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

A bit more background before our next song... so Billy spends late '71 and '72 on the road, playing shows. Wiki tells us that the band consisted of Rhys Clark (drums), Al Hertzberg (guitar) and Larry Russell (bass). Clark had been on the record, the rest not AFAICT. They opened "for groups such as the J. Geils Band, The Beach Boys, and Taj Mahal," which sounds like pretty good work!

http://www.onefinalserenade.com/uploads/2/9/1/2/2912571/billy-1971_1_orig.jpg https://s-media-cache-ak0.pinimg.com/originals/16/fa/86/16fa864f13b27aa1dfe0440971bbf584.jpg

As noted above, someone from Columbia (I said Clive Davis, but Wiki says Herb Gordon) notices the "Captain Jack" buzz in Philly and gets him signed up, though as we've discussed, Ripp held on to a piece of Joel for basically forever. As best as I can reconstruct events through very lazy Internet research, relocates to Los Angeles late in '72 with Elizabeth, she his lyrical muse and manager, formerly wed to his Attila bandmate. He picks up a piano-bar gig for six months or so, which some claim as the source of the "Piano Man" lyric - - - though if you dig around for more than a few minutes you'll find this disputed in the comments section by old-time New York Staters, who will insist variously that it was actually their local bar in Oyster Bay, Huntington, Massapequa, or somewhere up the Hudson. I'm sure people who've read actualy Joel biographies can untangle this - was he searching for inspiration? Biding time until a hole in the studio schedule? No advance from the label? Or just trying to make ends meet, with Eliabeth having a kid from her previous marriage? Anyway, the sessions for his Columbia debut don't begin until September of 1973 - right alongside his marriage to Elizabeth. Congrats!

The new album was produced by Michael Stewart (brother of the Kingston Trio's John, father of Xiu Xiu's John, and veteran of "You Were On My Mind" hitmakers The We Five). Apart from one track carrying Rhys Clark over, it's an all-new lineup of session guys (various players on various tracks), and, when the album drops in November, it's an all-new marketing campaign:

http://www.52ndstreetband.com/img/memoir/pianoman%20poster.jpg

http://www.onefinalserenade.com/uploads/2/9/1/2/2912571/cold-spring-harbor-promo_1.jpg

https://img.discogs.com/xAMg9NxlniJkVu-9coFXAioEf-I=/fit-in/600x600/filters:strip_icc():format(jpeg):mode_rgb():quality(90)/discogs-images/R-1674119-1373588955-6612.jpeg.jpg https://img.discogs.com/L_hukCWbcx68ycA2YUu32VQS4nE=/fit-in/600x600/filters:strip_icc():format(jpeg):mode_rgb():quality(90)/discogs-images/R-1674119-1373588958-7290.jpeg.jpg

The title track is a moderate hit; I'll get into the chart performance details when we get there. Columbia issues three more singles, none of them "Captain Jack" - obscenity concerns? - and while they make far less of a splash, the promotion is enough to get the album to peak at #27 on Billboard - #56 on the year-end pop album chart. Not bad for what is effectively a second debut.

Oh - - - and in one of my biggest and most obvious blind spots as a Joel fan, I've never heard the Piano Man album. Every time I've seen it in the cheapo bin, I pause, think about it, then look again at that cover and go "....nahhhhh." So this is almost all new to me!

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=E1K80k4NLio

Travelin' Prayer kicks off the record, and was later issued as the third single, peaking at #77 (#31 on Easy Listening). It's also one of a couple of Joel songs to get a prominent country cover later on - it won Dolly Parton a Grammy when she covered it in 1999.

And man... what a way to introduce an album called "Piano Man."

It's a'me,

https://s-media-cache-ak0.pinimg.com/originals/16/fa/86/16fa864f13b27aa1dfe0440971bbf584.jpg

I like Parton's cover.

This is OK: he may have himself heard a Parton song or two by this point. Reverse influence!

And man... what a way to introduce an album called "Piano Man."

Not to get ahead of ourselves, not to slam the song-a-day format, but the segue between this one and the title track is one of my favorite of his.

Just on production value alone, this track makes Cold Spring Harbor sound like a paper sack full of gray slush found at the end of the driveway.

yeah no kidding. I don't know if I've ever heard him get this country, but this works just based on the arrangement

The single version, by the way, runs to 3:03 (not quite 3:05, an important number later on). I can't find it online so I'm not sure what was cut, but I have to assume the majority of it is the instrumental jam at the end. Mouth-harp fans were not a key demographic in the early 1970s.

