Billy Joel C/D?

"The Stranger" was among the better AOR albums.

I think you speak for all of us.

You do know he played piano on "Remember (Walkin' in the Sand)" now don't you?

"Do you know who Billy Joel is?" Yes. "Good."

Oh no, dear Amateurist. I've had well over twenty years to build up to that one. ;-)

When you're forced to listen to something that much eventually you have to develop a relationship with it a little more complicated that pure antipathy.

Truly OTM. Ned may have built nothing but hostility toward the man over the years, but most of us have had to also admit his good points at one time or another. And that creates confusion. He sucks. mostly, but not in some opressive, ubiquitous, meat-headed Phil Collins way. I'll admit, much of The Stranger still charms me, especially "Vienna" and "Movin' Out." They're little New Jersey symphonies, for all that's worth, which is admittedly not much. But at leat Billy Joel doesn't distance himself from his material -- he always honestly comes off as exactly the schlub that he is. And that's kind of admirable, though again, not much.

I think that's "Scenes from An Italian Restaurant" from The Stranger. But that's not why I'm responding to this. I think all Billy Joel songs should from here on be referred to as BJ songs. That's hilarious.

I'm coming in late to this thread, and rading it in pieces, so forgive if my responses are out of order of importance.

Did he really say that? When? Because that's perfect. If he can sum himself up in such an astute way, my respect for him has just jumped three notches.

He said it on Tuesday night's episode of American Idol, for which he provided the "music" (ie, they all just sang his songs). I thought it was a pretty honest self-assessment, actually. I still don't like him tho.

I wouldn't be so sure about that. And as for that quote, it says nothing. I don't care if he's competent, for fuck's sake, I care if he (or anybody) does something that interests me, and he interests me only in the sense that I wouldn't mind browbeating him for all his albums-worth o' crap.

And "Uptown Girl" has this Nazi-step march ham-fisted oppression that top none other. I had his greatest hits I & II when I was in 7th grade, but just because I learned to play "She's got a way" for this girl I had a crush on. He is a miserable sod, on top of everything. He must hate life. He has his few, few moments, but on the whole, the most abhorrent artist I can bring to mind. Sorry.

see: Elvis Costello

Anyone seen "Movin' Out" yet?

WTF? Have you ever heard Elvis Costello?

Joel's addiction to WINE is also a bit sad. I mean, Christie won't even let him near the kids.

And that song "River Of Dreams"?

>quiver<

i've own all those "great" records he's made and really really tried to like him. really. i tried. i failed.

Maybe BJ can help me out here:

I must be looking for something
Something sacred I lost
But the river is wide
And it's too hard to cross

indeed.

I have a soft spot in my heart for "Pressure," "It's Still Rock n' Roll...," and the ultimate (wait for it)...

..."It's My Life." How can a guy who's song was used as the theme for "Bosom Buddies" be a dud?

raising a bottle of white to the continued health of ned's dad and a bottle of red to the speedy recovery of our billy.

poor Billy :( hope he pulls through

but yes, good news re yr Dad, Ned.

Too kind! Fear not, my dad seems to be very well. I'll be seeing him tomorrow to sense the results directly.

I saw the doc, all five hours of it. Every ten minutes I thought, huh, I guess I've been giving Billy Joel a hard time, he's got a lot of talent, he's a hard worker, he has some good songs, and then every other ten minutes I wanted to throw something at the TV.

Five hours of BJ is about 4 hours and 55 minutes too much

Nylon Curtain is a fantastic and really interesting LP.

I still haven't watched Part II yet.

Want to hear more about the Nylon Curtain. Kinda interested in hearing about Elle and Christie (kinda). USSR tour, sure.

But everything else? Might be like two hours of the Chuck Panozzo's reduced role, Cyclorama and Big Bang Theory (2003–2009) section of the Styx wikipedia article.

Part II gets you a good Holocaust story, Christie, rehab and the risible humblebrag of writing a classical piece so challenging he needed a ringer to record it.

My takeaway is I wasn't convinced enough to give his music any more time than I have already so far in my life (that is to say, next to none, besides what I hear on the radio), but I did learn a lot about what makes the guy tick. It's fascinating that someone so bitter, angry, cynical and resentful couldn't channel those negative energies into music more incisive and less whiny. On the other hand, I'm glad he never tried to ape Randy Newman, though his Steely Dan rip "Zanzibar" makes me wonder what it might have been like if his ambitions weren't usually so steadfastly middlebrow.

Well. You know I'm always up for a good Holocaust story.

I thought getting an actual classical pianist to play his classical record showed admirable self awareness, even if the music itself sounded dire.

I guess, but I took it as a humblebrag as well. "I, modest Billy Joel, composed a piece too challenging for me to play." Especially considering that self-awareness never really pops up anywhere in the previous decades of his career.

Well yeah.

