The songs? They're ok as structures; the chords flow and the transitions between verses, choruses and middle eights are smooth. And they do have the personality supplement that any accomplished songwriter will bring. Take the arrangements away and they're recognisable and playable.
The production? Well, you could hear this and easily think it was a kind of boomer-retro with no difficulty at all. Everything sits where it should and no information is lost.
Are you just saying it's bland or mediocre? Well, yes and no. Honestly, lesser songsmiths would be happy with any one of these tracks and boast of them. No, everything falls into place and the message needs no repetition. He's making it do what it says on the label.
What then? Hard to pinpoint but there's a kind of overhanging sneer to it that can't be ignored. It's there in the Stones riffing of the opening track with the polished-out Jagger vocal. Everyone still likes the Stones, don't they? Well, the Stones I liked back there at seventeen was the great singles band of the '60s. In 1980, releasing albums patched from spare sessions left off previous records, the Stones didn't seem to like the Stones that much. But Billy Joel is banking on you liking his version of it.
The next track is packed with lots of goodness from a producer (Phil Ramone) who knew that a cute backing vocal hook that sounded like it was coming from an old phone sounded NOW! Oh, and the chunky palm muted guitar and bellying echo vocals of any Cars track from the time helped. This is Billy in New Wave mode.
Don't Ask Me Why is a Paul McCartney pastiche with a perky acoustic guitar spring. Still Rock and Roll to Me plays on both sides of the street with nods to the Elvis of where it all began and the snotty thrashing rockabilly of the Stray Cats. He's out of style but it's still rock and roll to him. The big drunk-uncle sax solo sounds like a taunt. Hey, punk, I was already there. All for Leyna begins with a chorused piano and pedal distorted guitar and quirky rhythm section. It sounded and sounds still like Toto.
I Don't Want to Be Alone doesn't just sound like Elvis Costello even down to the white knuckle pre-chorus transition but also puts EC's most used phrase in the title. It's so obviously pastiched it sounds like a pisstake. But it isn't. It seems to dare anyone younger in his audience to point it out so he can come back with how long he'd been sweating at this game before that brat came along.
Sleeping with the Television On has that syncopated quirky perky rhythm that still makes me wince. You Are the One at least sounds like something from a Billy Joel album. It's perfectly judged, well delivered and sounds sincere. I wonder if Close to the Borderline is Billy's garbled version of something like Television. Finally, Through the Long Night begins with a late '60s pop French horn riff and a perfectly pleasant twisty melody and another British Invasion vocal (think Odessey era Zombies).
End.
This album emerged after a mass of interviews in the late '70s that always seemed to include how Billy hated the ugliness of the punks' music but felt triumphant at being more of a success. This outing has the feel of a begrudging acceptance. That it's too bland and too late doesn't seem to bother him. And why should it? He was right. The punks lost and the great tide of pitch perfect professionalism just kept swelling. The longer game was in fact still happening deep below the current and learning that it didn't need the stadium or the major deal as "local" always felt more exciting and intimate.
But there's a dark shadow to this record and it falls on me.
In 1980 I was sent down to Brisbane to buff up my high school results so I could get into Uni. Not getting into Uni was not on. Fine with me, more opportunity to have fun and find stuff out. The place that all my kind were sent to if we hadn't said our prayers was called Hubbard's. What they did was add supplements to your crappy subjects and push you through to getting the numbers you needed. This wasn't generally for medicine or law, mind you (but one fellow alumnus o' mine was heading into medicine through this very avenue). Anyway, we were poor little rich kids who had to behave for a year before entering the better class of opportunity at the end of at least an Arts degree.
A few of us took a month or two to gravitate but we did and found some good company. Really, the schoolwork was routine and a lot more serious than any of us were used to but we knew the stakes now so we did get into it. But at close of play each week we had fun. And with the connections we had we still partied. This time we also studied but we still partied. And we all got through.
Maybe. One who probably didn't was Tusk. I'm calling him that because that was an album he probably liked. I have no evidence of this, I'm just making it up, but read on.
