It’s nice to see the title track of Billy Joel’s 1978 album 52nd Street pop up on a Random Weekend so soon after my trip to New York City to see Hamilton.
I’ve always considered this jazzy rock classic one of the quintessential New York City albums, from its cover photo of Joel leaning against a wall on 52nd Street and Seventh Avenue to city settings like Zanzibar and the Herald Square of ‘Rosalinda’s Eyes.’
Elvis Costello has released so many albums, and so many reissues of those albums featuring dozens of bonus tracks, that he’s bound to show up on Random Weekends more than most.
I don’t have the numbers in front of me, but I recall Costello bonus disc cuts like today’s SOTD popping up more than a few times since I started this tradition.
David Bowie escaped his drug-fueled paranoia in West Berlin and over the next three years recorded a trio of albums known as his “Berlin trilogy.” The first of those was Low, released in 1977.
In my research for these Bowie theme weeks, Low came up again and again as one of Bowie’s finest albums, often topping critics’ and fans’ personal rankings of his best work. So it was with giddy anticipation that I first listened to this record.
I’m starting to sound like a broken record here, but David Bowie’s next album came out just nine months after Young Americans — who the hell can claim such a streak of uninterrupted brilliance right out of the gate?
Station to Station, released in early 1976, served as a transition between the soul music of Young Americans and the “Berlin period” to come. I knew nothing about this album before diving into Bowie’s catalog but it wound up emerging as one of my favorites.
1975’s Young Americans is the eighth David Bowie album I’m featuring in this retrospective, with all eight (plus a few I’ve left out) released over just nine years. And all of this happened 40 years before his death. What a remarkable run.
Young Americans kicked off Bowie’s brief soul period. Bowie got an assist from a young Luther Vandross, who performed on the album and co-wrote one track. Bowie described the album this way: “The squashed remains of ethnic music as it survives in the age of Muzak rock, written and sung by a white limey.”
