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- [00:00]
Chris Melanfi
You're listening ad free on Amazon Music.
- [00:09]
Chris Melanfi (singing or quoting lyrics)
For the longest time.
- [00:12]
Chris Melanfi
Whoa. Welcome back to Hit Parade, a podcast of pop chart history from Slate magazine about the hits from coast to coast. I'm Chris Melanfi, chart analyst, pop critic and writer of Slate's why Is this Song Number One Series. On our last episode, we covered the first decade of Billy Joel's career. Yes, he was the piano man, but really Joel was the pastiche man, borrowing styles and melodic tropes, sometimes down to the same beat, from both contemporary artists and hitmakers from his youth. We are now up to the early 80s and Joel is about to turn this trick from subtext into text. He was going to mine his musical passed openly to generate hits. Across 12 years and seven albums, Billy Joel had tried to be his own version of Elton John, the Ronettes, Ray Charles and Bruce Springsteen. He'd paid homage to both Lennon and McCartney and echoed the Ramones, Queen, Randy Newman, even Gary Newman. Entering 1983, Joel had a new idea. What if he packed a range of musical personae into a single album? What if on every track he was, in essence, a different artist from the past? This concept led to Billy Joel's most hit packed LP ever, an album that improbably made the 34 year old one of the top stars of the early TV era. He called the album An Innocent Man. In virtually every way, 1983's An Innocent man was an antidote to the nylon curtain, ebullient where its predecessor had been dour, blatantly accessible where its predecessor had been thorny and experimental. Simply put, Billy Joel was in a great mood. For starters, he was in a new romance, dating his future second wife, supermodel Christie Brinkley. For another thing, once he settled on the album's retro theme, the songs Joel said in later interviews poured out of him. And why not? He was openly rewriting musical tropes of his youth. But again, Joel's reboots were not pure rip offs. He had a talent for evoking a specific song mode while writing an original melody. Take the first single, for example. Tell Her About It.
- [03:31]
Chris Melanfi (singing or quoting lyrics)
Thing you feel.
- [03:34]
Chris Melanfi
Joel has openly admitted this song was an homage to Motown, more specifically, the recordings of classic Motown girl group the Supremes.
- [03:55]
Chris Melanfi (singing or quoting lyrics)
Give and take, I Can't Hurry but.
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Chris Melanfi
Tell Her about it sounds like no one supreme song. Never mind that a man is singing it. The song exudes Motown flavor down to its lyrics, in which an experienced elder advises a younger man in the ways of romance.
- [04:17]
Chris Melanfi (singing or quoting lyrics)
Listen, boy, is good information from a man who's made mistakes, just a word.
- [04:22]
Chris Melanfi
Or two, but the melody and lyric are new, original, bespoke. Joel is a one man, Holland Dozier Holland, the legendary Motown songwriting team. And okay, Tell Her about it isn't as great as those immortal Supremes songs, but Joel did write himself a number one hit. Tell Her about it debuted on the Hot 100 in July 1983, and it was on top by September. For the second time in three years, Billy Joel was leading America's hit parade with a song that didn't sound like typical Billy Joel. No prominent piano, no troubadourish lyric like it's still rock and roll to me before it. Billy's new hit was a knowing throwback and total kitsch. So kitschy, in fact, that in the song's smash music video, Joel plays a singer performing on the Ed Sullivan Show. Tell Her about it was the only Hot 100 number one from an innocent man, but arguably it wasn't the album's biggest, most enduring single. As many of my fellow chart nerds know, songs that peak lower can wind up with stronger legacies. And that was definitely true of the follow up hit. Uptown girl reached number three on the Hot 100 in November 1983, but it held there for five weeks and spent a month longer on the chart overall. To this day, Uptown Girl is Billy Joel's most played radio hit, and it was Joel's only number one in England. Its music video, in which Billy plays a garage mechanic with not the best dancing skills, became an even bigger MTV sensation than then Tell Her about it, thanks to a cameo by Joel's then girlfriend, Christie Brinkley. Of course, this was retro Billy in yet another 60s mode. Joel openly admitted Uptown Girl was an homage to the leading falsetto singing doo wop group of his youth, the Four Seasons. This was the pattern for the next year and a half. Joel kept spinning off singles from the album, six in total, all of them top 30 hits, and each was a kind of spot. The Influences Game, the title track from An Innocent man, a number 10 hit in February 1984.
- [07:46]
Chris Melanfi (singing or quoting lyrics)
I know you're only protecting yourself, I know you're thinking of somebody else.
