The Duality Of Billy Joel ... And Ween?

Plus: The Apple Music 100 Songs List, My Fave Uncle Tupelo Bootleg, And A New Album by From Indian Lakes

Happy holiday weekend! Hopefully you are reading this on a patio with a beverage in your hand and good music in your ears.

Speaking of good music …

This week Uproxx published my deep dive on the career and catalog of Billy Joel, who turned 75 earlier this month. I’ve been listening to The Piano Man for most of my life. That double-disc Greatest Hits album with the black-and-white photo of Billy on the cover was a mainstay of suburban minivans from coast to coast during my formative years, and 1989’s Storm Front was among the earliest cassettes in my collection. His music was like my training wheels for caring about rock music. And I still have a lot of affection for the man. His ’70s albums are genuinely underrated as classics of the singer-songwriter genre — The Stranger has been rehabbed enough critically to warrant a sympathetic Pitchfork Sunday Review, but I would argue that the record before that one, 1976’s Turnstiles, is actually Billy’s finest LP of the era and the best exhibition for his musical and lyrical (yes, lyrical!) abilities. As for the ’80s, 1983’s An Innocent Man has some serious cheeseball moments — particularly if you subject yourself to the music videos of that time — but it also shows off his all-time melodic sense, which would have translated in any era. If he had been born in the 1920s, Billy would have written hits for Bing Crosby. If he had been born in 1990, he’d be lapping Jack Antonoff on the charts today. When it comes to targeting mass taste with accessible earworms, Billy Joel just has the knack.

One of my go-to listens as I was writing the column was a bootleg recording of Gene Ween performing a set of Billy Joel covers in 2015, as part of a very brief tour with his band. You can see the performance in its entirety here.

What’s great about this bootleg (and potentially confusing for a Ween fan that doesn’t get Billy Joel and vice versa) is how faithful Gene is to the source material. One might have expected him to take a more subversive route, skewering Billy’s bevy of hits to the point of making them sound strange or fucked up or even stupid. But Gene does not do this. He clearly loves the songs and performs them with the gusto of a world-class tribute artist. And that actually isn’t as out of line with Gene Ween’s own work, which has displayed a sweet/sentimental streak even on Ween’s earliest and most perverse albums, to say nothing of their straighter and less brown later work.

At another point in the article I actually compare Billy to Ween in one specific and narrow way: Both entities have a great talent for mimicry. Now, this isn’t the first time I have compared a classic rocker to Ween. (I also compared ’80s Neil Young to Ween at least once or twice, starting with a reference in Twilight Of The Gods.) But it’s actually more apt for Billy Joel, so I’ll stick it to him.

Let me quote myself here:

During his “imperial” era in the late ’70s and early ’80s, he had a Ween-like tendency to turn every album into a genre experiment. 52nd Street is the “I enjoyed Steely Dan’s Aja” record. Glass Houses is the “I enjoyed Elvis Costello’s This Year’s Model” record. The Nylon Curtain is the “I enjoyed late-period Beatles” record. And An Innocent Man is the “I enjoyed the oldies that influenced the Grease soundtrack” record.

In the case of Ween, this genre fluidity is the general basis for the band’s popular and critical appreciation. People love that the same band made a country record and a prog rock record with a sea-faring theme in quick succession in the mid-’90s. For Billy, however, his virtuosic ability to create hits in several different guises has often worked against him. The stock criticism of Billy in his prime is that he was a hack who would do anything to get on the charts. The fact that he once played in a two-man Deep Purple knockoff was taken as evidence that he had no real musical personality of his own.

Of course, that’s plainly not true since we can all recognize a Billy Joel parody when we hear it. (Adam Schlesinger executed it the best.) But Billy’s expert mimicry is one of my favorite things about him. Any time I hear “You May Be Right,” I appreciate the specificity of the Mick Jagger impersonation lurking in his phrasing. (See how Billy sings “raiiiin.”)

