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

omg

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0qwEtA_yx-g

The Great Suburban Showdown: Billy gets some time on the studio's Moog, and spins out another sketch of a time and place, though this time in the first person and with more of a story (and perhaps a touch more empathy). The setting, though certainly not the treatment, reminds me a bit of Newman's "So Long Dad"...

I like this one. Needs a stronger hook but that intro with the Moog just puts me in a good mood, cemented by the steel guitar. How many songs feature both of those instruments? Very odd hybrid he's going for - wonder if he'd heard Jeff Haskell's Switched On Buck (1971). Anyway, I'd forgotten that his country attempts continued onto this album... a part of his kettle of influences I don't normally think about, or try to listen for in later albums. This song probably needs more of a hook - I kinda don't remember it after it's over - but it's the best listen on this album so far, for me.

i thought "los angelenos" was just kind of ok but it's still stuck in my head a day later

Miss the days of flying commercial, drinking free champagne, and going "oh, shit, should've brought my gun with me."

i like this one!

I think Dr C's right abt needing a stronger hook ... and yeah the gun thing is weird! esp since it seems like his folks are just boring & not really getting up in his business or anything

what is the "showdown" part aside from just saying goodbye?

in general, I'm finding myself wanting to root for this album but not being able to, it's almost like he's playing with the idea of doing some kinda Springsteen more conceptual thing but it's just not his nature and he can't really do the songs for it

whereas on "Captain Jack" he manages to make a good suburban ennui that really sticks to your ribs

I don't know if the Moog is the best instrument for the ends he wants to achieve – and what are those ends anyway?

I feel like he wanted to write a song about being a twentysomething and having this mixed thing about going home and your parents drive you crazy but it's also kind of comforting to be there - hey, lots of people would relate to that - but he pulls back from really developing either theme and it just ends up vague again. Or maybe he started out wanting to write a tough ugly cynical song cause he's such a world-wise rockin' guy but then got partway through and was like "nahhhhh, I mean Dad can be annoying but I like the folks okay and it'll always be home!" Either way it feels a little purposeless. There's something about how this will all continue in heaven (a sort of lame shade of "Daddy Sang Bass") but nothing really *happens*, certainly not a showdown. My workshopping suggestion: add e a bridge that flashes back to earlier times, establishes in a few evocative words what his relationship to this place *used* to be, and then the juxtaposition of that and the rest of it creates some kind of emotional tug.

Honestly, the most interesting angle, and the most Joel-ish, would have been to make an earnest case *for* Long Island suburban life and family - stick it to all those cooler-than-thou Los Angeles snobs with their Pleasant Valley Sundays and Paved Paradises! Give us the flipside of Captain Jack - guy comes back from his strange couple years in LA and is fucking thrilled to see the crabgrass, oh man guys you don't know how crazy everybody is out west. He'd take basically that course on the next album, but adopting NYC rather than your Huntingtons and Cold Spring Harbors.

(versus Captain Jack, whose lead is parading around the old town in affected hipster styles. but maybe that's closer to how Joel really felt about his roots at this point? hence the lunge for NYC cred?)

No to go back to Cpt. Jack too much, but I still don't get how you can pretty easily get to Greenwich Village and rub elbows with junkies/queens, on the one hand, but you're also somehow simultaneously in a "one-horse town" where there is nowhere to go and nothing to do.

Like, I know about suburbs from which all the delights of the city are within easy reach, transitwise. I also know about small towns where there's nothing exciting to do, and you're hours away from anything interesting. I don't get how a town can be both of those at the same time.

Hmmm, you're making me wonder if that song's lyric is meant to unfold in time, across the verses... I've always read it as basically describing one point in the character's life, but maybe the Village detour happens during a semester at NYU, the father's death over the summer, etc.

Doctor, I, too, have always understood it to mean one specific "tonight."

Maybe he's on Long Island in a place where he can get to the city for a little bit in the daytime, but the train schedules and/or parental restrictions make it difficult as an evening excursion?

So it would be theoretically possible to go to the Village for a while to people-watch. But he's got to be back in Hicksville (or whatever) before things get interesting in the city. That makes the whiny bits about his sister being on a date, but he's got no place to go, make a tiny bit more sense.

But for decades I've wondered why he doesn't just stay in the Village and, like, I dunno, go see a band or something. Also, he can get heroin! Jeez. In my experience, most teenagers I knew back then would have felt like scoring H and hanging on Bleecker was a pretty exciting evening.