My Joel connection is pure nostalgia from his once omnipresence; I never looked back, never bought any of his albums, nada. But I found the documentary interesting on various levels, and the deep and layered dive into his background unfolding over the whole thing was pretty well done. Certainly won't inspire me to revisit anything, true, and yet I have to say that I was taken by the Bruce Springsteen comments throughout simply because I have this vague sense that a whole bunch of the (always unnamed aside from a screenshot or two) critics you could tell got under Joel's skin likely were hailing Bruuuuce as the best thing since sliced bread.

Well, for sure one of the critics that panned Billy Joel in Rolling Stone was Dave Marsh, who has been directly hitched to the Bruce train for decades.

Part of the problem I have with Billy Joel is that he seems incapable of recognizing *why* critics might have panned him, or preferred someone else.

Of course, something else I got from the documentary is that he will never be happy or satisfied anyway, no matter what people say.

There's plenty in the doc that's either not addressed or elided over. (I, for one, am kinda amazed that we got so much commentary from his first wife, who clearly was crucial for his career and who understandably left when he was in one of his worst self-induced health/alcohol-related states, but the fact that her brother ended up being the manager that fucked him over a decade later and that she doesn't talk about that at all or anything...I mean there's a real tangle there!)

My takewaways:

1. He's had a lot of success despite running his career very badly. (Botched debut album, crooked record deal, management troubles, grift magnet)

2. He has some decent relationships in his life despite running his personal life very badly. Always seems to be able to find another young woman willing to roll the dice on a fixer-upper husband. ("Maybe it'll work *this* time...")

3. He seems modestly happy despite his mental and physical health being disaster areas. (Matter-of-fact about his suicidal streak, etc.)

4. He is sufficiently beloved, by a generation- and globe-spanning audience, despite coming off as the smuggest and most punchable motherfucker in ButtafuocoLand.

One wonders how far he might have gone without all the obstacles he placed on himself. He's the Harrison Bergeron of piano rock.

Or how about when Christie is moved to tears by him dismissing her concerns, Joel saying he knows his former brother in law a lot better than he knows her. He's just a resolute dick, smug about his music, bitter about everything else, even when many of his problems are self-inflicted.

Just a coincidence I watched this right after I finished the Randy Newman bio. Newman was also raised by a distant father who drummed classical music into his son, but Newman's clearly some sort of genius, and his worldview and curiosity - socially, politically - stretched much farther and deeper than Los Angeles, whereas very hard worker but not genius Billy Joel's world begins and ends on Long Island. And yet unlike Newman (or for that matter Springsteen) imo he lacks the skills to fill his songs with memorable stories and characters that give life to their geographic isolation/inspiration. People of Long Island might see themselves in his songs, but I don't really see *them* in his songs.

Five hours was a little long, and the second part was not as interesting as the first, but they got some fantastic interviews, not least of all Billy at the piano. there's many small moments where he played something to make a point and it made me smile

Ned: in the doc, doesn't Elizabeth say she warned Billy not to hire Frank when they split up? I remember there being something like that, but it's a small mention

doesn't Elizabeth say she warned Billy not to hire Frank when they split up

she does, and i think that's all she needed to say. she's there to talk about billy when she was part of his life, and to walk away as fast as possible when she realizes she can't fix him and he isn't going to fix himself. before the doc, she literally hadn't said a word about him in public in more than 40 years. when she left, she left. i think the fact he agreed to participate in the doc is the single most interesting thing about it, and the reason why it works. and i think her one warning about her brother tells us pretty much everything we need to know about that part of the story from her. she wasn't there when the fuckery happened.

And here we are waving Lizzie and Billy goodbye

the Randy Newman bio

written by one of those unnamed critics who most definitely got under young billy's skin. (and one of the worst rock critics, imho, to work at a major american newspaper in the classic rock era.)

The wife tells me I’m not jewish enough to get Billy Joel. Who am I to say if she’s right, the only Joel I fuck with is “For The Longest Time.”

i think the fact he agreed to participate in the doc is the single most interesting thing about it, and the reason why it works.

obviously i meant the fact *she* agreed to participate! (though also obviously, the fact *he* agreed was kind of important too!)

I am grateful for this thread because I'm curious about the bio but absolutely not, in any universe, ever, "watch a biography of Billy Joel for five hours" serious

It's pretty entertaining even if you are only casually interested in Joel. I was actually interested to learn some of the more recent history. I guess I had just completely forgot that he had done all that touring with Elton John. And then it seemed like after the classical album he was just done with his pop stuff. But then the Sandy Benefit happened, he decided he liked playing those old songs after all, and then the long-standing series at MSG came out of that, which gave him a nice 2nd (3rd? 4th?) act and cemented his universally beloved elder statesman status. I thought it was actually Mellencamp who had the most biting words about the critics who panned Billy back in the day, but perhaps the most damning evidence of their cluelessness is the fact that they liked him better as his music got worse. His late-period albums got respectable notices in the major rock-crit bastions.

is "Scenes from An Italian Restaurant" prog rock? discuss

No. It's dinner four days after Thanksgiving when you have three things to use up. They don't quite go together, but none is sufficient on its own.

