Loading summary
Transcript48 lines
- [00:00]
A
You're listening ad free on Amazon Music.
- [00:09]
B
Welcome to Hit Parade, a podcast of pop chart history from Slate magazine about the hits from coast to coast. I'm Chris Melanfy, chart analyst, pop critic and writer of Slate's why Is this Song Number One? Series. On today's show. Forty years ago, in April 1980, a well established pop star was making his comeback into the top 10 on the Billboard charts. In popular parlance, this guy was nicknamed the Piano Man. Only piano wasn't the most prominent instrument on his latest hit. It was basically a guitar rock song.
- [00:57]
A
If I'm crazy then it's true that it's all because of you and you wouldn't sure.
- [01:06]
B
Way back in the mix on youn May Be Right, you could hear its singer and songwriter Billy Joel pounding away on the piano as usual. But not much about this song was usual for for Joel it was snotty, snide, snarky. Not the first time he'd tried on that attitude, but the first time he'd made it the first single from a new album. In fact, every single that Billy Joel Hit machine released in 1980, downplayed the piano entirely.
- [01:47]
A
Or you can get the satisfaction it's just a fantasy it's got the real pain.
- [01:56]
B
But while this was the most rock forward that Joel had been in his career to date, it was hardly the first time he'd tried on a new style and scored a hit with it. The truth is, Billy Joel never really was the Piano Man. Not entirely anyway. Some of his most famous piano standards weren't actually Billboard chart hits in their day. And even on the massive Grammy winning smashes, keyboards were just one tool in Joel's bag of tricks. The song, not the tinkling of the ivories, was what made Joel a hitmaker. Forget Piano Man. Joel was the pastiche man by the 80s when he was at the peak of his hit generating powers, he was trying on genres, styles and even voices like they were clothing. Sometimes he didn't need any instruments besides the human voice voice. And to a generation born after the 80s, he is now mostly known as the guy with that apocalyptic history lesson song with too many words in it. Yes, we will talk about that strange, unconscious, unkillable Hot 100 number one hit and all of Joel's Billboard chart toppers. Was there ever a Billy Joel sound at all? And did it matter? Because good God, all those hits. How did this guy do it? Today on Hit Parade we are going to pinpoint the moment that Joel's career attained exit velocity from his so called piano man Persona. The year he won the top Grammy, he released an album full of rock songs where the piano was an afterthought. And he was rewarded for it, topping the charts more consistently than ever before. He even poked fun at his own stylistic insecurities right in the lyrics of a hit. And that's where your hit parade marches today. The week ending July 19, 1980, when it's still rock and roll to me, became Billy Joel's first number one song on the Hot 100. The same week, his album Glass Houses was completing a six week run on top of the Billboard album chart. Joel had established himself as one of the new decade's top pop stars and a man who would try anything. The next phase New wave dance craze. Any ways to get on the radio?
- [05:55]
A
Hang at your average tea.
- [06:02]
B
In the critically acclaimed 1983 film comedy Zelig, written and directed by Woody Allen, by the way. Although this is not an anecdote about him, the Jazz Age title character, Leonard Zellig, has an uncanny and scientifically unexplained capability. He takes on the appearance, style and speech of whomever he comes in contact with. With the doctors watching, Zelig becomes a perfect psychiatrist.
- [06:39]
A
When two Frenchmen are brought in, Zelig assumes their characters and speaks reasonable French.
- [06:46]
B
If you've ever heard a cultural critic call someone the Zelig of something, this is what they mean. Not just that the person is a chameleon, but that he sublimates his own identity to mimic, imitate or synthesize whatever other cultural figure is ready at hand. By that measure, I submit to that Billy Joel was the Zelig figure of late 20th century pop. Not a copycat, but an adept cultural Synthesist. In the 70s, 80s and early 90s, Joel had an uncanny ability to to take song tropes, production styles, and even whole genres and run them through the Billy Joel machine. For the record, countless musical artists over the decades have tried this trick and scored hit songs with it. Like Paul McCartney, who openly imitated the Beach Boys on the 1968 Beatles classic back in the USSR. Or Bruno Mars, who seems to pick a different genre for each of his hits. From imitating the Police on Locked out of Heaven. To echoing rick james and the gap band on mars smash with mark ronson, uptown funk. Or how about a huge talent that the music world just lost to Coronavirus? Adam Schlesinger, the songwriter and multi instrumentalist from Fountains of Wayne. Schlesinger built his career out of an indefatigable talent for imitating everything from 60s British Invasion to 70s New Wave to 90s New Jack Swing. In fact, recent memorials to Adam Schlesinger have pointed out that among the artists he grew up listening to was, you guessed it, Billy Joel. And this makes sense. Few artists scored as many Billboard chart hits by imitating as many distinct song subgenres as Joel did. Billy Joel has many critics, to name two Jimmy Guterman and Owen O', Donnell, the co authors of the 1991 book book, the Worst Rock and Roll Records of All Time, ranked Joel as the worst rock and roller of all time. Critics like these call Joel's dilettante songwriting approach crass, nakedly commercial and shameless. Which, by the way, is another song Joel wrote in another style.
