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

FCC et al., you people continue to amaze and delight me, with your willingness to keep unpacking new aspects of this completely overexposed bit of boomer culture. Thank you.

Backing upthread to Dr C - la dee dah etc. is fine here! In fact, comparatively laudable.

Inside the frame narrative, the old man is trying to hum, to Bill, the melody of the song he's trying to recall and request.

For me, that is like Ilsa in Casablanca humming "As Time Goes By" to get Sam to play it, after Sam claims to not remember the tune.

Much more defensible, lyrically, than the lazy LIE LA LIE bits of Paul Simon's "The Boxer" and Bruce Springsteen's "The Rising."

• Did not know this came out in November 1973 -- the month I was born!

• Still go huh? when he says they're all getting stoned. I guess "drunk" doesn't have the same cadence to it, but it's such a weed word.

• Song does have classic wordplay like ''real estate novelist,'' but there are phrases like "when I wore a younger man's clothes" that sound like, well, they fit in there and worked ok? Stop hassling Billy!

• But seriously, I still wear flannel shirts that I wore in college. The pants, maybe not so much.

• And I've said it before, and I'll say it again: No person has ever ordered a "tonic and gin" unless they were trying to be cute about the song.

would everyone still find this song terrible if it wasn't so heavily & mercilessly overplayed?

i guess it is impossible to answer

Still go huh? when he says they're all getting stoned. I guess "drunk" doesn't have the same cadence to it, but it's such a weed word.

it never occurred to me that the businessmen weren't actually getting stoned! i assumed they were in a dark booth quietly passing a joint around. but, um, you may be right. your interpretation - that billy just liked the word better - makes more sense and is in character for our tonic-and-gin swilling songwriter.

honestly my earliest memory of this song is from a comic book: Dan Pussey "air piano"-ing to it in an early 90s issue of Dan Clowes "Eightball". I don't think I actually heard the song til a little later, at which point I found myself actively annoyed at the "slowly gets stoned" line.

I just want to post in this thread every photo in this link: http://www.popspotsnyc.com/billy_joel_piano_man/

excellent link!

that is very cool!

mum used to listen to her cassette of Greatest Hits vi & ii while she was baking or getting dinner ready & us kids would be playing in the living room - piano man & goodbye hollywood especially remind me of playing lego on a blanket in the living room

Thank you for your valiant defense and evocative takes, Vegemitegrrl.

I think for me, this material was mostly greatest hits cassettes and bad boombox mix tapes grabbed from the radio circa ninth grade. I doubt I heard these albums in full till much later.

Listening to 'Piano Man' for the first time on headphones. I never noticed the mandolin before!

Maybe Paul the real estate novelist writes books like this

https://images-na.ssl-images-amazon.com/images/I/51s8GjGTdyL._SX311_BO1,204,203,200_.jpg

https://images-na.ssl-images-amazon.com/images/I/41PFv26dxmL._SX311_BO1,204,203,200_.jpg

but this is my favorite

https://images-na.ssl-images-amazon.com/images/I/41szxseGdmL._SX322_BO1,204,203,200_.jpg

The Romance of Real Estate

"Good real estate novelists drive us out to parts of town we've never seen before."

Disclosure: I am a professional writer with a degree in English literature. My particular specialty was, and is, 20th century novels.

I have no problem believing there are, or have been, actual "real estate novelists" working in the years 1990-2017.

Not sure I believe there was such a thing in 1970-73. Sorry.

cant we dream

hey now hey now

Richard Ford is a real-estate novelist.

did HE have time for a wife i wonder?

cant we dream

can't paul dream

lets spare a thought for navy davy tho

give a moment or two to the navy dave man

Richard Ford is a real-estate novelist.

― Eazy, Friday, July 28, 2017 6:30 PM Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

See my link upthread!

I'm not surprised anyone would hate this song. Not only has it been massively overplayed, but it has the same problems as "American Pie" - designed as a sing along, and it's quite long. You've heard the melody a hundred times after just one listen. Yet I never got as sick of this song. Maybe I just heard it at the right age, but I think as far as Joel lyrics goes, it succeeds in painting a vivid picture, despite some clunker lines. I can still sing along and enjoy it in the right mood. "American Pie" can fuck off though

It's twelve o'clock, Tuesday afternoon
A happy couple enters the bar,
There's an old man sitting next to me
Peeling labels off his bottles of Bud...

I have no problem believing there are, or have been, actual "real estate novelists" working in the years 1990-2017.

Not sure I believe there was such a thing in 1970-73. Sorry.

― okapi paste (Ye Mad Puffin), Friday, July 28, 2017

Louis Auchincloss?

Yeah god American Pie is like 45 minutes long - any self-respecting Buddy Holly fan would have made a song honoring his death a thousand times more succinct

I went camping over 4th of July and the campground was very 'activities-based' and held a karaoke event. I watched this poor old fool get up and do American Pie probably just thinking hey I like this song I never hear it no more but after the 79th verse he was practically blinking 'help me' in morse code it was brutal

poor dude was a least 4 bars off the whole way through too lol

lol at the 'help me' bit

re: Paul Simon: https://www.ilxor.com/ILX/ThreadSelectedControllerServlet?boardid=41&threadid=31830

re: "stoned" as "drunk" - this is an older usage, right? feel like I've heard it in very square comedy or movies from the early 60s and clearly referring to, yeah, businessmen on their third martinis. if so it would date the song dramatically except that the weed usage had already half-supplanted it and today is presumably what 99% of listeners assume is going on. the surreptitious joint in the corner booth just about works, though it does change the kind of bar that a guy walks into. pplains's link to popspots helps me reconcile that to some degree. if that's the same site I've been to before, they also locate the "streetlife serenade" cover. fabulous work.

and yeah, "all I wanna do" is pretty clearly in this song's debt. doesn't hurt it none!

