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

http://images.45cat.com/billy-joel-only-the-good-die-young-cbs-2.jpg

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Crif5E67ar0

Only The Good Die Young, not to be confused with the Iron Maiden song of the same name, was the third single off of The Stranger, backed with "Get It Right The First Time." It had the weakest performance from the LP, peaking at #24 on the Hot 100 - still one slot higher than "Piano Man" so I'm sure no one was complaining. A #18 in Canada was its best performance overall. It may have gotten a small boost from Joel's SNL performance (when supposedly, Billy had been asked not to perform it and had even rehearsed another song to fake Lorne Michaels out). It's a nice enough performance of the song - nevermind the weird website hosting the video - but mainly, you get to see Richie Cannata jumping up from the organ to play the sax solo. Love it.

Per Wiki, Attempts to censor the song only made it more popular, after religious groups considered it anti-Catholic,[3] and pressured radio stations to remove it from their playlists,[2] which Billy plausibly claims was a sales boon. Whether anyone pointed out the larger problem of it being a song about a guy relentlessly pursuing sex with a young woman is unclear. It never bothered me as a kid because it was hooky as hell, and I was both an oblivious cis dude and a pre-teen who didn't even really register the plot. It kinda leaps out at me now. There are probably more charitable readings - here's Melissa Etheridge covering it, with an introduction that asserts that "back in high school, this was a very definite emotion of mine." And of course, for all we know, Virginia (named for a real Virginia that Joel knew in high school) could be totally into it - or rolling her eyes at his desperate attempts to convince her that he spends his nights running "with a dangerous crowd," rather than getting picked up from piano lessons by his mom.

If you're looking for a different angle - or you're one of this thread's many devoted fans of "All You Wanna Do Is Dance," then you simply must check out this early, reggae-styled take, including brief mid-song commentary from Billy. Kind of an amazing document of how much these things grow in the studio - apart from the huge style shift, several of the most compelling features of the song just aren't there yet. Reportedly, Liberty DeVitto axed the whole approach, telling Billy something to the effect of "the closest you've been to Jamaica is the Jamaica Avenue BMT." The released version is take three.

https://img.discogs.com/uBkVooUblj7r1Yb2Y71XvYIcNMo=/fit-in/600x600/filters:strip_icc():format(jpeg):mode_rgb():quality(90)/discogs-images/R-8912552-1471333418-2661.jpeg.jpg

I love the exuberant horn action on this track, totally life-affirming

then you simply must check out this early, reggae-styled take

weirdly unsurprised, as i was focusing on devitto's drums this listen and thought "huh, if the beat shifted and slowed a little this would be a reggae jam"

This is my #1 all time favorite Billy Joel song

It's a kick off your shoes & dance in your socks expression of exuberant...well, lust... and I am 100% ok with it, especially since it leans heavily on the youthful aspect & isnt read as a thirty year old trying to get a highschooler to give it up

the joyfulnesd gives me a Four Seasons vibe idk why really, just a feeling more than any musical connotation

i'd rather laugh with the sinners than cry with thr saints
the sinners are much more fun

also it is absolutely PACKED with great lyrics and turns of phrase. and then the freshness of the song and the arrangement come off in the performance, the delivery of those lines has this great youthful vivacity. "youuuu mightve heard i RUN with a DANgerous kuhROWD" - love it. secret highlight: towards the end, the "oh-HOO-ooo-OOOOO" followed by the variation on the delivery, "only the good DIIIIIIE young" - this guy is really working up some passion about this whole thing! this too is probably crucial to the lyrical conceit working at all - the guy is using every lame wheedling ploy in the book and it's obnoxious but at least he's not doing so purposefully. like he didn't get this out of a pick-up-artist manual or advice from older kids, he's just sincerely inventing on the spot, out of horny desperation, the oldest set of lines in the book.

i think as a kid i just loved it as a song about, like, someone living in a gray sad world repressed by evil elders, but a rescue is on the way! i also didn't know any catholics (that i knew of) so the reference to a rosary went right over my head if i even registered that as being the words. later i read it more like this guy really was a super cool badass guy (see also the self-destructive window-smashing biker in "you may be right"), too old for this girl and justifying all the complaints registered against him by the girl's mother and the church at large. now though he just seems like a kinda pimply kid, laughing a bit too loud, wishing to god he was one of those bad dangerous crowd guys who get all the girls. he rehearses his speech in the mirror, applying old spice and combing his hair in a pompadour, like the rest of the romeos wore.