- [10:25]
A
I'm shameless.
- [10:33]
B
I have encountered plenty of Billy Joel haters in my life. Many call his music schlock. Truthfully, that may just be a statement of fact. On the other hand, as a New Yorker, I have grown up with Joel. Most of my blood relatives, especially on my Italian side, worship him.
- [10:56]
A
Him.
- [10:57]
B
This podcast episode will not convince anyone on either side of the Billy Joel divide to change their minds or certainly their taste. Rather, I aim to point out that the haters and the worshipers are mostly focusing on the same thing. Billy Joel is a blatant peddler of a variety of instantly hummable styles he picked up from across the rock era. Era. Whether you have a problem with this is up to you. The fact is William Martin Joel, born in the Bronx and famously raised in the Long island town of Hicksville, New York, was virtually powerless in his desire to imitate his heroes. Joel didn't even sound like himself, if there was such a thing. From the moment he started recording, That's the Hassles, Billy Joel's first recording act, but not his first band. As a teenager in Hicksville, Joel's main interests were playing the piano. Lessons had been foisted on him as early as four boxing. He won 22 bouts as an amateur Golden Glove before finally stopping after a broken nose. And soon enough, rock and roll. Like so many future music stars, Joel was impassioned by the Beatles playing ed Sullivan in 1964, just before his 15th birthday. By 1965, still a teenager, Joel was playing as a session pianist and performing in the Echoes, a British Invasion cover band popular on Long Island. After two band name changes, the Joel eventually found himself playing with the Hassles, another Long island band that signed a recording contract, and his sound had shifted from British Invasion rock to a kind of psychedelic R and B. This Search by a young artist for a sound of his own is not exceptional. In previous Hit Parade episodes, I've talked about how everyone from the Bee Gees to Donna Summer to Tom Petty made their bones with a sound different from the one that would later make them famous. But Joel proved himself even more of a genre dabbler than Most when the 60s were barely even over.
- [14:17]
A
Wonder Woman with your skin so bare Wonder Woman with your long red hair.
- [14:25]
B
This proto metal band Attila consisted of just two performers, Billy Joel on keyboards and his former Hassles bandmate John Small on drums. The album cover of their one LP, 1970s Attila, featured the duo posed in a meat locker wearing medieval armor, their hair the length of Led Zeppelin's Robert Plant. Attila's album was not a success. The band broke up in a year, and might have anyway after Joel had had an affair with his bandmate's wife. Elizabeth Weber would later become Joel's first wife and the inspiration for a number of his early songs, including this one.
- [15:22]
A
She's Got a Way of Pleasing I Don't know what it is, but there doesn't have to be a Reason.
- [15:34]
B
She's Got Away was the lead off track to Cold spring Harbor, Billy Joel's 1971 solo debut LP. From the jump, this sounds like the Joel who would later become a superstar, but Joel was no overnight sensation. Issued on the Family Productions label via a rapacious contract that Joel would come to regret, signing the Cold Spring Harbor LP was initially mastered at the wrong speed, making Joel's voice on some tracks more nasal and high pitched. Still though, the LP was a flop. Billboard reported it bubbling under the album chart at number 202. This was Joel finding himself the best known version of himself piano balladeer, writer of alluring rolling melodies. That's an important detail, by the way, way Joel wrote all of his own material, making him, to use the popular post Beatles early 70s term, a singer songwriter. In this way at least his timing was good. In 1971 the top selling artist of the year was another piano playing heart on sleeve singer songwriter Carole King.
- [17:17]
A
I feel the earth move under my feet I feel the sky tumbling down.
- [17:25]
B
But if Singer songwriters were one dominant early 70s trend, so was album oriented rock or AOR. And what finally got Billy Joel on the radio was when he reoriented his piano playing toward an AOR power anthem. One Saturday in April 1972, while on tour to promote Cold Spring Harbor, Joel and his band did a live radio performance at the famed Philadelphia studio Sigma Sound. They did it for Philly's leading progressive rock station, wmmr. Joel debuted several songs that night that had yet to be recorded, one of which was an apparent stoner anthem called Captain Jack.
