FEATURE:
(I Love You) Just the Way You Are
Billy Joel's The Stranger at Forty-Five
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I have been doing a lot of features…
PHOTO CREDIT: Michael Putland/Getty Images
that mark legendary albums celebrating big anniversaries. One that almost passed me by is Billy Joel’s sensational fifth studio album, The Stranger. It was a commercial and critical breakthrough for him. Maybe the fact was because it was the first of Joel's albums to be produced by Phil Ramone (with whom he would work for five subsequent albums). Joel’s previous album, 1976’s Turnstiles, sold poorly and was not overly-loved. It is a great album, but the sense of resurrection and revelation on The Stranger is amazing! Consider the fact this album came a year after his previous one makes the quality on it that much more remarkable. It is Joel’s band that help to define and make The Stranger. The band consisted of drummer Liberty DeVitto, bassist Doug Stegmeyer, and multi-instrumentalist saxophonist/organist Richie Cannata. Spending six weeks at number two on the US Billboard 200, The Stranger is a masterpiece. You can see a track-by-track guide of the album. Featuring some of Joel’s defining songs – including Just the Way You Are, She’s Only a Woman and Scenes from an Italian Restaurant -, there will be a lot of new love around The Stranger ahead of its anniversary on 29th September. I wanted to pull in first Pitchfork’s review of The Stranger. They provide us with some useful background:
“The Stranger is the reason we know who Billy Joel is. Before the album, his fourth for Columbia and fifth as a solo artist, Joel had two Top 40 songs: “Piano Man,” about a guy (Joel) who got stuck playing bar tunes to a bunch of drunks, and “The Entertainer,” about a guy (Joel) who got stuck playing music for a fickle audience and whose label cut that other song in half just to fit on the radio. Joel was raised in Hicksville, Long Island, classically trained on the piano, and giddily admired the real rock’n’roll of the 1950s. He was something of an anomaly on the label of Bob Dylan and Bruce Springsteen, not an impassioned poet, prophet, or star, just a guy with a choir boy’s tenor who loved melody and technique and when songs sounded good. He wasn’t his label’s priority and he wasn’t much of a name, but then he went ahead and made an album filled with classics.
Joel says he didn’t make The Stranger like it was his last shot at success, but it’s hard to see it any other way. Famously, Joel likes to say that he didn’t want to put the biggest song on the album. “That’s one of the greatest songs I’ve ever heard,” Linda Ronstadt apparently told Joel after hearing “Just the Way You Are” in the studio. A lot of people have since agreed with her, including those at the Recording Academy, which gave Joel the Grammys for Record and Song of the Year.
The success of The Stranger did a lot to erase, or at least ameliorate, Billy Joel’s reputation as an aggrieved musician who made a point of despising the dog and pony show of music promotion. He cut his teeth as a young musician, playing on three albums before his 1971 solo debut: The Hassles and Hour of the Wolf, with his bar band the Hassles, and the proto-metal Attila, with his buddy and fellow former Hassle Jon Small. The albums weren’t notable enough even to call them failures. His debut, however, was a failure and objectively fucked up. For some reason, Artie Ripp, who produced the album and signed Joel despite his commercial track record, simply didn’t notice or care that the mixing machine was set incorrectly, leaving Joel’s vocals on Cold Spring Harbor pitched up “like Alvin and the Chipmunks.” Joel smashed his test pressing, and still claims to hate the album.
After Cold Spring Harbor, Joel drove across the country to Los Angeles with his girlfriend Elizabeth Weber and her 5-year-old son Sean. (The hiccup was that Weber was married to Jon Small, who figured his wife and son were kidnapped and went West to locate them and bring them back to Long Island. Weber later married and managed Joel.) In Los Angeles, Joel struck a deal with Columbia and made two albums, Piano Man and Streetlife Serenade. While the former had its champions, not many people liked Streetlife Serenade. Stephen Holden, who eventually wrote glowingly about Joel for The New York Times, opened his Rolling Stone review, “Billy Joel’s pop schmaltz occupies a stylistic no man’s land where musical and lyric truisms borrowed from disparate sources are forced together.” Joel returned to New York in 1975 and made Turnstiles, which Village Voice critic Robert Christgau called “more obnoxious.”
