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

haven't been following this thread too closely, but I see someone stumbled on my comment about "My Rival". I can confirm that I was specifically thinking of The Stranger, because of both the "whining stranger" line, and also the reference to "Anthony's Bar & Grill", which I thought was maybe a joke on the Anthony of "Movin' Out".

"sure, he's a Jolly Roger": Captain Jack

..."until he answers for his [ain't no] crime"

Something about "My Life" is more 70s/80s/timeless lounge than "Piano Man" itself. The piano sounds almost like a fake synth piano, the whole thing is made for a one-man piano busker. Not so much disco as easy-listening cha-cha-cha samba, kind of self-aware easy listening à la Rupert Holmes and "Margaritaville."

agree! that opening riff and into the flourish is total piano lounge in my mind

like it's the musical version of the when harry mey sally "white man's overbite" & the men are wearing leather sportcoats & the women all smoke dunhills

https://media.tenor.com/images/5ca3980117f310c62f933d891b31232f/tenor.gif

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Yget4xVAulE

Zanzibar, my favorite album track when I first got into this record, closes out side one. It began life as a hazy idea to do some kind of exoticist sketch of faraway lands, etc. Maybe Billy'd been listening to Dylan's "Mozambique." Thankfully, Phil Ramone, on hearing the title, proclaimed that it sounded like the name of a "jazzy sports bar," and Joel wisely reverted to his write-what-you-know approach.

The trumpet solos, as mentioned above, are courtesy Freddie Hubbard, who probably needs no introduction with the jazzbos in the room; in addition to an extensive discography as bandleader, he'd recorded with John Coltrane, Ornette Coleman, Art Blakey, Herbie Hancock, and the list goes on. The 5:13 album version fades out on the second solo, but the full 6:46 take can be heard on the "My Lives" box set. Wiki: Joel also recalled that after playing with Hubbard on the song, drummer Liberty DeVitto claimed that "Now I feel like a grown up."[4]

Re Devito and "My Life" -- boy, did these guys hate disco.

i absolutely adore this song. mostly for the sublime chorus, but also: the swagger of the verse melody, which sounds like it's dancing along with ali and running the bases with pete rose. the gorgeous breakdown and build back up into a completely different song (and completely different band) in the bridge/solo section with the freddie hubbard payoff. the sound of the piano (is that all electric, or is there both electric and acoustic piano going on here?). the details behind the piano, especially the vibes. i even like the lyric even though i'm not sure it works. is this a high-school kid out for a night in his old man's car, trying to get to second base with a waitress? or an older dude who's a regular with a tab at the bar? do older dudes/regulars have dreams of getting to second base? do younger dudes run tabs? and where exactly is this bar that has muhammad ali on the tv (which would've been a pricey pay-per-view event) and a shantytown nearby? what country are we in? or what's going on here? but i really don't care. he gets to the "i've got the old man's car/i've got a jazz guitar" part and i am melting, and if leon spinks is somewhere in this here bar, he can knock me out with one punch and i won't even feel it.

i also adore action bronson's homage:

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

i like this! even more so than Movin Out or Scenes from an Italian Restaurant this one really feels like it's straight out of a broadway show

that repeating fast-paced piano line reminds me of "At The Ballet" from A Chorus Line:
"Daddy always thought that he married beneath him
That's what he said
that's what he said"

Just realized how much the chorus groove of this reminds me of the verse groove from "Movin' Out." That is not a bad thing.

Vintage live version. Very Steely Dan.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cN8ngsgZhTg

how many billy songs have woah-oh-oh parts in them? is someone keeping count? the one in "zanzibar" come at a spot where one of those tinkly piano runs would have worked almost as well.

I think I enjoy BJ songs more if I pretend they're being performed by Rowlf the Dog.

but this is front-to-back awful imo. Stiff, rhythmically and melodically forced, z-grade Steely Dan lyrics (now with added shitty sports metaphor!), no hooks, bellowed vocal trying *really* hard to make this work but just ... no.

This song makes me feel bad for Freddie Hubbard.

lol Shakes
reading yr reactions itt is like what I picure would happen if joined a "broccoli of the month" club
<3

yeah yeah
https://images.duckduckgo.com/iu/?u=https%3A%2F%2Fmedia.giphy.com%2Fmedia%2FdwCDhA5qVhYoU%2Fgiphy.gif&f=1

lol

Dude went full Attilla for a sec in Eazy's clip!