- [18:27]
A
You'd like to find a little hole in the ground for a while.
- [18:35]
B
Joel would later attest that that the song was anti drug. Its protagonist was, to him, quote, a pathetic loser. But of course, the lines captain Jack will get you high tonight. Just a little push and you'll be smiling worked either way on AOR radio.
- [19:04]
A
Take me to your special island.
- [19:09]
B
WMMR's DJs and listeners loved the track, which at seven minutes had the length and heft of other AOR anthems of the period. WMMR put the Sigma Sound live version of Captain Jack into their rotation for the next year, spinning it repeatedly while Joel went in search of a better recording contract. He eventually attracted the attention of major label Columbia Records, which signed Joel in 1973 on the strength of Captain Jack. A studio version of the song would later appear on Joel's Columbia debut alongside other songs he had launched at wmmr. These songs showed off his eclecticism. Travel and Prayer, for example, was essentially a country song, dominated not by Joel's piano, but by a banjo played by dueling banjos performer Eric Weisberg. For the record, Travel and Prayer was so authentic sounding it was recorded by actual country artists. Banjo player Earl Scruggs issued his version less than a year after Joel's version came out, And flashing ahead a quarter century, it was later covered by no less than Ms. Dolly Parton.
- [21:04]
A
Hang on to look out for him tonight for it gets Rough along the way.
- [21:10]
B
You can picture a parallel history where this skill is Billy Joel's main claim to fame. A magpie songwriter with a gift for melody who writes songs that others make famous. But of course, that's not how things worked out, thanks to his aforementioned 1973 major label debut album. Did I mention the album's Title? So a word or two about the song that gave Billy his nickname and his Persona. Yes, Piano man is a piano based song about a piano player and at a pub, chronicling the sad lives of the barflies who request songs and put bread in my jar. But its primary instrumental hook is played not on piano, but on a harmonica. Joel would often perform the song, handling both the piano and the harmonica himself, attaching the harp to his neck on a stand, Bob Dylan style. Joel would later cite Dylan as an influence on his harmonica playing, and indeed, Piano man reads as a kind of pop folk song. A Tin Pan Alley meets Desolation Row Hybrid. Maybe Like Me Even if you are a Billy Joel fan, you don't need to to hear Piano man again. But it's popular for a reason. A saloon ballad with a sturdy melody that's simple enough for a child or a drunk adult to sing along with, and it finally got Billy Joel onto the charts. Piano man debuted on the Hot 100 in February 1974 and peaked at number 25 by April. While the Piano man album also reached the top 40 that spring, peaking at number 27 on the album chart, it sold only modestly at the time, the LP would not even go gold for more than two years, and during that time Joel issued two more albums, neither of which matched Piano Man's peak. 1974's Street Life Serenade scraped the top 40 on the coattails of its predecessor, but it spent less than half as long on the charts. Even now, Joel was still trying to to hone his sound. The album's title track, Street Life Serenader, bore more than a passing resemblance to the chart dominant piano man of the era, Billy's future friend Elton John. A year and a half later, Joel's album Turnstiles fared even worse on the charts, peaking at number 122. The well reviewed album found Joel casting an even wider net for musical inspiration. Its lead single, say Goodbye to Hollywood, was a knowing homage to one very specific 60s song, say Goodbye to Hollywood.
- [25:46]
A
Say Goodbye my baby.
- [25:53]
B
Joel was doing his best Ronnie Spector imitation, recreating both the singing style and even the drumbeat of the immortal Phil Spector produced 1963 Ronettes hit be My Baby. Elsewhere on Turnstiles, Joel channeled crooner legends on an album cut that has since become a standard both for Joel and for the city it commemorates. New York State of Mind was never issued as a 45 RPM single. Hence, as per Billboard chart rules at the time, it was ineligible for for the Hot 100. But it eventually became one of Joel's most played radio tracks. After spending three years living and recording on the West Coast, Joel found himself homesick for his home state and poured those feelings into New York's State of Mind, essentially invoking the feel, if not the exact sound of classic Tony Bennett.
- [27:33]
A
I Left My Heart. In San Francisco.