first paragraph there was meant to wrap up with reference to the joyfulness that Veg identifies. key to the whole thing. without that it's just another Me Boy, Me Want You, Girl type song. as an indicator of how horribly wrong this can all go, see the turgid, joyless and invention-free "Hot Blooded" (recorded while this was on the charts, in fact).

got some catching up to do.

scenes from an italian restaurant - i love this unreservedly. longform without a wasted moment (in all senses of the word wasted). this is like a shangri-la's single blown out to seven and a half minutes, with overture, place-setting, story and reprise of overture seamlessly wound together with no scaramouches, no fandangos, no wayward sons, no flute solos, no phil rizzuto. okay, it's not *that* great. but still. i do think the flow is kinda flawless. the only thing that sounds out of place to me is billy shouting "yeah rock and roll" immediately after informing us that b & e are broke, fighting and crying. what's with that?

individual pieces, ranked:

1. bottle of red
2. the pounding piano run betw "my sweet romantic rights" and "brenda and eddie"
3. things are ok
4. brenda & eddie

and i like brenda & eddie a lot.

vienna - always liked this one a lot, too. something about the melody sounds very elton johnny circa "harmony," and something else about it, which i can't quite put my finger on, makes it sound more like a "52nd street" than a "stranger" song to me. and i think it's absolutely lovely.

only the good die young - reason #764 why it never ever ever ever occurred to me, a jew, that billy was jewish. no way a jewish dude writes this song. jewish kids from long island are not running with dangerous crowds, pretending they have a shot with unattainable catholic girls or displaying a working knowledge of catholic schools and churches. they might well love this song though. i did. they just wouldn't know how to write it. and that would in fact be part of its appeal.

the two syllable pronunciation of "well" in "i might as weh-well be the one" is great.

liberty's drum intro is weird and cool.

how many thousands of kids noted in their high school yearbooks in the late '70s that they'd rather laugh with the sinners than cry with the saints?

I can confirm that it was still a viable yearbook sentiment in 1989, cuz.

I used to dislike it; now I can hear the craft.

The most 80s song on this album. I hear hints of "Don't Ask Me Why" along with all sorts of snippets from An Innocent Man. I dig the shuffle. Even the brass sounds modern, in that "Golden (wha-wha-wha) Years" sort of way.

liberty's drum intro is weird and cool. - Agreed.

I don't take this narrator and the one from "Hot Blooded" from the same school at all. If anything, you could paint him as a "yeah, I could be getting laid, but The Church keeps cock-blocking me." Because, come on. What Catholic girl doesn't give it up? Just maybe not to this guy. "Oooo, you run with a Dangerous crowd. And where might those boys be hanging out tonight?"

Read somewhere that WMJ got death threats in St. Louis, warning him not to play this song. So he played it TWICE.

haha I just dislike foreigner and wanted a foil for billy's verbal energy and the band's cleverness here

That Foreigner song does represent a lot more about what's wrong with rock and roll instead of what's right.

Billy naming the object of desire "Virginia" instead of Maria or Patricia does walk the fine line between stupid and clever though.

well, there was a real Virginia, supposedly. also reminds me of "yes virginia, there is a santa claus." an almost folkloric convention: addressing a girl in the second person? consider "virginia!"

I know a Virginia who went by Ginger for many years partly to get away from people who sang this at her.

understandable. though i think Train may have committed the greater sin in this category.

Train is the greater sin, full stop. In every category.

sadly i think "drops of jupiter" might actually be their attempt at a billy joel song. tho probably u2 is their more direct reference point for big anthemic garbage. anyway though they have no place polluting this thread and i apologize for even bringing them up.

This is pretty good. I've never really thought about/listened to the lyrics before. It sounds very much like a Dion & the Belmonts tribute to my ears, especially with a lot of the doo-wop-ish asides and accents in the vocal.

Yeah, the "wo wo wo" bit in particular is a really nicely integrated doo-wop element that feels totally natural in this very different sound, and a little foretaste of An Innocent Man.

that little shuffle-skip devitto does after the piano intro before the song kicks in = my favorite thing

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Cx3QmqV2pHg

She's Always A Woman is another Elizabeth song, apparently meant to be complimentary, with regard to her negotiating savvy as his manager. Released as the album's final single, it peaked at #17 on the Hot 100, and got to #2 on the Easy Listening chart. I'm not sure what beat it out there, since I'm not sure when it peaked, but the odds favor England Dan & John Ford Coley. Lynda Carter's cover seems sadly to have done little to get her singing career off the ground, though it's a remarkable period piece, sonically.