I agree with Shakey on one thing. The late 70s such a halcyon time for overstuffed baseball metaphors.

I love this song. Would even love a mix of just four bars from the verse looped over and over again. Evil jazz guitarists driving down the turnpike, passing under a streetlight on every fourth beat.

Yankees stealing the headlines... Goddamm does this guy enjoy reading a newspaper. That line was a big hit during the Shea Stadium shows though.

More childhood misreadings: it never occurred to me that "Ali" referred to Muhammad Ali but rather to some young guy working his ass off as a dancer at this bar. Makes more sense anyway with people trying to steer him away from going downtown and blowing his night's tips buying people free drinks.

But I do think the song holds together well - narrator is old enough to be at a bar but still kinda faking it, excited to *be* a nobody at a bar, I've even got a *tab*, just like in the movies! It's like a teenage "Deacon Blues" with even more basic and maybe less pathetic aspirations: drink, watch TV, try and pick up a waitress. Oddly, we never even really hear about him *playing* the guitar (unless this is another Piano Man scenario and he's observing this all from the stage, off to the side of Ali's dance routine)... another prop of adult coolness, like Billy's trumpet on the cover, that he's not actually prepared to back up.

I've been to a lot of sports bars. Pretty much none have featured live jazz, and even fewer have had male professional dancers.

Maybe I just don't get out enough. Clearly I don't know as much about bars as BAR PRO BJ. After all, he knows that all the hepcats order Tonic and Gins.

Ali on the stage is a dancer guy
Gives away drinks for free

Afterthought: maybe the old man's car was left to him, or a hand-me-down?

Then he could be simply an introverted adult who lives largely in fantasy (not a teenager who somehow has a bar tab).

maybe he killed an old man (using the sound of the applause for ali's dancing as cover) and took his car

alternately he could be nursing a can of popular diet soda Tab

Part-time driver for a mob capo.

the old man who was making love to his tonic and gin died and left billy his car. unfortunately apart from that things have been going downhill. he lost his piano gig when the manager decided to go with a trumpet-and-live-male-dancing format, and is now just another tab.

billy has traveled into the future and is an introverted kid living in the fantasy world of his laptop in his bedroom. it is 2008 and he has several tabs open on his firefox browser: a used car lot selling an old honda just like his dad has. a guitar shop. and, obviously, a zanzibar tab. but mostly he's watching old sports clips on youtube.

Honesty - Only heard it a few times on the radio - it wasn't on my copy of Greatest Hits I/II. It's a bit too plodding, like everyone has said, but I think the verse chords are subtly interesting. Doesn't quite go where I expect

My Life - Love this song. That piano tinkling is such a nice detail, I stole it for one of my own songs

Zanzibar - The delivery is so intense! It sounds like they recorded the vocal over a different arrangement, then changed the arrangement. The piano is really awkward and the whole thing comes off like "Copacabana". In spite of that, I think the chorus is cool and the instrumental section even better. Weird song though, for him

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lmUrJ_el-SM

Stiletto opens side two with another move towards jazzier directions, this time with room for Richie Cannata. An ode to a femme fatale, or perhaps to BDSM practices, its extended instrumental passages retain something of the sweep of "Scenes From An Italian Restaurant," and have been repeatedly sampled. Maybe I'll manage to get my own 2010-era mashup attempt online later today...

(tbh when i first heard this, my reference point was almost certainly this guy)

this is good except for the "Billy Joel sings" parts

Such a leap forward in confidence. It's not a great song but it's a real nice listen.

this is all about billy's left hand, the bass and the finger snaps. and they are fantastic finger snaps. his voice keeps slipping in and out of ray charles mode, which is weird. and i can.not.stand the way he pronounces stil-EHH-TTOHHH with the extra emphasis and extra length on TTOHHH. the band sounds looser than he does.

hey sorry, burned my ILX time today arguing with Fred. please continue to enjoy "stiletto" and we'll be back later tonight, or perhaps tomorrow AM!

A perfect time to catch up, then...

My Life - There's something that's just so perfectly on brand about Billy writing the quintessential "me decade" anthem, but I've always heard a melancholy to the arrangement, delivery and a good portion of the lyric that reveals a self-awareness--there's something more going on here than just an asshole whining about the perils of adulthood. Contrast "We used to be real close" and the whole bit about sleeping with alone/with somebody else/waking up alone to the "fuck you" chorus--there's an "is this all there is?" kind of disappointment to the whole song that runs deeper than the petulance/defiance of "go ahead with your own life / leave me alone."

