IT'S BETTER THAN DRINKIN' ALONE: The Official ILM Track-by-Track BILLY JOEL Listening Thread

(Just thought I'd beat the rest of you to writing out that last sentence.)

(see also: warren zevon)

ATTENTION! NATALIE MAINES IS NOT A LESBIAN.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wPxllU2WUak

I know singers have been tweaking lyrics to suit their gender/orientation for decades, but shifting it from first-person to third-person changes the context too much.

centuries

The song's vagueness--he likes this woman, but can't quite isolate her particular qualities--nicely mirrors my own ambiguous feelings towards it.

It's a vague sentiment, sure, but it's light-years better than "Always a Woman," in which the message is "she's a heinous bitch but I like her anyway."

i like this, nice little song

love the cover, i love how period it looks, like it could be some long forgotten "lost classic" reissued by Light in the Attic

though I'm pretty impressed, for a first song on a first album this feels very much like a "Billy Joel" song, like he's got his aesthetic and identity right out of the gate, like Black Sabbath or something

new goal of this listening thread: to pinpoint the moment he loses his hopeful high voice

The vagueness also makes it one of VERY FEW love songs that a father could plausibly dedicate to a daughter and have it come off in a not-totally-creepy way.

This may venture into uber-maudlin TMI territory, but: the line "she's got a smile that heals me" does in fact make me think of my daughter. I know it's corny as hell but there it is.

no that's otm

and lovely <3

for a first song on a first album this feels very much like a "Billy Joel" song, like he's got his aesthetic and identity right out of the gate, like Black Sabbath or something

haha. but i'm not sure he truly finds his "billy joel" voice until track 3 on this album.

his hopeful high voice

sounds like he's channelling paul mccartney via emitt rhodes, who at this particular point in time was making better billy joel records than billy joel was.

true!

I don't know if its the pitch issue, but his voice sounds more shaky than I expected. Starting from "Piano Man" on, his voice has a confidence that he never loses - I just figured he always had it. Interesting to hear, actually

i think he's trying to go for lilting & comes off as slightly petrified haha

yeah track three is KEY to joel's entire steez going forward, looking forward to that.

agreed about trying to sound lilting. ATTILA reminds us that he did already know how to sing in a more forceful and confident manner, so this here is as much a "poetic" affectation as his bellows over there are an attempt to find his "hard rock" voice.

"maybe i'm amazed" is a very apt comparison - and it, too, wasn't a hit until a live album years later! I picture joel watching it rise on the charts in 1976, clenching his fists, blood boiling at the CSH screwups all over again, and swearing that if HE ever gets big enough to merit a live album, he knows just what the single will be and won't THAT show 'em all? "your song" also probably had to be on somebody's mind, the label's if not the artist's.

like he's got his aesthetic and identity right out of the gate, like Black Sabbath or something running down the road, trying to loosen its load....

i'm guessing this song's about the other member of attila's wife (later to be his own).

i'd always understood that the "mastering error" is because they wanted to cram too many minutes of music onto the album.

so many wives...

like he's got his aesthetic and identity right out of the gate, like Black Sabbath or something running down the road, trying to loosen its load....

― pplains, Monday, July 17, 2017 12:41 PM (two hours ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

you know...for some reason it never occurred to me till this very second that the protagonist of "Take it Easy" was shitting his pants

i'd lump the eagles in with billy as a band who didn't achieve their full aesthetic and identity until track three of their debut album. chug all night y'all.

i'd always understood that the "mastering error" is because they wanted to cram too many minutes of music onto the album

I hadn't heard that specifically about CSH. But I have heard that "Silver Springs" was kept off Rumours partly because the resulting length would have mean that they could just BARELY fit it in only by narrowing the grooves and unacceptably compromising the bass response.

Tangent: Interesting to think about the degree to which actual physical limitations were relevant - all of this in living memory. Les Paul was faking multitracking by ping-ponging, then the Beatles were on four tracks, then eight, then DSotM, then Steely Dan's automated mixes, then ProTools... all of this has happened within the lifespan of specific known humans. The time from the Wright brother's first flight to walking on muthaflippin moon? Many of us have grandparents who lived through both.

agreed about trying to sound lilting. ATTILA reminds us that he did already know how to sing in a more forceful and confident manner, so this here is as much a "poetic" affectation as his bellows over there are an attempt to find his "hard rock" voice.

Ah gotcha. I ain't heard CSH yet, so I sure as hell ain't heard Attila yet

so....does someone want me to post the next song? We can't break the streak.

