publicists working on his behalf held an open house to sell the property. The listing price is $49.9 million.
The hourslong affair was by invitation only, and high-end real estate agents arrived by speedboat. Potential buyers are in the 0.1 per cent -- at least one billionaire and the representative of a Brussels-based hedge fund were expected to tour the home. Among Joel's former neighbors are Rupert Murdoch, Sean Hannity and one of the heirs to the Exxon Mobil fortune, say his staff.
It's a crowd that is a world away from the one Joel used to inhabit, his identity and music closely tied with Long Island's working class.
Hicksville, where he grew up in the 1950s and '60s, is less than 15 miles away from his mansion. When President John F Kennedy was assassinated, his mother sent him to a nearby store to rent a TV. He returned with the TV on a dolly, explained his biographer Fred Schruers.
Though Joel's family didn't have a television set, they did have a beat-up Lester upright piano, and his mother insisted he take lessons, Schruers said. Eager to go out and play with his friends, Joel resented practicing, so he learned to imitate the style of Beethoven just well enough to make his mother think that he was following the sheet music, he said.
He tried to embed those modest musical roots into the property when he first bought it by naming it "MiddleSea" -- a reference to its location in the middle of the sea, on a spit that juts out with Oyster Bay on one side and Cold Spring Harbor on the other. But it's also a double entendre referring to the note of middle C, the first key that beginning piano players learn.
"If it's not for me being able to take piano lessons, I probably would never have been able to afford a highflying property like this. So, I named it after the first note which I learned on the piano, which was C," he explained.
The highflying property at 26 acres has a main house, a beach house and two guesthouses, totaling 18 bedrooms, 16 bathrooms, three swimming pools, a bowling alley and a helipad.
The expansiveness of the grounds are hard to put into words, so I walked from one end of the property line to the other. At a brisk pace, it took me 9 minutes 3 seconds, almost the same amount of time that it takes me to walk seven city blocks in Manhattan.
Guests and Joel get around in golf carts -- electric ones, his property manager is quick to note.
A sandy beach, stretching over 2,000 feet, graces the edge of the property.
On Long Island's "Gold Coast," as the area is known, "it's rare to find a property with 200 feet of beach," said Emmett Laffey, CEO of Berkshire Hathaway HomeServices, who is representing Joel in the sale of the property.
The singer still owns other property on Long Island, including a home in Sag Harbor, but his base is now in Florida, where his two youngest daughters, ages 7 and 9, are enrolled in school. "Once they started going to school, you're kind of locked in," Joel said.
That's one reason he's selling. There's also a more mundane concern: taxes.
At $567,686, the yearly taxes on the property are more than the median sales price of a single-family home in the United States. "It's not cheap, let's put it that way," he said. "As successful I've been financially, yeah, that's, you know, that's a lot."
The home first went up for sale last year. A renovation that involved replacing all the bathroom fixtures, putting in brand-new marble floors, revamping the kitchens and redoing the brick walkways and patios, was still underway -- tarps covered certain rooms and it didn't show well, said Laffey. It was taken off the market and re-listed last month after the renovations were completed, with a bump in the price tag to $49.9 million from $49 million.
To market a property at this price point, an "elevated open house" was apropos. Liveried waiters served shrimp and goat cheese hors d'oeuvres, as classical music poured out from a property-wide speaker system.
The group of high-end agents who arrived by speedboat to tour the property were seeing it for the first time the way Joel first saw it -- from the coast, except that he was on an oyster boat and the guests arrived clutching luxury purses.
One woman from the group took off her heels and ran back barefoot, after realizing she had forgotten her Dior purse on the dock -- the group had stopped to take photos against the shimmering water.
"This is so nice," said one. "Gorgeous," said another, as the mansion on the hill came into focus. "What a view," said a third.
What they toured was actually a restoration. Joel's property manager, Chad Nuzzi, discovered blueprints and plans, dated 1913 and signed by George Bullock, a railway magnate, in a tucked-away closet. The property had been called "Yeadon," thought by Joel and his staff to be a reference to Bullock's ancestral village in England, and had been subdivided into four lots.
In the years that followed, Joel said he worked to reconstitute the original estate -- re-creating a piece of land of Gatsbian proportions. (The trust that bought the original parcel in 2002 is listed as "F. Scott LLC," a possible reference to F. Scott Fitzgerald.)
Joel has lived a life of luxury there. As fans of the working class nostalgia embedded in his songs filled up Madison Square Garden again and again, Joel headed to the concert venue by helicopter -- a 13-minute ride from tail up to tail down -- from his helipad.
Not bad for a former oysterman.
"I love this property. I don't think there's a property as beautiful as this," he said. "It's got that Gatsby sense to it, which I dreamed about as a little boy. When I hand over the keys, there'll be some regret."