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

like if you get away from what you WANT the song to be about, the character that is narrating has a pretty well-studied voice

(i feel the same way abt Goodnight Saigon later too)

yeah that's always been what works best for me in this song - very real sense of letdown and bitterness, the unfairness of it, and the timeline where it all goes wrong in one generation. from a post-2016 vantage some of this emotive territory reads differently perhaps.

this song gave me a pretty negative impression of unions, as a kid - "crawled away," sounds snakelike, and they left everybody else behind? opportunistic fair-weather friends, sounds like! oops. this part, and "taken all the coal from the ground" seem furthest from really understanding what was happening and who/what was responsible for plant closures. but maybe both reflected a real feeling he was hearing from people in the area, idk.

yeah i mean, i don’t think this is intended as a thesis ...it’s a very personal, emotional viewpoint that feels more believable because it’s flawed & simplified
like it’s one guy’s letter to the editor of the local newspaper

also, just remembered I need to dig up my allergy-themed rewrite, "pollentown," circa 1992

yeah agreed. just wish he'd heap some blame on the bosses while he's at it. elsewhere, in retrospective interviews, he's confusingly pinned the problems on reaganomics. but I wonder if at the time he would have agreed with the imagined letter-writer that the problem was the exhaustion of coal reserves combined with cowardice from "the union people."

Yeah he captured the sentiment well on this song. I also like the clanking sounds and other noises, which adds to the feeling. In general, he's good at matching the music with the subject matter

at least some PA miner types hated this song, iirc. Elvis Costello has an anecdote about being insulted in an elevator by someone who thought he was Billy Joel.

When I listed BJ's best songs, "Allentown" was my #1. He gets it right: the at times forced conviction works in a song about grinning through tears.

Intriguing point, Lord Alfred.

Springsteen's version of this song ("My Home Town") is elegiac and resigned... but also relaxed/mellow in a way that "Allentown" isn't. Maybe Bill's air of neurotic frustration and barely suppressed anger is more appropriate to the material! Bruce, for all his ostensible common-man sympathies, has always been a basically comfortable and happy person.

Other entries in the category - James Taylor's way-too-mellow "Letter in the Mail," Mary Chapin Carpenter's "I am a Town," all of Richard Shindell's trucker anthems - also fall limp for the same reasons. These pampered folkies with their nice guitars and calm voices SAY they sympathize with the plight of the downtrodden, but they don't betray any familiarity with hardship. Of course Billy never worked on a fishing boat or in a steel mill, but at least he brings some evident inner conflict and angst to the party.

BTW, I neglected to mention it above, but this was the #1 finisher back when Veg polled the Greatest Hits in 2012!

Great song, for all of the reasons that have already been stated. Veg quoted my favourite part; I love the way that this almost hoarily romantic image becomes a kind of promise, along with the assurances of "if we work hard / if we behave," that the present reality has failed to deliver. I love his wistful delivery, too; had Billy's performance underlined the bitterness of the lyric, rather than the sadness, he would have missed the point of his own song.

• I used to stare at that inner sleeve of WMJ drinking his coffee, reading the newspaper, trying to figure out if that was a real window, what newspaper he was reading (it's the sports section, I think I remember figuring that one out.) Also doing the math in my head and thinking that by the year 2006, I should be able to grow a beard like that too. (I still can't.)

• Just going to quote this Allentown wiki one more time:
"The rhythm heard in the introduction.. is reminiscent of the sound of a rolling mill converting steel ingots into I-beams or other shapes... This gives the song an early industrial music influence."

In case you were wondering who paved the way for Skinny Puppy.

• And hey, if you were looking for a nice slice of Beefcake Steelworker ass in 1982, look no further than your nearest Billy Joel video.

Was going to say, the opening to "Allentown" in the Live from Long Island HBO concert was my first introduction to industrial.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QOa7jBlFvNg

considering this song with glass houses still in my head, i like that the sound effects are now intruding on the song instead of just introducing it

btw i've never consciously heard "allentown" before and i like it a lot

i like that it seems v narrowly constructed until he gets to the "aayyyyyyyyy," frustration and resentment building toward a momentary release that leads right back into the original constricted design

somewhere online last night I read that the "industrial" sounds were mostly phil and billy putting a bunch of fragile instruments (maracas and such) in a box and turning it over repeatedly.

The song - and My Hometown and Born in the USA album in general and and Scarecrow by Mellencamp - were all very powerful to me in the 80s, especially living on a family farm by a small town, you were sort of living in this haunted world, all these buildings - that used to be the bowling alley, that used to be the movie theater, that used to be a grocery store can you believe we used to have three grocery stores in town? that use to be the Viking Cafe.....

there was always this sense that we were living in the aftermath of this era of the heyday 50s and 60s that our grandparents and parents had lived through, when Frost, Minnesota had over 500 people instead of 190 and was the Sugar Beet Capital of the World (TM).

i love how "allentown" serves as a kind of bernie (broad strokes, anger) to "my hometown"'s hillary (details, resignation). i love both songs.

i also love how the pounding piano picks up a bit of the "all for leyna" vibe from the last album without sounding anything like it. i remember the first time i heard the piano intro to both songs and how quickly i fell in love both times.

later i moved to bethlehem, which presumably would've been the title of the song if it wasn't such a difficult rhyme. that's where the steel industry was. allentown had mack trucks but it was a bigger, more diverse city, much better positioned to deal with the economic woes of the '80s. bethlehem steel's headquarters had two enormous parking lots, one for american cars, right next to the entrance, and one for foreign cars, which in my memory was a solid 10-minute walk away. i drove a honda. i got a lot of shit for it and in retrospect i have some regrets about it.

you were sort of living in this haunted world, all these buildings - that used to be the bowling alley, that used to be the movie theater, that used to be a grocery store can you believe we used to have three grocery stores in town? that use to be the Viking Cafe

great post

The beginning of the video reminded me this morning of the one for "Atlantic City".

a highlight of songs in the attic is the crowd cheering when they hear the words "masturbate" and "pot" in "captain jack"

Billy knows his audience

ums, thanks for mentioning "Scarecrow" - both as an entry in the category that I'd forgotten about, and also kind of a counter to my argument. Melonhead's vocal is rather more anguished than Billy's.

