Question: is we didn't start the fire about the cold war

Answer: No, Joel got the idea for the song when he had just turned 40. He was in a recording studio and met a friend of Sean Lennon who had just turned 21 who said ``It's a terrible time to be 21!'' Joel replied to him, ``Yeah, I remember when I was 21 -- I thought it was an awful time and we had Vietnam, and y'know, drug problems, and civil rights problems and everything seemed to be awful.'' The friend replied, ``Yeah, yeah, yeah, but it's different for you. You were a kid in the fifties and everybody knows that nothing happened in the fifties''. Joel retorted, ``Wait a minute, didn't you hear of the Korean War or the Suez Canal Crisis?'' Joel later said those headlines formed the basic framework for the song.