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

yeah this song was great cod McCartney, it's funny I mean of course Billy Joel loved the Beatles, everyone loved the Beatles but it's kinda funny to me to hear him sound so McCartneyesqe, I never considered him particularly a big Beatles influenced guy in terms of the stuff I knew.

Also the sound quality is crazy bad, like a bootleg or I think veg said upthread a rehearsal tape, which is weird because like this time frame in the industry you just don't hear a lot of bad sounding records, it was such a peak of good producers, good studios, etc, and I looked it up on wiki and it was done at Record Plant and some other big studios....

Since I'm not as familiar with this album as I am with the ones from 52nd Street on, I looked up the credits on Wikipedia, and lo and behold:

Denny Seiwell – drums on "You Can Make Me Free"

Later in the very same month this was recorded, Seiwell would of course be the drummer on the first Wings album, Wild Life.

Also the sound quality is crazy bad

surely this is attributable to it being a pitch-corrected youtube rip...? idk

I link to this Billy Joel interview with Alec Baldwin all the time, but in one section he goes into the Beatles influence and how his first songs even had their phrasing/accent.

Billy Joel: There wasn’t anybody but white people in my school. I think there were a couple of Jews, some Latinos. There was sprinklings, but everybody liked soul music, “Twist and Shout,” when everybody would do, 'Come on now, shout. Come on now.' And “Louie, Louie” – I think that was the Kingsmen. “What I Say,” Ray Charles. “See the girl all dressed in green?” You’d make up really dirty words to that. We came up with some really good stuff.

So, I loved that stuff, and then The Beatles came around, and there it was. Boom. Four working class guys from Liverpool, which is as close to Levittown, in England, I think, in sounding anyway. Okay, if four guys from Liverpool –

Alec Baldwin: I never thought of that. Levittown is our Liverpool.

Billy Joel: Yeah, Liverpool. And uh, it’s possible, it’s possible. They don’t look like Frankie Avalon. They don’t look like Bobbie Rydell. They look like four working class guys, from anywhere. They could be from Hicksville. They could be from Levittown. So I said, that’s possible. That’s what I want to do. I want to write my own songs. I want to play in my own band, do our own arrangements, and make our own way.

Dude worshipped McCartney. I've mentioned this before, but it still kills me.

...There's this part in the Billy Joel bio about his shows closing out Shea Stadium in its final year. This whole chapter about how they had to add a second show, controversies in ticket prices, how Joel rounded up all of these celebrity guests like Tony Bennett to sing "New York State of Mind" -- all leading up to trying to get Paul McCartney to show up as the cherry on top.

Negotiations went on for weeks, Paul jetting across the Atlantic, still in the air when the show started. Joel gets a note midway through proclaiming that his secret guest was "in New York airspace." Plane lands, McCartney and crew get rushed out by the airport by NYPD, bypassing Customs supposedly, with a motorcade all the way out to Queens.

McCartney comes on with Billy, crowd goes wild, they do some songs, and backstage before the final encore in Joel's hometown, McCartney says, "You know what you we have to close it out with, right?" Joel, deferring to his hero, says "What did you have in mind?" ... and Paul says, "We have to close it out with... LET IT BE."

You can just about hear the air leave the sails, deflating the whole chapter with those words. You get this idea that wherever Macca goes, he's doing something like telling Neil Young at the Bridge Benefit 'YOU KNOW WHAT WE HAVE TO CLOSE IT OUT WITH, RIGHT?"

― pplains, Sunday, June 7, 2015 2:36 PM Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

- Take a Sad Song and Extract Every Last Ounce of Spontaneity from It: the Beatles Uber-Ballad Poll

haha god that is so McCartney

I quite liked this - Billy's top 5 according to Billy

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

also I would totally watch the movie about Piano Man + Rocket Man vs Tamborine Man

what, no Spoon Man

has McCartney ever praised Joel?

xpost lol shakey

and no "Mirror Man"!

Ramblin Gamblin Man could be good to have on yr team imo

idk he seems kinda unreliable

:/

He rambles, he gambles, is this guy even gonna show up? Sub in Particle Man.

haha

That Colbert clip is all-around great. Love his (friendly) dig at Elton.

Also, Billy OTM re: his #1 song.

he does pretty good impressions! his Tony Bennett was right on the money

also I like how visibly nervous he seemed at the beginning.

young billy doing piano impressions of neil young ("i would never write anything like that 'cause it's too simple, it's too obvious"), elton john and leon russell:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AljfNsA6t30

cute clip

i like how mid 20's I'M MY OWN THING I AINT LIKE NOBODY ELSE

Dr C, thanks for starting this thread, it's already awesome...!

https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/e/e1/Getting_Things_Done.jpg

yeah otm

it's like summer camp for music nerds who like music everyone else hates :D

Oh shit - sorry - wrong thread

Oh shit - sorry - wrong thread

idk seemed appropriate hah

many xposts to Alfred

From Paul's fanclub newsletter Club Sandwich, Winter 1994 Issue #72:

Is there one song by someone else you wished you had written? From Carol Orice, Coventry England; Kate Graham, Weybridge, England; and Adrian Rider, St. Ives, England
I really don't want to have written anyone else's songs, but as a fantasy question, I love 'Star Dust', by Hoagy Carmichael and Mitchell Parish. It's a beautiful song. And I remember thinking that Billy Joel's first hit, 'Just The Way You Are', was a nice song. I'd like to have written that one too. 'Star Dust' first though.

as far as McCartney praise goes, that's pretty high imo

def, and also led me to realize that it was indeed his first hit in the UK, with Piano Man having peaked at... #136. Makes me wonder if there are aspects of Billy Joel that are so "American" (or so "Long Island" ) that they don't export so well, sorta like how Americans don't know "Mull of Kintyre," which was pretty much Wings's biggest hit over there. But I just recently read Greil Marcus's /Mystery Train/, so I sort of want to check myself on making broad statements about "Americanness" - though man would Joel have been an interesting case study for that book.

Not sure listening to every Billy Joel track is better than drinking alone. And even if it was, by the end you'll be alone and drinking.

you never know! you might find out!

you may be right etc etc

i highly recommend joel's biography (which was supposed to be his autobiography), which shines some light on his version of 'american.' long island was in a few ways hermetically sealed off from the rest of the country until i would argue the mid-'90s (that was when kmart finally arrived) - a combination of geographical isolation and new york city looming so large over everything else. i remember feeling very alien when reading ya books about all-american teens and only really "getting" books written by ellen conford (from massapequa), lois lowry (the anastasia krupnik books were set in manhattan) and judy blume (the fudge books were set in nyc and princeton, which was close enough, and other books revolved around the new york/new jersey axis).

anyway, go comets
https://www.billyjoel.com/news/watch-billy-joel-give-heartfelt-speech-hicksville-graduation/

i was going to ask about the biography; I'm gonna check it out I think!

i highly recommend joel's biography (which was supposed to be his autobiography

Working title when it was still an auto was going to be from that one song on 52nd Street...

..."Zanzibar"

That 77 interview is great
Love how he breaks down the styles of Elton and Leon Russell

Alfred's list of Billy songs mentioned something about how Allentown could've been done by Neil Young.

So I've been terrorizing the house all week, singing my warbly falsetto version, "Every child had a pretty good shot?"

I am not a huge Stern fan but this extended Town Hall interview with Billy Joel from 2014 is really great imo if you have a couple of hours to spare

They have a good rapport & there's some good stuff covered

https://youtu.be/c0Xh0BqUaNY

my sister in law recommended this to me the other day! his appearance on alec baldwin's podcast (is that still a thing?) is also solid. at one point the two of them devolve into long island accents and it's glorious

http://www.wnyc.org/story/225651-billy-joel/

stern locks in to joel & maybe bcz of their friendship is able to grt him to talk about in-depth stuff in a v conversational way

also melissa etheridge covers "only the good die young" and it's one of my favorite things ever

i didn't see this thread. how many songs have you done? i might be dumb enough to play along.

only 2 songs so far! join us :)

i might...i'll check my appointment book.

all the cool kids are doing it

Okay, seems like some folks weren't quite buying Billy as McCartney. Well... how about Lennon then?

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DrMcc-5APtg

Everybody Loves You Now, with ugly resentment wrapped around a brilliant hook and relentless strumming, would go on to be a fan favorite and Joel-song prototype. Nasty as it is, it's been stuck in my head for the past three days straight.

As elsewhere, the 1981 Songs in the Attic version (check the promo clip) has a lot more thunder - especially versus the profoundly murky, home-demo-like audio we have above - even if its showmanship loses something of the wounded, vicious edge. The 1983 remix of the album, while easier on the ears than the Chipmunk version, has a totally different rhythm track and was made without Joel's involvement. For the obsessed, I also found a 1971 promo clip on "The Old Grey Whistle Test" (nigh unlistenable), a 1974 live show in Memphis with some laddish stage banter and some really goofy (or... great?) drumming, and, maybe my favorite of these, the 1972 'Sigma Sound' performance on WMMR.

And Scott, do please join!

ugly resentment ... and he still has a crush on her. so much of billy joel as billy joel is born in these two-and-a-half minutes. the not-so-repressed anger and bitterness, directed at a woman who presumably rejected him (and also at the industry that he assumes will reject him, too). the fast piano arpeggios. the acoustic guitar/piano interplay. the random long island/staten island shoutouts. the big, obvious, good hook. the big, obvious, good middle eight.

can we/should we discuss the line "ahh they all want your white body"?

Like this one much better. Great melody in the bit right before "everybody loves you now." I tried to find a stripped down version - all the acoustic guitar strumming a little overstuffed - didn't see a good one though. This one fits much better with the rest of the catalog.