I thought "She's Got a Way" was today's song?

yeah i figured that too

let's not pre-empt the Doctor yet

...not a huge fan, but i recently was gifted MFSL flacs from his "classic" years. so i might become a convert during the span of this thread.

the TV show Preacher used Uptown Girl to somewhat amusing effect in a recent episode

Don't know/haven't seen, but The Simpsons owns classic use of that song.

Hey yeah, sorry, was waiting til tonight... I'm stoked that people are gnawing at the bit for this thread!

Our next track underwent some of the biggest alterations in the 1983 remix of Cold Spring Harbor, losing a full three minutes of running time - which, since we're dealing with track two here, seriously affects the pacing of the album. I'm sticking with a 'homemade' pitch-corrected version (credit to YouTuber TheZestanor). Bask in the sudden expansion of the arrangement: drums, searing guitar work, and some sweet sweet backing vocals. It's You Can Make Me Free:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QkNdRLwRLGE

The truncated and otherwise altered 1983 remix can be heard here, as well as on Spotify, etc. The Chipmunk version does not appear to be online anywhere handy, but I think we'll all live without it.

I'm mostly familiar with BJ from The Stranger on, so listening to all these older albums is kind of a neat thing to finally get around to. I've already jumped ahead, of course, but I'm primed.

I'm digging this whole experiment - I own a lot of Joel records and know most of them backwards and forwards, but I also have huge gaps in that listening, and my copy of CSH for example is a Chipmunk edition so I've actually never taken the time to track down corrected versions and pay real attention to (some of) these songs.

wow mccartney much, bill? lol

also it kinda sounds like a guy walking through a sound stage while random people are playing instruments loudly to themselves

you can barely hear him over the piano at first & then when the guitar kicks in it's ok wtf is happening

like i think the guitarist may be playing to a different song than Joel & the drummer

hey man, they made him free

free to do what we wanna do

free to get loaded & to party

and not to keep time or play together really at all

i still kinda like it though

I dig it, but I'm such a Ram stan that I love the idea of someone getting that record day one, devouring it, and entering the studio two months later all keyed up to attempt one's own "Back Seat of My Car." Of course there are earlier McCartney precedents - "Another Day" had been out for a few months longer, and I sorta wish that amid his vocal outbursts at the end he tossed in "JUDE JUDY JUDY JUDY JUDY JUDY JU-DY WAIIIOW!" The backing vocals in particular are a lot closer to Linda's sandy overdubs than anything on Abbey Road, to my ears anyway. This is a really bizarre choice for the second track on a singer-songwriter album but maybe Billy or somebody wanted to make sure you got that he was a rocker, that this wasn't just going to be an album of "Your Song" type ballads.

yeah i think the devout mccarrtneyisms itt to me are what i like about it, as a mccartney fan myself

much more than "she's got a way," i'd say this is his "maybe i'm amazed" moment. or at least his attempt at that moment. it's catchy, but it ain't mccartney-catchy.

maybe the ending jam is a gift to any hassles or attila fans who were still hanging around. with some beatles ah-ah-aah harmonies on top of it just because.

Digging this experiment. I also came in with The Stranger. But, wow, You Can Make Me Free, not so great. Much more pastiche than BJ himself. The underlying song isn't that hot so he just added more and more stuff.

Yeah agree that this is a very weird second track. That jam would disrupt any album momentum. It's a fine song, but I would have thought it was McCartney if I wasn't listening carefully

Everyone OTM this morning.

Gonna wake up the kids with this and tell 'em it's Aerosmith.

lol

I had resigned myself to an entire album of earnest piano ballads, so this was unexpected? I mean, it starts out as something very much in that mode, but then the production/accompaniment just goes kinda bonkers.

these threads (ie this, Eagles, Elton John etc.) seem like some mix of gluttony for punishment, genuine attempts at critical discourse re: artists people don't necessarily like all that much, and semi-closeted fans seeking vindication

not at all sure they beat drinking alone tho

thanks for your contribution

yeah this song was great cod McCartney, it's funny I mean of course Billy Joel loved the Beatles, everyone loved the Beatles but it's kinda funny to me to hear him sound so McCartneyesqe, I never considered him particularly a big Beatles influenced guy in terms of the stuff I knew.

Also the sound quality is crazy bad, like a bootleg or I think veg said upthread a rehearsal tape, which is weird because like this time frame in the industry you just don't hear a lot of bad sounding records, it was such a peak of good producers, good studios, etc, and I looked it up on wiki and it was done at Record Plant and some other big studios....

Since I'm not as familiar with this album as I am with the ones from 52nd Street on, I looked up the credits on Wikipedia, and lo and behold:

Denny Seiwell – drums on "You Can Make Me Free"

Later in the very same month this was recorded, Seiwell would of course be the drummer on the first Wings album, Wild Life.