Another narrative song, but less forced and more solidly melodic than "Streetlife Serenader." I like the way that the lyric "We'll all sit around in the kitchen chairs / With the TV on and the neighbors there" kind of tumbles out, sounding anxious and frustrated compared to the rest of it; there's some anger barely creeping in here that is sinisterly hinted at with the early line about the gun. It's not a subtle song, necessarily, but it leaves some things tantalizingly unsaid.

That said, I don't know what's going on with that Moog, either.

New theory: Jack operates a small ferry service - with the option to ride "high" up in the crow's nest for an extra fee - whose stops include a small, rocky outcropping much beloved by the main character. Unfortunately, the last boat out is at 7 PM, so there's really no option to do much in the city if you want to make it.

I like the album art.

captain jack to me occurs over time

he's IN the one horse town ie home/suburbs
so he GOES to the village
but all the while throughout the song he is still living at home (mum makes yr bed etc)

i assume "the great suburban showdown" is the same narrator as "captain jack" a few years down the line. and now he's a boring, cynical asshole with a shitty office job in san diego who thinks he's seen the world. also, he owns a moog. i'd much rather hear the song from mom and dad's point of view. junior's just kind of boring me to death here.

I like the way that the lyric "We'll all sit around in the kitchen chairs / With the TV on and the neighbors there" kind of tumbles out

i do like that line.

the most interesting angle, and the most Joel-ish, would have been to make an earnest case *for* Long Island suburban life and family - stick it to all those cooler-than-thou Los Angeles snobs with their Pleasant Valley Sundays and Paved Paradises!

we are the long island preservation society
god save the northern state, easthampton and anxiety

Anyone get a Jackson Browne vibe from this song?

ew no

but then I don't like him so my brain doesn't really even go there

jackson browne is a good call on this one.

I don't know if the Moog is the best instrument for the ends he wants to achieve

we'll be hearing more of that. i think it was a new toy and he wanted to use it every chance he got.

sing us a song yr the moog man

suburban showdown really needed a "Scenes from an Italian restaurant" style break in the middle where the tempo speeds up and they all have a big argument or something and then switch back to humdrum suburbia

that would've been cool

yeah totally!

Jackson Browne was a better melodist and storyteller, even at this stage.

go peddle yr JB love on the Eagles thread buddy

Alfred otm

"like"

and I'm not remotely a fan

"Somebody's Baby" >>> entire BJ catalog imo

Browne and Joel have their respective gaucheries, so they cancel each other out.

except that jackson browne is creepy & gross & i hate him

he looks like a serial killer who goes around playing a guitar luring women

The Nice Guy Killer

bleh

the intersection of the jackson and billy venn diagram is "lawyers in love," which should have been on one of billy's '80s albums.

so.... the difference w Billy Joel is he plays piano?

xp

Joel comes off plenty creepy and gross, as we'll soon see.

Browne plays piano too!

billy plays guitar too! (more or less)

GODDAMMIT WHY DO I HAVE TO EVEN DEFEND BILLY JOEL AGAINST MOTHERFUCKING JACKSON BROWNE IN A THREAD THAT ISNT EVEN ABOUT JACKSON BROWNE IN THE FIRST PLACE

you are all wrong and you should all shut up imo

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mKrd0lv_p1c

Root Beer Rag is the first of two instrumentals on the record, and perhaps reflects the enthusiasm for ragtime following the massive success of The Sting the previous year. Somehow, Columbia managed not to make it the b-side to "The Entertainer," which surely could have snagged a few unsuspecting Joplin fans, but in an odd twist it would be used as the b-side for several 52nd Street singles in different markets. Meanwhile, per Wiki, it saw plenty of use as TV theme and incidental music, including as the opening to the very first, local-to-Chicago Siskel & Ebert program. It's also been covered a few times, including an a capella rendition by the German Wise Guys.

Joel remains fond of the song; here it is live in 1978 (there's the Moog next to him!) and 2013. Finally: "Root Beer Rag" was also the name of a Billy Joel newsletter (now defunct) published in the late 1970s to late 1980s.

By the way, since the album cover came up, here's that entry from Pop Spots, a charming site previously invoked with regard to the original Piano Man bar location.

And, from that link, this great ad which I missed when introducing the album:

http://www.popspotsnyc.com/streetlife_serenade/Steetlife_Ad_1_800.jpg

Um, cute?

nightmarish

a city full of Billy Joel's talking about Billy Joel, that's some malkovich malkovich malkovich shit

original concept for Longest Time video iirc

lol that'd be amazing. each new vocal part, another advent-calendar window pops open or another target-practice cut-out springs up from the ground, hey it's billy!

"root beer rag" makes me ridiculously happy.