- [27:48]
B
In later interviews, Joel also said that the soulful approach of New York State of Mind was meant to emulate the playing style of New York Ray Charles, a legend Joel idolized. Still, New York State of Mind's slow emergence as an Empire State anthem didn't Help Turnstiles despite containing many of the songs that would become fan favorites, including Angry Young man and Summer Highland Falls, Turnstiles was off the album chart in just 12 weeks. It would be the last new Billy Joel album to do so poorly on the channel charts. Of course, Joel didn't know in 1976 that he had such a bright future. Reportedly, Columbia Records was already having second thoughts. Just three albums into his contract and Joel's next album would be make or break for his career. Joel had gone about as far as he could as a straight up piano balladeer. Fortunately, he picked the right moment to step up his game. The Stranger was Billy Joel's commercial and creative breakthrough, though it was bound together by Joel's piano playing and lyrics that frequently evoked themes of his outer borough, no New York City background. Sonically, the LP was wide ranging. Joel had found a sympathetic partner in producer and fellow New Yorker Phil Ramone, who had just won a Grammy for producing Paul Simon's 1976 album of the Year winner. Still crazy after all these years, Ramone gave Joel confidence in his material. For example, he convinced Joel to leave in his own whistling at the start of the Stranger's title track. Ramone also supported Joel's preference to use his touring band instead of studio musicians, and they too influenced the material. The Catholicism satire and pro lust anthem Only the Good Die Young was a slower paced reggae song until drummer Liberty DeVito persuaded Joel to give it a boogie woogie shuffle beat instead. Joel was also still coming up with clever ways to nick an idea here and there. The closing piano on the album's first single, Movin Out. Anthony's song. Was reportedly, by Joel's own admission, an interpolation of the closing piano from the Eric Clapton classic Layla by Derek and the Dominoes. And the epic scenes from an Italian restaurant, which changes tempos multiple times over the course of its seven minute running time. Was Joel's attempt to cross the eclecticism of the second side of the Beatles Abbey Road with the drama of mid-70s Bruce Springsteen epics like Jungleland. Even the ballads such as the drumless She's Always a Woman were kicked up a notch with stately arrangements more polished than than on any prior Joel album. One ballad, however, out charted them all. Joel attempted to lead off the Stranger with Movin out as the first single, but Movin out was at first ignored as radio programmers honed in on the album's mellowest, sweetest track, the jazzy sax inflected Just the way you are.
- [33:27]
A
Don'T go tryin some new fashion don't change the color of your hair.
- [33:38]
B
Joel and his bandmates found the the song overly sappy and he almost left it off the album. It took fellow singers Linda Ronstadt and Phoebe Snow, who visited Joel in the studio to convince him the sentimental song was worth keeping. Released in November 1977, Just the Way youy Are became Billy Joel's first top ten hit in February February of 1978 peaking at number three. The Stranger album reached number two that same month, right behind the Saturday Night Fever soundtrack. By the end of 1978, the Stranger had spun off a stunning four Top 40 hits just the Way youy Are, which went on to win record of the Year at the Grammys Movin out, which did better the second time it was issued as a single, reaching number 17. Only the good die young, which reached number 24 despite libidinous lyrics that made certain radio stations uncomfortable and she's always a woman, another number 17 hit. Finally experiencing the biggest break of his life, Billy Joel wasted no time recording a follow up LP one year to the month after the Stranger debuted, and while its final single, She's Always a Woman, was still in the top 40, Joel issued 52nd Street. Named after Manhattan's famed Center of Jazz performance from the mid 20th century, 52nd street benefited from the coattails of the Stranger, and it shot to number one in all, only its fourth week on the album chart. Given the new album's jazzy title and the fact that Joel had finally broken through with the smooth stylings of Just the Way you Are, you might have expected Joel's grab at the Brass Ring to be filled with more cocktail lounge balladry, and there was some.
- [36:19]
A
I do anything to take away her teeth.