Love the way his voice sounds so light & dreamy in this

I have a real soft spot for it. I do catch the admiration in the lyrics & delivery though over time it sounds condescending esp in light of his general tone in later years it's hard not to hear it as sarcastic

clearly this time of night i do away with most forms of punctuation so make of the above what you will :/

Maybe I've got too much "Just Like A Woman" on the mind, but this morning, this song is screaming Dylan at me.

Wonder if Henley heard this in the shadows and thought, "YES. 'HIDES LIKE A CHILD.' THIS BOY'S NAILED IT."

All that said, it is a pretty song. It's probably in the Top 20 songs of "Aren't You Listening To These Lyrics?", where prom dances end with "Wonderful Tonight" and fathers dance with their newly married daughters to "Just Like A Woman".

I think when Billy's trying to be sarcastic it's more obvious - this one to me feels like it belongs in the "singer comes off as a dick" thread. Beautiful music though, the melody is effortlessly pretty. the key change in the second part of the bridge (the higher "ohhhhh") gives me tingles sometimes

this is the official anthem of every long island wedding

I really have so little to say about this one! Some great melody stuff (mainly the move to the title line, the "she steals like a thief" bit - that's great), but the entire premise feels incredibly dated for obvious reasons surrounding the painful generalizations. Like whether or not it's misogynistic, it has the same problem as "She's A Woman" or "American Girl" where it's like the big payoff is that she, get this... is a woman. Well, the American adult female population in 1977 was around eighty million people so that really doesn't narrow things down very much. Anything we're supposed to infer based on this is essentialist baggage we're bringing in from outside the song - ah, yes, a woman, I sure know what THAT implies about this person and this relationship. Barf.

I do think Dylan's is way worse, but at least it has "Nobody feels any pain" opening things out with something so seemingly strange and off-topic that I'm always prepared to give it another chance, aha, this time it will turn out to be an interesting song. (It never is.)

i like how after the discrete chords of the first verse billy starts doing these very nice chromatic figures that kinda make the song feel centerless in a good way

Are they chromatic? I always thought they were just arpeggios. ("Just" very tasty ones.)

lmao i don't know anything about scales and briefly confused two concepts i learned 100 years ago when i was trying to learn the piano, yeah they're just arpeggios

They are great though. Didn't mean to turn this into Theory 101 class, sorry.

Anyway I think this is one of his most McCartneyan vocals. The "oh, and she never gives out" bit, with the oboe noodling in the background? That would have fit fine on Abbey Road or Let It Be (though Paul would never have been able to play a piano part like this).

Then, as if to provide an antidote to the sweetness, he thickens up the Lawn Guyland in the last verse - "suddenly cruel," "nobody's fool" sound like he's wearing a boxing mouthguard.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ccdC_EPih2E

Get It Right The First Time leads us into the home stretch of the album. I always forget about this one.

she's always a woman - beautiful medley. the "she takes care of herself" part is one of his best paul mccartney/emitt rhodes moments. the tone of the lyric is confusing to me. i honestly can't tell if he's trying to be sweet, trying to be a dick, trying to remember what bob dylan said, or what.

get it right the first time - sounds like an early, lesser pass at "tell her about it." the la la la part is very stevie wonder. i, too, hardly remember this one. i can imagine it being a fun live jam.

*beautiful medley* is my way of saying *beautiful melody.*

I was dreading today's, but it wasn't that bad! Maybe my memories are colored by its proximity to... tomorrow's little ditty.

I like the rough voice he's got here. He's an excellent singer, with a few limited tricks in his bag, but this one just sounds like him sangin' away. Reminds me of "Josie", where Fagan slips down a little from his leather upholstered sidewing stool to exclaim "When Josie comes HOME! TONIGHT."

Nothing on Who Sampled Who for this one! I figured for sure someone would've used this. It's got that groove. The bass is in an odd signature. Maybe not a hip-hop artist, but surely some Daft Punk wannabe would've liked this one.

Because who doesn't like a nice breezy samba?

Quickly catching up...

"Only the Good Die Young" - If not a perfect song, than definitely a perfect Billy Joel song--witty and gently subversive lyrics (I love the fairy tale-ish detail of "they built you a temple and locked you away"), a muscular and diverse arrangement, hooks for days.

"She's Always a Woman" - Frequently kind and suddenly cruel, indeed. Billy's inability to contain his spite in some of these lyrics gives the song a weird tension, but I don't hear any attempt at democracy like I did with "Just the Way You Are" (where, as I said above, I hear the song as a kind of conversation that grants the subject some--though admittedly not much--agency as a character), so for me this is mostly just a kind of nice song that doused with a jarring sourness.