Incidentally, folks here probably know this, but the Easy Listening chart, which would be good to Joel from this point forward, was the precursor to the Adult Contemporary chart. While certainly more laid-back (and overwhelmingly whiter) than the main chart - this is Carpenters territory for sure - it was sonically a little more open than you might expect, and the country flavor of this song may reflect a desire to score with precisely this audience. Just to give a sense of the musical landscape, toppers of this chart in 1973 include Carole King's "Been to Canaan," Weissberg & Mandel's "Dueling Banjos," Edward Bear's "Last Song," Dawn and Tony Orlando's "Tie A Yellow Ribbon," Wings's "My Love," Helen Reddy's "Leave Me Alone (Ruby Red Dress)" and "Delta Dawn," and B.W. Stevenson's marvelous "My Maria." In 1974, when this single came out, highlights include Barbra Streisand's "The Way We Were," Gordon Lightfoot's "Sundown" and "Carefree Highway," MFSB's "TSOP," The Three Degrees' "When Will I See You Again," Dave Loggins's forgotten and underrated "Please Come To Boston," Roberta Flack's "Feel Like Makin' Love," and three each by Reddy and John Denver.

Ready to make that mouth-harp outro my ringtone.

Heard now, this comes off as a bit too self-conscious in its attempt to do country (the fiddles! the banjo! that boingy sound!), but as a performance, it's solid. Agree that it feels like a big leap from both the production and the overall quaintness of CSH; he's making a statement here about his range, and this song is anything but indistinct.

"Captain Jack is one of the strongest musical pieces ever created for the popular music idiom" - haha okay Dennis Fine at Zoo World, pump yr brakes buddy...good tune and all but

also I want a t-shirt with that Mar Y Sol 72 triangle graphic so fucking bad

Travelin' Prayer is an odd concoction!

Like uh....Meatloaf meets Pure Prairie League or something?

haha when the bullfrog jaw harp comes in is great

love the breakneck tempo

drummer on this is great

this song is a lot of fun and yeah the production is such a dramatic step up

Yeah, this is cool! Billy must have been stoked to get home and put *this* on for the first time. Even though I don't normally think of him and country in the same breath, he feels like much more his own person than on the last album - not a lot of McCartney here. But as before, short and sweet, and a nice showcase for his piano skills (tho that's really confined to one stretch in the middle). The rapid-fire phrasing continues the approach from the Falling of the Rain, but with more rests, you can take it in better. I dig this. The forward momentum reminds me a bit of Albert Hammond's "I'm A Train," also released in '74 (and charting higher than anything from this album, though like a lot of Easy Listening hits, totally radio-homeless these days).

it won Dolly Parton a Grammy when she covered it in 1999.

hfs - I love this Dolly album but totally missed that this was a BJ song

has a 70s Gene Clark vibe to it

xxp yeah I was gonna comment something to the effect of "RIP Easy Listening format"

it's pretty much gone the way of the "Oldies" stations, i.e. mostly vanished from the American psyche

Albert Hammond's "I'm A Train,"

goddamn that's a great song

We've touched on the sad decline of Oldies before, maybe in the Three Dog Night thread - tons of great, great songs that I still heard on the radio in the 80s, and maybe some of 'em in dentists' offices through the 90s, but now lost. Particularly sad since the 70s AM gold era (which obviously would overlap a lot with this chart) was basically the best period ever for the marriage of fabulous studio musicians and professional songwriting, imho.

Yes, all those great songs, music that just makes you feel good - but if you had to hunt down all those songs individually, it could take you years, and you could spend hundreds or thousands of dollars... and those scratchy, noisy old records! If only there were an easier way!

i've always adored "travelin' prayer," which absorbs its country and gospel influences casually and confidently, as if this is what billy joel actually sounds like. it's a good, crisp, straightahead country-rock road song. but it's *not* what billy joel actually sounds like, is it?, and i've therefore always found it a strange song to lead off what most of the world thought was his debut album. while there's still more toying with country-rock to come, and while, yeah, there was lot of that in the easy listening air in the early '70s (see also: elton john, of course), it's still basically a career-launching head fake.

this is a good line that sort of acknowledges the head fakiness: "said now if this song seems strange it's just because i don't know how to pray."

well, to be fair, the calling card was really "piano man" as lead single, so unless that completely flopped, they probably figured people arriving at the album would find this an interesting curtain-raiser, where's this headed, seems like it'll be a stylistically diverse album etc. and then maybe if "piano man" did flop they'd have a backup plan: force a bunch of country numbers on him and start repackaging the "john denver of the adironadacks."