Meanwhile, it's time for our next track - but if you're inclined to keep the Piano Man discussion rolling, well, It Ain't No Crime.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WWS5xUF1nlA

This is a slightly more obscure track and there's not much to add here. This 1978 performance on The Old Grey Whistle Test shows how the fully-formed Billy Joel Band tackled it. Almost no online discussion of the song exists, save the every-Billy-Joel-song blog One Final Serenade which I really should have linked already, especially as I've linked to a couple of the images collected by the author. Mea culpa.

Except for the backing vocals, which sound like they're out of a Leon Russell record, the fullthroated singing and piano boogie could've been from an Elton single.

Yeah, this could have come straight off of Tumbleweed Connection.

The boogie could also be from a Leon Russell record - I could see this wandering into "Shootout on the Plantation" without much effort. Long John Baldry comes to mind again. Joel's vocal here, and especially in the live version, take him into a zone that I never really like from him, where he's trying to get all husky and barky and soulful. "Easy Money" is the nadir for me.

The song's fine, I guess? It's interesting in that it's basically the same setup as "Big Shot," speaking in the second-person to someone who partied a little too hard last night - but there he's full of venom and judgement, and sounds very comfortable being an asshole, while here it ain't no crime and he sounds a little forced trying to embrace the revelry. "I've Loved These Days," in the first person and mixing celebration with a sense of emptiness and futility, also works better imho.

this is very cute if sort of undistinguished

elton leon joe cocker a bit of all of that. more than a bit. billy used to do a good joe cocker impression. during the instrumental bits with the sax i feel like i'm listening to the saturday night live band play us out of a commercial break. good early '70s album filler. rod stewart could've done justice to this one.

Wow, SNL band is harsh but fair FCC.

"Only Human" is another lyrical descendent of "Ain't No Crime," imo.

My interpretation of the businessmen slowly get stoned is that they are periodically going out to the alley behind the bar and burning a J, thus slowly getting more stoned throughout the evening

Woah this Ain't No Crime REALLY doesn't seem like a Billy Joel song, I don't like him trying to be all funky

maybe they are bumming their tokes off paul simon

"Big Shot" comparison is accurate - even that bass riff in the chorus is Big Shotty.

Not a huge fan of this voice either. I haven't decided if I'm going to take a day off from this thread or not for the day we hit "Everybody Has a Dream".

I mean, it's one thing to fudge all the details and play faux western on Billy the Kid, but this boogie woogie stuff just doesn't ring true for me. And I love this man, you all know this.

TL;DR - Had I been his dad, I too would've slapped the shit out of him had I heard him trying this on Beethoven.

oh god i got 30 seconds in and had to stop to gather my rage into an incandescent pyre

MAWNIN
OWN THE FLAW
WAWKIN OWT THA DAW

wtf is this deeply shity embarrassing bad dr john impersonator voice you are doing dude

i want to slam the cover down on his hands & make him stop

ugh that was gross

i need a silkwood shower

lol pplains I didn't see yr post til just now

jinx

lol

Lost opportunity for this to be the theme song to a 70s ABC sitcom.

Which is the worst faux-western pastiche: "Billy the Kid," "Lily, Rosemary, and the Jack of Hearts," or "Glitter Gulch"?

FWIW I don't have an answer because I hate them all.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ATQ5ays9t1I

You're My Home, track four on Piano Man, takes us back into love ballad territory, again with some country shadings. It did double duty as the B-side to the title track, and perhaps reached most people via Helen Reddy, whose cover on 1974's Love Song For Jeffrey also appeared as the B-side to "Keep on Singing" and perhaps made Billy a little nugget in royalties (the album went gold and the single topped the Easy Listening chart). A live version from 1980 would appear on Songs in the Attic and was issued as a single - check this promo video - which peaked at #100 in Australia and did not chart anywhere else.

Did Helen Reddy really sing the lyrics, "You're my Pleasuredome?"

Good Sunday morning track. Bless whoever it was who planted this sensitive singer-songwriter into Hell's Kitchen later on with a shaky marriage and Phil Ramone.

I actually like "You're My Home," and it's interesting to compare it thematically with "And So It Goes," where in every heart there is a room. Or how Brender and Eddie have an apartment with deep-pile carpets. Or how the angry young man sits in a room with a lock on the door.

Not trying to reignite the issue of "real estate novelist," but it does seem there is a running theme here of spatial metaphors for emotional states.

An understandable metaphor for a young guy, first marriage, buying a house, all the headaches and worry that come with that, and then of course the musician thing of being on the road and away from said home... though maybe Elizabeth came along? Not sure exactly what their arrangement was. I learned the other night that right around when I was born, my dad was out of work and facing down two mortgages (both for houses in cities that we'd moved to for jobs at companies that closed down a few months after arrival). Your basic "Marge is pregnant with Lisa" episode in a lot of ways - holding the baby in your arms and having no earthly idea how you're going to work this all out. Mortgage payments get really mixed together with the whole rest of one's life at times like that. Joel of course had a recording contract but presumably there was still some uncertainty, or maybe the song is from a slightly earlier moment.