The secrets to The Stranger’s success, however, are scattered across Joel’s first four albums, unfortunately buttressed by a lot of unremarkable songs that lack their own punch. Take “James,” from Turnstiles, inspired by Joel’s high school friend and bandmate Jim Bosse. Joel lightly excoriates James for pausing his artistic ambitions to go to college and “living up to expectations.” The melody is not particularly gripping and the chiding doesn’t feel particularly deserved. Now turn to The Stranger, which opens thrillingly with another mild diatribe against middle class professional ambition, “Movin’ Out (Anthony’s Song).” As soon as the needle drops, Joel is smashing on his piano and the bass is kicking up the groove, playing with gusto and rhythm.
Also from Turnstiles is “Summer, Highland Falls,” my favorite pre-Stranger Joel song. His piano chords are enchanting, and he coins his greatest phrase from a non-hit: “It’s either sadness or euphoria.” As charming as “Summer, Highland Falls” is, it’s also absurdly wordy: “How thoughtlessly we dissipate our energies/Perhaps we don’t fulfill each other’s fantasies.” Again, fast forward to 1977 and “Only the Good Die Young,” Joel’s cleverest Stranger song lyrically: “You didn’t count on me/When you were counting on your rosary,” and, “You say your mother told you all that I could give you was a reputation.” It’s a hoot.
Joel made The Stranger with his road band, largely the same group who played on Turnstiles. The big difference was that Joel produced Turnstiles himself but brought in the well-regarded Phil Ramone for The Stranger, with whom he struck a long-term relationship. Joel claims that he chose to work with Ramone—known for work with Paul Simon and Phoebe Snow and co-producing Barbra Streisand and Kris Kristofferson’s A Star Is Born—instead of the legendary Beatles producer George Martin because Martin wanted the pianist to record his album with session musicians, which Joel attempted to poor results on Streetlife.
Ramone liked Joel’s band—most importantly comprised of bassist Doug Stegmeyer, drummer Liberty DeVitto, and multi-instrumentalist Richie Cannata—and wanted to bring their live energy to life in the studio, where things had rarely clicked for Joel. One of the most frequent criticisms in his early career was his inability to translate the magnetic personality of his live performances onto his records. An early 1977 concert preview from the Los Angeles Times read: “A common question about the 27-year-old New Yorker is why such a scintillating performer hasn’t become a star.” Later, as if to prove the point, Joel gathered his unheralded songs on the 1981 live compilation Songs in the Attic where the early material absolutely soars and the crowds erupt.
With Ramone behind the boards and the band intact, Joel made an album with a verve and attitude he’d never achieved, sounding like an actual rock star, one who’s sardonic but hopeful. Almost every song on The Stranger has one accusatory line or another, a facet of his lyricism that Joel is quick to attribute to the general unhappiness of a person whose father, a Jewish refugee of Nazi Germany, purportedly told him as a little boy, “Life is a cesspool.” I’d be naïve, however, to try to argue that Joel made depressing songs, no matter how depressed he was while he was making them. Joel is a straightforward, often simplistic lyricist, and he composed primarily in the major key. And it’s that tension, the meeting of bombast and the mundane, that makes The Stranger the greatest success in his catalog.
The juxtaposition bursts open on The Stranger’s centerpiece “Scenes From an Italian Restaurant.” Across seven and a half minutes, Joel tells the superbly ordinary tale of Brenda and Eddie, high school sweethearts turned divorcées reuniting for dinner. The music tells another story, as Joel and his piano are accompanied by a carnivalesque swirl of accordion, saxophone, tuba, and the works, and it’s all for lines of unadulterated chitchat, such as, “Things are OK with me these days/Got a good job, got a good office/Got a new wife, got a new life/And the family is fine.” The music, understandably, is most jubilant when it soundtracks Brenda and Eddie’s good ol’ days, but those yesteryears aren’t exactly exceptional: “Nobody looked any finer/Or was more of a hit at the Parkway Diner”.
