BILLY JOEL'S late-Seventies records have revealed a songwriter with a fair amount of wit, a tough, unsetimental view of generational and class concerns, a real gift for the melodic hook, and a not-inconsiderable skill as a bandleader. If he sold records in slightly smaller quantities, I have no doubt the critics would have made him a cult figure on the order of, say, Warren Zevon. The unforgivelable sin of his vsat popularity notwithstanding, it should be obvious that, compared with his commercial competition -- the Styxs, REO Speedwagons, and Journeys that glut our airwaves and pretty much define mainstream above-ground rock -- he comes off as a genius. Or at least an honest respectable craftsman.That said, Joel's new Columbia album The Nylon Curtain feels like something of a throwback to his earlier, dismissable work. (The songs that made his initial reputation -- "Piano Man" and the like -- seem overheated and faintly embarrassing now.) The admirable Long Island bar-band rocker who had emerged in his recent work is strangely muted here, as is the social diarist, and in their place at times seems to be just aother cabaret artist. The songs, when they're not weighted down with shameless and inexplicable musical references to Sgt. Pepper, are vague and far too personal. Theyre not annoyingly confessional in the usual manner of the nakedly emotional singer/songwriter; they're simply cryptic. Instead of sketching specific incidents and letting them stand as metaphors for experiences we've all had, they pile on so many specific, unconnected details that they become unintentionally surreal. "Scandinavian Skies," for eample, is basically just another band-on-the-road song, but Joel has tricked it up to the point where I defy anybody who wasn't along for the ride to know what the hell he's talking about.
Other songs that might have worked are scuttled by their length. "Laura," a potentially interesting portrait of a desperately unhappy girl of a type we have probably all known, goes on longer than War and Peace (well, perhaps it just seems to). And some are simply overambitious. "Goodnight Saigon," for example, tries for a large-scale statement about the horror of the Vietnam War but collapses in a confused welter of irony and second-hand period scene-setting that sugggests its author OD'd on home viewings of Apocaypse Now.
There are two marvelous exceptions, however. "Pressure" is a satisfyingly spiteful put-down song in the great tradition (an upwardly mobile "Like a Rolling Stone," perhaps) in which the singer sneers at a young woman whose world view seems limited to college psychology courses and Time magazine, Musically, it's a neatly executed mix of New Wave electronics and a kind of of demented nineteenth-century classicism, and it makes a splendid single. Even better is "Allentown." Over a great, chugging instrumental track (comeplete with some discreet factory sound effects) Joel recounts a story as contemporary as the morning paper, a story of broken promises and fading dreams in America's industrial heartland. It rings utterly true, evoking a genuine mood of contemporary despair without once lapsing into mawkishness or cheapjack cynicism. It's a grand song -- and the most overtly rock-and-roll cut on the record, which may not be coincidental.
While The Nylon Curtain isn't a great album, or even a topflight Billy Joel album, it has to be accounted a partial success for these two songs. Their presence is all the more laudable in an era when the musical mainstream is deliberately bland and the "avant-garde" is recylcing devices from fifty-year-old Dada manifestos. -- Steve Simels
BILLY JOEL: The Nylon Curtain.
COLUMBIA TCT 38200.
I should add that the above ran in the same issue as my thoughts on Bruce Springsteen's also then-new Nebraska, an album that I was, to my surprise, far less taken with than the Joel effort. In any event, I bring the whole subject up because I really kinda disliked Joel for the longest time (heh heh) until well into this century, when I saw one of his now legendary shows at Madison Square Garden and became a forever devotee.
Which leads us, inexorably and inevitably, to the subject of the business at hand. To wit:
...and the post-Elvis pop/rock/folk/soul solo artist or band you were largely meh about when they were at their commercial and cultural peak of popularity but have since turned into a rabid fan is...?
Discuss.
No arbirtrary rules of any kind, but I will add that if you want to flip this -- give an example of a band or group that you loved, nay lurved back in the day, but now you go "what was I thinking?" when you consider them today -- I wouldn't object.
And in case you are wondering -- and I suspect long-time readers will have guessed this -- my nominee in the original category is Queen. Who I really disliked when they were big, but since seeing the bio-pic I now worship the ground they walked on.
Alrighty then -- what would YOUR choices be?
And have a great weekend, everybody!!!!
