Billy Joel
The Bridge

Introduction:

As almost all rock music enthusiasts know, our Billy, in the mid-nineties and still a forty-year-old, called himself out of the routine of composing and recording new material (“I’ve said everything I had to say…”). At that point, the booklet of songs put together over twenty years of career proved useful for the subsequent quarter of a century, which has seen and still sees BJ engaged more or less sporadically in re-proposing his numerous hits on stage. This activity is still indispensable because, as he says, “…gotta feed the elephant…” referring to the numerous staff members of his organization, the permanent group that accompanies him live, the technicians, the artistic director, and so on. Not to mention personal luxuries like villas in Long Island and Florida, the Italian chef, the collection of vintage motorcycles, the horse stable of the current fourth wife, and the alimony to those who preceded her, affectionately differentiated by him as ex-1, ex-2, and ex-3.

Being the ex-2 (allow me the prolonged digression) that astral beauty of the supermodel Christie Brinkley, whom he met one evening when she approached the piano while he was tinkling it in a bar of a Caribbean island hotel. She was escorted by friends Elle Macpherson(!) and Whitney Houston(!), and the first reaction to that panorama by our piano man was to quietly thank his mother for having so firmly nudged him as a boy, often despite himself, to take all those piano lessons. Biographies continue to narrate that one evening the poor Houston, then still a teenager and unknown, at some point asked him to accompany her at the piano on an Aretha Franklin song: he kindly complied only to find himself shortly after, along with everyone present, with his jaw dropped... the young mulatto was singing full throttle and waving everyone out of the hotel!

Returning to BJ’s current routine, to feed his elephant, he has thought for years now to subscribe to monthly performances at Madison Square Garden, which is not even twenty minutes by helicopter from his home, managing to obtain a sold-out every time so far. Specifically, it consists of flying from the small home helipad in the afternoon for the sound-check and returning five hours later in the late evening with everything finished. As he says: “Two hours as Mussolini in front of twenty thousand enthusiastic people, and ten minutes later, I am just another schmuck in New York traffic.” Yes, but in those two sweaty hours, that schmuck earned a million dollars at least, and the elephant can eat to its heart’s content...

The now elderly Billy continues to put on weight but has chosen not to care (“I’m from the Jack Nicholson school, like him I find there’s nothing more depressing than a man on a diet”). His performances have been somewhat breathless for some time, but still energetic: he promises to stop when he feels he no longer has the adequate strength, or when fans of the Big Apple start to leave gaps in the Garden, whichever of these two events happens first. Among his tricks as an old entertainer, there’s spraying his throat now and then, between songs, with an anti-asthma spray; moreover, he has long had the pitch lowered of songs whose melody pushed too high for his once tenor and now baritone emission; finally, he replaced the traditional pianist’s bench with a drummer’s stand set real high, to help the diaphragm rise better for singing, and never mind if the high posture on the keyboard slightly compromises the piano technique, the breath is more important.

Context:

This 1986 album is his tenth, and third to last, of unreleased tracks; only another followed in 1989 and the last dated 1993.

The eighties are notoriously denounced by the majority of music lovers as the worst period of pop and rock music (despite the presence in them of some outstanding gems, obviously) and it so happens that 1986 is the absolute worst moment. To say, in my well-stocked discotheque, there are as few as thirty-two albums from '81 and '84 to a maximum of fifty-one from '89, apart from the aforementioned black year 1986 which boasts only nineteen!

Therefore, this work by Joel ends up being easily, in my opinion, one of the best products of popular music of that year (albeit certainly not the peak of the artist), despite partially suffering from the unfortunate production fashions of the time: cumbersome synthesizers, Phil Collins-esque reverb on drums, and so on.

BJ was faring well at the time and was on a roll, still fresh from marrying the gorgeous Uptown Girl Brinkley and the recent parenthood of their Alexia, as well as before all the legal troubles he would have with record companies and lawyers at the end of the eighties for the protection of his royalties. The album perhaps suffers a bit from this peaceful and joyful phase as our hero has always, laudably, made songs to tell true and good stories (his, of his life), all alone and without help neither for the music nor for the lyrics and thus the usual law applies whereby the more demanding the topics and memories and troubles, the better their artistic translation renders.

In short: “The Bridge” is not a masterpiece but only another good Joel album, after all, one of the few '70s rock and pop artists who didn’t suffer too much from the general '80s crisis (all his records from that decade are valid, and many people consider some of them his masterpieces) continuing, even in that very conditioning period, to create without too much effort his music made of soul blues, Beatles, jazz influences, operatic, country, hard rock.

