Gateway To Geekery: Billy Joel

Geek Obsession – Billy Joel: Billy Joel is one of the few artists who genuinely needs no introduction. A giant of the music industry from the early 70's until his final album in 1993, Joel has enjoyed commercial success like virtually no-one else. Currently ranked as the third highest selling solo artist in American music history, his commercial success has been vast, and while well-appreciated as both a musician and songwriter credibility has rarely been one of Joel’s hallmarks. Since officially ending his recording career in 1993 after a run of twelve studio albums, Joel has continued to tour to record-breaking success.  He is now so popular that he's become a resident and franchise of Madison Square Gardens in New York City, performing one concert per month indefinitely, and was awarded the Kennedy Centre Honours in 2013 for his lifetime contribution to American culture. Despite a troubled personal life that’s taken in three marriages, depression, a suicide attempt and alcohol dependency issues, Joel has managed to produce music successfully for three decades and remains an inescapable part of American music in the 20th century.



Why it’s Daunting: The credibility deficit. Joel’s a well-loved, popular and vastly successful artist in his own right, but announcing yourself as a Billy Joel fan is as likely to be met with eye-rolls or “the piano guy? Really?”-type comments as it is with “oh yea, I love him too!” For an artist of such wide appeal, that’s surprising. Despite being a gifted, talented musician the gap between success and respect remains a yawning chasm to cross. Equally, some of his material is so well-known it’s near-impossible to come to it with fresh ears and, as is not uncommon with hugely successful commercial acts, their best known material often just isn’t their strongest. “Just The Way You Are” probably symbolizes that as much as any other song in his back catalogue – it was a massive hit in its own right, has been covered by everyone from Barry White to Frank Sinatra (with varying degrees of success), and is probably as well-known as any other Joel song, with the possible exception of “Uptown Girl”. But like “Uptown Girl”, and despite its popularity, it’s hardly Joel’s finest work - the production, on the otherwise stellar The Stranger, is uninspired, the lyrics rather clichéd, and the vocal performance a little under-heated yet over-sincere.  It's easy to see why it would be as much as a barrier as it would a gateway.


Potential Gateway: Glass Houses



There are quite a few Billy Joel albums that could act as a potential gateway and choosing just one is no easy task. 1977’s The Stranger was Joel’s breakthrough album, catapulting him from a mildly successful musician to one of the year’s most triumphant artists and spawning, in “Just The Way You Are”, one of his signature songs. The follow-up, 52^nd Street, shifted over seven million units off the back of the success of The Stranger and produced a string of successful singles in its own right. Yet Glasses Houses is arguably one of the most Billy Joel-y albums in his back catalogue. While both The Stranger and 52^nd Street focus on predominantly piano-driven songs, Glass Houses has a wider range to it and is more guitar-oriented, while at the same time allowing all the familiar Joel-isms to shine through (it also doesn't peter out the way 52^nd Street does).

Glass Houses saw Joel stretching his songwriting skills just a bit further than had been the case on the previous few albums and, with the release of “It’s Still Rock’n’Roll To Me”, another one of his signature songs and his first Billboard 100 Number One. It’s a deceptively simple song, built around a pulsing bass-line, with a call-and-response lyric (both sides of which are delivered by Joel in fine voice, one side delivered innocently, the other snidely) decrying the importance of image in music as the expense of the actual music by drawing analogies with other walks of line ( “what’s the matter with the car I’m driving / can’t you tell that it’s out of style?” and “what’s the matter with the clothes I’m wearing / can’t you tell that your tie’s too wide?”, amongst others), and a blistering sax solo in the middle just to keep things moving along.

In fact the album is lyrically stronger than anything in his back catalogue up to this point, whether it’s an unlikely ode to phone sex (“Sometimes A Fantasy”), the relaxed, gentle self-mockery of “I Don’t Want To Be Alone” or the pointed, bitter cynicism of “Close To The Borderline”. The latter, especially, feels like a refreshing step away from Joel’s more traditional material and showcases his emerging socio-political interests (which would gain much more traction on the follow-up and career-best album The Nylon Curtain), with a lyric concerned with modern life in all its most miserable facets (“young girl standing on the ledge looks like another suicide / She’s gotta hit those bricks coz the news at six / gotta stick to a deadline") and futile ironies (“I need a doctor for my pressure pills / I need a lawyer for my medical bills”). It’s a blunt, direct song that wastes no time with subtleties or shades of grey and shows him at his angriest, the song being driven by angular guitars and a furious vocal. But one of the pleasures of Glass Houses is its range of emotions, and the anger sits equally comfortably alongside a traditional Joel ballad like “Through The Long Night”, which follows “Close To The Borderline” and closes out the album, without either seeming out of place. It’s an album of broad strokes, opening with the shattering of glass, a payoff from the cover art, which shows on the front a leather-clad Joel holding a rock in front of a glass house and on the back a picture of him wearing an “oh-well” expression in front of a broken window like a naughty schoolboy. Even this connection between cover and execution show more attention to detail than we've had in the past. And it all ends with a calm, quiet moment of reflection. At once playful, self-aware and driven it has matured nicely and become one of Joel’s finest works.


Next Steps:



Both the aforementioned The Stranger and 52^nd Street are strong albums in their own right. The former made Joel as a recording artist and began his seemingly-immovable presence in the charts until 1993’s successful but underwhelming swansong, River Of Dreams.  The latter features some of his most well-known and beloved hits, including the sneering “Big Shot” and the calm, factually-stated “fuck you” that is “My Life”. Both make great entries to Joel’s work in their own right. Yet 1982’s The Nylon Curtain although noticeably less well-known rewards further listening much more. With The Nylon Curtain the steps into a more socially-conscious mode of writing which began on Glass Houses really take root, but the album is produced much less lushly than anything that came either before or after in Joel’s catalogue, with a harsher, more spartan feel to it.