goddam this is great

*waves goodbye to Cold Spring Harbor*

it feels like a legit country song, the structure, the repitition, the arrangement: shakey otm about 70's gene clark

has billy talked about how he ended up writing recording this one, where it came from?

and a fkn great way to start an album

i'm excited!

great first cut. not sure it's his most memorable melody or lyrics (despite all the repeated lines) but the beat and the piano chords move really well & pull the listener in.

gonna be a real mood shift in this thread for the next track

The lyrical theme of Travelin' Prayer is also interesting to me - I think of Joel as kind of a tough-talking wiseass, who affects having been around the block, with advice to dispense and judgments to call. Nice hearing him in a position of vulnerability, hoping for the safety and peace of mind of someone else.

^ yeah i liked that too

agreed. a sincere, unselfish, nonjudgmental love song. not sure we're going to see too many more of these as we move forward.

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Piano Man, usually regarded as Billy Joel's signature song, was the first single off his Columbia debut; the single version, which is what a lot of us grew up with (depending which version of Greatest Hits I & II you had!) is a minute shorter, and there was a 3:16 promo release at some point.
This promotional clip might also be of interest, but c'mon, it's all about the full-bellied album version:

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

Released in November, 1973, it was a slow grower, reaching its chart peak of #25 the following April - #4 on Easy Listening. As Wiki reports, being a moderate-size hit, it did not immediately become a radio recurrent; it was after the success of The Stranger several years later that it found its way back into the playlists and gradually became a ubiquitous standard. In Canada it peaked at #10, establishing a solid market for Billy.

As a kid, I thought the crowd at the bar was saying, "sing us the song of a piano man," and Billy was kindly obliging.

same actually!

Something I've never figured out after thirty-some years: what is a "real estate novelist?"

I think "real estate novelist" means that he works as a real estate agent, but really wants to be a novelist. Kinda like working in a piano bar and wanting to be a globally adored rock star.

Anyway I am on record as a moderate BJ stan but this song has never sat well with me for various reasons. I Have Thoughts.

First, one of the minor tyrannies accompanying singer-songwriterdom is the risk of conflation of self with speaker, and a the quicksand of related temptations.

Many s/s types (myself included) want to have it both ways. One wants to be allowed to sing a song like "Honesty" or "She's Got a Way" or "Just the Way You Are" and the presentation is understood as being from the heart, as oneself. Singer-songwriters want to be applauded for their, um, honesty. I'm sure James Taylor and John Denver would co-sign on this desire.

But at the same time, one wants to be permitted to do ventriloquism when it suits one. "Allentown," "The Downeaster Alexa," "Goodnight Saigon" are obvious examples relevant to the thread. Paging a million folkies like Phil Ochs or Richard Shindell (who writes as a biblical woman, a Civil War soldier, or a long-distance trucker as often as he writes as a middle-aged suburban dad).

Case in point: No one asks Levon Helm whether he was actually present during the Civil War. But if he sang a song about being in a band or losing a woman, we'd naturally assume he was Speaking From the Heart.

All of that is a really long and completely pointless introduction to my thoughts about "Piano Man."

The song would be okay in third person (like "Angry Young Man" is).

But in my view it's untenable in first person because it's so self-flattering. "I, the artist, float above this human misery. And by the way everyone loves me because I make them so happy. And, further, I am so awesome that people are surprised that I am doing this instead of being the global superstar I was clearly meant to be."

Which might be true, but it is so douchey to say out loud that I cannot stand to hear it said, and I will change the radio station when this song comes on, despite it being the signature song of an artist I generally either love or tolerate.

By "and a the quicksand of related temptations" I guess I mean the wish to have it both ways.

Personally, if I were a professional songwriter, I would want a song about my tender love for my wife and children to be taken as sincere. But at the same time I would want songs about being a zombie or a psycho killer (or shooting a man in Reno just to watch him die) to be taken as imaginative fictional ventriloquism.

