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

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.

that little guitar solo is very very george harrison. the call-and-response backing vox are very very beatles, too, and i assume the raw-sounding lead vocal and the attempt to transgress are the first of a few attempts on this album to channel john lennon. the piano intro and outro are meant as reminders, i assume, that this is in fact a billy joel song. i forgot how long and plodding it is. five minutes, feels like 10. the weird transparent vocal punch-ins ("suddenly,""immunized," etc.) make me carsick.

ha yeah i was being a little sarcastic with my "some other band," but it was a silly joke. this is the most clear attempt at beatles-ness he ever put on record. or at the very least, a solo lennon track with george's guitar, paul's backing harmonies, and a couple of ringo's fills passing through the studio.

this is totally composed like it's supposed to be an outtake from Imagine or Plastic Ono Band except that it is 3 times longer than it should be, the lyrics suck, and there's no hook. the (v brief) guitar solo is a nice George homage but beyond that this is just ugly all the way around. Never heard it before.

God, I love Laura. I love this whole album to bits, but I love Laura in particular.

yeah it feels like Plastic Ono Band to me as well, maybe because of the negative vibe

i don’t hate it, i just dont really like listening to it?

i think tucked into the album as a whole it would pass by ok though

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6Z5WdSL0BK0

Pressure, according to one interview with Billy that I listened to, is "about pressure." Got it! (He's elaborated more elsewhere on the pressure of writer's block, and looking back on financial pressures earlier in his career.)

If you're like me and grew up on the first-issue Greatest Hits, the album version (found in the clip above) may be a surprise; the single cut it down from 4:40 to 3:16 by eliminating several sections, beginning with the "don't ask for help" verse. I guess the label applied some.......... influence.

https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/e/e8/PressureBillyJoel.jpg

As the album's lead single, it peaked at #20 in the US and #9 in Canada. The music video, focused mainly on water pressure and some Shatnerian emoting from BJ, sticks to the album length with a slightly different mix.

Lyrically, vocally and hook-wise, the New Wavey-est thing I've heard from Billy so far, but damn those synths are shrill. New Wave, particularly circa 1982, was far more minimal, and often much warmer sounding, than this.

Listen to this and "Shock the Monkey" back to back.

You used to call me paranoid.... MON-KEY!!

One of the first videos I remember seeing.

I mean, it's hard to keep up with the other videos it foreshadowed:

"Electric Avenue"
"Owner of a Lonely Heart"
"Synchronicity II"
Um, "Hot for Teacher"?

But I didn't realize that *cough* this video was released in 1978?

https://i.imgur.com/vTPJLgD.png

When the content becomes self-aware:

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

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

Harry Truman, Doris Day...

So, Roger. What did you think of this one?

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