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Chris Melanfi
Was an interpolation of the moody, impassioned R and B of artists like the Drifters and Ben E. King.
- [08:05]
Chris Melanfi (singing or quoting lyrics)
And Darling, Darling, Stand by Me.
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Chris Melanfi
The fourth single, the Longest Time, was pure a cappella doo wop. Remarkably, despite its lack of instrumentation, save for a chorus of human voices, the song reached number 14 on the Hot 100 in May 1984, at the height of synth pop, it was the most stark sounding song on the radio.
- [08:44]
Chris Melanfi (singing or quoting lyrics)
For the longest time.
- [08:48]
Chris Melanfi
And of course, here again, Joel was paying his respects, in this case to doo wop hall of famers Frankie Lyman and the Teenagers. The fifth single, leave A Tender Moment Alone, was a yearning mid tempo ballad with prominent harmonica. It reached number 27 in August 1984.
- [09:24]
Chris Melanfi (singing or quoting lyrics)
Even though I'm in love.
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Chris Melanfi
Fans and Joel himself cited many influences for the track, including the Rascals and Smokey Robinson. But in a later interview, Joel revealed that he had deliberately based the melody for Leave A Tender Moment Alone on the Burt Bacharach Hal David composition sung by both Jackie DeShannon and Dionne Warwick. What the World Needs Now. Finally, for the album's improbable sixth top 40 hit, Joel went with the wistful album closing up tempo pop track Keeping the Faith. The album had so exceeded expectations that Joel and his label almost didn't think it necessary to issue a sixth single at all. But after a gap of a few months, Keeping the Faith put a button on the Innocent man era, reaching number 18 in March of 1985, 19 months after the album's release.
- [10:42]
Chris Melanfi (singing or quoting lyrics)
If it seems like I've been lost in let's Remember.
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Chris Melanfi
A fun Keeping the Faith is perhaps the most difficult hit from an innocent man to spot the influence on, but Joel did get its lurching guitar groove from somewhere. Actually, it was an early 70s hit, Betty Wright's R&B jam clean up woman, a number six hit in January 1972.
- [11:20]
Chris Melanfi (singing or quoting lyrics)
A cleanup woman is a woman who gets all the love we girls leave behind.
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Chris Melanfi
Here's the fun part. If you think this similarity in the hook of both songs is just a coincidence, go watch Billy Joel's Keeping the Faith video. He's thrown in an Easter egg for eagle eyed fans around 45 seconds into the clip, which takes place in an imagined musical courtroom with Joel on trial to determine if he is an innocent man. Billy sits at the defense table spinning a vinyl single on his Finger and what 45 is it? A copy of Betty Wright's Clean Up Woman. By the start of 1985, an innocent man was quadruple platinum and more than half its songs were top 40 hits, the biggest hit ratio of any Billy Joel album. Most of the hits did not even feature the piano prominently, affirming that there was no one Billy Joel sound. At the peak of Michael Jackson, Duran Duran and Madonna, the dude from Hicksville was an MTV and radio megastar. Taking advantage of this peak moment, Joel picked 1985 to issue his first greatest hits album, a two record set that went on to become one of the best selling albums of all time. Joel included two new tracks on Greatest Hits Volume 1 and Volume 2, one of which was a top 10 hit, the rather dated synth pop meets doo wop track your Only Human Second Wind. To Joel's credit, the song's theme at least was heartfelt, a plea to teenagers contemplating suicide from a songwriter who had battled depression and suicidal ideation himself. Proceeds from youm Only Human went to the National Committee for Youth Suicide Prevention. During the first decade of his major label career, Joel had not allowed more than a year or two to go by without a new album. But now approaching 40, Joel was content to let up to three years lapse between LPs. The one thing that did remain consistent was that he would not settle on any one style. Joel's 1986 album the Bridge if nothing else, we here at Hit Parade, like that title was led off by another synth driven bouncy hit that even Joel himself later came to denigrate. Modern Woman, a number 10 hit on the Hot 100, was taken from the Bette Midler Danny DeVito film comedy Ruthless People. If anything was interesting about Modern Woman, it was its Broadway show tunes vibe. Joel had long flirted with music that sounded like it belonged on a stage. Indeed, a decade and a half later, dancer and choreographer Twyla Tharp would mount a jukebox musical Movin out, based entirely on Upon Joel's music. This show tunes vibe pervaded much of the Bridge, from the chugging urbane Running on Ice to the brassy Big man on Mulberry Street, a song that inspired a musical episode of the hit Cybill Shepherd Bruce Willis TV show Moonlighting.
