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

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BRvDvVu-Jzo

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BRvDvVu-Jzo

This Night is the big slow-dance number, inspired by Elle Macpherson and released as a single overseas to middling returns. In the UK it got a deluxe gatefold single treatment, apparently intended as a romantic stocking-stuffer. Huh.

If the chorus melody seems somehow un-Joelish, that may be because - per the liner notes - he was working with a cowriter, one "L. v. Beethoven." Nice of Billy to give the guy a leg up.

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That Beethoven guy didn't need Billy's help - he'd cowritten a hit song with that exact same tune for Louise Tucker just the year before

Wow, what a hack! Did he think no one would notice?

If, as someone pointed out yesterday, "The Longest Time" sounds like it could have come from the actual heyday of doo-wop twenty or thirty years prior, "This Night" sounds very much like an 80s take on the genre. I don't hate it, but its easily the least memorable AIM track up to this point.

I could see hearing the shoop-shoo-wahs as somehow a little more affected and winking, but for me it totally works. That chorus melody really does a lot of work!

I do wish it were "This night is ours" even if that throws away the "mine / I" rhyme. Everything else about it is a just-we-two kind of thing, time stops around us, this night can last forever. "This night is mine" makes him sound like Conan the Barbarian.

I can hear the lamentations of the women

I mean, did the Stray Cats get pissed that someone else was pulling the whole retro thing?

It's a pretty song.

Sting would pull the ol' borrow-from-the-dead trick later on his own album:

https://i.imgur.com/CnYX3em.png

Stray Cats came out of a totally different scene - they're contemporaries/immediate predecessor were people like X and the Gun Club and the Cramps

Built For Speed was #2 behind Business as Usual for 15 weeks. Clearly 'Happy Days' were here again.

huh I had no idea the Stray Cats went the Pretenders/Hendrix "let's move to the UK!" success route

Stray Cats couldn't really be that pissed, right? 1950s retro was just in the air, in part because of Boomer demographics obviously. Postmodernist aesthetics got really into postwar suburban kitsch as much or more than they did premodern classicism. We touched on this a bit in that 1985 paint splatter/Keith Haring squiggle-art/polka dot/loud color street style (Memphis Group, Pee Wee's Playhouse, B-52s) but there may be another thread more specifically on that. Hmmm... revisionist doo-wop has a bit on Billy as does Tributes to 50s Rock’n’Roll and Doo Wop by Rockers form the late 60s and early 70s (A List) though both are more interested in a 60s/70s thing. Basically there's a case that some of these sounds never went away, but there is something in the 80s where they stop being novelty tracks buried in the deep cuts, and become singles and in this case a whole album.

i can see the polecats or the blasters being pissed at the stray cats, but i can't see the stray cats being pissed at anybody.

ah the Blasters!!! knew I was forgetting someone crucial from my list

OK! The Stray Cats were cool with it!

were Seven Mary Three pissed at Pearl Jam?

I know I was!

>:(

lol

Twisted Sister released the follow-up to their 1984 smash Stay Hungry. Come Out and Play was, well, it was not particularly great. While the album was popular enough to go gold, it didn’t quite have the hits that the previous album had and was reportedly one of the first CDs to go out of print. You can get a hint of the direction of the album from its lead single, a cover of the 60s girl group the Shangri-Las’ “Leader of the Pack.”

The multi-platinum success of Stay Hungry led the band to go for broke and take a shot at the mainstream with “Be Chrool To Your Scuel.” As the headline references, not only did the band recruit fellow Long Islander Billy Joel to play piano on the track, they also called in Alice Cooper, who’d also written his own anthem about school. Bruce Springsteeen saxophonist Clarence Clemons, Stray Cats guitarist Brian Setzer and the Uptown Horns, were among the others that played on the track.