Love the subtle Mr. Cacciatore call outs

Part 1 was fantastic stuff, felt like everyone was interested in telling it right rather than their own agendas, which is pretty rare. When it ended I realised that was pretty much the point I stopped being a fan (at the tender age of 13) and I can’t imagine part 2 will have much to offer me. But what a superb job by the directors and editors.

yeah, I didn't know anything about Billy's personal life other than the fact he was married to Christie Brinkley (who hasn't even been invoked yet) so when the film first mentions Elizabeth as the wife of his buddy from Atilla and shows her talking on camera for the first time I was like wow, she looks incredible, of course subsequently learning that she became rich along with Billy (often largely due to her managerial wisdom) made it much more explicable.

i really enjoyed her insights into some of the songs, (especially Stiletto!)

I am looking forward to watching this but does it have any sequences of people in front of a mixing console, isolating tracks and remarking on their grooviness?

That is a key feature of rock documentaries and I cannot get enough of it

no it does not

Weirdly, as soon as I turned 50 I started to respect his songcraft a bit more. Not enough to play him on purpose though, lol.

I saw Weird Al at Madison Square Garden last weekend, his first time there. He joked that he only had 149 more to go to beat Billy's record.

Way more interesting than I expected going in. Agree with the point above, part 1 is really the Billy and Elizabeth show. She’s a star, no way Billy’s career does as well without her driving the train.

Also gotta give a shout out to Liberty DeVitto’s “Brooklyn Vinnies” cap. Primo

Garth Durst

Really need a gif of Billy licking his harmonica.

I really don't.

The "Uptown Girl" headlight polishing gif is the only gif I need.

https://i.imgur.com/Wawj5V5.gif

5 hrs of documentary goes by pretty fast...

1. Elizabeth is cool and looks great
2. Christine Brinkley also looks great/has a good plastic surgeon
3. That whole holocaust backstory, was not not prepared for that, seems like the key to his anxious asshole personality.
4. For all the money and success, would anyone want to be Billy? So many people upthread talking about associating this music with childhood (me too) and I wonder if Billy is a 10 year olds idea of an adult, in the same way Jordan Peterson is a stupid persons idea of an intellectual.

And is that some sort of cigar vape he's clutching?

It is indeed. (It's not as 'hmm' as realizing that both his most recent ex-wife and his current spouse are both essentially the same age as Alexa.)

Though no real fan, I did enjoy the watch -- it's a good memory trawl and I pretty much know all the big singles and a couple of deep cuts just through cultural osmosis as a kid so it was a good prompt, and yes, a lot of remarkable comments and points of view beyond Billy himself making it notably better than the norm. (I suspect Bruce's praise in particular will also have caused a lot of 70s/early 80s critics to have felt a REAL burn.) One curious thing about it, though, and I know I'm not the only one who picked up on this: so obviously we get a lot about him as a musician, his training and connections as piano player and songwriter, we also get via the various lyric sheets a hint of him on that front plus the mentions of him being a heavy reader in general and his knowledge of musical theater and so forth, and finally there's plenty of examples of him as a performer throughout his career. The one thing that's kinda missing in the documentary the whole time, outside of just a bare glancing hint here or there: no sense of him as a *singer* -- and I distinguish that from being a performer with stage presence. If he didn't have that going for him, he presumably could just simply have been a songwriter, but no, the guy's got a distinct vocal instrument, and notably (in comparison to Elton, say) he's kept it all this time. It would have been interesting to get more talk on that: not just in terms of influences as such, but whatever training he did or didn't have, how he maintains it, and so forth. It's a little odd to me that it's almost talked around -- maybe everyone just takes it as read? Even so, though.

(Side note too -- I found it verrrrrry interesting that yeah, we get Elizabeth, we unsurprisingly don't get her thieving brother...but nothing from her ABOUT her thieving brother and how his involvement happened to start with? I'm guessing there's some no-go zones/NDAs or something at work. Is the dude even still alive?)

Hey “always a woman”, “just like a woman” called

Saw the doc and it made me a do a complete180 of my opinion of dude

I don’t know what the music is behind these lyrics but they are straight fire

Some people stay far away from the door
If there's a chance of it opening up
They hear a voice in the hall outside
And hope that it just passes by
Some people live with the fear of a touch
And the anger of having been a fool
They will not listen to anyone
So nobody tells them a lie

in the wild: dodgers stadium organist playing "pressure" in the top of the 10th inning in tonight's dodgers-phillies playoff game (even though there were neither two men out nor three men on)

(and again in the 11th, this time with two men out and one man on)

strike one, strike two, what do you know?

cleveland cavaliers center jarrett allen, mic'd up before tonight's cavs-knicks season opener: "i watched this billy joel movie, with jimmy. incredible!"

go cavs!