- [15:58]
Chris Melanfi (singing or quoting lyrics)
I don't fit into the groove now, I ain't a bad guy.
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Chris Melanfi
Start to finish, the Bridge was a hodgepodge. Its biggest hit, A Matter of Trust was a rare song Joel wrote primarily for the guitar. In both the video and in concert, Joel abandons his piano to strap on an electric Widely agreed to be the bridge's best hit, A Matter of Trust reached number 10 in October 1986. And on the number 18 hit this is the Time, which is by and large a traditional wistful Billy Joel cat keyboard ballad, Joel overtly echoed the somber beach at Winter vibe of Don Henley's prior 1984 hit the Boys of Summer. Joel was now such a well established cultural figure by 1986 and 87 that he had the clout to duet with his hero Ray Charles. Me. And represent America in the Then Soviet Union. As part of Russian President Mikhail Gorbachev's cultural outreach effort known as Glasnost, Billy Joel was invited to play a series of concerts, three in Moscow, three in Leningrad, in the summer of 1987. He was the first Western rock star to play in the Soviet Union under communism. Joel recorded the Soviet concerts and released the them later that year as a live album. His cover of the Beatles Back in the ussr Live in Leningrad was the first single he'd ever issued written by someone other than himself. The triumph of the Russian tour could well have been a capper to Billy Joel's career, a signal that he had evolved into a kind of popular eminence and would no longer be a hitmaker. Behind the scenes, Joel was in professional turmoil. He had tired of working with his established producer Phil Ramone, and he uncovered fiscal malfeasance by his manager and former brother in law, Frank Weber, leading to a bitter lawsuit. The last thing anyone expected, Billy Joel included, was that he would score chart topping hits at the end of the 80s. Surely that would be a fluke. Yeah, about that fluke. The story of how Billy Joel came to write his stream of consciousness history lesson, we didn't start the fire has been oft told and may be apocryphal. In most versions, Joel claimed he wrote the song as a rejoinder to a Gen Xer who in a conversation with boomer Billy claimed that nothing much had happened in the 50s. Joel was aghast. Wait a minute, I told him, didn't you ever hear of Dien Bien Phu? The Hungarian freedom fighters, The Suez Canal crisis? He never heard of any of this stuff. In some versions of Joel's story, the dude he was debating was a 21 year old friend of John Lennon's son, Sean Ono Lennon. Anyway, Joel also claims he wrote fire's lyrics as a kind of mental exercise and as a way for this high school dropout to satisfy his long held secret dream of being a history professor. Musically, Joel has also claimed in certain interviews that the bars he's dropping in the song were inspired by the rise of hip hop, which in 1988 and 89 was entering its golden period.
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Rap or Hip Hop Artist (quoted)
I was a fiend before I became a teen. I melted microphones instead of cones and ice cream. Music orientated. So when hip hop was originated, fitted like pieces of puzzles complicated.
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Chris Melanfi
Even Joel's most negative critics half agree with this comparison, cynically calling we didn't start the fire a white man's or baby boomer's rap. What is likely closer to the truth, however, is that Joel, fans and critics agree was inspired by REM's own tongue twisting word soup hit from 1988. The similarly apocalyptic it's the End of the World as We Know it and I Feel Fine.
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REM (quoted)
As We Know It. It's the end of the World as We Know it it's the end of the World as We Know It. I Feel fine.
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Chris Melanfi
As I noted in our REM episode of Hit Parade, End of the World is actually a much wordier song. Billy Joel's hit is nearly a minute longer than REM's but contains about 100 fewer words. Whatever its inspiration, here's the funniest and most ironic thing about We Didn't Start the Fire. Indisputably, it was written by a baby boomer ranting at a younger person. It is quite literally, to paraphrase the Simpsons, the old man yells at cloud of pop hits. And yet We Didn't Start the Fire is beloved by generations of young people. School kids memorize its history lesson Lyrics Hamilton style.
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Chris Melanfi (singing or quoting lyrics)
Politician, Sex, JFK blown away. What else do I have to say?
