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

"Until the Night" sounds like an attempt at writing a low budget Righteous Bros song.

he's talked about how it's particularly tough to write on tour when you play a grand piano that isn't exactly going to come up with you to the hotel room

Wait, I was given to understand that he does his writing on his road guitar, and makes his living in a pyano bar. I feel so misled.

http://www.onefinalserenade.com/uploads/2/9/1/2/2912571/billy-joel-glass-houses-ad-hes-got-a-little-something-for-ya_orig.jpg

Following another year of intensive touring, Joel hit the studio in the winter of 1979/80 to knock out another slab of tunes with Phil Ramone and Jim Boyer. In this long making-of interview, Joel describes the album in terms of the group "becoming a garage band all over again [...] to make music that all the musicians enjoyed playing, as if we were in a bar," as well as club exposure to new wave. He also likes to point out that all the arena shows had also made him think more about what played well at that scale.

Meanwhile, the title and the cover (featuring Joel's own house) showed a desire to "shatter" his image of himself as a ballad guy. (This studio chatter with Ramone, including some unflattering impressions of punk bands doing promo, focuses on how to promote the album without 'giving it away.') It was in any case his attempt to push back against the critics; Rolling Stone didn't bite, but a few months later, they put him on the cover with a "gutsy" and pretty interestingTimothy White interview re-establishing his street credentials. Perhaps they were impressed by the album's six-week stint at #1 during the summer in 1980, buoyed by four hit singles including Joel's first #1. It's been certified seven times platinum, and RS's 2013 readers' poll crowned it as his second-best album, behind The Stranger.

https://img.discogs.com/bUiYI68vScbS5ARu9vY0jzCF40w=/fit-in/600x599/filters:strip_icc():format(jpeg):mode_rgb():quality(90)/discogs-images/R-1674121-1315702113.jpeg.jpg https://img.discogs.com/r5wKNBOEKMcV_cY1ZurC-Vix6s8=/fit-in/600x600/filters:strip_icc():format(jpeg):mode_rgb():quality(90)/discogs-images/R-1674121-1315702120.jpeg.jpg

https://img.discogs.com/RfYOOscRmtny4QY4CTfV4Xn3aFI=/fit-in/600x600/filters:strip_icc():format(jpeg):mode_rgb():quality(90)/discogs-images/R-1674121-1315702182.jpeg.jpg https://img.discogs.com/nFS5-9DpHU6jXE9b0cU7DkOSrO8=/fit-in/600x600/filters:strip_icc():format(jpeg):mode_rgb():quality(90)/discogs-images/R-1674121-1315702188.jpeg.jpg

Oh yeah and it's called Glass Houses. First song:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ilsv0C1-aBw

You May Be Right, in most markets the lead single, opens the album with a literal smash. It peaked at #7 in the US and #6 in Canada, and made the top 40 in Australia and New Zealand.

The video - a minute shorter, with a different take and no glass-breaking! - can be enjoyed here. The footage was also used for this delightful TV commercial for the album.

https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/4/48/YouMayBeRight.jpg

oh good – I hadn't disliked a Joel song in a couple weeks.

^^^ alfred, only proving he's insay-a-ayne

Friday night HULK SMASH YOUR PARTY
Saturday, Hulk say HULK SORRY
Sunday came,
HULK SMASH IT OUT AGAIN

― Doctor Casino, Monday, March 19, 2012 2:51 PM (28 minutes ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

Still laughing.

Also, wonder if he really did walk like this through Bed-Sty:

https://i.imgur.com/RQDU6bu.gif

"Glass Houses" was the second rock album I ever owned -- the first being "Get the Knack," which I bought on cassette at the tender age of 9. This one was given as a Christmas gift to me in 1980 by my Aunt Debbie, who was only 10 years older than I was. So any objective thoughts about the songs on this record are inevitably colored by nostalgia. Still, I really do love this record a lot, and I think this is a great opener. 11-year-old me had no idea what a "Bedford-Stuy" was. I had to ask my dad, who as a Brooklyn guy was very amused.

I have to decide which Joel I dislike least: the piano man chanteur? the rock and roll belter? the pastiche-er?

I can't remember ever not knowing all the words to this (tho maybe I had some other notion of what this "Bedford's Tie" was) but I do have a specific memory of being baffled by its adultyness, on a phone call with a 7th grade friend who also liked Joel, when she confronted me with the lyric "you were lonely for a man, I said take me as I am" : did I know what this meant? Uh oh - apparently she did, and I didn't. No explanation was forthcoming, but clearly I had a lot to learn about the world.