- [36:23]
B
But Joel wanted to range wider than that, and he'd actually been paying attention to music outside his wheelhouse. From 1976-78. While Billy Joel was recording, releasing and promoting the Stranger, Punk happened to be sure, the idea that Billy Joel could ever be a punk is laughable on its face, but Joel was ready to start trying some harder rock than he'd attempted before. He also wanted to keep up with with his peer Elton John, who a couple of years before Punk had proved he could rock credibly on hits like the Bitch Is Back. So 52nd street didn't open with a piano ballad or a wistful Tin Pan Alley Diddy. Track one was this. Big Shot was yet another Billy Joel song about New York, but a different take on New York. It was a snotty downtown guy's evisceration of of Uptown Studio 54 era proto yuppie culture with references to fashion designer Halston and the Upper east side scenester restaurant Elaine's. Does it seem implausible to connect this song to punk decades later? The Beastie Boys didn't think so. They covered Big Shot numerous times live at a speed closer to the way Joel intended it. Of course, Big Shot was still an outlier on the album. Nothing else on the 52nd Street LP rocked quite that hard. However, Joel was also cleverly invoking other au courant pop stylings. My Life, the album's first single, was about as meta as a hit gets a California style pop song. At the peak of California pop that talks about California in the lyrics, Joel was no longer a Californian himself, having returned to his east coast ancestral home. But on My Life he showed he could do on trend Cali pop alongside the likes of Jackson Brown, Linda Ronstadt and Ricky Lee Jones. My Life even caught the moment when another piano troubadour, acclaimed west coast satirist Randy Newman, was scoring hits of his own. As for Joel's single, My Life immediately became one of his biggest pop hits, matching Just the Way youy Are by peaking at number three on the Hot 100 in January 1979.
- [40:30]
A
I don't care what you say anymore, this is my life.
- [40:37]
B
It was so popular that a little over a year later it would be repurposed as the theme song to the Tom Hanks Peter Scolari cross dressing sitcom Bosom Buddies in every possible way. 52nd street cleaned up. By the end of 1979, the LP and Joel were nominated for multiple Grammys. Its third single, a more traditionally Joel like piano ballad called Honesty, was a nominee for Song of the Year.
- [41:14]
A
If you search for tenderness it isn't hard to find you can have the love you need to live.
- [41:27]
B
When Grammy Knight arrived in in February 1980, 52nd street pulled off an upset winning Album of the Year over Grammy favorites like the Doobie Brothers, Kenny Rogers and Donna Summer. Even though Joel didn't bother to attend the ceremony at the time, he claimed to feel uncomfortable at award shows. The Grammy win affirmed that his genre hopping had worked, broadening his appeal to a new generation of pop fans, and it kicked off a busy year and ridiculously successful decade, one that would make Joel's previous dabblings in anthemic rock, pseudo punk and west coast pop seem like child's play. When we come back, Billy Joel kicks off the 80s by calling himself out of touch and America loves it.
- [42:30]
A
Maybe I should buy some old tab collars. Welcome back to the Edge of Jive. Where have you been hiding out lately? Honey, you can't dress trash until you spend a lot of money.
- [42:44]
B
Everybody's talking as disco began to fade in 1980, several hit acts from the 70s took turned toward retro rock sounds to score hits. For example, at the end of 1979, British rock band Queen issued the rockabilly single Crazy Little Thing called love. By February 1980, Queen had their first first American number one hit with it. Later that same year, John Lennon would come back with a retro hit too, his future number one. Just like Starting over, these rock acts were reacting not just to the commercial death of disco, but the rise of new wave, which itself invoked elements of early rock and roll. But nobody did trends quite like Billy Joel. The man who had just scored a smash with My Life, a West coast song talking about the west coast, would now try his hand at a new wave song that talked about new wave. And like Queen's hit, it would thrum with a rockabilly pulse.
- [44:13]
A
Rock and Roll to me.
- [44:16]
B
Has there ever been a more self referential chart topping hit than it's still rock and Roll to Me? A schizo Billy Joel is having a conversation with himself. Old man Rockabilly Joel expresses befuddlement at the kids with their new trends and skinny ties. New Wave Joel, signified in the song by a different vocal effect and the singer's sneering tone is withering in his contempt for old man Joel. Welcome back to the age of jive scoffs. New Wave Joel. It is both a lament about aging by a man who'd only just turned 30 and a sly commentary on trend hopping. Joel had his new wave cake and ate it too. Released as the second single from the 1980 album Glass Houses, It's Still Rock and Roll to me became Billy Joel's first Hot 100 number one in July 1980. As I noted at the top of the show, the single and album were both on top of their respective charts that summer. Actually, the album was already number one after its first single, you May Be Right reached the top ten.
- [45:57]
A
Enjoy the weekend for a change.
- [46:05]
B
Glass Houses was a self conscious attempt down to its title and the COVID shot of Joel holding a rock in front of a plate glass window to shatter his prior piano man Persona. Joel's critics often point point to this album as laughable evidence of him embarrassing himself. Author Jimmy Guterman, in the Worst Rock and Roll Records of All time, calls Glass House's quote a package of bluster. Here's the thing. Call Joel insecure, self conscious, inauthentic. This career reboot worked. Glass Houses made Billy Joel A quintessential 1980s rock star. All purpose, multi genre, naturally tuneful but meticulously produced. And not all of the album's singles rocked hard.