I will finish off with a couple of positive reviews for a classic. AllMusic highlight how there appears to be a thematic thread or concept running through The Stranger, although I don’t think that is what Billy Joel intended:
“Billy Joel teamed with Phil Ramone, a famed engineer who had just scored his first producing hits with Art Garfunkel's Breakaway and Paul Simon's Still Crazy After All These Years for The Stranger, his follow-up to Turnstiles. Joel still favored big, sweeping melodies, but Ramone convinced him to streamline his arrangements and clean up the production. The results aren't necessarily revelatory, since he covered so much ground on Turnstiles, but the commercialism of The Stranger is a bit of a surprise. None of his ballads have been as sweet or slick as "Just the Way You Are"; he never had created a rocker as bouncy or infectious as "Only the Good Die Young"; and the glossy production of "She's Always a Woman" disguises its latent misogynist streak. Joel balanced such radio-ready material with a series of New York vignettes, seemingly inspired by Springsteen's working-class fables and clearly intended to be the artistic centerpieces of the album. They do provide The Stranger with the feel of a concept album, yet there is no true thematic connection between the pieces, and his lyrics are often vague or mean-spirited. His lyrical shortcomings are overshadowed by his musical strengths. Even if his melodies sound more Broadway than Beatles -- the epic suite "Scenes From an Italian Restaurant" feels like a show-stopping closer -- there's no denying that the melodies of each song on The Stranger are memorable, so much so that they strengthen the weaker portions of the album. Joel rarely wrote a set of songs better than those on The Stranger, nor did he often deliver an album as consistently listenable”.
Before ending this feature, I want to highlight SLANT’s excellent review of a masterpiece from 1977. Joel would follow The Stranger a year later with the brilliant 52nd Street. This was the start of a new and successful phase for him:
“Billy Joel’s seminal 1977 release The Stranger is a concept album of sorts, an ode to the singer’s native New York underscored by his paranoid obsession (and resistance) to change. The album begins with “Movin’ Out (Anthony’s Song),” which decries the popular ‘70s notion that moving out to the suburbs and starting a family is the means to a better life—“Who needs a house out in Hackensack?” he asks, “Is that all you get for your money?” While Joel’s music has always been patently “American,” The Stranger is, in many ways, a rejection of the American Dream. (It’s a proud
Billy Joel’s seminal 1977 release The Stranger is a concept album of sorts, an ode to the singer’s native New York underscored by his paranoid obsession (and resistance) to change. The album begins with “Movin’ Out (Anthony’s Song),” which decries the popular ‘70s notion that moving out to the suburbs and starting a family is the means to a better life—“Who needs a house out in Hackensack?” he asks, “Is that all you get for your money?” While Joel’s music has always been patently “American,” The Stranger is, in many ways, a rejection of the American Dream. (It’s a proud New York record without the obviousness of “New York State Of Mind,” and it’s purely American without using slogans like “born in the U.S.A.”)
Joel’s struggle to keep things constant is apparent on “Just The Way You Are,” an uncharacteristically gooey ballad (for this early in his career) that, like most of his songs, displays an underlying sadness: When he says “I just want someone that I can talk to,” you get the impression that the “you” he’s singing to could be any woman at all. Joel’s pessimism peeks in atop the bouncy piano of the Broadway-style “Scenes From An Italian Restaurant” (his “A Day In The Life,” if you will, albeit from the perspective of a bitter New Yorker); it’s the tale of Brenda and Eddie, the prom king and queen who moved out the suburbs to start a new life together but, as Joel poignantly narrates, “just didn’t count on the tears.” Other songs are downright cynical (“Only The Good Die Young,” which explains a girl’s Catholic blues by way of the greaser down the block), while others are thinly veiled in optimism (“She is frequently kind/And she’s suddenly cruel,” Joel sings along to the classic, delicate melody of “She’s Always A Woman”). The Stranger might not carry the weight of Albert Camus’ famous novel of the same name, but its title track certainly finds the singer in an existential crisis, unable to completely expose his true self to his lover or himself: “Well, we all have a face/That we hide away forever/And we take them out and show ourselves/When everyone has gone.” As proof of this seemingly eternal loneliness, most recently displayed by a public announcement that he was actively searching for a new wife (the hunt ended when he met Kate Lee, now 23, in 2003), the album’s cover finds Joel alone on a bed looking down at his mask on the pillow beside him”.
On 29th September, I hope that Billy Joel himself thinks about The Stranger and recalls how it was received and what it was like making the album. Arguably his greatest ever album, you can play it today and it still holds so much power and genius. Since its release, The Stranger has featured in lists of the best albums ever. Few could argue against the assertion that The Stranger is…
AMONG the best albums ever.