Tusk was tall and good looking but couldn't make that work. He said little and when he did it came out as labour, a kind of cleft palate struggle that always just sounded uncomfortable. He skulked in company, hanging around the back as though he was in a school class photo, and had to be drawn to join in. Well, I can be like that, too (take me out of adoring company and I shrink into dowdy wordless failure), but I'd look at him and think, you've got everything, why are you like this?
The other thing is that he clung. If we'd been more mature seventeen year olds we would have understood this and extended some support. Instead, we used him. He drove us around the city when we'd be getting into the booze or the parties or whatever and invited us not only into his home but into the high rise unit his parents owned on the Coast. There was no hatred here. I would shy from even calling it contempt. It was more like the guy in the band who owns the van. He did at least get opportunities out of it, if success continued to elude him.
Ok, so why...? Well, for almost that entire year, if you got into his car as we all did he would stab the cassette player with his car copy of Glass Houses. If the trip was long enough we would hear it from minute zero to the very end. We knew the lyrics and arrangements and so well that a bar or two out of context could send any of us rigid with mocking laughter. The other thing was that it was never at normal car volume but at a windscreen vibrating roar. It was as though Tusk thought massive volume stood in for cultural power, that the might of this ghastly smugness only needed to be set on 10 to become Never Mind the Bollocks. It's cringing uncoolness blasted into us and formed a kind of ticket price for Tusk's inner sanctum.
Billy Joel sounds like he's thinking of what his '80s are going to be like. The way he's doing that is by trying to sound like the cooler records from the late '70s. You can hear the cogs turning when so much of it veers toward the new songwriter he thinks is closest to him in terms of craft, Elvis Costello. He ditched that as soon as he realised that it wasn't going to be so tough to hold on to the various teams in suburbia and the ageing boomers and used this self-conscious step to get a lot leaner. Did I care about that? No. I wouldn't have cared about this but for Tusk and his deafening car sound system through which this thing blasted for months.
As much as we winced or sniggered about it, I do recall feeling smug about my favourite music changing this ogre from the mainstream. Even down to the cover art with him in his zip-up and still-rock-and-roll sneakers, about to hurl a rock into the glass walls of a designer mansion somewhere that I didn't care about in North America (which I also didn't care about) it screamed shopping centres and wrestlemania. To his credit, Joel does own this. Apart from that one Elvis Costello clone, he presents himself unmistakably.
As for Tusk. He drove me down to Schoolie's Week on the Coast after exams. Other members of his family came by and we were less than welcome so I hooked on to the caravan of closer friends who had turned up and went to hang out at Kaye's place at Mermaid Beach for the rest of the week. I lived on beer, blackberry nip and Chiko rolls and regretted it with pain. He picked me up for a lift back to Brisbane. It was raining heavily on the freeway. I tried to get a Tubeway Army cassette going but the tape was damaged and had no top end. He took it out and put a Smokie compilation on. (It's not that long a drive.) And then he saw me off at the airport. Everyone else was still down there. I shook his hand with a smile and headed to my gate, knowing I would never lay eyes on him again.
I had the feeling he'd do ok. He'd get into uni or go and join his family in their business or something and make all the right decisions. And he'd probably be genuinely happy about it, more consistently than me and for longer. He could even boast a real flirtation with the wild side, hanging around with the Brisbane punks (all middle class of us) in his days o' youth. I know how writerly this is sounding, roping him to his favourite record and the desperation of its author but, really, he still comes out better than Billy Joel because, for all Joel's foraging and grasping at cool, Tusk wasn't listening to it because he thought he had to or had to be known to listen the way the rest of us did with our records, he listened because he liked it. And because that makes him far less of a conspicuous consumer than any of the rest of us cadging lifts off him he could probably hear it again now and smile warmly at the memory. As for me I listened to all of it again for this article on YouTube and forgot early tracks by the time I had to describe them. Was I just transported by a residual distaste back forty years? The idea that that might count as nostalgia just sent a shiver through me.
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