I never need to hear this again (it plays in my head, unbidden, at the slightest jog of memory) but I want to note that My Dick's "Piano Dick" version works pretty well as an antidote

I wish this song sunk into quicksand.

oh man... My Dick... just... wow...

haha you're welcome

I had forgotten about them but thank you, yes

i forgot about my dick, so hilarious

but yeah Piano Man, it's like...I can't even really rate it...it's just "there" like a mountain or "Sweet Caroline" or something so ubiquitous for so many years that it's hard to have any critical thought about it

I'll be an island and say that I still like it. Maybe it's only nostalgia keeping it alive for me at this point but I do enjoy it.

re Ye Mad Puffin, my read is not that he thinks he's so great.
all of these people he sees at the bar have aspirations beyond their day jobs (novelist, politics, movie star etc- and they're all saying to him what are YOU doing here but he's the only one getting paid to be there.
they could all be chasing their dreams but they're all drinking to forget instead

or something like that

it's like the tonic of shared loneliness and disappointment is somehow more powerful than ambition or something

idk

it speaks to me on a small-town level

this song is awful

just give up guys

you may be right
we may be crazy

Wow, I really like Veg's reading! Never occurred to me - I loved the song as a kid but somewhere along the way I settled into finding it kind of douchey. It was evocative of a smoky and fascinating adult world, I loved the cast of characters and pondered the meaning of things I misunderstood (it's not literal bread in the jar - oops) or just plain misheard ("but it's better that drink is alone"). Even if I don't really need to hear it again, ever, I have a baseline affection for it.

YMP's analysis does a great job of articulating the possible douche problems. I wonder, without that "what are YOU doin' here?" would the default reading lean so hard on the songwriter's pretensions? Or would it meanwhile rob the song of something important? I think younger me just took the drama of the situation at face value, not thinking of the narrator as basically patting himself on the back, but just finding something moving in the idea of this great piano player unappreciated in his time. A third-person equivalent might be found in all the "Fool on the Hill" descendents about misunderstood artists - Don McLean's "Vincent" or Brian and Michael's "Matchstalk Men and Matchstalk Cats and Dogs" - which are almost all terrible since now singer and audience are patting themselves on the back for being among the Few Who See. "Deacon Blues" is a first-person version that shreds the illusion - the guy's a wannabe who hasn't even sat down with the instrument, and is looking forward to being an unappreciated loser.

I can imagine a version of "Piano Man" closer to that, maybe - or one more like "Lose Yourself," where Joel dropped some of the pose of a wise man at the piano and more Honestly sweated out the desperation of a repeatedly flopped songwriter facing down the prospect that his dreams, too, will wind up withered: I cannot grow old with Dave and Paul. I don't know if either would have worked, but I feel like partial echoes of them are already there in the song, making it a little richer than it might appear. Another thing I kinda appreciate is that he's *not* just complaining; it seems like he likes the regulars well enough, he gets by on the tips okay, and the boss appreciates him. Ehhh this piano bar... it's not so bad. There's a line straight from here to the "Cheers" theme, which may suggest some of what this song's audience found in it.

Joel's lyric has a few pretty good phrases imho, even if they're worn out by overfamiliarity and rubbing shoulders with some clunkers and stock ironies. I like "and I knew it complete," as odd as it is, and "real-estate novelist," and "Bill, I believe this is killing me," even if it's then stifled by the cartoonish, would-be poet's business about a smile running away from a face. "And probably will be for life" turns a walk-on about whom we know basically nothing into a miserable Ethan Frome - dunno if that's good or hackneyed but I found it very grim at age 10 even if I couldn't guess what's supposed to be so bad about being a Navy lifer. "The piano sounds like a carnival, the microphone smells like a beer" is nice: one second the Piano Man's conjuring up a sonic world that's not there in the mix - the closest he comes to the Tambourine Man - the next second we're back in the banal reality of this kinda shitty, dingy old-man dive bar.

Fun fact that doesn't fit anywhere else: Larry Kenchtel of the Wrecking Crew - who will appear on Joel's next album - played bass on the Byrds' "Mr. Tambourine Man" and was, as a member of Bread" the guitar man on "The Guitar Man." I would love for it to come out that some Columbia exec, unsure of Joel's talents, brought him in to ghost-plink "Piano Man" and complete the set.

"piano man" is a pretty good harry chapin imitation.

it's also a weird structure for a pop hit. it proceeds from verse to pre-chorus to first chorus in businesslike fashion, and then keeps putting off the second chorus, first with an unexpected extra verse, and then, after that extra verse, an unexpected piano solo. it takes more than two minutes to get from the first chorus to the second. paul the real estate novelist could finish his novel while waiting for that chorus to come around.

in my fantasy paul writes novels *about* real estate.

i like that piano solo. it's not fast and flashy like billy often likes to do, just a cool melodic interlude. he has a couple different ways of playing it live, which are equally fun.

always read this song as "sketch of people in bars" more than anything specific abt the protagonist