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

this song does that quintessential Billy Joel thing where one of the instruments (usually Joel's piano) is banging out straight 8th notes all the way through while other instruments shift around where the downbeat/emphasis is. I believe this juxtaposition is meant to represent "complexity".

but I find it pretty irritating.

There is nothing about this song I don't love. It's my favorite Joel song and always has been since I first heard.

it.

Also made a good bumper going into the bottom-of-the-hour break.

Laura is great, so far his Beatles pastiches have generally be McCartneyesque this leans towards Lennon

Pressure I remember so vividly as a kid, it seemed so weird and intense to me, cornfields post-punk I guess

it's ridiculous but it works

though I have to say, like everyone been listening to a lot of Tom Petty lately and the graceful, easy way his best songs have does make me like Billy's try-hard piano lesson kid I'll huff and I'll puff and I'll blow yr house down thing a little less

Pressure is def Billy on 11

I do love that the synth parts are this mix of minor and diminished chords that resolve solidly into major for the verses, then he re-visits them again to get back to the chorus without making it sound quite so tense until the next instrumental break. He uses a lot of passing tones in this one, too.

this song does that quintessential Billy Joel thing where one of the instruments (usually Joel's piano) is banging out straight 8th notes all the way through while other instruments shift around where the downbeat/emphasis is. I believe this juxtaposition is meant to represent "complexity".

but I find it pretty irritating.

^^^ cannot handle "Pressure"

wow they really chopped the shit out of the Greatest Hits version, huh.

this song makes me think of interpretive dance and the "Oh Industry" song from Beaches
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QpX80Soj44M

also this is definitely one of those songs that sounded VERY ADULT to my child-ears
loaded guns? in my face? O_O
and singing about stuff like Peter Pan and Sesame Street but he sounded so MAD about them which I found very confusing

it's specifically the new-york-area PBS station -

Love this line, because in Minneapolis we called our local PBS station "Channel 2."

That was ours too.

And Channel 6. And Channel 9. We had a lot of low-wattage towers covering the state, but that's neither here nor there.

Yep, Cleveland's version was Channel 25. As far as I'm concerned it still is!

https://youtu.be/7wqfcwgT0Ds

Wasn't until I saw this that I realized we've found the little brother of "My Life".

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hp_npbYf5pA

Also, I have led a worthless life.

fast bikes, you say

http://i.pinimg.com/originals/e9/04/04/e90404264872ad01453f1eabff586937.jpg

this song is one of my top five billy tunes

I just remembered that this one had another mondegreen for me - I always heard it as "You will come to a place where the only thing you feel/Alone it comes in your face . . ."

This afternoon I had the haziest memory of not being able to parse what he was saying with "peter pan advice" - something like "feet of hand advice" but it's just been too many years and it's gone now.

Most of this track sounds like theme music for a sports programme. I thought it was tremendously exciting as a kid, it sounds dreadful now, trying so hard to be edgy.

Just came in to say I agree the keyboards sound like Genesis, but more like "Duke" than "Abacab" -- in particular, I feel like the piano chords in the opening are Billy having a go at "Turn it On Again"

Entertainer synth is way more egregious imo - synth on Pressure is practically calming by comparison

oh man if only phil had let him wheel out that zippy little minimoog for this. PRESSURE!!! doot doodly doot doot do diddily doo de doo....

http://www.gifbin.com/bin/1238157980_scanners_-_head_explosion.gif

There are a lot of annoying billy Joel songs but this one takes the cake. But I'd still rather sit through this than Piano Man.

Entertainer synth is way more egregious imo - synth on Pressure is practically calming by comparison

― Squeaky Fromage (VegemiteGrrl), Wednesday, October 11, 2017 11:27 PM (eleven minutes ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

I love "The Entertainer" and only sorta like "Pressure," but I can't really argue with this. The best I can do is that the former is sort of uniquely weird while the latter sounds more standardly arena-ready.

Not feeling "Laura". Very Beatles-y, but I don't like the hook much. Reminds me of some of the less good post-Beatles stuff. Too blustery too, I think

"Pressure" is all-time though. Love the synth, lots of memorable lines. Pretty interesting writing too - switching between major and minor and the way the rhythm switch in the pre-chorus is delayed. And whatever the hell is going on at 3:47

I think what I love about Laura is that its about as gritty as Billy goes, all fucked up family dynamics and "HEY I'M WALKIN HERE" NYC edginess and weirdo 70s urban angst, and yet there's all these gonzo Beatlesque production games he's playing throughout, like the blasts of unexpected harmonies, the George Harrison guitar lushness, the bits that are all "laura LAURA calls me CALLS ME even if i don't care AND IF I DON'T CARE AHHHHHHH". It's just calmly, sourly berserk.