Anyway, I think it's a great little rock single, and actually in the course of this project I've become a little less skeptical of the makeover of Billy Joel as a self-destructive drunken asshole. Like idk, songs very much in character, shrug. The motorcycle still seems an awkward fit, even though he did in fact ride one, and survived a could-have-killed-him accident a couple years ago. But as Stones pastiches go, it beats what the Stones themselves were putting out around this time, trading their instrumental virtuosity for well-calibrated caveman crowd-pleasers from Liberty, and doling out a few bonus hooks along the way. Always glad when we get around to that penultimate variation on the title: you maaaay be wrong, for all I KNOW you may be right. (Versus say "She's So Cold" where a stanza or two in it's like, ugh, is this over soon? but you know you have to sit through several more minutes of sameness.)

In real life, of course, I would find this character loathsome. If someone was writing this out as a blog post or meme trying to win over a justifiably uninterested woman, I'd be infuriated. As with "Only The Good Die Young," it really depends on us charitably assuming that the woman in question would basically corroborate his version of their dysfunctional relationship, and declare that she's into it. Unlike that song, we don't have the other way out, where the narrator is an endearingly inept kid attempting a seduction with secondhand lines that are never going to go any further than psyching himself up in the mirror. This guy on the other hand is just a POS; at best, he's *her* POS and she wouldn't want him any other way.

Seriously? "She's So Cold" has a taut mastery – that instrumental break! – and an excellent vocal that knows when to get out of the way.

This was the first Billy Joel album I had, the only one I've ever truly loved, and so to me this just IS who Billy Joel is; it's the 70s ballads, encountered later, that read to me as a reinvention-reaction.

obv I agree that "You May Be Right" is part of the New Wave train jumping trend.

yeah idk "she's so cold" has just never done anything at all for me. ditto "start me up" which basically displays all its tricks in the snippet used to promote windows 95 (where I first heard it), and they're mostly lifted from "thunder island" anyway. I like the sound of the recordings okay but they're just not what I look for from the stones.

and ahahaha thanks pplains. that post might be one of my two or three proudest moments on ilx. tho the key imo is tarfumes's setup observation that billy "must have turned into the Hulk or something" to flip over his giant Yamaha onstage.

Casino, you evidently haven't heard my karaoke version of "She's 'So Cold."

I love the Chris Kimsey-engineered self-produced Stones mall rat era (I'm not a "Start Me Up" fan).

As a kid, I learned what the Combat Zone and Bed-Stuy were from this song.

This one to my ears fits "[song / album] basically invented [band / genre]" -- this is the ur-text for Quebec bar-band rock.

Billy Joel, New Wave--I fail to see the problem.

catching up!:

"zanzibar": i think this is my favorite billy joel song???? which is mostly bc it's billy simulating a steely dan song and doing it extremely well????

"stiletto": i love this song even though billy's vocal on it is fucking bizarre. such a sharp, excitable arrangement, the bridge especially. feel like a lot of his best songs are generated from this kind of irascible excitability which i feel is embodied in the live clip of "zanzibar" where he runs across the stage just to play a solo on a hammond organ

"rosalinda's eyes": the opening groove is so lush and centerless and but it gets mushy and undistinguished from there. like many of dude's deep cuts it feels like a draft for a better song he never ended up writing. the all-percussion coda is a nice touch

"half a mile away": hell YEAH. horns! buy a cheap wai-yine!!! i guess this song could revolve around a stronger hook but it nails the philly soul vibe so well that i don't mind "wordless flights into falsetto standing in for the hook." i feel tremendous unearned affection for this song lol

"until the night": wtf is up with billy's voice. stop it, my dude. six minutes of posturing that doesn't actually assemble into a song. why is this song so long, why won't it stop. i'm glad he starts singing normally in the fourteenth verse or whatever and the sax solo is incredible but i'm so tired and here comes that underwritten chorus again, thankfully it is the year 2177 and i am a skeleton whose ears have been reduced to mute unresonating bones

"52nd street": yeah some more of those collapsing steely dan-esque chords billy! no not more of your ray charles imitation wtf!!!

"you may be right" is a fuckin jam ofc though i remember the guitar riff in the chorus being more muscular than it actually is. any punk covers of this shit

i'm surprised that after the relatively self-assured the stranger that so much of the second side of 52nd street is devoted to identity crisis but about half of those songs are great anyway

it's hard for me to separate any positive feelings I have for this song from nostalgia because it is SO goddamn ridiculous (albeit catchy). Is this the first thing he put out with *no* piano on it?

animated gifs from this album's videos will never not be funny tho

"You may be right" is what drunk old guys with bandannas on their foreheads sing when they wander around parking lots

"You may be right" is what drunk old guys with bandannas on their foreheads sing when they wander around parking lots

― calstars, Thursday, September 21, 2017 9:20 AM (three minutes ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

also, in my experience, in karaoke bars

christgau's billy joel page is maybe my favorite observable evolution of his opinions, right up to when he reaches the greatest hits record, writes "i give up" and gives it an a-

I was gonna say Bowie

Also: "Zanzibar" is very good.

such a jam, i love this without reservation

the drums on the chorus are my favorite thing

YOU MAY BE RIGHT (WHAP! WHAP! WHAP!)
I MAY BE CRAZY (WHAP! WHAP! WHAP!)

and Cannata's sax solo is great

my sister & i used to sing this all the time

i love the long/short phrasing/cadence of this:

thiniiiik of all the years
you tried to
find
some
one
to
sat
is
fy you
i might be as craaazy as you saaay
if i'm craaaazy then it's truuue
that it's allllll becauuuuse of youuuu
amd you wouldnt want me aaaany other waaaay

CHILDHOOD THOUGHTS: Trying to imagine sweet talkin' a girl who's ALONE IN HER ELECTRIC CHAIR.