- [47:13]
A
All the waiters in your grand cafe Leave their tables when you blink.
- [47:21]
B
Don't Ask Me why was yet another genre hopper for Joel, with gentle Latin percussion and a melody that fused the sound of two Pauls, McCartney and Simon. Indeed, it alluded to the Latin esque balladry of Paul McCartney's early Beatles work, Crossed with Paul Simon's light ethnic derived folk. Released as the third and least rock driven single from Glass Houses, don't Ask Me why reached number 19 in September 1980. Having invoked McCartney, longtime Beatles fan, Billy Joel's next studio album would be largely an homage to John Lennon in tribute to the former Beatle after his assassination in December 1980. The Lennon sound, marked by double tracked vocals and evocative lyrics, was all over Billy Joel's 1982 studio album, the Nylon Curtain. This was a more experimental, thematically unified album for Joel. The Nylon Curtain's lyrics were impressionistic, ambitious, often downbeat. Joel's mood may have been affected not only by John Lennon's death, but by a motorcycle accident that joel suffered in April 1982, which delayed the album by a couple of months. In addition, during the LP's creation, Joel's marriage was falling apart. He and Elizabeth would divorce a few months before the album's release. In any case, the Nylon Curtains lyrics reached beyond relationships and personal observations to chronicle the American experience on a large scale, most notably traumatized Vietnam veterans on the deliberately bleak elegiac Good Night Sky Saigon. Yet Billy Joel had hardly turned minimalist overnight. This album was not a John Lennon Primal Scream LP. Joel, ever the melodist, a McCartney fan as much as a Lennon fan, remembered to bring the pop hooks even when they were in an experimental package. Pressure, a kind of synthesizer symphony, found Joel going deeper into trendy new wave. In the time between Joel's studio albums, MTV had launched, kicking off the music video era in America. Although Joel had shot music videos before, dating back to the late 70s, they were relatively low concept affairs. Pressure was, in essence, Joel's overt bid for MTV success.
- [51:34]
A
In your face, and you'll have to deal with Pressure.
- [51:39]
B
With its synth hooks, pounding beat and paranoid lyrics about a modern society gone mad, the song sounded like a music video, even on the radio. As for mtv, Joel provided a high concept clip directed by future Duran Duran video maker Russell Mulcahy, with slow motion special effects and relentless edits to match the song's jittery mood pressure. The Nylon Curtains leadoff single reached number 20 in November 1982, but the album's combination of catchiness and social commentary was best realized on its second single and biggest hit, Allentown. Originally titled Levittown, about a Long island suburb near where Joel grew up, Allentown turned into an ode to blue collar workers after Joel switched the title to the Pennsylvania town, a former stronghold of the iron and steel industry. It fused all of the influences Billy Joel was exploring on the Nylon Curtain, a jaundiced eye a la Bruce Springsteen, double tracked vocals a la John Lennon, and a music video which styled Billy as a modern day Woody Guthrie. Allentown reached number 17 in February 1983. Billy Joel had successfully made the transition into the MTV era, not only by shooting high concept videos, but by continuing his magpie ways, fusing styles and tropes into clever amalgams that maintained his chart relevancy. It was a neat trick. By borrowing from the past, Joel somehow still sounded current. But all of these experiments were just a warm up for his next move, which would turn Joel's nostalgic trope rebooting trick into multi platinum. When we come back, Billy Joel generates the biggest hit making streak of his career by going overtly, shamelessly retro on the album where his ship came in. Non Slate plus plus Listeners will hear the rest of this episode in two weeks. For now, I hope you've been enjoying this episode of Hit Parade. Our show was written, edited and narrated by Chris Melanti. That's me. The producer for this show was Benjamin Frisch, with additional 2022 production from Kevin Bendis. My very special thanks also to musician and and Billy Joel consultant Julian Villard. Alicia Montgomery is the Executive Producer and Derek John the supervising Narrative Producer of Slate Podcasts. Check out their roster of shows@slate.com podcasts. You can subscribe to Hit Parade wherever you get your podcasts, in addition to finding it in the Slate Culture feed. If you're subscribing on Alex Apple Podcasts, please rate and review us while you're there. It helps other listeners find the show. Thanks for listening and I look forward to leading the Hit Parade back your way. We'll see you for part two in a couple of weeks. Until then, keep on marching on the one. I'm Chris Melanthe.