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Chris Melanfi
It was also loved by young people in 1989, in a year when Paula Abdul, New Kids on the Block and Janet Jackson were topping the charts. We Didn't Start the fire became Billy Joel's third and last career number one, topping the Hot 100 in December 1989. And that's the final irony. This song completes a hat trick of Billy Joel chart toppers in which the piano is not the primary instrument. Fire in particular seems to possess everything but a baby grand squealing guitars, pinging synthesizers, pounding drums, even congas and timbales on the clattery rhythm track. To recap, it's still rock and roll to me. Tell her about it and We Didn't Start the Fire. These are the so called piano Man's three number one hits. Liberace Goodbye. We Didn't Start the Fire led off the release of Joel's 1989 album Stormfront, his first LP in more than a dozen years not to be produced by Phil Ramone. After shopping around for producers at one point, Joel was reportedly even considering Eddie Van Halen. Billy settled on Mick Jones, the British guitarist and founder of the hit rock band Foreigner. The album Jones produced for Joel, thanks in large part to We Didn't Start The Fire became Billy's first album chart number one since Glass Houses in 1980. Joel's 83 album An Innocent man, despite spinning off all those hits, couldn't get past number four on the album chart in the peak year of Michael Jackson's Thriller, possibly also because of Mick Jones's credibility on album rock radio. The singles from Stormfront got Joel back on AO are with higher charting hits than he'd enjoyed on that format in years. I Go To Extremes, the second single from Stormfront, was its second top 10 hit on the album rock chart and another top 10 hit on the Hot 100, peaking at number six. The album spun off a half dozen singles to various radio formats, and yet again, the sound of the singles was eclectic. Stormfront's third top 40 pop hit, the heartbreaking ballad and so It Goes, a song Joel wrote back in 1983 and based on an old English folk Ballad, reached number 37 on the Hot 105 at Adult Contemporary radio. But possibly the most uncharacteristic song on Stormfront was an album cut buried in the middle of the lp, a bluesy, twangy saloon ballad about abject infatuation called Shameless. Joel had no intention of releasing Shameless as a single, but in 1991, rising country megastar Garth Brooks heard Shameless for what it was, a country song waiting to happen. Of course, Joel had written and recorded songs that edged toward country before the aforementioned Travel and Prayer was covered by country artists and another piano man deep cut the Ballad of Billy the Kid, played with western cowboy troupes. But at the turn of the 90s, country music was moving in Billy Joel's direction. New artists like Brooks cited 70s rock acts like the Eagles, James Taylor and yes, Joel as inspirations for their music as much as they cited Hank Williams. So Garth Brooks recorded a cover of Shameless Nashville style for his blockbuster album Ropin the Wind, And it became a country mega hit, topping Billboard's Hot Country Songs chart for two weeks in November 1991. Even Joel's original version of the song became a minor latter day hit on the Adult Contemporary chart thanks to Brooks's cover. A few years later, at Garth's heavily hyped 1997 concert in Central park, famed New Yorker Billy Joel joined him on stage to perform the song that Joel had written and Brooks had made famous.
- [29:26]
REM (quoted)
Every time I see you stand.
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Chris Melanfi
Back in the early 90s, however, Garth Brooks wasn't the only new thing happening in popular music. The evolution of the Billboard charts under the computerized soundscan system, as we talked about in prior episodes of Hit Parade, revealed that both country and hip hop were more popular than previously realized, and that baby Boomer era rock stars were not quite the chart titans they had been hyped as Gen X music, particularly grunge and gangsta rap, began to take over, thanks in part to the chart's improved accuracy. You would think this finally would put an end to Billy Joel's chart topping era. Not quite. In 1993 Joel returned with one more studio album, river of Dreams, and once again it was preceded by a pop single that proved irresistible. The album's title track, the river of Dreams. Joel was not exactly on trend with this song. Most critics proclaimed that Joel was imitating or at least alluding to the cross of African music and New York style rock and roll proffered by fellow New Yorker Paul Simon on his blockbuster 1986 album Graceland. Joel's new record was arriving seven years after Simon's Grammy winner, but yet again, Joel managed to capture the flavor of Simon's cross cultural experiment without copying any one Graceland song. In addition, and very cleverly, the river of Dreams, with its doo wop and R and B vocals also invoked the classic style of the token's 1961 chart topping hit the Lion Sleeps Tonight, which was itself adapted from African music. But but as had been true throughout his career, the end result was just Billy Joel music. These influences were transmogrified into yet another improbable, undeniable hit. In the year of grunge and gangsta. Joel's latest single reached number three on the Hot 100 in October of 1993, and that wasn't the most incredible chart feat by 1993. With SoundScan in effect on the charts, it was now normal for superstar artists to debut high with their new albums. And so when Joel released the river of Dreams CD in August, it debuted at number one on the album chart. At age 44, Billy Joel had his first ever LP open on top of the charts. No other song from river of Dreams did as well on the charts as its title track, although yet again the singles were varied and the last single Joel issued from the album pointed the way toward his future. Lullaby, Parentheses Good Night, My angel was originally not a pop song. Joel wrote it as a standalone classical piece. He had infused songs with classical melodies before. One track on An Innocent man, the album cut this night, borrowed the second movement of Ludwig van Beethoven's Pathetique Sonata. Joel credited Beethoven in the LP's liner notes, but Lullaby became a literal lullaby for his daughter, Alexa Ray Joel. One night after he was trying to reassure the girl before bed, Joel took his standalone instrumental piano piece and added lyrics. Though not a big hit, it made the top 20 on the adult contemporary chart and only number six 77 on the Hot 100 lullaby served as a quiet coda on Billy Joel's pop career. He would never write or record another pop album again. Always at war with his critics and wary of trying to be a hitmaker into middle age, Joel simply decided to take himself out of the game with one last chart topping album under his belt. Since river of Dreams, Joel's recording has been very sporadic. In 2001 he issued his first and to date only fully composed classical album, the self deprecatingly titled Fantasies and Delusions. Performed by pianist Richard Hyun Ki Julie. The album was filled with more of the etude style piano pieces, not unlike the original Lullaby that Joel had been toying with for years.
