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

i still kinda like it though

I dig it, but I'm such a Ram stan that I love the idea of someone getting that record day one, devouring it, and entering the studio two months later all keyed up to attempt one's own "Back Seat of My Car." Of course there are earlier McCartney precedents - "Another Day" had been out for a few months longer, and I sorta wish that amid his vocal outbursts at the end he tossed in "JUDE JUDY JUDY JUDY JUDY JUDY JU-DY WAIIIOW!" The backing vocals in particular are a lot closer to Linda's sandy overdubs than anything on Abbey Road, to my ears anyway. This is a really bizarre choice for the second track on a singer-songwriter album but maybe Billy or somebody wanted to make sure you got that he was a rocker, that this wasn't just going to be an album of "Your Song" type ballads.

yeah i think the devout mccarrtneyisms itt to me are what i like about it, as a mccartney fan myself

much more than "she's got a way," i'd say this is his "maybe i'm amazed" moment. or at least his attempt at that moment. it's catchy, but it ain't mccartney-catchy.

maybe the ending jam is a gift to any hassles or attila fans who were still hanging around. with some beatles ah-ah-aah harmonies on top of it just because.

Digging this experiment. I also came in with The Stranger. But, wow, You Can Make Me Free, not so great. Much more pastiche than BJ himself. The underlying song isn't that hot so he just added more and more stuff.

Yeah agree that this is a very weird second track. That jam would disrupt any album momentum. It's a fine song, but I would have thought it was McCartney if I wasn't listening carefully

Everyone OTM this morning.

Gonna wake up the kids with this and tell 'em it's Aerosmith.

lol

I had resigned myself to an entire album of earnest piano ballads, so this was unexpected? I mean, it starts out as something very much in that mode, but then the production/accompaniment just goes kinda bonkers.

these threads (ie this, Eagles, Elton John etc.) seem like some mix of gluttony for punishment, genuine attempts at critical discourse re: artists people don't necessarily like all that much, and semi-closeted fans seeking vindication

not at all sure they beat drinking alone tho

thanks for your contribution

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?"