Also, always liked this moment on his Live at Long Island tape. If only that light guy had been there in the USSR.

(Just typed in "Long in Live Island" while searching for that, and now I've got Captain Jack porn possibilities in my head.)

WMJ's album personas are seamless, by the way. (The only one slightly opaque is 52nd Street jazz boy.) Him releasing this album in the midst of New Wave wasn't some sort of "Hello, fellow students." He was still who he was AND he was still relevant. There isn't a false note anywhere on this album.

Well, except maybe when he sings in French, but we'll get to that.

Anyway, I think it's a great little rock single

Pretty sure he recorded it in NYC, but we'll take the compliment!

haaa

believe it or not, there IS piano buried in the mix, it's just really close to the rhythm guitar part and hard to catch. maybe most audible in the "told me not to drive" part. my guess is they decided they didn't want it, turned it down to zero, but still got just a taste of it on the other mics in the room.

thiniiiik of all the years
you tried to
find
some
one
to
sat
is
fy you

Joel's hyperenunciation on vocals, often borderline fussy, pays off here in the word "satisfy"

Agreed. He's a songwriter with high self-esteem; of course he wants his words un.der.stood.

(I can relate - when I have written a song with very careful attention to meter and to lyrical cleverness, I hate giving it to a singery singer who wants to do all sorts of murky singerish stuff with it that will render my perfect words unintelligible.)

Billy Joel on Glass Houses - "This album is hard rock heavy. No balance between the ballads and the harder stuff."

lol this album is heavy as a wad of bubblegum

that's pretty heavy in the particular gravity of billy joel's home planet

Good song, though I didn't like it much growing up. I like the verses more than the chorus (in fact, chorus is probably the worst part), for some of the phrasings he comes up with, like the thing vg posted

It was punk enough to be featured on a punk compilation....
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chipmunk_Punk

i am going to a karaoke party next saturday...i may sing this. or Only The Good Die Young

Wow. Is this the raciest song Alvin and company ever cut? I was expecting to find the lyrics bowdlerized but, nope, "I told you dirty jokes until you smiled." Also, say what you will about Billy's rhythm section but they certainly wipe the floor with the autopilot goons on this cut.

Good song, though I didn't like it much growing up. I like the verses more than the chorus (in fact, chorus is probably the worst part), for some of the phrasings he comes up with, like the thing vg posted

― Vinnie, Thursday, September 21, 2017

otm

Liberty DeVitto vs. Kenny Aronoff for king of the disgruntled hard hitting hacks.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nTWSXhMKX4I

Sometimes a Fantasy, Billy's sweaty ode to phone sex, keeps up the new-wavey trappings, hung on a vocal that owes more to Elvis or Buddy Holly. As the album's third single - unusually released in a version a good thirty seconds longer than that heard on the LP - it got to #36 in the US and #21 in Canada. Apparently this was a weak enough performance that it got left off of the Greatest Hits (though it outperformed "Goodnight Saigon").

Joel likes to talk about it getting some degree of public backlash due to its racy premise. Supposedly, some listeners also worked out the phone number at the start based on the dial tones and started harassing that particular Bell customer. O_o The video - a proper Music Video this time, with a plot, and still more Acting! - is obviously a must-see.

I should also mention, what with all the shredding on the fadeout, that as of this album Billy finally has a consistent lead guitarist, one Dave Brown, who'll stick around all the way through Storm Front. Some online sources have him showing up on The Stranger and 52nd Street but the liner notes aren't backing that up.

https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/6/68/SometimesAFantasy.jpg

hot damn i love that cover, it looks like a vintage contemporary paperback by a debut novelist with a quirky and compulsively readable yet deeply literary take on youth in new york

"This 'Fantasy' is the real deal." –Thomas McGuane

"LET'S SEE OL' MR. THE WAITING IS THE HARDEST PART PULL SOMETHING LIKE THIS OFF." - pplains, 3/18/2012

"Pull something off"

https://i.makeagif.com/media/5-13-2014/nUYiIH.gif

Supposedly, some listeners also worked out the phone number at the start based on the dial tones and started harassing that particular Bell customer.

Always had heard it was the phone number for the Root Beer Rag subscription line!

https://i.makeagif.com/media/5-13-2014/nUYiIH.gif

It's a small thing, but I like how the rhythm section holds back until the second bar of the verses.