- [35:59]
Billy Joel (quoted or referenced)
I guess I got to a point in my life I just thought that I had said all I wanted to say. With lyrics I may write songs again, I don't know. But for the last eight years all I've been writing is instrumental music and it speaks for me.
- [36:19]
Chris Melanfi
As for pop music with lyrics, Joel scored only one more such chart hit. In 1997, on the occasion of the release of yet another greatest hits album, Joel recorded a song written not by himself but by rock legend Bob Dylan that was soon to become a standard. To make you feel my love when.
- [36:44]
Chris Melanfi (singing or quoting lyrics)
The rain is blowing in your face and the whole world is on your kiss.
- [36:57]
Chris Melanfi
Joel was actually the first to record this oft covered track. It would later be released by Dylan himself as well as Garth Brooks and Adele. Joel's version was only a modest hit, peaking halfway up the hot 100 and making the top 10 on the adult Contemporary chart. Live performance has been another story, although even there, Joel more than once has threatened to take himself off the road. One so called farewell concert on New Year's Eve 1999 led to a two year absence that ended with a pair of 911 benefit performances. A series of successful tours with Elton John were blockbusters in the 90s and aughts, but a feud between the piano men over Elton's impressions of Joel's health and sobriety after his rehab stints brought those tours to an end. By 2010, Joel has told his band more than once privately he wanted to hang it up, only to be lured back for a concert appearance. For most of the last decade, however, Joel has been enjoying a renaissance in his public regard. He received the Kennedy center honors from President Obama in 2013 and a month later Joel began a so called residency at New York's Madison Square Garden, a series of monthly concerts at the arena that he says will continue as long as there is demand for tickets. He has interspersed the Garden shows with one off concerts at ballparks and arenas around the country. And in February 2020, just before the novel Coronavirus shut down all touring nationwide, Joel played the record 73rd consecutive monthly show of his Madison Square Garden residency at the Garden shows. Joel has a charming sense of perspective about his deep musical catalog. The shows are packed with hits, but he will also take a moment to to poll the audience on what song they would prefer to hear.
- [39:23]
Billy Joel (quoted or referenced)
First choice would be a song called Just the Way youy Are. The other choice is song called Vienna.
- [39:44]
Chris Melanfi
At practically every concert, Joel's fans choose Vienna over the mega hit Just the Way youy Are. Both songs were on Joel's breakthrough 1977 album The Stranger, but Vienna was never issued as a single. It was not a hit on the charts or any radio format. Joel has long claimed he wrote Via Vienna for his German born father Helmut Joel. The song has elements of Kurt Weil and German cabaret and on record it even includes an accordion solo. In other words, when given the choice between one of Billy Joel's most iconic hits and a deep cut where he is imitating the music of Weimar Republic IR Germany, his fans pick the German pastiche every time. Sure, it is a piano song, Billy Joel will never fully kick the moniker Piano man, but it's also one more reminder the Billy Joel sound effortlessly melodic, shamelessly sentimental, always crowd pleasing, contains multitudes. I hope you enjoyed this episode of Hit Parade. Our show was written, edited and narrated by Chris Melanfi. That's me. My producer for this show was Benjamin frisch with additional 2022 production from Kevin Bendis. My very special thanks to musician and Billy Joel consultant Julian Bullard. 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 per Parade wherever you get your podcasts, in addition to finding it in the Slate Culture feed. If you're subscribing on 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. Until then, keep on marching on the one. I'm Chris Melanfi.