Dancing About Architecture, Part MMXXXVVIIII

Earlier this year, this album was re-released in a deluxe edition. My immediate, knee-jerk reaction was that I didn't want the deluxe version, but I did want the original album, the one I had and enjoyed and treasured as a kid. By the time I got it, in fact, I was playing catch-up: Glass Houses had come out and produced a couple of monster hits, and the hits off the previous albums were dripping out over the gunwales of the airwaves. So I decided, after getting Glass Houses, that I had to have this as well. I also had to have 52nd Street . Shortly after that, I got ahold of Songs in the Attic, and, with that, considered my collection of Billy Joel complete at the time.

(More about that at the end.) So I got these for my birthday. On the day I actually went out and ordered them, I suddenly found myself wondering if I didn't, in fact, want the deluxe edition of The Stranger, but that was 44 bucks and the original format was 18 I think.

And I feel like I made the right decision. These are two albums that come form a period in Joel's career when he was really, really making albums. These are concept albums in the purest sense of the term. They don't tell a narrative story, or even narrative stories, so much as they set out examples of concepts. The Stranger is all about coming into adulthood. "Movin' Out," well, pretty obviously, is about rejecting stereotypical notions of grown-up success; "The Stranger" is about confronting the world of adult eroticism, although I kind of felt as a kid, and know now as an adult, that he's exagerrating a bit: we don't all have masks we put on when we want to get kinky. Plenty of us a re capable of getting kinky without any kind of formal assistance at all.

And on and on. If you know the album and the songs on it, you'd probably pretty much agree. Except, well . . . I guess I oughta qualify: these songs are all about young adulthood. "Scenes From An Italian Restaurant" is about watching other people's lives run off the tracks and wondering if your own is not far from the same fate. "Vienna" is about that moment when you feel like you have made it: you have leaped onto this strange precipice known as adulthood, and sooner or later, out there on the horizon, lies a first big vacation. "Only the Good Die Young" is about tempting someone into the ring of adulthood who had been daunted into thinking the trappings of adulthood were sinful. "She's Always A Woman" is about realizing that people can be very different within intimate realtions than they seem to be in public. "Get It Right the First Time" is about that moment when dating goes from being a ritual to a requirement: it's not just about making this one connection right now. There's more at stake suddenly. "Everybody Has A Dream" is about the realization that being in a mature, commited relationship is, in itself, something of a fantastic notion. Gee. I wasn't going to do that, but lookit there, I did. Knocked it down song by song.

52nd Street is about escape. Escape into a lover's arms, another part of town, maybe even a part of New York that only exists insofar as people are willing to believe in it; escape from the lie-telling real world, escape into music (both "Rosalinda's Eyes" and "Zanzibar"), maybe even escape into a relationship that is as painful as it is pleasureable ("Stiletto," duh). When I first got the thing, I remember thinking I was gonna have problems with it based solely on the cover: Billy Joel doesn't play the trumpet. But then I listened to it and thought, "Nah. Billy can pretend he plays the trumpet if he wants to."

(Also, I have walked the length of 52nd Street, and I never did find the wall he is leaning up against. Not to say this picture wasn't taken there; it could have been around some corner I didn't see, or they maybe painted it since then. Or maybe I just missed it. Cause, New York, y'know?)

So now I have in my Billy Joel collection, The Stranger, 52nd Street, Songs in the Attic, and The Nylon Curtain. I will probably have to buy a copy of Glass Houses one of these days. And I will most likely end up getting a copy of Turnstiles. It has been argued by many that most of what you'd want from Turnstiles is on Songs in the Attic anyways, but I have to disagree, if no other reason that "New York State of Mind" isn't. And that's something I think I ought to have available. Because, New York, y'know?

PS: I followed my listening of The Stranger with Leonard Bersnstein and the New York Philharmonic performing Mussorgsky's Pictures At An Exhibition and Night On Bald Mountain. Which seems very oddly appropriate.