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

If I may invoke Manny Farber's "white elephant vs. termite art" for a minute, I want to add that while I think that The Deer Hunter, Apocalypse Now and Full Metal Jacket are better movies than "Goodnight Saigon" is a song, I think it might get to the heart of its subject more effectively than any of those films--bold auteurist works that likely say more about the filmmakers' particularly interests and perspectives than they actually do the work of documenting the Vietnam War--do. Not having seen any of Oliver Stone's 'Nam cycle either in decades or at all, the closes parallel I can think of to Billy's song here is Tim O'Brien's devastating memoir The Things They Carried.

Able Baker Charlie

wtf guys

xp

I always understood them as being able to stand either for specific people, or (as Doc says) synecdoches. The choice of these most generic possible names may have been intended for the greatest possible universality.

As Οὖτις notes, "Able Baker Charlie Dog..." is a variant / forerunner of the phonetic alphabet that we now use ("Alpha Bravo Charlie Delta...")

So it is almost literally not possible for the names to be more generic. We're not in a realm of specificity like Anthony, Mr. Cacciatore, Mama Leone, Brender, Laura, Judy, etc.

"I can always find my Cuban skies, in Charlie Baker's eyes"

but i actually never knew about the other phonetic alphabets!

this song is... a lot. billy is trying so hard. this endears me to it even if the chorus is a little much

it's widely beloved even though it wasn't a hit

the verse melody is among the loveliest in his catalog imo

(Able Baker Charlie etc. is historically naval, which is why D-Day had beach sectors named Dog and Easy. Of course USMC, as a branch of the Navy, would have followed this nomenclature instead of the more universal and less culturally rooted NATO alphabet.)

i love this song without reservation

i love it just as a song to sing along to. especially when drunk bcz KNIVES IVES IVES IVES is just fun to scream

but i love the storytelling so much
it has the feel of a fictionalised oral history, not trying to “say” anything, just relate the experience in very specific ways.
and his delivery belies that the song was inspired by close friends, i think the fragility & tenderness in his voice for the verses honors the subject matter in a beautiful way

i love the rhyming too:
We came in spastic, like tamelees horses
We left in plastic, as numbered corpses

weirdly this song reminds me of some older warren zevon compositions, stuff like "desperados under the eaves." more emotionally obvious ofc

that couplet is great vg

it’s so clean & perfect

i think about it a lot

Also the SNL Goodnight Saigon is one of my favorites
bcz it’s clearly just an excuse for everyone to sing the song lol

http://indavideo.hu/video/Goodnight_Saigon_-_Will_Ferrell

So y'all are trying to tell me that John Steinbeck's dog wasn't named after me either.

Another huge McCartney flavour to this track - like a mashup of the "we're so sorry" parts of "Uncle Albert/Admiral Halsey" with "Live and Let Die".
This always felt like a counterpart to "Captain Jack" to me - not sure why, maybe the seriousness and the length?

always love ending that stanza on "Promise our mothers we'd write"

Liking that Philip Roth font on the 45 single.

on headphones it sounds even better, i dont think i ever noticed how they slowly add backing between the first two verses

and those are A+ maracas...

YMP wrote exactly what I wanted to say about this song

btw, is “Pressure” the only known song that ends with a countdown?

I'm sure I've heard another one, but can't think of it. I can think of "Pink Cigarette" by Mr. Bungle, but that's more a "99 bottles of beer" style countdown

Count-UP isn't it?

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

She's Right On Time opens side two as if eager to turn away from all this talk of pressure, disenfranchised workers and lives wasted in the madness of Vietnam. Billy has described it as his version of a Christmas song. Though not a single in the US, it got a release in the Netherlands, I assume based on the success "Goodnight Saigon" had there. The video, which I never knew existed, lets Billy try his hand at slapstick even has he faces situations arguably more alarming than those we saw in "Pressure."

https://img.discogs.com/N6w4fGZPaKZSR9E-HxZhonVpkpU=/fit-in/600x600/filters:strip_icc():format(jpeg):mode_rgb():quality(90)/discogs-images/R-7237923-1436868364-5156.jpeg.jpg

God, that's awful. Generic MOR.

Sometimes in my head I conflate "She's Right on Time" with "That's Not Her Style," possibly because they scan the same and I normally give exactly no thought to either song.

On relistening the only thing I like about this is the arpeggiated guitar in the beginning, playing what would ordinarily have been done on piano; it's a refreshing change. I find myself hoping it will keep going that way, but then by the second chorus that thread is lost and we're back in wall-to-wall pyannoville.

Maybe #57 on one's life list of Jewish Christmas songs.

Moreso than anything we've heard so far, this feels, with hindsight, like "Billy Joel is READY FOR THE EIGHTIES," with the new wave interzone behind us. I can't point to the exact specific features that give it that feeling of a digital arena lightshow number, but somehow it feels less like another stylistic experiment/digression and more like "okay, this is what pop-rock Billy sounds like now." Thankfully (imho) that's not what we're in for QUITE yet. But despite a basically catchy chorus and an appealing sense of drama, this one never grabs me. Verse melody's monotonous and the bridge melody is still waiting to be found.

Yeah, there's nothing interesting here. Even Billy's singing is boring.

I think Just In Time might be one of Billy's own favourite songs, iirc

hahah doh Right On Time obvs

Whatevs, I love this song ... for what it is. My "Die Hard" entry on the list of favorite Christmas songs.

My step-brother had MTV while up in the woods, we were still twisting the aerial antenna on cloudy nights. He once told me about this Billy Joel video where Billy's waiting for this chick, but he keeps setting fire to his kitchen and having the blinds fall on him . I thought he was so full of shit because his word was like the only testimony to that video's existence for like 15 years. Finally, one night when M2 was still a thing, this video came on and ... I don't know, it was like seeing The Day the Clown Cried for the first time. You know, as if someone had told you about The Day the Clown Cried, but you said they were full of shit.

But I do love watching these old videos, checking out old cars, dated home interiors, and seeing how the street signs in NYC used to look:

https://i.imgur.com/26hsX5P.png

is that real street footage? the "skyscrapers" outside billy's windows made me think this was all LA backlot stuff...

omg this video. his videos really are something else. Anyone wanna take a stab at identifying what records he has in his apartment when that shelf collapses

loool @ "better hide the porn!" shot

Sounds like a halfway point between "Hysteria" and Christian rock.

"Billy Joel Speedwagon" I say

Just to briefly bring it back to 'Goodnight Saigon', I've always thought that in the last drum fill in the final chorus, the snare roll has the exact tempo and timbre of heavy machine gun fire. It may not have been intentional, but it adds to the drama for me. Great, great song.

i sorta like this song! even though it doesn't really work per se

the bridge is a lot of the reason why

also the arrangement is doing the majority of the work

Billy really makes some odd decisions regarding promo and 45 cover shots

God this is so Styx-ian

oh man the chorus has been stuck in my head all afternoon

the chorus has one of those melodies that sounds kinda off and tuneless, but I know will get stuck in my head this week

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yDZdNz7Wg0Y

Though the title of A Room Of Our Own might suggest a lazy reading of Virginia Woolf, it's actually a mars-and-venus ode to separate spheres. It is a song on this record.

This certainly a Billy Joel song that exists

I'm pretty pissed at Billy for the failure of nerve these last two songs represent

otm

yeah I feel like there's a real writer's block thing with just a few tracks on this album, and they end up really undermining the bigger and more complete things, as well as the notion that this is some deep Statement album. billy's songs tend to come off as effortless or very very effortful.

this is his New Jersey isn't it

nope! next album is a smash.