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

'back to a time when tomatoes were cheaper' is a long stupid walk to get a rhyme with speaker, billy

eventually he'll learn that he can get more mileage from a cheap pair of sneakers.

shuddering to think how narrowly we missed out on "you got more mileage when tomatoes were cheaper"

really like "Summer, Highland Falls", filter great Plains Copelandisms through the Beatles into a piano part that feel like proto-Hornsby

Def hear some Jackson Browne in this too in the way he phrases certain lines

As for the other song...

What the heck was it where EVERY FUCKING ROCK ACT felt like they had to try their hand at cod-reggae?? it's such a disease in the 70s, I wonder why? I guess maybe it was a like a 50s exotica fad deal and emphasizing the 2 and 4 with a guitar chop is such an easy and superficial way to sort ape reggae...but god almighty what terrible music resulted.

anyway this song sucks...though the Moog "steel drums" are goofy enough they almost remind me of something Zappa would do in a funny way

I imagine we have whole threads about cod reggae but imho most charitable reading, and I have to reach for this, is that it was (to them) a 'new' sound and yet within their instrumental grasp and probably very enjoyable to play. Not a great argument in favor of cultural appropriation but I can see how it happened. After Clapton hit #1 in the US with "I Shot the Sheriff" and Typically Tropical did the same with "Barbados" in the UK, further attempts were probably inevitable.

If I'm going to give BJ any credit on this one it's that the choice is either wildly incongruous to the song, or pays it off lyrically in a surprising way: the contemporary music that the fuddy-duddy subject things she can't dance to is reggae, which is actually very danceable! Hey lady, get over your nostalgia for the glory days of Elvis, the kids are listening to Bob Marley! I dunno... another reach maybe. But I think he comes off well versus Anglos trying to mimic Jamaican accents and Patois, or in the case of "Barbados," singing in the first person as a Barbadian immigrant (aka minstrelsy).

i was bracing myself for nope-inducing patois, thank god that didnt happen

I'm trying to keep my mouth shut out of respect for all of you but really

Nope-inducing patois inna Hicksville stylee, mon. We didn't start the irie.

lol!

yeah um that kinda thing

STOP IT

but yes thankfully billy's most egregious affected accents are caricatures of new york white ethnics. there's another anecdote i keep wanting to paste in here but it concerns a mind-warping demo version of a big, big billy song on the next album and i want to save it til then.

man i can't wait til we're done with this song

why did u make us listen to that, doctor casino

i thought u liked us ;_;

say goodbye to joel bein' good
say hello, cod reggae

noooooo

don't worry, the album gets better. "irie state of mind" is of course his classic, practically the jamaican national anthem at this point. "dub prelude/irie young man" is an underrated lee scratch perry collaboration. "irie loved these days" is some sweet lovers rock. and, obviously, "montego bay 2017 (seen the lights go out on irie)." very prescient.

If you don't think I'm slightly curious about what a "dub prelude" would sound like, then you don't know me at all.

i'm pretty sure it involves sly, robbie and a super-fast melodica solo. i imagine there's moog in there, too.

i will maintain to my grave that this rinky-dink tune in all its lameness is a far, far better thing than "jamaica jerk-off" or "dreadlock holiday." robert palmer's rendition of "pressure drop" is another story though, and i am incapable of being rational about "c moon."

and of course there's ron wood's "i can feel the fire." he had his own reggae to do.

let's not drag the unfuckwithable robert palmer into this.

oh that was badly worded, I was trying to exclude him from the list of things "all you wanna do is dance" is better than.

idk any of those songs and am kind of glad I don't tbh

although sounds like it might make for an interesting hate-listening thread

xp

this is def a million times worse than D'yer Mak'er, that's for sure

oh that was badly worded, I was trying to exclude him from the list of things "all you wanna do is dance" is better than.

i got that! i was just trying to save him from having his name appear anywhere in this discussion.

this song is a good forty seconds shorter than "d'yer mak'er" which should count for something imo

I wish it was 3:48 seconds shorter

f.c. cuz, you're going to hell for "irie young man."

That said: "took on diesel back in MONtauk yesterday..."

For all dyer makr's shortcomings, at least bob plant didn't appropriate an accent. Can't say the same for mick and oh cherry tho

Or "luxury" but that's a different thread

"Still Trenchtown Rock to Me"

Uptown Girl Ranking

LOL

Jamaican Jerk Off is so bad...the title alone

Ugh

Now Billy's style are strictly roots

For all dyer makr's shortcomings, at least bob plant didn't appropriate an accent.

Bring It On Home, however....