Never even heard of this! Sub-Meat-Loaf!

http://www.metalinsider.net/news/today-in-metal-twisted-sister-team-up-with-billy-joel-alice-cooper-for-come-out-and-play

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pWAJG71Urbw

1950s retro was just in the air

see also: neil young everybody's rockin', released one week before an innocent man

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fprpTNVM8EY

Tell Her About It closes Side One on an upbeat note. Its Motown stylings and avuncular wisdom made it Billy's second Hot 100 number-one, for one week in September of 1983 - between the longer stints of "Maniac" and "Total Eclipse of the Heart." Naturally, it also topped the Adult Contemporary chart (where it helped keep "Human Nature" and Air Supply's "Making Love Out of Nothing At All" to #2), and was a top-ten hit in Australia, Canada, and the UK. Naturally, it also had a video.

The 12" single featured a 5:35 remix by John "Jellybean" Benitez on the A-side (it's weird) and on the reverse, "Easy Money" and a live version of "You've Got Me Hummin'" (made famous by Sam & Dave, and previously covered by Billy with the Hassles); again, as it's a live number, I'll just link it here rather than treating it as a separate song entry.

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Like I said upthread, "The Longest Time" and "Uptown Girl" have lived longer in public memory than this thing.

Gotta admit, it's a bouncier closer to Side A than what Nylon Curtain had.

Also, this is the second video we've watched this week where a black guy looks directly into the camera and does a WATWUZTHAT face.

Ooooooohhoooooohooooo

"The Longest Time" and "Uptown Girl" may be more ubiquitous this days, but this song is the most played out of those, for me. If I think that "The Longest Time" is magical and this is simply meh, it might have a lot to do with my having a much greater familiarity with Motown than I do with doo wop. I've lived with so many better versions of this song for about the same length of time that I've lived with this song, so it's never really had the chance to register as anything other than "oh, I see what he's doing there" for me.

I wonder what Joel and his crew thought the real overlap between "MTV watchers" and "Ed Sullivan show fans" (or even people old enough to remember Sullivan) was?

Anyway, I love this tune -- it's like the lyrical riposte to "Sleeping With The Television On." Guys, don't be afraid, talk to women and tell them how you feel!

Not enough discussion yet around this record about how well the band adjusts to all these different 50s-60s rock idioms. Stylistically they're stepping a little more outside what they've done on past records. Liberty and Doug in particular seem to be having a great time on every song.

Good points.

The Ed Sullivan thing -

One of the reasons I feel old is because I remember the big deal made about the 20th anniversary of the Beatles appearing on Ed Sullivan. So by the time this video appeared, I was more than aware of Ed Sullivan, Topo Gigio, Señor Wences, Jackie Mason, and "Let's Spend Some Time Together."

Weird to think that if they did that video today, they'd just CGI Ed Sullivan in there somehow, and miss out on having him standing on the side of the stage. (Or they could just do what the Rutles did 40 years ago.)

(40 years since the Rutles! Good grief!)

I like that he's having fun with the same advice-giving voice he did so seriously in "Vienna" and "James" and so on.

Listened to this whole album a lot, but I'm gonna be straight with you, this was the track that spoke DIRECTLY to 6th grade me. It gives me goosebumps even now.

"Listen, boy" -- I'm listening, Billy!

I loved Glass Houses but never really grasped the cynicism. This I grasped. And craved. A grownup man who'd had a girlfriend telling me, look, take it from me, just be yourself and be a good guy and it's gonna work out -- I mean "not automatically a certain guarantee," but in the long run, this is how you do it. Of course you heard this from a lot of people, but from Billy Joel I BELIEVED IT.

Hadn't connected it to "Sleeping..." but somewhere upthread it occurred to me to read it as a retraction of "Just The Way You Are," specifically the "unspoken passion" so thoroughly dismembered by Veg. As on "The Stranger," Billy's advice-giving is much easier to take with him painting himself as "a man who's made mistakes" than when he's just telling James off for not being as cool as him.

I wonder how this played for Elizabeth Weber - was it like, "oh so NOW this has occurred to him"?