"Get It Right the First Time" - Spirited album filler.

kinda hate "She's Always a Woman" - piano part is too busy, the lyrics are (as noted) a shitty riff on a (mostly) shitty Dylan lyric, and while the melody is v pretty (def McCartney/Emmitt Rhodes school) the other crap gets in the way too much imo

"Get It Right The First Time" has some nice things going on in the arrangement, especially the flute, but man does it feel like album filler. No surprise it's the first thing we've hit on this record that's not either a single or a fan favorite or both. Probably fun to play on, but there's just not enough hooks and the whole concept is pretty lame. "Get it right the first time, that's the main thing ... Get it right the next time, that's not the same thing" --- zzzz, really, "not the same thing?" How so? Who cares? Why bother?

yeah it's fine. enjoyable but rote

lyrics should've ended with "I took five minutes to write this/and now this song is over/got it right the first time"

it's funny bc before this track i was ready to post something along the lines of "i've never heard the last two tracks of the stranger but i'm pretty sure this album 100 percent rules?"

i mean it's still really good imo

Feel like he has one of these on each album... midtempo workout with no compelling reason to exist, but like, decent enough... Worse Comes To Worse, Weekend Song, and All You Wanna Do Is Dance (if you squint)...

Finally caught up. Turnstiles was the best album up to that point, with two tracks I had heard of but never heard ("Summer, Highland Falls" and "Miami 2017"). Both earn their place as fan favorites pretty easily - perhaps predictably, they are my favorite new finds from this thread. "Prelude/Angry Young Man" is also cool, if a bit of a weaker version of "Brenda Rinetti" musically

Of course, the Stranger still blows that album away. Hard to deny most of the songs on it, despite having heard them countless times. Had heard and enjoyed "Vienna" a few times before, didn't realize it was one of the few non-single tracks from this album. Save something for the next few albums! Well, I guess "Get It Right the First Time" is a surprising dud, except the Stevie Wonder bit

And since no one mentioned it (maybe because it's so obvious), "James" seems like a near steal of "Daniel" by Elton John. Same instrumentation, same mood, lyrics about a friend.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=S129T9kav8I

Everybody Has a Dream closes The Stranger with a song Billy had apparently had kicking around since the Cold Spring Harbor era, though I don't know when it got set up with the Charles-influenced verses and gospel-borrowing choruses. The last two minutes are effectively "The Stranger (Reprise)," though not identified as such on the jacket. Love that whistle! Online sources indicate it began life as a James-Taylor inspired song in waltz time - he must have really been struggling to make that work or you figure it would have cropped up on Streetlife Serenade when he was really hard up for material. But anyway.

As before, I recommend to the devoted fans the Sirius XM clips of Billy Joel talking about the album, which have little in the way of deep insight but a lot of little treats. In this case you get him at the piano knocking through the pieces of the Abbey Road medley and some version of the "Oyster Bay" song-fragment when discussing "Scenes," and his attempt at a Gordon Lightfoot impression on "She's Always a Woman."

Also, just to restate what a milestone this album was for him, we've really crossed a rubicon here. The album before this one peaked at #122. This one got to #2; of his seven remaining pop LPs, all would peak in the top ten, and four would hit #1. That's not counting live albums, and of course the juggernaut double-disc Greatest Hits. His singles would perform a bit more unevenly, but he still has twenty top-twenty hits ahead of him, including three number ones. I don't know if Billy Joel can be said to have an imperial phase... but if it weren't for this album, I doubt any of us would have ever heard of him. Maybe from alternate-timeline Sounds of the Seventies comps that dug up "Piano Man" to stuff as filler between bigger hits.

hmmm. a song on one of my all-time favorite artists' signature albums and i don't remember a thing about it. i don't even remember the title. i don't remember the "stranger" reprise outro. i'm aware there were songs after "she's always a woman," but my recollections end there. a billy black hole.

sounds like he's sort of going for '68 comeback era elvis presley, in addition to the usual ray charles reach. and failing miserably. while losing himself in palaces of sand. whatever that means.

also this doesn't sound like it would belong on the stranger even if it was good.

Yeah.... this one's never meant much to me. It's okay I guess but seems kinda obvious and uninspired for how long he'd had it around and how much you'd think the idea of dream-having might have meant to this scrappy underdog guy. The "Stranger" reprise just feels like filler to me - I mean I'm certainly not fooled into thinking this has all been some concept album, or a symphonic composition or something. Maybe the idea is that after all the dreams, what waits for you is not Vienna, but the cynical performances of so many strangers. More of a Plastic Ono Band ending than a Band on the Run ending, if you will - tho obviously, unearned reprises were a favored McCartney device.