Billy chews and spits "every child had a pretty good SHOT!" but Johnny fairly screams "the FARMERS BANK FORECLOSED!"

Of course the clanking industrial rhythm of the opener is another McCartney nod, “Silly Love Songs” opens the same way.

I remember how weird this album was to me when it came out - my parents were massive fans and we had waited an eternity since Glass Houses for a new album. And then I saw it in the racks and it looked like a move poster (THE KILLING FIELDS maybe) and BJ looked pretty odd on the back and there was obviously something pretty adult and high concept in the track titles. Took me a long time to get into it. He no longer seemed fun.

*movie poster, ach

lol yes

I’m making it up in retrospect - KF came out in 1984. But the cover looked like a TIME magazine or something I guess.

https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/thumb/d/d3/The_Onion_Field.jpg/220px-The_Onion_Field.jpg

Ha, no. I'll accept it.

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

https://i.imgur.com/u8OPmpJ.jpg

https://images.duckduckgo.com/iu/?u=https%3A%2F%2Ftse3.mm.bing.net%2Fth%3Fid%3DOIP.b4ZfA5gQ0c8IxA1Pm3StAgDIEs%26pid%3D15.1&f=1

d'oh xp

Also - just looked this up!

The Nylon Curtain
Released September 23, 1982

Nebraska
Released September 30, 1982

^^ Columbia Records radio guys must have done a lot of drinking that month.

it is 100 percent an "80s oscar movie" aesthetic. lotta boomers trying to find what looked right as "grown up" and "serious statement" I think. i mean without the cover, just from the iron-curtain pun title, you'd think we were in for some jokey 70s bullshit but with that font it feels like a monumental pronouncement on the quiet miseries of Adult Marriage and Divorce.

loving the allentown discussion. feel like this would be an easy song to clown, oh look at this faux-empathy, but clearly at least some of the ppl he was writing about found something meaningful in the song. i believe billy HAD worked in a factory btw - tho not for long and not in a steel mill. still I'm sure that helped. must have been a lot of places in long island that also had that ghost-town quality.

reminded me of this

http://movies2.nm-unlimited2.net/1980s/Graphics-Photos/milagro_beanfield_poster.jpg

Wasn't expecting The Killing Fields to come up until at least Thursday.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ALp9rfnPJ8c

Laura, tale of another femme fatale - or a mothering queen of the harpies - sounds to my ears like it's in the style of some other band. Darned if I could guess which one.

There should be an album of outtakes/sessions from The Nylon Curtain called "Expos Top Punchless Mets"

He sound awful on "Laura."

maybe he's trying to find an aural equivalent to the awfulness of the General Hospital character

this song has never worked for me. i like the sound and tempo on the verses - this weirdly metallic and mechanical take on the source material. but when it hits the choruses it has that "i wish this was a few BPM faster" problem - just plodding and grunting his way through. i'm spinning my finger in the air, okay, okay, we get it, wrap this up and move on... presumably this was purposeful, to capture the frustration and grind of this relationship but in general i only like joel's attempts at biting angry edgy vocals as an accent in the midst of verses. the lyric also just bores me, here's another jerk lady he's going to tell us about at great length. zzz.

The first song I ever heard with an F-bomb in it. Thanks, Obama Billy!

Plodding and lyrically uninteresting, but the F-bomb sure catches me off guard.

( best swearing on a track? )
i believe it's still my job to chime in all threads in which pleasant plains mentions billy joel, so i will continue my streak here to argue that "laura" is one of the all-time worst AND all-time best examples of swearing in a song. best, because unlike most of the others above, it was fully unexpected and at least a little bit transgressive. worst, because of the way he over-enunciates it, as if to draw attention to how transgressive and unexpected and just plain fucking silly it is.

― fact checking cuz, Tuesday, November 11, 2008 9:49 AM

FCC is right, though I would argue that the over enunciation of it to draw attention to the transgression of it all also makes it the best example of someone saying "fucking" in the middle of a pop song.

Also, back in the day when Rolling Stone featured two-page ad spreads on records you could order from Columbia House, it was always funny to see Nylon Curtain with a little '‡' next to it for "explicit lyrics".

― ⊂⊃ ⊂⊃ ⊂⊃ ⊂⊃ ⊂⊃ ⊂⊃ (Pleasant Plains), Thursday, November 13, 2008 12:50 PM

Then these careless fingers
They get caught in her vice
Til they're bleeding
On my coffee table

Those are some wild lyrics, but the weird thing is, I automatically know it's one of those square slate metal coffee tables and not the wooden kind with the the carved rings around it like mine.

this song is v weird

seems to finally find its purpose in the guitar solo/bridge just to return to the okay verse/...is that a chorus? i can't tell, sounds like he's pushing the song uphill. prime sisyphean billy i guess

genuinely love the production on the record so far though, kind of a combo of the lushness of the stranger and the bite of glass houses; the piano sounds real glassy and brittle but the guitars are so warrrrm. very abbey road

whoops this song is stuck in my head now :\

sounds to my ears like it's in the style of some other band

If I had to blurt out a band instinctively, it would be 10cc, but I can't explain why.