"This Night": A bit labored, like the opposite side of the doo-wop coin from "The Longest Time", but not bad. Great use of Beethoven there, by far the best part of the track

"Tell Her About It": I used to roll my eyes at Billy's "take it from me" songs and still do a little bit at this one (though much more at a song that should be coming up soon). Feel like the dude has always been an old man ready to dole out advice. The melody here is undeniable though, and I have an inexplicable love of songs that change the key for the chorus, if it's done smoothly

weird that this was the biggest hit, it sounds totally unfamiliar to me (beyond being a bad Motown pastiche, which is def familiar)

man you are not even remotely sympathetic to Joel, eh?

i love the rhythm & consance of the T sounds in this line:

“Listen boy it’s not automatically a certain guarantee”

and the way it tumbles out so quickly

it’s very pleasing to me

This song is about emotional honesty and telling someone how you feel. I will be emotionally honest and tell you all about my feelings: I don't like this song. Never have.

Like Οὖτις I don't think it's even a good Motown pastiche. Plenty of Motown songs have bouncy melodies and joyful horns and straightforward messages, but none of them come off this leaden and labored and flat. Sorry.

Phil Collins' did this bit better, I hate to say it

man you are not even remotely sympathetic to Joel, eh?

I find his hammy self-deprecation (which *really* comes across in the videos) charming, but it masks a lot of anger and bitterness which creeps through the cracks in unattractive ways.

Phil Collins' did this bit better, I hate to say it

Absolutely agree.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=e1Ea5RtNwa0

Dave Gruber Allen playing some phat basslines there

I like it more today than I did last week but it was never on the radio enough for me to develop feelings for it one way or another.

omg this CLOBBERS collins's efforts in this vein. it's not even close to my favorite song on the album but this is soooo much more fun and energetic. agreed about the tumbling-out of "not automatically a certain guarantee," best part of the song imho.

man if "behind the lines" counts as this bit then yes phil collins feat. the earth wind and fire horns totally steamrolls over "tell her about it" or whatever

Doctor, I usually respect and share your taste but on this point we must part ways.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=o-0Oect0nVQ

Uptown Girl opens side two with another joyous mega-hit, the album's second single and basis for its most giffable music video. Held to #3 in the US by "All Night Long" and "Islands in the Stream," it topped the charts in Australia, New Zealand, and the UK. It was his first time in all three markets; in the latter, while it was his only chart-topper, it held the spot for five weeks (blocking out "Say Say Say" and Paul Young's "Love of the Common People"). It became the UK's second-best-selling single of 1983 (behind "Karma Chameleon") and 19th-best-seller of the 1980s (below "Ghostbusters" and above "Ride on Time"). Again, I'm not sure how or whether these sales sort out between the 7" and the more appealing 12" single, which in this case offered another three older hits for late-comer fans.

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Predictably, this success gave rise to later covers, and in 2001, Westlife would get to #1 with their own, dreary and bland rendition. Ska and punk bands seem to relate to the song's underdog narrative, with Me First and the Gimme Gimmes and The Holophonics among the notable downtowners. The Shadows, apparently still a going concern in 1990, knocked out a generic instrumental version before packing it in; supposedly, genuine old-school Philly soulsters The Stylistics took a stab at it on their 2013 album Cover With The Stylistics, but I can't find that online.

can't knock this one, totally spot-on Frankie Lymon pastiche with hooks to spare

Held to #3 in the US by "All Night Long" and "Islands in the Stream,"

haha beaten by the Gibbs

I've warmed to this one too.

at it's core it has the classic Joelian underdog POV but it's all aspirational without a trace of sourness, and the vocal arrangement is great, kinda reminds me of the Raspberries (who were enamored of similar nostalgia exercises). and there's no fat on the track, no showy rhythmic switchups or aimless bridges, all the different little melodic bits are precisely arranged to flow smoothly.