Billy Joel

He adored New York. He idolized it beyond measure… No, it's better to say he mythologized it beyond measure. For him, in any season, this was still a city that existed in black and white and pulsed with the great themes of George Gershwin.

(Woody Allen, "Manhattan", 1979)

In the imagination of someone who, like me, has never been to New York, multiple representations of the Big Apple coexist. There's the "most European city in America," an oasis of worldly, frantic normality at the edge of an alien continent dotted with forests, prairies, rifles and drive-ins; the land of entrepreneurial, financial and media dreams, with the Empire State Building, the Chrysler Building and the Rockefeller Center looming over its checkerboard of numbered streets, immortalized in a 1930s postcard; the temple of pop music for those who can actually read and write music, home to Gershwin and Cole Porter, to Broadway, Tin Pan Alley and the Brill Building. Or there's the affluent, stressed-out New York, the one of jogging in Central Park and pop-up stores, of radical-chic activism and gentrified neighborhoods, of the lofts of those who've made it or want to look like they have, of the fees paid to psychiatrists who specialize in breakdowns and failed marriages. Or, again, the metropolis par excellence, made of marginalization and contrasts, back alleys and gangs, avant-garde intellectuals outdone in avant-gardism by the swirl of street noise: the homeland of Andy Warhol, of the Velvet Underground and CBGB, of Patti Smith, of the Talking Heads; of Basquiat and Haring, of the ghettoblaster and street culture.

Which of these is the real face of New York? None of them, certainly: all three are caricatured profiles, and their blend—filtered through images, stories and sounds—has over time built the collage that turned the city, or rather its idealization, into an icon familiar to everyone.

"The Stranger," the fifth album by New York native Billy Joel, is about as close as you can get to a concept album about New York. Most of its songs attempt to translate the lives of the city's microcosm of the time into piano, voice and rock band, through a style that owes as much to the great New York jazz and music-hall songwriters of the early twentieth century as it does to the Beatles, Elton John or rock'n'roll. Looked at closely, the record represents precisely the marriage between the nostalgic, almost genteel image of the city—embodied by the pre-rock musical styles of NYC's golden age—and its present-day life, made up of small bittersweet stories, shattered dreams and everyday masks. What's entirely missing from its suites and ballads, though, is the "dirty," conflicted soul of NYC: no Bronx, no streets, no Blackness, in short; but also no punk or counterculture, which, for a 1977 record, is no small thing. Perhaps it's precisely this old-fashioned allure that accounts for the album's peculiar aura: in trying to be true, raw and contemporary, the songs and their sheer class set up a refined, exclusive stage, creating that ineffable distance or hall-of-mirrors effect that may lie behind every Classic with a capital C.

Not that "The Stranger" lives in a bubble of nostalgia and white cultural supremacy. Tracks like the snappy opener "Movin' Out" or the fiery title track owe much of their rhythmic drive to irrepressible Black musical elements. Unlike the timid, caricatured or imitative attitude with which other white artists have approached Black musical material, though, what Joel adopts here and throughout the record is an omnivorous approach, able to absorb influences and compositional idioms without giving up his strong personal stamp or the solid "white" foundations of his own music.

The brisk, zigzagging feel of the verse in "Movin' Out" is thus a compositional device serving the song's central theme: the "social climber" mentality with which many European immigrants approach life in the Big Apple, its costs and its contradictions. In the contrast between the nimble stride of the verse and the murky trudge of the pre-chorus lies the whole conflict between the frantic, ambition-fueled drive with which the "Anthonys" and "O'Learys" (symbols, respectively, of Italian and Irish immigrants) work from morning to night, piling up debts and savings to buy themselves the "good life," and the broken hopes in which they soon find themselves. It's a ruthless New York, the one in "The Stranger": it deceives and demands every ounce of effort for itself, only to betray the hapless New Yorker (an adoptive one, in this case) with an empty, unsatisfying life. Rather than struggle to "move up," better to leave: "movin' out," as the closing line of the chorus and the punchy sax refrain put it.

