My family and I play this game where we line up movies, songs or musicians into a college hoops-style bracket (OK, I line up the brackets) and vote on a series of matchups until you narrow things down to a final face-off.
So a Steven Spielberg game might see Jaws up against Always in an early round (an easy pick for most people, I imagine) then advancing to face Schindler’s List in round two (maybe not as easy a pick, though I’d still go with Jaws).
We played this game using Billy Joel songs once and after a drawn-out battle, our final two were both tracks from Joel’s classic 1977 album The Stranger — ‘Vienna’ and ‘Scenes From an Italian Restaurant.’
After much soul-searching by all involved, ‘Vienna’ won the day. And appropriately, it’s the song I featured when I got to Billy Joel during a theme week in mid-2009.
But ‘Scenes From an Italian Restaurant’ deserves its moment in the spotlight, so here it is.
I love that this song is an epic, showboating, multi-part operetta along the lines of ‘Bohemian Rhapsody’ or something Green Day’s put out in the last decade and yet it never feels like one of those songs. It feels entirely organic. Each section flows so nicely into the next that you never know quite how you got from the slow jazz of “a bottle of red, a bottle of white” to the rock staccato of “Brenda and Eddie had had it already by the summer of ’75.”
It has the easy flow and unexpected twists of a conversation between old friends, which is of course exactly what it is.
I also love Joel’s storytelling gift. In five quick verses, he draws a sketch of this teenage couple that could serve as the plot for a feature-length film. In fact, I’m surprised nobody has attempted to adapt it into one (hell, somebody probably has).
And is there another movie to be made about this pair in the Italian restaurant? She’s looking nice after all this time… after a couple bottles of red (or white) and reminiscing about those sweet romantic teenage nights, maybe that new wife isn’t top of mind.
Perhaps a bottle of rosé instead.
We’ll get a table near the street
In our old familiar place
You and I – face to face
A bottle of red, a bottle of white
It all depends upon your appetite
I’ll meet you any time you want
In our Italian Restaurant
Things are okay with me these days
I got a good job, I got a good office
I got a new wife, got a new life
And the family is fine
Oh we lost touch long ago
You lost weight – I did not know
you could ever look so nice after so much time.
Do you remember those days hanging out at the village green?
Engineer boots, leather jackets and tight blue jeans
Oh you drop a dime in the box play a song about New Orleans
Cold beer, hot lights, my sweet romantic teenage nights
Brenda and Eddie were the popular steadies
And the king and the queen of the prom
Riding around with the car top down and the radio on
Nobody looked any finer
Or was more of a hit at the Parkway Diner
We never knew we could want more than that out of life
Surely Brenda and Eddie would always know how to survive
Brenda and Eddie were still going steady in the summer of ’75
When they decided the marriage would be at the end of July
Everyone said they were crazy
“Brenda you know that you’re much too lazy
and Eddie could never afford to live that kind of life.”
Oh, but there we were wavin’ Brenda and Eddie goodbye
Well they got an apartment with deep pile carpets
And a couple of paintings from Sears
A big waterbed that they bought with the bread
They had saved for a couple of years
But they started to fight when the money got tight
And they just didn’t count on the tears
Well, they lived for a while in a very nice style
But it’s always the same in the end
They got a divorce as a matter of course
And they parted the closest of friends
Then the king and the queen went back to the green
But you can never go back there again
Brenda and Eddie had had it already by the summer of ’75
From the high to the low to the end of the show
For the rest of their lives
They couldn’t go back to the greasers
The best they could do was pick up their pieces
We always knew they would both find a way to get by
Oh and that’s all I heard about Brenda and Eddie
Can’t tell you more ’cause I’ve told you already
And here we are wavin’ Brenda and Eddie goodbye
A bottle of red, a bottle of white,
Whatever kind of mood you’re in tonight
I’ll meet you anytime you want
In our Italian Restaurant
Meet Me In Montauk 
I still stand by my vote for the number one Joel song, but “Scenes” is undoubtedly a worthy contender. It is, in every sense of the word, a classic.
I recently heard Joel talking about the song and how it is really an homage to the B side of Abbey Road, where the Beatles combined a series of incomplete songs into one fantastic medley. It’s wonderful that the Beatles’ innovation inspired Joel to piece together three incomplete songs to create his own masterpiece.
Great song on a great album! This was alway one of our favorites.
Does Billy Joel get any respect? That’s what I wonder when I listen to this song and read your post. You mention him and this song alongside Queen’s Bohemian Rhapsody, a song often dropped into conversation or columns as one of the ALL TIME GREAT SONGS. I don’t feel as though I come across Billy Joel referenced in that same way. Outside of our family that is.
He’s undoubtedly beloved. He sells out arenas quickly and usually has to play several nights in a row in any big city in order to meet even a bit of his fan base. But I don’t think critics give him his due. It probably doesn’t help that he married Christie Brinkley and stuck her in his video for “Uptown Girl,” or that he divorced her and married some twinkie who was 40 years younger than him. Or that he decided to stop writing music with lyrics!!!! What the hell was that all about?
Still, for all of his quirks and oddball decisions, he wrote “Scenes from an Italian Restaurant,” and he ought to be given some credit for that, don’t you think?!
I think it’s worse than that. Critics and music snobs don’t just not give him his due… they actively disdain him. His name is thrown around as the sort of thing listened to by people who don’t know any better.
Perhaps it’s that extraordinary success that turns them off, or maybe ‘Just the Way You Are’ pigeonholed him in their minds as some kind of schlock-merchant.
Unfortunately, Clay is right. Of course, the criticism primarily came from the folks at Rolling Stone magazine, which for years has dominated as to what is and is not “good” in rock music. I’m not sure they hated him from the time of The Stranger and “Just the Way You Are,” but they certainly turned on him when his success reached a crescendo with 52nd Street and Glass Houses. He won them back a bit with Nylon Curtain, and I think in the years since then, RS has tried to make some amends for the early criticism.