Captain Jack

This song is based on a real person: A drug dealer who lived near Joel in Oyster Bay, New York. But, as the singer explained in a 1975 interview with ZigZag, the character "Captain Jack" was a composite of different kinds of people. Said Joel: "I was just sitting around one day looking out of the window wondering what I was going to write about, and kinda wrote about what was going on outside. I mean, Long Island is a suburb and it was about a suburban type of character. There's a lot of frustration living in the suburbs - you don't have an identity as you would if you came from the city or the country, there's city music and there's country music, but there's really no suburban music, you kinda copy the city. You have both influences pulling on you."

Joel considers this an anti-drug song, as he sings about how their users become apathetic and lifeless. Before playing the song at concerts, Joel has explained to the audience that the song is about spoiled, lazy, apathetic young college students who don't care about much other than partying and having sex; their family has money and paid for them to receive a good education, but they toss it away and don't care for anything except 'good ol' Captain Jack. "I was puzzled as to why young, affluent suburban kids would go to score drugs from a guy in a housing project," said Joel. "How bad can life be where you have to get that junked out?"

While many songs contain references to masturbation (check out "She Bop" or "Whip It"), this is one of the few that actually uses the word "masturbate" in the lyrics. Joel says that his record company, Columbia, has never interfered with his music and made no effort to change it.