The following track, which also gives the album its title, likewise plays on duplicity and contrast. This time, the focus is on the personal masks everyone wears to hide the parts of themselves they don't want anyone to see: that elusive "stranger" symbolized musically by the lone, nocturnal whistling that opens and closes the track, wrapped in a hazy jazz atmosphere. The shift that follows the smooth piano-and-whistle exposition of the unforgettable melodic theme, however, reveals just how disruptive this "stranger" is in the life of the person hosting it and of those around them. Energetic drums, vamping guitar and funky bass form—together with the ever-present piano—the rhythmic backbone of a mighty jazz-rock groove over which Joel strings together sharp, self-critical lines: "Once I used to believe/ I was such a great romancer/ Then I came home to a woman/ That I could not recognize/ When I pressed her for a reason/ She refused to even answer/ It was then I felt the stranger/ Kick me right between the eyes." While the razor-sharp double guitar riffs separating the verses only underline the cynicism laid out so far, the change of mood in the chorus offers—at least while it lasts—a glimmer of serenity: "Don't be afraid to try again/ Everyone goes south/ Every now and then/ You've done it why can't someone else?/ You should know by now/ You've been there yourself." The words, laid over a bed of Latin-tinged chimes, seem to come from a second voice, almost an offstage narrator or a theatrical chorus: it's one of the many melodramatic touches that characterize the songs on the record, and that make its songwriting so close to musical-theatre tradition (and it's no coincidence that a musical would eventually be born from Billy Joel's songs: it would be called "Movin' Out," and it debuted on Broadway in 2002).

If the musical seemed the most natural destination for the title track, with the seven-and-a-half minutes of "Scenes From An Italian Restaurant" the theatricality becomes even more pronounced, taking on the unmistakable shape of a prog suite. Prog sui generis, without a doubt: worlds away from the fantasy-pastoral bent that defined both the genre's British origins and its later variations or imitations around half the globe. In the most acrobatic track of his career, Billy Joel delivers a rock sound that's as grandiose, theatrical and piano-driven as it is sarcastic, urban and rooted in the fundamentals of "highbrow" white pop music: Broadway and the Beatles. Joel himself has stated, on more than one occasion, that the idea behind "Scenes From An Italian Restaurant" was to stitch together scraps of unfinished songs, using the same "trick" the Beatles used for side two of "Abbey Road": working through improvisation and polishing, and trusting in the magic atmosphere of the recording studio.

This quintessential tour de force of piano rock rests on the same parenthetical structure as the title track, with mirroring intro and outro that act as a curtain, setting the scene: a dinner between ex-lovers at an Italian restaurant, whose exact location in the geography of NYC fans still argue over. Between the two bookends—jazzy, postcard-perfect, stereotyped passages of piano, sax and accordion—scenes of life unfold: perhaps fragments of conversation about old times, certainly scraps of those "unfinished songs" from which the composition took shape. First the small talk, the "I'm fine, and you?" attempts to mask the void left by the other, then the first memories of the past, which gradually build into a whirl of images that grow ever more vivid, joyful and detailed, bringing back to life moments that no longer exist and will never return. The music grows and quickens too: jazz-rock again, starting at full tilt but gathering ever more energy with each bar, and, following the progression of images of youth and the American dream it evokes, diving into the past and adding Dixieland, vaudeville and ragtime memories to its momentum.

It's a ride of rare electrifying power, a torrent of words and musical invention whose only real parallel in 1970s America—despite the considerable stylistic differences—might be Don McLean's sprawling "American Pie," itself grappling with an equally swirling and nostalgic evocation of America's postwar golden years.

It wouldn't be Billy Joel, though, and it wouldn't be "The Stranger," if nostalgia and fond memories were the only face of the reminiscing at the Italian restaurant. The mental cinema of the two lovers, Brenda and Eddie, barely has time to light up in full color before the first shadows creep in: their hasty, lavish marriage falls apart as soon as money starts running short, divorce is the logical outcome, friends drift away, and each of them ends up leading a dull, unfulfilling life. Just as it formed, the bubble of memories dissolves, leaving only the artificially serene mood of the dinner at the restaurant.

More defeats than happy endings, then, more disappointments than hopes. Taken together, Billy Joel's "American portraits" form a disillusioned fresco of the New York mindset, so consumed by the obsession with "making it" (to success, to marriage, to the fashionable apartment) that it burns through its best years, never to get them back. The different register of "Vienna," however, casts a different light on what might otherwise seem a pure exercise in cynicism. Interviewed some time after writing it, following a trip to Europe, the songwriter said that—although he hadn't realized it at the time—the song is about his complicated relationship with his father, who, when Billy Joel was still a child, left the family to move to Austria and build a new life for himself. "Slow down you crazy child/ You're so ambitious for a juvenile/ But then if you're so smart tell me/ Why are you still so afraid? Where's the fire, what's the hurry about?/ You better cool it off before you burn it out/ You got so much to do and only/ So many hours in a day." This praise of slowness, glorified by the Habsburg calm of the Austrian capital, is the key that allows one to move past the disenchantment of the other tracks. For the young, being in a hurry is normal, and so is making mistakes, having to turn back and start over. Fortunately, as long as you've kept at least a bit of energy in reserve, there's always time to rebuild: as the story of his father teaches, the second half of life exists precisely to find the peace that was missing in the first.