Strengths and weaknesses:

Billy Joel's albums are important, well-sold, and interesting because he is one of the acclaimed (especially in the USA) living geniuses of that pop subgenre conceived and made with the piano: by popular acclaim the number two in the world after Elton John, his ex-friend with whom he performed for a long time as a duo to the delight of all the piano pop fans in the world. Everything went down the drain between them when Elton decided to air dirty laundry, telling the press how unreliable his friend was (canceled concerts together etc.) due to persistent drinking and sniffing habits, coupled with the little willingness to quit. “...When it was my turn, at the end of the eighties, it was a serious thing, I had to mop floors and such, at the place where I was getting treated…” Sir Elton had to say. Billy only mildly replied (“Elton is Elton,...”) but he somehow held it against him: “…, he always perceived me as a younger brother…” (there is a two-year age difference between them, but four in career as Elton hit the big time at twenty-four in 1971, Billy at twenty-six in 1975).

In reality, they both have the same illustrious piano man as their forerunner (both for music and vices, clearly…), Ray Charles. That's the way the world goes, him so talented and famous and seminal but less universal and eclectic, so most of the money and celebrity went to those two talented disciples of his. It had happened, after all, also to the Beatles and Stones to start by mimicking black Americans and immediately receiving a completely different attention compared to their masters... only to deserve it all thanks to the brilliantly introduced variations on the theme later on but that's another story. Boycotted at the start because he was black, poor Ray remained appreciated yes, but not universally marketable in environments interested only in white affairs, so BJ was right to affirm, during his acceptance speech on the occasion of his induction into the R’n’R Hall of Fame in 1999: “They often accuse me of being derivative: well I am as Hell, and I add that if this Hall of Fame kept out candidates on the basis of being derivative, you’d have never had a white guy here!” Great Billy!

Joel is quite different from Elton as a piano man: he is (also, or rather much more) a rocker. Elton’s vein and his pianism have deeper roots in the fifties, in the rock’n’roll created by the fusion of blues and country. Joel takes those same influences into account, but in his style, there are also deeply instilled the stiffening, weighting, shaping introduced by their subsequent evolution into hard rock with its syncopations, its volume, its power, its being more visceral. On the other hand, as a young man, he saw himself as tough, and badly tried to be a metalhead in an unusual organ/drums duo called (sic!) Attila. Too funny listening in the only album released under this moniker, to the twenty-year-old BJ squawking with all the voice he had in his body and in the meantime honking Hammond, but also simply admiring him on the cover, long-haired and scruffy as dictated by the genre. In summary, the two talents: Elton John = Rock&Roll, lighter and more fluid, Billy Joel = Rock, heavier and more shaped.

Therefore, the strength of this album is that common to all Billy Joel's works: you are in the presence of a talented composer of pop music with varied components, dosed in different ways to allow for a nice stylistic variety. The strong melodic ideas (occasionally memorable, on par with the best McCartney) play the main role, occasionally laid on substantial, occasionally ingenious harmonic progressions (in ballads, in more lyrical and dramatic or intimate episodes, in longer and multipartial tracks), other times set on decisive and noisy rock or funky rhythms, which forcefully are less rich motivically but still endowed with great “hooks” to be remembered. All complemented by texts almost never trivial and almost always narrating his life experiences, thus very heartfelt.

The limitation of this album lies instead in the relative number of memorable episodes, for me three out of nine in total, as well as in the presence of a couple of fillers of little interest, except for the already made discussion about the impact, although relative, of the perverse modes circulating in the '80s regarding sound and arrangement.

The best:

As I hear it, the most successful songs turn out to be, in order of appearance in the setlist, “This Is the Time”, “Baby Grand” and “Code of Silence.”

The first of these is the most famous of the group if only because it was long the Italian theme for the infamous soap opera “Guiding Light,” raging for a good two decades on Mediaset between the '80s and 2000s only to succumb at the height (so to speak), for cynical but in this case also blessed reasons of economic convenience. Grandmas and moms know it perfectly, therefore, but now a broad-scale Italian reunion is underway as it was recently resurrected for a bank advertisement (from bad to worse...). It’s the classic ballad with mirror-like melodic consistency spiced up by its dynamic flow, with subdued and descriptive verses contrasted by the declarative and booming chorus. BJ sketches a false start that serves as an introduction, then quietly settles in the verse to tell a girl, as they walk in winter by the sea, the classic story of the very troubled guy who was saved by her, indeed: more than a cliched subject but certainly truthful given the narrator and the detailed setting. What works great is the advent of the chorus. After a complete stop, good old Billy enters it slyly, proceeding through clever chords that move the bass out of tonic to become more interesting, up to catharsis on the beautiful closing phrase "You've given me the best of you, and now I need the rest of you." All people falling in love should find inside themselves and express to whom it may concern this concept… personally, I completely fell in love with my wife when, shortly after we got together, I asked her one night what she was looking for from me and she instantly replied: "Everything!" Great Billy.

