Billy Joel, The #8 Artist of the Rock Era, Part Two

 

(Continued from Part One)

 

Joel moved back to New York City in 1975 and released the album Turnstiles, a turning point in his career as he decided to assert his control over his music.  Never released as a single, Billy wrote this the day he moved back from California in a Greyhound bus.  "It's the one I wrote in like 15 minutes," he said in a 2010 interview.  "I'm sitting on the bus (to Highland Falls)...and I started scribbling in a  notebook.  I got to the house where my wife was waiting.  I said, 'I got to write this song right now.'"  It was later brought to its current prominence after the 9/11 murders when Billy performed it on worldwide television in a benefit concert ("America: A Tribute to Heroes") for the victims (and yes, we will feature that later as well!). 

 

This is another Top Track*.  Billy said the rapid-fire riff at the beginning was meant to be an homage to the great surfing song "Wipe Out" by the Surfaris.  He could have been semi-autobiographical here, but out of that anger grew a gifted performer for the ages.  Here is "Prelude:  Angry Young Man".

 

The album is loaded with prime cuts.  One of his best ballads ever, be it largely undiscovered by the general public, is this fantastic song written about the place in upstate New York that he stayed at after moving back to the state from California.  It features one of the great piano intros of all-time that sounds like a cascading falls.  Enjoy "Summer, Highland Falls", another of The Top Unknown/Underrated Songs of the Rock Era*.

This Top Track* is another of Billy's hidden treasures; essentially a farewell to a lifestyle that was tempting but impossible to sustain--"I've Loved These Days".

"James" is about a friend of Billy's in his early days.

 

So much great music that most people don't know about.  Billy wrote this song after U.S. President Gerald Ford refused to give federal assistance to New York City, which was on the verge of default, prompting the famous Daily News headline, "Ford to City:  Drop Dead."  "As soon as I saw that headline," Billy said, "'I said, wait a minute.  If New York's going down the tubes, I'm gonna' go down with it.'"  This is the great song "Miami 2017 (Seen The Lights Go Out On Broadway".

With his first few albums, we saw what Joel could do.  The only missing ingredient was a solid producer, and Columbia remedied that when they hooked Billy up with Phil Ramone, who would be Joel's go-to producer for the next nine years and who would produce two of The Top 100 Albums of the Rock Era*.  It was a major coup for Billy--Ramone was a superstar producer, having already worked with Barbra Streisand, Bob Dylan, Paul Simon, Kenny Loggins, Astrid Gilberto and Stan Getz, John Coltrane, and many others.  Ramone was a brilliant South African prodigy who began playing violin at age three and performing for Queen Elizabeth II at 10.

The first album with Joel was his breakthrough, The Stranger.  Billy wrote this song for his wife Elizabeth, and it catapulted Joel into stardom.  Although it was an important song to him personally, Billy credits Ramone with convincing him it was a great song.  Ramone brought Linda Ronstadt and Phoebe Snow to hear it in the studio, and when they both loved it, that was good enough for Billy.

 

 

"Just The Way You Are" won both Record of the Year and Song of the Year at the Grammy Awards.  The classic reached #2 in Canada, #1 on the Adult Contemporary chart and #3 overall in the United States, #6 in Australia and New Zealand and #7 in Ireland, and has sold over two million copies.  It is also one of six of Billy's tunes to make it to the book The Top 500 Songs of the Rock Era*.

 

 

Joel's historic album hit the Top 5 in nearly every country in the world, helped by another Top Unknown/Underrated Song*.  The screeching tires sound was achieved when bassist Doug Stegmeyer hung a microphone out the rear end of his '60's-era Corvette and started burning rubber as he raced away from his house."Movin' Out" is a million-seller that somehow stalled at #17.  The stage production of Movin' Out, featuring Billy's songs, opened on Broadway in 2002 and continued for three years.

 

 

The Stranger has sold 10 million copies in the United States alone, one of The Top 100 Albums of the Rock Era*.  "Only The Good Die Young" became Joel's third consecutive Gold record, and this one went Platinum.

All The Stranger did was reach #2 on the Album chart and become the top-seller in the history of Columbia Records, outpacing even Simon & Garfunkel's masterpiece Bridge Over Troubled Water.  This song is another about his first wife Elizabeth, who was married to drummer Jon Small at the time he met her.  Billy was so troubled by the affair that he drank furniture polish in an attempt to kill himself.  

"She's Always A Woman", another of The Top Unknown/Underrated Songs of the Rock Era*, #17 on the Popular chart although it did rise to #2 among adults.  Pink, a big fan of Billy's, walked down the aisle to this song at her wedding.

 

 

Here is the title song, which also got considerable airplay. 

 

This tasty track ranks high on our list of Top Unknown/Underrated Songs of the Rock Era*.  If you aren't already familiar with it, it could become one of your favorite Billy Joel songs.  The Italian restaurant Fontana di Trevi ( now closed, but once at 151 West 57th Street in New York City, across from Carnegie Hall) inspired this song.  "It was for the opera crowd," Billy told USA Today in 2008, "but the Italian food was really good.  They didn't really know who I was, which was fine with me, but sometimes you would have a hard time getting a table."  

Here is the wonderful "Scenes From An Italian Restaurant", in four movements (1--"Italian Restaurant", 2--"Things Are OK With Me These Days", 3--"The Ballad Of Brenda And Eddie" and 4--a reprise of "Italian Restaurant").  Beautifully done.

 

Billy first went to Vienna, Austria when he was 23 years old to meet his father, who had moved there.  The song, therefore, is the foundation of a very emotional relationship with the city.  "Slow down, look around you and have some gratitude for the good things in your life," Billy told Vienna Now--Forever.  "That's what Vienna represented to me," he continued.  "When I wrote 'Vienna waits for you', I meant that it is a place where you close the circle.  By going to Vienna, suddenly things started to make sense in the world for me.  Here is another amazing track--"Vienna".

The Stranger, like the fine wine Billy sings about in "Scenes From An Italian Restaurant", seems to get so much better with time.  Highly regarded at the time, it's stature has only grown through the years, to the point where it was ranked #21 for the Rock Era in 2011.  And perhaps it has grown since then.

Although he had already shown his tremendous talent to this point, as you have already heard, for most of the public they were just starting to listen to him.  Joel was on his way to being a legend.  Join us for Part Three, exclusively on Inside The Rock Era!