"Vienna" is a slow number: one of the four ballads that, on "The Stranger," counterbalance the rhythmic sturdiness of the more upbeat tracks. Among the others, "Just The Way You Are" stands out in particular. Skillfully built on that feeling of ostentatious sincerity audiences are used to calling "romance," the song is an undeniable classic of the love song: over a comfortable, partly sweetened bossa-derived groove, garnished with hushed multitracked backing vocals in the style of "I'm Not In Love," the songwriter urges his lover to stay who she is, without changing herself to become more pleasing. Flashing his best poker face as a confiding crooner, Joel scored his first single to crack the US Top Ten.

In other tracks too, Joel abandons the bird's-eye view of the City to slip into a more personal role. In the sardonic "Only The Good Die Young", banned from radio for its risqué tone, he mocks with a hint of resentment a young fan who, after coming on to him at the end of a concert, refused to sleep with him because of her Catholic upbringing. If the lyrics are scornful and salacious ("They built you a temple and locked you away/ But they never told you the price that you pay/ For things that you might have done…/ Only the good die young"), musically the song is lively and catchy: a lightly retro rockabilly number whose attempted ban from radio playlists only ended up boosting the album's sales. Despite its risqué edge, though, the song shares with the rest of the album its underlying theme: the futile struggle of youth and the inevitability of failure. However biting and politically incorrect the narrator's language may be, the gist of the story is still yet another dead end.

To credit the album's whole appeal to Billy Joel's compositional flair and sharp pen, however, would be to shortchange the contribution of the band – the Billy Joel Band, made up of Doug Stegmeyer on bass, Liberty DeVitto on drums, Richie Cannata on horns and the Steve Khan/Hiram Bullock guitar combo – and of producer Phil Ramone. Ever since the previous album, "Turnstiles", the band's core members had been touring with the singer and honing the craft of polishing songs in the studio: several of Joel's albums were built around a small nucleus of songs brought into the studio already fully formed, alongside many ideas and fragments that only took shape as complete songs thanks to studio sessions and the author's subsequent revisions. For "The Stranger" in particular, Joel aimed to lean heavily on this compositional approach, and remembering the work George Martin had done with the Beatles on "Abbey Road", he tried to pull off a major coup by securing the legendary producer's collaboration. Martin's lack of faith in the musicians of Joel's band – essential, however, to the singer-songwriter and his working method – led to the project being shelved; Joel then turned to Phil Ramone, who would go on to work with him on many albums (having heard the finished result of "The Stranger", Martin later wrote to Joel expressing regret over the failed collaboration).

No track shows the importance of the artists surrounding Joel quite like "Get It Right For The First Time", the album's penultimate track. A kind of samba with sturdy jazz/disco/rock contours, the piece is an excellent showcase of the band's cohesion and versatility, as well as evidence of the producer's skill in giving each instrument its proper weight without stripping the vocal of its pop centrality. Regarding this very song, drummer Liberty DeVitto would recall that – in perfect keeping with its title – this was the hardest track to record satisfactorily, given the difficulty of striking the right balance between musical complexity and pop "ease".

And it's perhaps precisely this special balance between ambition and immediacy that makes the album unique and unmistakable. Blending jazz-rock virtuosity with star-like brashness, sincere yet detached character sketches with faux first-person romanticism, Joel manages to craft a pop record that is at once mature and dynamic, direct and layered. Many critics would snub it, labelling his music "soft rock", as if to call out its supposed lack of authenticity and relevance. Years later, we're here celebrating it because Joel, with his cynical, artificial, timeless style, had seen it clearly all along: his career would go on for decades more, unlike those of many of his more "honest" contemporaries. And rightly so: after all, "Only the good die young", and the path to a fulfilling life is – as "Vienna" reminds us, and really the whole album too – found in taking the long view and shedding urgency.

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18/12/2016