Circling back to Turnstiles: Billy slips effortlessly into a variety of instantly recognizable styles, from Phil Spector pop (“Say Goodbye To Hollywood”), Frank Sinatra-style balladry (“New York State Of Mind”), Tommy-era The Who (“Prelude/Angry Young Man”), and even proto-New Wave faux-ska (“All You Wanna Do Is Dance”). The album also contains one of his greatest songs, “Summer, Highland Falls,” which is Billy doing his “quintessential Billy Joel ballad” thing.

In my mind (and probably only in my mind) Turnstiles is a parallel record to Ween’s finest LP, 1994’s Chocolate And Cheese, which similarly moves through many different music styles from track to track. (In the dualism sense, Ween is the dark to Billy’s light.) Like Billy, Ween was attracted to Beatles homages with a spiteful edge (“Baby Bitch”), R&B/soul pastiche (“Freedom Of ’76”), ersatz psychedelia (“A Tear For Eddie”), and blustery arena rock (“Take Me Away”). In my imagination, it’s the sort of record that Billy himself could credibly cover, as repayment for Gene Ween’s tribute. If only we could hear The Piano Man’s take on “Spinal Meningitis (Got Me Down).”

Half-Baked Rock Critic Theory About That Apple Music List

Back in the old days of Twitter, I would occasionally shoot off half-baked rock critic theories under the branding of “Half-Baked Rock Critic Theory.” And now I’m reviving it. This is for thoughts I have that aren’t fully road tested, but nevertheless seem interesting enough to air out on the ol’ Substack.

This one derives from a conversation I had with Ian Cohen on Indiecast about the week’s big viral content related to the Apple Music Best 100 Albums List. As a maker of lists myself, I can’t player-hate here too much. Lists to me are always harmless fun, as are the conversations they inspire. Though some of us, The Lists Artistes if you will, like to use the format as a Trojan horse for long essays that happen to be broken up with numbers. (The Apple Music list meanwhile had zero blurbs.) The biggest bone of contention with the Apple Music list from many people had to do with the countless weird juxtapositions of classics from 50 years ago being placed next to records from the past few years. Is Astroworld better than Hotel California? Is A Love Supreme slightly worse than Billie Eilish’s debut? Is 1989 (Taylor’s Version) — even Apple Music has to suck up to Taylor by pretending the original 1989 is inferior to the re-recorded (Taylor’s Version)! — more of a classic than Pet Sounds and Revolver?

To most normal people, this all probably seems pretty ridiculous. And that’s because lists that attempt to assess all music over many decades eventually start to look incoherent if the span of time is too wide. If Apple Music really wanted to do an all-time list, wouldn’t they have pitted Thriller against Beethoven’s Ninth? Where do Gregorian chants fit? Can we make a case that John Philip Sousa is better than Exile On Main Street?

Now, we don’t do that because comparing Michael Jackson to Beethoven is clearly silly. The span of time and sound is simply too vast. But what is the appropriate of time that a list can adequately assess?

Here’s your answer: THIRTY YEARS. That’s the maximum. Beyond that, you gotta start over with a new era. That’s the rule. (Bangs gavel.)

Patio Hall Of Fame Album (Of The Week)

I have been on something of an Uncle Tupelo kick lately, in large part because the weather in my area has been seriously “alt-country friendly” lately. This bootleg from the Vic Theatre in 1993 — when the lineup had turned over and was essentially proto-Wilco — is my fave UT live recording, and maybe my fave UT recording of any kind, period.

Recommendation Corner

I’m big into Head Void, the latest album From Indian Lakes. It’s a sister album of sorts to DIIV’s Frog In Boiling Water, which dropped on Friday. Spin them both this weekend for a dream pop interlude on the nearest patio.

Self Promotion Time

My book There Was Nothing You Could Do: Bruce Springsteen’s “Born In The U.S.A.” And The End Of The Heartland comes out on Tuesday! According to The Washington Post, the book is “briskly written and astute” and I am apparently “an imaginative cultural omnivore.” On Wednesday, I will be at Powerhouse Arena in Brooklyn to talk about the book with my pal Brian Fallon of The Gaslight Anthem. Come thru!