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Artist's Revisionary Assessment Evidence (ARSE) - Billy Joel
People come and go. Reputations soar and tumble, inflate and are punctured. Are the rage and then are reviled, or worse, forgotten.
One of the things about this gathering is that we are a cross-section of geography and humanity, bound together by the threads of a similar interest. A jury. Capable of emotional prosecution certainly, but also more sober defense.
Although I welcome anyone else's submission of candidates for assessment, my own suggestions will be of people who are still, for now, living. This comes about (for the record) as a result of having a distant dinner last night and getting into a long back and forth about what we'd say if Billy Joel had just died and thus being prepared to try and give the man his greater props rather than reacting only as the current fashion dictates...you know the drill. This thread will close after 24 hours.
So. Billy Joel. What is his ARSE in your opinion? Is he front rank? Secondary? As a musician? A songwriter? A performer? Or whatever else you've got....
In every heart there is a room
A sanctuary safe and strong
To heal the wounds from lovers past
Until a new one comes along...
Comments
Nnnoooooooo! I loved Uptown Girl.
Years ago, a good friend whose musical advice I highly respect, pointed out that Joel was a master of pastiche, and that itself takes a high level of skill. It made me start listening to him with a different appreciation. It doesn’t mean that I love everything the man has done, but I now do recognize his mastery. It’s not just disposable schlock.
Another note: Warren Zevon said that years ago he considered himself the cock of the walk when it came to combining classical training in the service of popcraft. All of that changed for him when he saw/heard a then unknown Joel play.
His songs are fun and nostalgic for me. My impression of Joel as an artist is that he's a talented writer of show tunes who wishes he was a talented writer of rock and roll music.
For example, I'd never consider "It's Still Rock and Roll to Me" as a R&R song. It's a bouncy back-and-forth that you can imagine being performed on stage by two musical theater ruffians in stage make-up. I love that song, though.
Assessment doesn’t begin with S
Silly goose. It's the ass
Just the way you are. Top-drawer for this alone.
Damning with faint praise but rings very true also. Whole realms of side roads about what is culture high and low etc. Much of which is what makes him a good person to discuss I think. Talent and art and on and on....
Billy Joel is a thoroughly underrated songwriter. He's up there with Paul McCartney as being one of the best melody writers in the business, in my opinion. His lyrics are more contrived than a number of his contemporaries, but still his melodic sensibilities are impressive.
He's had his social foibles to be sure, but most have. He also wrote less interesting material as he aged, but again most do. I think he's sorely under appreciated nowadays. Objectively he scored a MASSIVE amount of hits covering 2 decades - not too shabby.
God dang, did I loathe all that Franki Valli crap. But I can forgive all of that for The Stranger. Incredible album through and through.
Agree with most of this and suspect when he IS dead and some time goes by folks will realize that as a product of 70s/80s he is wasn't too permed by the times....I wonder if he's someone who's been covered as much as you might think? Will have to take a look....
Some great social commentary in Joel’s tunes as well. "Allentown" is the obvious one (well, I suppose "We Didn’t Start the Fire" is the really obvious one), but goddamn, "Goodnight Saigon." Wrecks me every time.
I was a teen in the 70’s and 80’s. I did not care for his work then, and do not care for it now. My opinion: He was/is a skillful purveyor of songs that do not seem especially sincere or deep. On the plus side, his work is timelessly bland. His work exists as a kind of Members Only jacket of music - a fake leather jacket that makes reference to leather jackets. It is a sensibility that I understand and pity. YMMV, IMHO, etc.
It’s also the case, I think, that songwriting voice in pop music has changed in the last few decades - songs from the narrative perspective of someone who can be reasonably assumed to not be the singer/songwriter used to be somewhat more common. See, for example, Steely Dan’s entire output.
Edit: I have also heard that he had ghost writers to help him from time to time. Not unusual, and might explain the shallowness of his work.
The man can play and write - no question.
And I have known every character in Piano Man and still like to visit on occasion.
Beautiful sax solo in "Just the Way You Are." However, that is where it starts and ends for me. I'm with ALB on this one.
For me he's a songwriter that really knew the history of popular songs... very much like Carol King. He could generate a new tune based on a trove of existing musical materials. Much better keyboard player than your typical singer/songwriter. His album of classical piano compositions played by a concert pianist shows his depth of musical sophistication.
Carol had an early history of writing songs that matched the musical ideas of a current hit. I think Billy was doing that for hits people had completely forgotten about.