In the WNYC interview with Alec Baldwin, he shows the source of the Pressure synth riff:

Billy Joel: Didn’t really sell a lot of records. “Pressure” was the big hit, I think. [Billy plays.] Tchaikovsky. What’s that one from Swan Lake? [Billy plays.]

Alec Baldwin: At least you’re ripping off the greats. Those Russians, man, go with Tchaikovsky.

Just a few years later, Sting would release "Russians," with a theme from Prokofiev.

We rag on Billy all the time for being derivative and yet he's often a step ahead of his peers. I didn't know until this thread that he'd messed about with corny-ass animated animal features before Elton and Phil, for example.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ghllgDOV8uA

Goodnight Saigon closes side one with an arena-ready, epic-sized ballad for the U.S. Marines who served overseas in Southeast Asia. It follows the "Allentown" template in that the emphasis is on the emotional experience and journey of the American soldier, rather than judging the war, telling its larger story, or considering the Vietnamese experience. In this it could be compared to Maya Lin's memorial (dedicated November, 1982) and Oliver Stone's Platoon, which had been bouncing around in script form for ages (including a pitch for Doors-tape participant Jim Morrison to play the lead) but wasn't filmed until 1986. One Final Serenade points us to an article in this promising Touro College symposium on Billy Joel which features an interpretation by one Morgan Jones - haven't read it so I can't comment.

https://img.discogs.com/Xzh6bldnlAj80xsntDjyVsnn9QI=/fit-in/600x594/filters:strip_icc():format(jpeg):mode_rgb():quality(90)/discogs-images/R-1202820-1270581237.jpeg.jpg

The song was released in February 1983 as the album's third and final single, in a shorter but still substantial 5:48 edit. I haven't found that version online, but the music video used a live take which gets close to that length just by leaving out most of the helicopter bookending. It peaked at #56 in the US and barely charted anywhere else - save the Netherlands, where it spent three weeks at the top of the charts before being dethroned by "Fame." It's his only Dutch #1. In 1998, an all-star Dutch-language version - Ellen ten Damme! Jantje Smit! Guus Meeuwis! - was released as a charity single to raise money for children in war zones. (Video contains footage of injured kids, FYI.) The "Nilsson" listed in the Wikipedia entry sadly turns out to be a Dutch alt-rock act, not Harry, although we may have reason to discuss the latter soon.

Unusually, the version on the Greatest Hits is the full seven-minute album recording. Clearly, Billy was proud of the song, since its length possibly displaces two of the six higher-charting singles left out of the track list. As we've discussed elsewhere, those were the days when a mega-selling comp could work to put a less-popular song in front of many more ears; I think that may account for this song's later life, including a cover by Garth Brooks (not his only Billy treatment, as we'll see) on a 2013 box set. That's not easily found online, so here's a live version done as a not-particularly-seamless medley with "Allentown," with veterans on stage, and Billy in the audience with John Kerry and the Obamas. Joan Baez's rendition (released on a 1991 compilation, Brothers in Arms) has no sitting presidents, but makes up for that with the voice of Joan Baez.

This was the "New York State of Mind" of side A (and later disc 2) for me as a kid--the song I always fast-forwarded/skipped through when listening to the Greatest Hits. It's still not something that I'll put on just to hear--the Ozzy-like echo on the end of certain lines feels like a gimmick cooked up to enliven a decidedly non-commercial song--but I've come to appreciate his lyrical detail. Especially this:

We had no home front, we had no soft soap
They sent us Playboy, they gave us Bob Hope

The Hope reference, in particular, speaks to a, shall we say, generational cluelessness that plagued the 'Nam era. This won't be the first or the last time I reference The Simpsons here, but I'm reminded of that episode where Homer is "studying" to be a hippie (the same ep that includes my very favourite Joel reference on The Simpsons, or possibly anywhere) by watching a tone-deaf Hope spoof hippies on a 60s era television special. Billy was definitely responding to America's need for a cathartic way through understanding Vietnam that began almost immediately after the fact (The Deer Hunter and Apocalypse Now being the major precursors to the 80s run of 'Nam flicks), but I think the main feeling he gets at here is one of fatigue at execution of the war, and that's not necessarily something I remember standing out in many of the cinematic documents of the era.

yes. i also think this song, with allentown, indicates that as much as we've occasionally had cause to lampoon his "sketch of a time and place" songs when he leans on hackier details, when he feels there's something important to capture about the time and place he can really convey something emotionally. it helps that he clearly spent time talking to people - including close friends - who really knew these experiences. as a kid i instantly got the significance of the unwanted and irrelevant Bob Hope, and even moreso the sense that this came at the expense of "cameras to shoot the landscape," a totally reasonable and human thing for some teenage kid in a faraway country to want.

interesting that both the Viet Cong and the army brass are simply "they." (i've seen it argued that by the end you're meant to feel that the vietnamese combatants are also meant to be included in the fraternity of those who will all go down together, but i really can't find that in the song.)

