Glass Houses sold seven million records, mostly on the strength of its singles “You May Be Right” and “It’s Still Rock and Roll to Me.” These songs are okay, I guess, although they never struck me as being particularly reflective of anything too important. They felt (and still feel) a tad melodramatic. They seem like they’re supposed to be “hit singles,” which means they sound like they’re supposed to be experienced in public. Because Joel has no clear connotation as a public figure, these songs don’t gain any significance by being popular. That paradox is even more evident on Joel’s 1982 follow-up album The Nylon Curtain, an opus with three decent songs that lots of people know by heart—“Allentown,” “Pressure,” and “Goodnight Saigon”—and six amazingly self-exploratory songs that almost no one except diehard fans are even vaguely familiar with.
Granted, I realize that I’m making a trite, superfan-ish argument: I constantly meet people who love some terrible band (usually the Moody Blues) and proceed to tell me that the reason I fail to understand their greatness is because I only know what I’ve heard on the radio. Most of the time, these people are completely wrong; while the finest Led Zeppelin songs (for example) are all obscure, the most important Zep songs are “Whole Lotta Love,” “Immigrant Song,” and “Stairway to Heaven.” These are the tracks that define what Zeppelin was about, beyond their tangible iconography as a loud four-piece rock band. Houses of the Holy is a great (small g) album, but those aforementioned three songs are why Led Zeppelin is Great (big G). This is true for most artists. So that being the case, it seems strange to advocate Billy Joel’s Greatness (big G) by pointing to unheralded songs off The Nylon Curtain, an album that only sold one million copies and was widely seen as a commercial disappointment. Logically, I should be talking about 1973’s “Piano Man,” his bread-and-butter tour de force and the one Joel song that’s forever part of the cultural lexicon. But that deconstructive angle wouldn’t work in this particular case; to argue for Joel’s import on the strength of “Piano Man” would make him no more consequential than Don McLean or Dexy’s Midnight Runners. “Piano Man” now belongs to everybody, and most of that everybody couldn’t care less about its source. Saying you like “Piano Man” doesn’t mean you like Billy Joel; it means you’re willing to go to a piano bar if there’s nothing else to do.
Meanwhile, saying you like “Immigrant Song” (or even just saying that you don’t hate “Stairway to Heaven”) means you like Led Zeppelin—and to say you “like Led Zeppelin” means you like their highly stylized version of cock-rock cool. It means you accept a certain kind of art. Pretty much everybody agrees that Zeppelin is—at the very least—cool to mainstream audiences, so their timelessness and significance is best defined by their best-known work. That’s how it works with cool artists (Miles Davis, Iggy Pop, whoever). But—as I’ve stated all along—Billy Joel is not cool.[23] Even though “Piano Man” is autobiographical, it’s not important that he’s the guy who wrote the words and sang the song; I’m sure it would be just as popular if Bernie Taupin had come up with those lyrics and Elton John had released it as the second single off Madman Across the Water. Because there’s nothing about Joel’s personage that’s integral to his success, he’s one of the only hyper-mainstream pop artists who’s brilliant for reasons (and for songs) that almost no one is aware of.
Which brings me back to The Nylon Curtain. The reason I generally dismiss the popular songs on this record is because they seem like big ideas that aren’t about any specific person, and Joel is better when he does the opposite. “Allentown” has a likable structure, but it’s just this big song about why baby boomers supposedly have it rough. “Pressure” is the big keyboardy Bright Lights, Big City coke song; “Goodnight Saigon” is the big retrospective Vietnam song that’s critical of the war but supportive of the people who fought there, a distinction nobody seemed to put forward until they starting reading Time-Life books in the early 1980s. All of this is fine and painless, and my assumption is that these three songs are the tunes conventional Joel proponents adore. But it’s two other songs—“Laura” and “Where’s the Orchestra”—that warrant a complete reinvention of how hipsters should look at Joel as a spokesman for the disaffection of success.
Joel wanted The Nylon Curtain to be like a mid-period Beatles record, which would be like me wanting this book to be as good as Catch-22. But “Laura” and “Where’s the Orchestra” really are as good as most of what’s on The White Album. This is because the first song says things so directly that its words shouldn’t make sense to anybody else (and yet they do), while the latter is so metaphorically vague that anybody should be able to understand what he’s implying (yet I’ve listened to this song for twenty years and still feel like I’m missing something).
“Laura” is about a relentlessly desperate woman (possibly his ex-wife, possibly someone else, possibly somebody fictional)[24] who is slowly killing the narrator by refusing to end a relationship that’s clearly over. Making matters worse is the narrator’s inability to say “no” to Laura, a woman who continues to sexually control him.
Now, the reason I keep using the term narrator(as opposed to Billy) is because this amazingly personal song never makes me think of the person who’s singing it. Whenever I hear “Laura,” I immediately put myself in Joel’s position, and he sort of disappears into the ether. It’s almost as if Joel’s role in the musical experience is just to create a framework that I can place myself into; some of Raymond Carver’s best stories do the same thing. The Laura character has specific—but not exclusionary—traits (her behavior seems unique, but still somewhat universal), and the mood of Joel’s piano playing has a quality that jams hopelessness into beauty. This is a song about someone whose life is technically and superficially perfect, but secretly in shambles. It’s about having a dark secret, but—once again—not a cool secret. This is not a sexy problem (like heroin addiction), or even an interesting one (like the entanglements expressed in Rufus Wainright’s “Instant Pleasure” or Sloan’s “Underwhelmed”). It’s mostly just exhausting, and that’s how it feels.
“Where’s the Orchestra” reveals the same sentiments, only sadder. The lyrics are one long allusion to watching a theatrical production that isn’t satisfying, and virtually anyone can figure out that Joel is actually discussing the inexplicable emptiness of his own life. The words are not subtle. But it paints a worldview that I have never been able to see through, and there has never been a point in my life—be it junior high, college, or ten minutes ago—when this song didn’t seem like the single most accurate depiction of my feelings toward the entire world. In fact, sometimes I tell people that they will understand me better if they listen to “Where’s the Orchestra?” And you know what? They never do. They never do, and it’s because they all inevitably think the song is actually about them.
That’s what all of The Nylon Curtain is really about, I think: the New Depression, which started around the same time this album came out. People have always been depressed, but—during the early eighties—there just seemed to be this overwhelming public consensus that being depressed was the most normal thing anyone could be. In fact, being depressed sort of meant you were smart. And in a larger sense, Joel’s music was documenting that idea from the very beginning. A song like “Honesty” (on 1978’s 52nd Street) implies that the only way you can tell whether someone really cares about you is if they tell you you’re bad. “So It Goes” (a ballad released in 1990 but actually written in 1983) has Joel conceding that every woman who loves him will eventually decide to leave; “Scenes from an Italian Restaurant,” off The Stranger, is about how the most perfect relationships are inevitably the most doomed. Joel’s music always has an undercurrent railing against the desire for perfection. Another song off The Stranger—“Just the Way You Are”—proves that sentiment twice (once cleverly, and once profoundly).
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2. It just now occurred to me that—if Billy Joel were to actually read this—he must hate how every attempt at advocating his genius is prefaced with a reminder of how cool he
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3. Actually, it turns out I was completely wrong about this: When I eventually had the opportunity to interview Joel (months after the completion of this essay) I asked him about “Laura,” and he said it was about a family member. He noted, “There’s a complete giveaway line where I sing, ‘How can she hold an umbilical cord so long.’ Now, who the hell could that be about?” Obviously, I can’t argue about the meaning of a song with the person who wrote it. But I still think my interpretation is more interesting than his truth.