“Baby Grand” is a whole different atmosphere and style. It is a tribute to Ray Charles' soul jazz blues with the late Maestro himself present to sing the second verse, duet in a call-and-response in the third, and accompany with his piano throughout the song alongside BJ. How amazing! To the left the principal’s piano, to the right the guest’s. Baby Grand by the way is the American pet name given to the baby grand piano (just under two meters), the most widely used and played by rock and jazz musicians representing a valid compromise between the ideal sound allowed by the much bulkier and less manageable concert grand and the one instead too limited and imprecise of the quarter grand (about a meter and a half), certainly more manageable. The song is not special in terms of melody and originality... a soul blues standard like many others in the purest and "black" of styles. What one appreciates is Ray’s voice (who naturally gives his pupil a run for his money), BJ’s aura of respect and gratitude towards his mentor, the four skilled hands facing each other detaching clear and tasty glissandos on the keyboards, enriching the melody's progress. Soul blues bores me quite when taken in large quantities, but an isolated song in this context, so full of skill, taste, experience, and gratitude towards the instrument of one's life and fortune, celebrated on the occasion as a sure refuge for one's sadness and loneliness, cannot but provoke me emotion and satisfaction.

“Code of Silence” is again a whole different world, a piece well immersed in its time i.e. the Eighties, and not least for the presence of Cindy Lauper as a guest. Billy Joel’s blondish fellow citizen was at the time at the very crest of the wave... to a superficial observation the umpteenth post-punk weirdo all grit and shouts, in reality, she was immediately adopted by the entire fine circle of American musicians (held in high esteem even by Frank Zappa, for instance): a voice like an angel, perfect intonation, abnormal range, tons of personality. Her tone so different from Billy’s pierces the mix, her ever-changing harmonizations and trademark countermelodies enrich the main sing-song melody to the final "hook" represented on the occasion by the conclusion of the chorus, when she "takes" the ninth, and together they lengthen in exquisite harmony.

The rest:

The opener “Running On Ice” immediately irritates with its prologue of ungraceful, rigid sequences of piano and snare, then it stabilizes in a fake reggae off-beat groove in the verses, that immediately runs to straighten on the "strong" cadence in the refrains. The drums are too high in the mix… they constantly try to steal Stewart Copeland’s style from the Police but with no hope of catching it; there is a lot of rhythmic energy, in any case, but little motif interest.

“A Matter of Trust” is Springsteen-esque to the core: initial "Onetwothreefour!", stentorian voice, trivial melody like the best tradition of the Americana genre. A real stereotype, of no charm, at least since my personal idiosyncrasies towards Bruce.

“Modern Woman” is a nice well-arranged funky jazz, Joel displays his strong ability to articulate wide-ranging melodies with a paroxysmal quantity of syllables. The only flaw is the bass line done with synthesizers, so very eighties, too much.

“Big Man on Mulberry Street” takes a nice step back and plunges the album into a Broadway musical atmosphere, complete with a resounding and thrilling brass section, filled as it is with superstars like Michael Brecker and Ron Carter, in highly successful guest appearances to do call-and-response against the bright, inspired, and brilliant piano breaks of the principal, at ease and indeed happy. All tremendously New Yorker, very sexy and dynamic, except for the falsetto vocal performance from our guy… euphemistically not the best choice.

The nocturnal “Temptation,” adequately garnished with aphrodisiac sax, narrates BJ’s urges instead of going to work in the morning he would stay in bed with his beautiful lady still rolling over between the covers. Nothing to say… steady ballad, carved melody, sleazy and warm arrangement, no concession to the times; it is timeless music, a classic and regular American old pop, well done.

“Getting Closer” is the closing filler, carefree with the air of having been composed and played between evening and morning. It reveals it through a text full of invectives against his old manager and the production company: evidently, such subjects did not even deserve a good song. Especially ugly is the repeated piano in the chorus, already rushed through its own right as a melody. The only moment of vivid interest ends up being Steve Winwood's final Hammond organ solo, but he too has done better.

Final judgment:

Three or four beautiful songs and just as many more than decent, often interesting and occasionally moving lyrics, synthesizers unfortunately sometimes overriding BJ’s piano, capable accompanists, and some excellent guest appearances by good colleagues, a couple of missteps in terms of borrowing others' musical intuitions, but in general a honorable search for variety and diversity: “The Bridge” is a solid work without being particularly memorable. Even the cover is quite nice, also American modern art, by such Brad Holland.