Glass Houses, at the time, was a real kick in the ass for Billy Joel fans. The jazz touches and piano balladry of his earlier work was pushed aside for straight-up rock-n-roll. If there’s any piano on this album at all, it’s buried under layers of electric guitar, synths and heavy drums.
Don’t get me wrong, it wasn’t Led Zeppelin. By any measure, Glass Houses is pretty mild… but from the man known for ‘Piano Man’ and ‘Just the Way You Are,’ ‘Sometimes a Fantasy’ was downright dangerous.
Billy Joel followed up The Stranger with an album just as strong if not as iconic, 52nd Street. This jazzy collection boasts such hits as ‘Big Shot,’ ‘Honesty’ and ‘My Life’ but it’s the other, lesser-known tracks that make it one of Joel’s finest efforts. ‘Zanzibar,’ ‘Stiletto,’ ‘Rosalinda’s Eyes,’ ‘Half a Mile Away,’ ‘Until the Night’ and the title track, which (in order) finish off the album after the first three hit tracks, are among the best songs Joel has ever written.
My personal favorite is today’s track, ‘Stiletto,’ and for one primary reason: the piano-bass interlude that starts at 2:08 and launches into that unreal horn part at 2:27 before easing back into the staccato piano and drum bit that precedes the next verse. That’s just quality stuff.
In the words of Jack Horner (Burt Reynolds) in Paul Thomas Anderson’s Boogie Nights, “This is it. This is the one they’ll remember me for.” Of course he was talking about a porn film, but I imagine Billy Joel feels the same way about his 1977 classic The Stranger.
The album contains only nine songs but just about every one is a classic. The first seven are undeniably so: ‘Movin’ Out,’ ‘The Stranger,’ ‘Just the Way You Are,’ ‘Scenes From and Italian Restaurant,’ Vienna,’ ‘Only the Good Die Young’ and ‘She’s Always a Woman.’ But the less ubiquitous final two tracks — ‘Get it Right the First Time’ and ‘Everybody Has a Dream’ — are just as strong.
Turnstiles is Billy Joel’s first truly great album. Featuring such classics as ‘New York State of Mind,’ ‘I’ve Loved These Days,’ ‘Summer, Highland Falls,’ ‘Say Goodbye to Hollywood’ and ‘Miami 2017’ (which I featured as a Song of the Day back in November), it’s practically a greatest hits collection.
This is Joel’s first New York album, to a degree that I never really appreciated until reading about it for this blog entry. All of the songs I mentioned above are either about New York or about leaving California behind.
Joel’s third album, Streetlife Serenade, is for me his least memorable. The only two songs I really know from it — ‘Los Angelenos’ and ‘Streetlife Serenader’ — were featured on the excellent live album Songs in the Attic and those versions top the ones found on this LP.
The rest of the album is forgettable. And I mean that literally… scanning the titles — ‘The Great Suburban Showdown,’ ‘Last of the Big Time Spenders,’ Weekend Song’ — I have absolutely no idea what they sound like. Perhaps they are lost gems, but I tend to believe this album is an early valley in a career of many peaks.