As with Glass Houses the album opens with a sound effect (here an end-of-shift whistle blowing), before launching into “Allentown”, the second single released from the album, concerned as it is with the decline of the American steel industry and the failures of the American Dream during the Reagan years. In common with most of the tracks on the album, the lyrics are direct and simply stated, yet draw their power from the simplicity of the couplets – as an opening line “Well we’re living here in Allentown / And there’re closing all the factories down” doesn’t leave a lot of room for doubt as to where the song is going. This approach reaches its height on “Goodnight Saigon”, a song Joel wrote about the Vietnam war and the many friends he had who fought in it. It’s not an anti-war song per se, so much as it’s about the experiences of the soldiers who fought, and he allows through those experiences listeners to draw their own conclusions without the need to make overt, trite “war is bad” statements. The simplicity of the lyric, based on stories returning vets told Joel, allows each couplet to deliver its own statement without ever becoming melodramatic or over the top, and it can be brutal in its juxtaposition of the fictions and realities of war (“we came in spastic / like tameless horses / we left in plastic / as numbered corpses”). It’s one of Joel’s most affecting and powerful songs. Even the traditional Billy Joel ballad (“She’s Right On Time”) feels a little harsher on The Nylon Curtain, and the albums two most vicious songs, the story-of-a-stalker “Laura” and the “I Am The Walrus”-meets-a-nervous-breakdown of the peerless “Scandinavian Skies” show Joel’s darker, more confrontational side. The album ends with “Where’s The Orchestra?” leading into a gentle, string arrangement that calls back to “Allentown”s melody, ending the album on a wistful note after the anger and misery of what came before it.

The elephant in the room of Billy Joel albums is An Innocent Man, released in 1983. Another huge success for Joel, it’s the only album in his back catalogue which was self-consciously designed for a purpose, in this case recapturing the feel of the music Joel grew up with in the 50's and early 60's, specifically doo-wop and soul. The best known song from the album is, of course, “Uptown Girl” (though it only charted at number three, compared with “Tell Her About It”, which was a Number One), and as a whole it’s a relaxed, breezy album with no goal other than to entertain, and is a marked, sharp contrast to The Nylon Curtain released just one year previously. Joel’s voice has rarely sounded better, and a succession of hits followed, but appreciation of what has become a sharply divisive album is likely to be dependent on how you feel about a white, middle-aged man singing 80's pastiches of 50s doo-wop and soul. Some love it, some don’t.



Where Not To Start:



The first album Billy Joel released under his own name, after a few years of knocking around in other bands, was Cold Spring Harbour and it’s entirely unremarkable, despite a couple of the songs becoming concert favourites (mostly off the back of the live recordings on Songs In The Attic rather than from the album itself though). The two albums that follow, Piano Man and Streetlife Serenade are both interesting in their own way, but don’t make for the best entry and musically feel very unrepresentative of what Joel became. Both were recorded in Los Angeles rather than Joel’s native New York and have an entirely different dimension to his more familiar material and sound. Piano Man, of course, contains the most archetypal of all Billy Joel songs in its title track (though it was only a modest success at the time of its release), and “Captain Jack” became a staunch favourite (with the memorable couplet, “You’re sister’s gone out, she’s on a date / And you just sit at home, and masturbate”, which isn’t a line everyone could pull off). As an album though, it wanders through a variety of styles without really settling on anything and as a result feels somewhat fractured. Streetlife Serenade does settle on a style, full of twangy guitars, desert stylings and lack of direction and it’s not an especially fruitful one. There are at least a few gems to enjoy - “The Entertainer” is amusingly self-aware, “Last Of The Big Time Spenders” is a big Billy Joel ballad in a style he would go on to make his own, and “Root Beer Rag” is a terrifically energetic piano instrumental. But beyond that it’s a dusty, directionless album that shows little of the flair that would come to characterise Joel’s later work.

At the other end of his career, Storm Front launched the inescapable single “We Didn’t Start The Fire”, a massive worldwide success for Joel with a scattershot lyric in the vein of “Subterranean Homesick Blues” or “It’s The End Of The World As We Known it (And I Feel Fine)”, which put Joel back on the map after the disappointments of the largely terrible 1986 effort The Bridge. The album shows Joel trying to reinvent himself, getting rid of most of his backing band to shake up the sound and going for a cleaner production, parting ways with long-term producer Phil Ramone and replacing him with Mick Jones (yes, the one from Foreigner). It’s a very 80’s album, slick and well put together but largely unaffecting, and displays little of the charm that makes Joel’s music such a pleasure. The last proper studio album, River of Dreams, is better produced but in service of inferior material – there’s a few highlights such as the pop-soul of the title track, and “All About Soul” has some real spark to it, but elsewhere things fall flat - “No Mans Land” growls away to ineffective nothingness, “The Great Wall Of China” with it’s Kinks-derived guitar riff sounds petulant rather than angry, and it all ultimately tails off with a couple of saccharine ballads. It’s a disappointing end to the career of one of the giants of American recorded music.



Potential Gateway Playlist:


Big Shot


Running On Ice


The Entertainer


We Didn’t Start The Fire


Close To The Borderline


Scandinavian Skies


It’s Still Rock’n’Roll To Me


New York State Of Mind


Captain Jack


She’s Always A Woman


An Innocent Man


Piano Man


Weekend Song


My Life


Movin’ Out (Anthony’s Song)


Worst Comes To Worst


Only The Good Die Young


Laura


The Downeaster “Alexia”


Baby Grand


Vienna


Where’s The Orchestra?