Along those lines, remembering "Charlie", who was a fellow soldier, but also the generic name for VC.

The lyrics are well-written and sharp (dare I say, as sharp as KNIVES knives knives). But I have not really warmed to this song and don't enjoy listening to it. The music is a bit plodding.

The concert thing where they get a bunch of local vets up on stage to sway meaningfully and sing seems... um... maudlin? Cloying? Anyway, a Bit Much, to my post-ironic sensibility. Also to my father, a Vietnam veteran himself, finds it eye-rolling and cheap. But I know it is a popular crowd-pleasing gesture and brings many people genuine feelz.

Note, AGAIN, that Sting and Bono started bringing up mothers of the disappeared, or whatever, after Billy started doing this.

"Charlie" and "Baker" are also USMC companies, I believe. "Charlie" is also a recruit company at Parris Island - maybe Baker was at that time also? So the names can refer to individual Marines that our speakers are reminiscing about to each other, or act as synecdoches for larger groups and by extension the Corps as a whole.

Dang it. I thought Baker was a dude who shared my last name.

If I may invoke Manny Farber's "white elephant vs. termite art" for a minute, I want to add that while I think that The Deer Hunter, Apocalypse Now and Full Metal Jacket are better movies than "Goodnight Saigon" is a song, I think it might get to the heart of its subject more effectively than any of those films--bold auteurist works that likely say more about the filmmakers' particularly interests and perspectives than they actually do the work of documenting the Vietnam War--do. Not having seen any of Oliver Stone's 'Nam cycle either in decades or at all, the closes parallel I can think of to Billy's song here is Tim O'Brien's devastating memoir The Things They Carried.

Able Baker Charlie

wtf guys

xp

I always understood them as being able to stand either for specific people, or (as Doc says) synecdoches. The choice of these most generic possible names may have been intended for the greatest possible universality.

As Οὖτις notes, "Able Baker Charlie Dog..." is a variant / forerunner of the phonetic alphabet that we now use ("Alpha Bravo Charlie Delta...")

So it is almost literally not possible for the names to be more generic. We're not in a realm of specificity like Anthony, Mr. Cacciatore, Mama Leone, Brender, Laura, Judy, etc.

"I can always find my Cuban skies, in Charlie Baker's eyes"

but i actually never knew about the other phonetic alphabets!

this song is... a lot. billy is trying so hard. this endears me to it even if the chorus is a little much

it's widely beloved even though it wasn't a hit

the verse melody is among the loveliest in his catalog imo

(Able Baker Charlie etc. is historically naval, which is why D-Day had beach sectors named Dog and Easy. Of course USMC, as a branch of the Navy, would have followed this nomenclature instead of the more universal and less culturally rooted NATO alphabet.)

i love this song without reservation

i love it just as a song to sing along to. especially when drunk bcz KNIVES IVES IVES IVES is just fun to scream

but i love the storytelling so much
it has the feel of a fictionalised oral history, not trying to “say” anything, just relate the experience in very specific ways.
and his delivery belies that the song was inspired by close friends, i think the fragility & tenderness in his voice for the verses honors the subject matter in a beautiful way

i love the rhyming too:
We came in spastic, like tamelees horses
We left in plastic, as numbered corpses

weirdly this song reminds me of some older warren zevon compositions, stuff like "desperados under the eaves." more emotionally obvious ofc

that couplet is great vg

it’s so clean & perfect

i think about it a lot

Also the SNL Goodnight Saigon is one of my favorites
bcz it’s clearly just an excuse for everyone to sing the song lol

http://indavideo.hu/video/Goodnight_Saigon_-_Will_Ferrell

So y'all are trying to tell me that John Steinbeck's dog wasn't named after me either.

Another huge McCartney flavour to this track - like a mashup of the "we're so sorry" parts of "Uncle Albert/Admiral Halsey" with "Live and Let Die".
This always felt like a counterpart to "Captain Jack" to me - not sure why, maybe the seriousness and the length?