The ingredients here are cabaret and arena rock. With a trifle more work and/or inspiration he could have made one good story ballad with a jazz solo and two energetic rock songs, but decided to centaur three not-quite-done ones together. It was the 70s and long tracks and double albums looked like ambition instead of a failure to edit.

"Prelude" is prog though.

I feel like there was a vein of songs in the late 60s/70s that were like opening a door and walking through a series of different rooms, in more of a traditionally episodic fashion, rather than writing a bunch of moments, somehow bundling them together and making a pocket progressive rock symphony.

Certainly, you could argue that it dovetails with the more classically derived end of Prog with the recapitulation of the theme and so on. He could have probably done some interesting, proggy stuff if he and the rest of the band had cast commerciality completely aside.

Definitely he had a big talented band, and letting them stretch out and display chops has always been a source of joy for him (see also Boss, the). Always pushing at how much they can get away with without losing the audience that came for pop hits.

I can appreciate that while still finding "Scenes" lazy. I'm being a trifle harsh because I don't think it hangs together, but also because I actively want the bits expanded.

In an alternate universe where it's two songs (piano ballad and rocker) or maybe three (+ a soprano sax showcase like "Still Crazy After All These Years"), everything is just better. Jimmy Carter was reelected and the World Trade Center is still standing.

maybe A Quick One While He's Away is more the root of it rather than prog? or Tommy, though you could argue those are proto prog

Jesus of Suburbia by Green Day might be the last of the line for this

though I thought the more corny side of prog just because Billy is obviously a chopsy keyboard guy a la prog

Long Island Prog

Someone once described Billy Joel's music, in particular, "Scenes From An Italian Restaurant" as musicals for guys from Long Island who think musicals are "too gay."

you guys are convincing me i need to see his former bandmates tomorrow.

https://oysterbaytown.com/free-last-summer-blast-concert-with-the-lords-of-52nd-street-september-17th/

On Brender et al., see this discussion from 9 years ago IT'S BETTER THAN DRINKIN' ALONE: The Official ILM Track-by-Track BILLY JOEL Listening Thread

Speaking as a writer, gathering odds and ends into a compilation ("scenes from" / "notes on" / etc.) is often what you do in the absence of a good Big Idea.

Compare, of course, "Suite: Judy Blue Eyes" and the Sgt. Pepper Medley. My conclusion is that the Beatles could get away with it because they were cute.

abbey road medley?

IMO, the transitions between the different parts of yer garden-variety prog tune are every bit as much an integral writing/arranging skill as making riffs in 11/8 or squiggly solos.

Like Yes' 'Awaken' is a bit of a masterclass in making potentially difficult transitions into big, heart-bursting 'events', the absolutely beautiful bell ringing descending bit just before the whole thing goes into 6/8 time, for example.

I could totally have seen BJ writing something like that into the middle of Summer Highland Falls

I mostly associate Joel's medley tendencies with Beatles/McCartney worship (A Day in the Life, Abbey Road, "Uncle Albert/Admiral Halsey," the less successful Red Rose Speedway medley, etc.), more than prog. But "A Quick One" is also pretty plausible as an ingredient... dude must have played that one back a few times. I'd be shocked if he weren't a Tommy fan. The cabaret/musical-theater revue element is also there, yeah. But totally, there was a general period tendency to try and get "proggy" by way of grafting together a long instrumental passage and a conventional rock song; Joel's "Prelude/Angry Young Man," which YMP name-checks, is basically of the same species as Elton's "Funeral For A Friend/Love Lies Bleeding." Warm up the crowd, warm up the band, and show off your chops without having the showcase interrupt the song.

I don't really mind the underdevelopment of the pieces of "Italian Restaurant"; I enjoy each of them, and as with Abbey Road it feels kinda greater-than-the-sum-of-its-parts. Only the Brenderenetti segment grabs me enough that I really wish it was a song in and of itself; the others might actually benefit from being fragmentary and suggestive, contributing to an overall vague mood-and-memory piece, rather than having to definitively state their positions.

(Oops re Abbey Road)

Long Island Prog

Reached via the Proggs Neck Bridge

The Downeaster "Tormato"

ButtafuCoheed and Cambria

The Brenderenetti section is about the fleeting optimism of youth which is too soon gone, so formally it’s perfect to leave it slightly underdeveloped.

I like that

Warm up the crowd, warm up the band, and show off your chops without having the showcase interrupt the song.

and then one album later, fuck it, let's interrupt the song: "zanzibar," one of my fave billy songs of all