Okay, so the cover is eerie; the youngish Billy Joel’s face, seemingly sinking into an oozing tarpit, makes me want to run. But 1973’s Piano Man includes three tunes I absolutely adore, including “Captain Jack,” one of the greatest pop, er make that pot, songs ever written. It was the album on which Joel, thanks chiefly to the title track, seized the brass ring of stardom and staked his claim as America’s very own Elton John. Not everybody liked it; The Village Voice’s Robert Christgau charged that Joel “poses as the Irving Berlin of narcissistic alienation, puffing up and condescending to the fantasies of fans who spend their lives by the stereo feeling sensitive.” Ouch.
Me, I hear the alienation but not the condescension; on “Piano Man” Joel doesn’t seem to be looking down on the customers in that cocktail lounge so much as feeling empathy for them, and the same goes for the reefer-smoking kid who seeks refuge on his “special island” in “Captain Jack.” We all need something to get us through this world, Joel seems to be saying, and while that’s sad, it’s just the way things are.
Besides, Piano Man is hardly the album to sit around and contemplate your navel to. In fact it’s full of fast numbers, like the chug-a-lugging “Travelin’ Prayer,” which is powered by the banjo of Eric Weissberg and the violin of Billy Armstrong, and the bona fide funky “Ain’t No Crime,” on which Joel once again tells us that getting fucked up may be the only way to survive in this hellhole of a world of ours. And on the similarly funky and calypso-flavored “Worse Comes to Worst” Joel sings, “I’ll get along/I don’t know how,” which is a despairing sentiment if I’ve ever heard one, and really isn’t so far away from Samuel Beckett’s “I can’t go on. I’ll go on.” As for “Somewhere Along the Line” it sounds like an Elton John song, and on it Joel, sitting in a café in Paris sings, “But in the morning there’ll be hell to pay/Somewhere along the line.” There’s no free lunch on this LP, and that’s one of the things I like most about it.
The best tracks on Piano Man are “The Ballad of Billy the Kid,” “Captain Jack,” and the title cut. “The Ballad of Billy the Kid” is a romanticized recounting of the career of the legendary killer with an interesting twist at the end; after Billy the Kid’s hanging Joel tosses in a final ironic verse in which he cuts to the present day, and sings, “From the town known as Oyster Bay, Long Island/Rode a boy with a six-pack in his hand/And his daring life of crime/Made him a legend in his time/East and West of the Rio Grande.” In the boy’s mind, perhaps. As for “Captain Jack,” it boasts a lovely melody and tells the story of a po-faced young man from “a one-horse town” who goes to Greenwich Village in his “New England clothes” to score some weed. Because, sings Joel, “Captain Jack will get you by tonight/Just a little push and you’ll be smiling.” The chorus soars, the kid plays his albums and masturbates, and he can’t understand what went wrong and why his world is so dead. But in the end it doesn’t really matter. Because here comes Captain Jack to get him high tonight, and take him to his special island.
As for “Piano Man,” I don’t know what to say about it that hasn’t already been said. It’s a great story song, with Joel going from lost soul to lost soul in his cocktail lounge of the living dead; this one is in the Navy and “probably will be for life,” this other one is a “real estate novelist,” whatever the fuck that is, and next to Billy at his piano sits an old man “making love to his tonic and gin.” All of them are, in Joel’s words, “sharing a drink they call loneliness/But it’s better than drinking alone.” Like wounded animals they come to that bar, to lick their wounds and forget about their troubles, but it remains, for all that, a kind of Hell in miniature, despite the piano that “sounds like a carnival.” And finally the song’s narrator acknowledges that he’s no different from anyone else in that lounge, and wow. Played to death or not, great song.
I don’t have much to say about the remaining songs. “You’re My Home” could almost be a John Denver song, but isn’t terrible for that fact, while “Stop in Nevada” sounds like classic Billy; he’s singing about a woman who tried her best to be a good wife, but has decided to throw it all away and head west, with a stop in Nevada along the way. “If Only I Had the Words (To Tell You)” is the only song on the album I really don’t care for; a big soaring ballad in the tradition of the later Neil Diamond, it reeks of schlock to me.
I wouldn’t go so far as to say Piano Man is Joel’s best album, although it remains my favorite. His pop craft undoubtedly improved, and over the following years he released heaps of songs that sound great on the car radio. But I’m a recidivist and will always prefer “The Ballad of Billy the Kid” and “Captain Jack” to “Just the Way You Are,” “Only the Good Die Young,” the terrible “It’s Still Rock and Roll to Me,” and his innumerable other smash hits. I mean, shit. Given what we have to look forward to over the next four years, we’ll all be better off letting Captain Jack transport us to his special island. Down with politics, and long live Captain Jack!
GRADED ON A CURVE:
A-