Zanzibar - Baseball as a metaphor for fucking, or maybe fucking as a metaphor for baseball, I dunno. Lyrically hamfisted--Billy mentions "stealing second base" in case you missed the point--and overlong as well. I briefly owned a copy of this album that I may or may not have grabbed from my aunt and uncle when they were getting rid of their old vinyls, and in my memory, the whole album kind of sounds vaguely like this--snoozy, jazzy soft-rock.

Stiletto - I admire the tight arrangement--the finger snaps, the piano arpeggios, the way the one little piano riff responds to his punchy delivery in a couple of moments--but I just ain't a fan of Billy trying to be Ray.

spoiler: in later tracks on this album you can look forward to him trying to be elton john, boz scaggs, and maybe the doobies. i like em all though. and i like your "my life" take. agreed. the "used to be real close" is quite suggestive... kinda feels like a muted followup to something like the last lines of simon and garfunkel's "america." everybody's living their own life, they want to be left alone, okay... but nobody's real close anymore. all come to look for anomieca. this kind of thing very well tees up all your boomer pity parties (the big chill, etc.).

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LB-tkHD4uXU

Rosalinda's Eyes carries us into the deep-cut zone of this severely front-loaded album with possibly the yachtiest number Billy ever cut.
If anyone wants to condemn it to the same bin as all the other 70s rocker "exotic island woman" numbers, I won't argue. For the record, the backstory is that Billy's mother was named "Rosalind," and in interviews he's described it as the kind of lyric he thinks his father should have sung to her, as apparently he wasn't the romantically expressive type. The Cuban business is biographical: Helmuth (later Howard) Joel was one of those who escaped Nazi Germany by way of a stay in Cuba to get past immigration quotas. I'm not really sure how long he stayed there, but I guess it's possible he developed a real affection for the place, and later identified it with his wife, who he met through musical theater.

for the record btw i think "stiletto" is great, dopey femme fatale lyric and all. i love how in the opening the sax riff feels like a translation of something like the "Stranger" whistle intro - just some wistful scene setting, and then when it comes around later with the band pounding away behind it, it's this fiery blast from richie c. all right, rico! and yeah, the groovy instrumental sections, the snaps...

i think the only thing i really get sick of is the verse. she CUTS you hard! she CUTS you deep! you've been BOUGHT! you've been SOLD! blah blah blah. as with "she's always a woman" i don't like this lyrical standpoint for joel, where he's letting you in on the intelligence he's assembled about this woman. get over yourself.

I don't wish to jump too far ahead of the story, Dr. C., but I think Glass Houses is even more front-loaded than 52nd Street, unless I'm gravely mistaken. A side of wall-to-wall hits, B side of mostly-forgotten rarities.

Almost all his albums are kinda like that, really, though yeah that one and Nylon Curtain are kinda extreme. The Stranger stands out for actually bothering to put a single on the second side; other than that, the mold isn't broken until he has an album with so many singles they won't all fit on one side. But indeed, that's getting ahead of ourselves...

the thing about glass houses is it was clearly intended to be front-loaded but he continued to write pretty good songs after he normally would have run out of them and side 2 is therefore totally not bad and has at least one certified classic.

(Man. "Zanzibar" is a relentless ear worm I've been waking up to each morning this week.)

He looks like he's about ready to kiss Fredo on the lips here

https://peopledotcom.files.wordpress.com/2016/09/3_19_79_750x1000.jpg

https://i.imgur.com/nvXeYUu.jpg

https://i.imgur.com/YHoXW76.jpg

(Also, Rita Coolidge is blond now! But I digress...)

Anyway. Everybody would've loved this song had it originally appeared on The Nightfly.

BJ isnt fit to polish Fagen's fenders in the lyric dept

Dancing solo down in Herald Square
It's murder out in the street

Minor, but pretty.

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

Half A Mile Away finds Billy vamping it up with a tale of a simple man's getaway from everyday troubles. I believe we're meant to hear it as another "Zanzibar"-like story of a ordinary city character... but I can't help but read it as being sung from the perspective of Billy Joel, international hitmaker, just wanting to slip a half a mile away to the old neighborhood, and simpler times.