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

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.

The early 70s was such a golden age for drumming, every song had some sick session dude and those great super dead/no verb boom bap Harvest/Deep Purple Ian Paice sounds

Yeah, all those great big honking drum kits in utterly dead rooms with carpet on the walls. I still love that sound. I sometimes strive to recreate it, but engineers hate it when I want to play good drums in live rooms, but then mute the hell out of them.

Have you tried oil filled drum heads? 2 ply with a thin layer of oil... Never actually seen them in the wikd but I know Paice used them, supposed to stop the ringing

have you tried setting the engineer on fire?

xp Yeah; Remo Pinstripes, Evans Hydraulics, pretty much the same tone.

lovely, john denver-y guitar ballad, but...

why does telling your girl she's always with you no matter what shitty city you're playing in or driving through sound so much less sexy and romantic than telling her to forget you ("wherever i lay my hat that's my home") or that you're fucking up even as you miss her ("can't hardly wait")? or is it that i just don't believe a guy on the road who tells his girl at home that she's "my castle ... my cabin and my instant pleasuredome," which, besides being a strange hallmark card, is entirely about him, not her? or is it that i know a little too much about where this actual dude is headed? "i'll never be a stranger." hmmm. run away, lady, before it's too late.

i much prefer "travelin' prayer," where she's on the road and he's at home longing for her and resorting to prayer even though he doesn't know how to pray because what the hell else is a guy supposed to do? that's a dude i'm rooting for.

side note: i had a friend in college who told me he preferred bruce springsteen to billy joel because most of bruce's songs had proper endings while too many of billy's songs faded out. he thought that was a sign of lack-of-commitment and halfhearted craft. "you're my home" is a particularly lame and unnecessary fadeout.

Nice song, very early 70s. I'd heard it before, but I can't figure out where, as I'd never heard the Piano Man album before. Did it ever turn up anywhere else?

cryptosicko - Songs in the Attic

my blurbs ;_;

"Ain't No Crime" - everyone otm. sounds like a totally different artist, SNL, slam the cover on his hands, 70's sitcom, all of that. "Big Shot" >>>> this

"You're My Home" - at least this one sounds like Billy singing. pleasant, but I feel like the metaphor has run itself dry before the third verse

ahhh much better

def john denver vibes, in the best way. i really like that a lot. A good KIP Billy track before the cynicism sled starts gaining speed lol

"You're My Home" is pretty enough that I can get past any of its lyrical shortcomings. The Denver connection is probably right, though the main guitar figure, especially in the opening, makes me think of the then-slightly-dated "Everybody's Talkin'." I like the "home could be the Pennyslvania turnpike" bridge where the rhythm section gets a little more oomph to it, and the pleasant AM gold incidental music right after that. "You're my instant pleasuredome" is such a distractingly awful lyric though, and it looms over the song once you know it's coming at the end. How the hell did he convince himself that was a good idea?

Helen Reddy, with Tom Catalano (who had produced, I think, all of Neil Diamond's records to that point) dials down the rhythm track and layers strings over the thing (with a bigger orchestral section blaring in for the bridge). It's more AM goldy which I like, but maybe a little too corny and certainly more dated. She certainly gets hold of the melody, and yes, she sings "instant pleasuredome," though she manages to make that sound prettier.

Here's Billy being a dick about the cover (though also zinging himself on a Storm Front album track):

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gDUWJA5W810

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=o1ASIT5DqN0

The Ballad of Billy the Kid is the epic Side One closer; not quite a ballad of Billy the Kid but also not exactly the autobiographical theme song one might be dreading, it would be issued as a single in the UK (where "Piano Man" was failing to take off) in April 1974. It stuck around in the live set and Billy clearly liked it --- in that cute interview clip fact checking cuz posted a while back (with the Young and Russell impressions) he amuses himself by tossing one of the key piano riffs from this song in at the end, almost like a signature. A 1980 Madison Square Garden performance made it into the set of songs selected for Songs in the Attic; that version isn't radically different besides taking on Billy's mature bellow and roar, but it's maybe just slightly more comfortable in its skin. The crowd seems excited, in any case.

Another one that sounds like it sounds like Billy heard Tumbleweed Connection and went "hey, I could do that!" I've never liked TC, but (to my knowledge) Elton never pulled that stereotypically clip-cloppy Western music that Billy uses to open this song, which makes this measurably worse than any of Elton's C&W pastiches.

I basically like Tumbleweed Connection, for its songwriting much more than its aesthetic. The lesser tracks kinda blend into the background as western-y texture, which maybe works better when that's the whole gimmick of an album, rather than coming in for a song here, a song there.

At this point I have to assume there was some crumpled-up draft of "Piano Man" that went for Tumbleweed territory, with all the 1970s set-dressing swapped out for your stereotypical passel of saloon extras. Yee-haw deh dee dah, deh dee dah.

I hope Henley went nuts hearing the inaccuracies as he, Bernie, and Glenn tried to hammer out "On the Border".

Elton never pulled that stereotypically clip-cloppy Western music

when people cite this riff (which gets recycled all over the place), how come it isn't ID'd as "Happy Trails" (instead of "generic Western film music" or whatever - I've seen this happen a bunch recently, it feels like)?

the post hippie diaspora's fascination with outlaws/cowboy mythology is super interesting to me, like psychedelia was initially a very urban movement (NYC, London, SF) that so quickly moved agrarian/farmer then on to druggie cowboy outlaw stuff, which lasted for so long stripped of its original 60s origins w/Bon Jovi, Kid Rock etc

when people cite this riff (which gets recycled all over the place), how come it isn't ID'd as "Happy Trails"

'Cause I didn't know that's what it was called!