Sweet Sixteen by Billy Idol

Billy Idol spent most of the 1980s sneering. "Rebel Yell" and "White Wedding" made him a star on attitude, leather and a fist in the air. Then, in April 1987, he put out a quiet acoustic song about a Latvian stonemason who spent almost thirty years carving a castle out of coral for a girl who never came to see it. "Sweet Sixteen" became one of his biggest hits. The story behind it is stranger than anything in his louder songs.

The idea came from television. Idol watched "The Castle of Secrets," an episode of Leonard Nimoy's series In Search of..., which looked at Coral Castle in south Florida and the man who built it. Edward Leedskalnin was born in Latvia in 1887. By his own account, he was engaged to Agnes Skuvst, a girl ten years younger. She called off the wedding the day before it was due to happen. She thought he was too old and too poor. Leedskalnin left for America and drifted for years before he settled in Florida.

In 1923 he started building. He worked alone, quarrying oolite limestone (locals call it coral) and shaping it with pulleys and simple tools. He stood about five feet tall and weighed around 100 pounds. He had a fourth-grade education and had survived tuberculosis. By the time he died in 1951 he had moved about 1,100 tons of stone. The pieces fit together with no mortar. There is a 30-ton block, two 25-foot monoliths, a sundial, a table shaped like Florida, chairs that rock, and a gate weighing nine tons that turns on a pivot so well balanced that a child can push it open with one finger.

Leedskalnin built the first version in Florida City. Around 1936, worried that a housing development would crowd him out, he took the whole thing apart and moved it ten miles north to Homestead. He charged visitors ten cents, later a quarter. Anyone with no money got in free. When people asked him why he had built it, he gave the same answer every time: it was for his Sweet Sixteen. Agnes never visited. He never married.

Idol saw his own life in it. He had been with the dancer Perri Lister since the early 1980s. By the time he wrote the song, they were apart. Lister was the woman behind several of his songs, "Rebel Yell" among them. In his 2014 memoir, Dancing with Myself, Idol called "Sweet Sixteen" a "heartfelt lament." He drew the line himself. Coral Castle was Leedskalnin's memorial to the woman who left him. The song was his memorial to Lister. He also quoted Leedskalnin's stock reply in the book, the one about the castle being "for my Sweet Sixteen."

Idol wrote the song years before anyone heard it. It dates from the Rebel Yell sessions in 1983, when he and guitarist Steve Stevens were making the loudest record of his career. "Sweet Sixteen" did not fit there. It sat on the shelf until Whiplash Smile, his third album, which came out in 1986 with Keith Forsey producing again. By then synthesizers and drum machines were all over Idol's sound. "Sweet Sixteen" went the other way.

The track is close to bare. Stevens plays a looping acoustic figure that repeats like a music box. The percussion stays far in the background. Idol sings low and soft, almost under his breath. There is no big guitar solo and no shouted chorus. For a singer known for the sneer, it was a sharp change. The lyric reads like a man talking to himself, building something that will last because the person he built it for will not.

Chrysalis released it as the album's third single, after "To Be a Lover" and "Don't Need a Gun," on 7-inch, 12-inch and cassette, with the album track "Beyond Belief" on the B-side. It reached No. 20 on the Billboard Hot 100 and No. 17 in the UK. It charted across Europe as well. Of his dozen Top 50 hits in the US, it ranks fifth.

Two videos were made for it. The first, directed by Peter Sinclair, is in black and white and shows Idol alone in an empty room with an acoustic guitar. The second, in color, went to the source: it was filmed at Coral Castle itself, with Idol among the stone chairs and the moon crescents Leedskalnin carved. The castle still has framed photos of his visit on display in its gift shop.

In 2001 Idol played a semi-acoustic set for VH1 Storytellers. "Sweet Sixteen" was part of it. That performance later came out on CD.

Coral Castle is still open in Homestead. It was added to the National Register of Historic Places in 1984. Visitors take a guided or audio tour past the same gate, the same rocking chair and the same heart-shaped table Leedskalnin made. People still argue about how a 100-pound man moved 30-ton blocks by himself. He left a few pamphlets about magnetism and one called A Book in Every Home, with blank pages for readers to fill in. He never explained the method.

The song runs at about 78 beats per minute in A minor. The full breakdown is on the "Sweet Sixteen" key and BPM page. The rest is in the lyric. One man carved coral in the Florida heat for a girl who stayed home. Sixty years later, another man wrote about him.