But he could also write a modern "art song" with a lyric that painted an images like "Scenes from an Italian Restaurant". The larger venues made him feel responsible to write music suited for those venues and his music changed to feed a larger crown. I think Elton faced the same career dynamics and everything had to fit the needs of a 90 minute stage show with the right chemistry and the sensitive thoughtful music of the cabaret style was over. I prefer when a singer songwriter never breaks out of the caberet dynamic like a James Taylor or Randy Newman. Still the music skills, lyrical abilities and arranging skills are all still there if buried by the Spotlights lights and massive sound system. I saw Billy perform at a hockey rink and it was tragic... like the sad clown. But he had some really bad money management in his career and needed to work those sporting venues to dig himself out of a hole.
I'm always surprised by the animus he generates. Probably mostly based on the mining of
trashy pop motifs from the past. I think he did a lot of those to mask his limited singing skills and give him a character to inhabit. For me it was just further evidence of a song writers skill to use available materials like a musical collage of eras.
I get a more mixed reaction to Elton John for starting out with great promise but ending up as a pop tune engine and a bad cabaret torch singer. The demands of the big stage destroyed him for me. And now he can only seem to sing with that huge voice and forgot how to state a lyric simply.
that bizarre portrait LP cover haunted my childhood dreams
That was jazz musician Phil Woods who was a dedicated devotee of Charlie Parker. He even married Chan Parker: Charlie's common law wife.
In addition to the memorable Bill Joel tun solo he also played the alto sax solo on Steely Dan's "Doctor Wu" from their 1975 album Katy Lied, as well as Paul Simon's "Have a Good Time" from the 1975 album Still Crazy After All These Years.
He studied with Lennie Tristano: the teacher of the @LinearLineman's teacher Connie Crothers.
While it is easy to just dismiss Billy as a shallow pop star, you can't write him off as a serious artist just because he had a ton of catchy hits.
As @celtic_elk said, songs from "The Nylon Curtain" album are quite powerful. Listen to it!
People who write-off Joel probably also dismiss John Cougar Mellencamp for all those pop hits like "Jack and Diane," Hurts So Good" and "Pink Houses." But did those people ever read the lyrics to Pink Houses" without the popish music???? I doubt it.
Mellencamp has written some extremely powerful and emotional songs over his career. If you don't believe me, I dare you to listen to the "Scarecrow" album and tell me different.
Most of the pop stars back in the 70's/80's had little to no control over their music, and only a monicum more over their lyrics.
Each had to get a couple pop albums on the charts before they could start writing the true music inside -- or even use their God-given real names.
Right. I’m biased, and here's why. I earned my living as a piano bar entertainer for twenty years, working four and a half hours a night. If a song isn’t great, and I had to play it night after night, I grew to loathe it. I won’t tell you which songs fell into this category, but I will say Billy Joel's didn’t. Allentown, She's always a woman, Goodnight Saigon, Vienna, Scenes from an Italian Restaurant, She's Got a Way, Honesty, Only the Good Die Young...yes, even Pianoman. We'll still sing them in a hundred years. At his best, his lyrics are every bit as powerful as Springsteen or Dylan. At his best, his melodies rival McCartney's. And there's a magic to a song like Leningrad that defies analysis. Of course this is all subjective, but I think my thousands of paid renditions gives me some perspective.
On a side note, that amazing Phil Woods sax solo on Just the Way You Are owes as much to producer Phil Ramone as Woods, as he stitched it together from multiple takes. My dad is a jazz guitarist. As a family, we listened to The Stranger for the first time on a trip from Shropshire to Scotland, and we all knew it was something special.
I first read “on a trip from Shoprite to Scotland” and was somewhat confused... 🤣
To carry on with my thin trial notion, you make an excellent witness for the defense... and my grandmother always told me never to cross a professional piano man...
I may be outvoted here, but I actually find Michael McDonald far less grating when I hear him in the local grocery store or drug emporium. Similar era, MOR target audience and commercial aspirations, but less smarmy to me - perhaps a more RnB influence. I wonder if living through the time when these hits were everywhere (with resultant ear fatigue) makes a difference, too.
A very fair nine yards.
This guy nails it:
https://slate.com/human-interest/2009/01/the-awfulness-of-billy-joel-explained.html
Thank you - nails a lot of my specific irritations with BJ.
"What right do you have to criticize such a popular artist? Aren’t you just being elitist?
No, you don’t understand: Billy’s from my ‘hood, mid-Long Island—Hicksville, to be precise (I’m from Bay Shore)—so I’m sensitive to his abuse of our common roots. Once I wrote something about the curse of being from the Guyland. In it I said something heartfelt: New Jersey may have a rep as a toxic dump for mob victims to fester in, but at least it brought forth Bruce Springsteen. The ultimate Guyland humiliation is to be repped to the world by Billy Joel. So I feel entitled to be cruel—may I continue?"
No.
So BJ's from your 'hood" and you're jealous because he hit it big and you're stuck writing for a failing online news site.
So sad.
Looks like a sour, bitter 75-year-old "get off my lawn" guy:
Wonder if he's missing an ear as well???