I think you mean hats off to harper

maybe that one too, but

All right! Now let's never speak of that again.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=F5LkGKJDc3Q

New York State of Mind, though not issued as a single until a 2001 duet with Tony Bennett, is surely on the shortlist of Billy Joel's signature songs, and among his most-covered. I'll let Wiki do the talking as I don't have the energy right now to look up even a handful of these promising renditions, which start to sound like a lost "We Didn't Start the Fire" verse: Barbra Streisand, Lea Michele and Melissa Benoist, Joanna Wang, Elton John, Ramin Karimloo, Shirley Bassey, Oleta Adams, Carmen McRae, Mark-Almond, Diane Schuur, Ben Sidran, Mel Tormé, Frank Sinatra Jr., Adam Pascal, and Tony Bennett. Perhaps uniquely, it has been interpreted by two different Muppet acts, with a 1977 performance by Dr. Teeth and the Electric Mayhem at their least mayhemic, and a 1984 solo piano treatment by Rowlf the Dog (later to appear on 1993's Ol' Brown Ears Is Back. (Those are Jerry Nelson and Jim Henson on vocals, respectively.)

It also became a children's book with illustrations by Izak Zenou; "Billy Joel's evocative lyrics invite readers to tag along as two spirited little dogs experience the energy and excitement of New York City."

For Greatest Hits I & II, the sax solos by Richie Cannata (by that point no longer in the band) were stripped out and replaced with one by Phil Woods, a jazz veteran with some 1,843 credits on AllMusic. He'd previously worked with Joel, on "Just The Way You Are"; Wiki also highlights his contributions to Steely Dan's "Doctor Wu" and Paul Simon's "Have A Good Time" though for jazz heads the resume runs much longer. The version of the song in the YouTube above is the original Turnstiles album recording, I think, unless it's the third version created for the quadrophonic CD release. Doing A/B with my vinyl copy was getting awkward so if there's a splice late in the song or something I might have screwed this up.

This one was affecting when Joel played it at the 9/11 memorial concert.

and not at any other moment

disagree :)

i love this. and i will even admit to doing the ultimate cheeseball cornball move: i listened to it while i was walking around NYC when I visited roughly 10 years ago.

it didnt feel cheesy though! The music, especially the piano felt like it caught some kind of a mood that wasn't at all what I expected

Including this one and Miami 2017 on the same record is sooooooo Billy.

The song I always skipped on GH Disc 1. I don't hate it like I used to, but its still far too formal and "adult" for my tastes, and certainly not what I come to Billy Joel for.

What *does* one come to Billy for?

agreed - this song is absolutely cornball or at least on the border, but i think it works.

in a weird way i think it foresages something like the use of Gershwin in manhattan... this attempt to reconstruct a timeless and classy new-yorkness, despite the FORD TO CITY: DROP DEAD era vibe of the times. joel is no george gershwin, mind you! i just mean, compare this with "miami 2017" later on this record which is very much of that era, and even seems to anticipate the '77 blackout. here he's pushing all that aside and saying yeah but man this place is pret-ty cool if you're in the right mood. he adored new york city. he idolised it all out of proportion. (...) he thrived on the hustle and bustle of the crowds and the traffic. in the context of where the city was at in the 70s it seems like a conscious push-back, out in california they think new york's a hellhole but i've CHOSEN it! up yours!

the lyric's invocation of a handful of vague signifiers (newspapers, chinatown, riverside) is admittedly a rorschach blot, but no moreso than the place names in "this land is your land," whose opening lines retrace the same journey as "say goodbye to hollywood." notably, again vs. "miami 2017," in the opening lines here, miami beach and hollywood are both rejected as destinations.

it also feels to me like an attempt to get something into his setlist that could maybe take the place of "piano man" - similar opening in a way, similar pace, similar reflective mood though without the 'carnival' quality, piano torch song, but a little more for billy and the band to do.

one of my all-time favorite new york songs, totally separate from my love for billy. great american songbook material coupled with his best faux ray charles performance. "i don't have any reasons/i left them all behind" is a strange thing to say about new york -- that's an island-in-the-caribbean sentiment, not a new york city sentiment -- and yet it works in a "fuhgeddaboudit this is f#$%ing new york city stop asking questions" sorta way. and besides, he grew up on that island just to the east, so maybe that's how long islanders think. or something. i don't know. i don't need any reasons either. A-plus.

i like phil woods' tone better than richie cannata's but i like richie's solo better and i hate that billy switched it out.

all-time worst version: billy and bruce springsteen duetting at msg. it's sooooooo not bruce springsteen material.

leaving one's reasons behind is also a good late-twenties kind of thought, i think. it's a between-the-lines thing but to me it suggests this larger sense of, following all these reasons is what got me to a place i wasn't happy, with people i didn't like, doing work that didn't feel good. i'm leaving them all behind, going on something other than reasons this time - a hunch, a bet, a faith.