Sex, Drugs, and Cocoa Puffs: A Low Culture Manifesto Read online

  What I’m saying is that there are no conditions for appreciating Billy Joel. I’m not sure loving an album like Glass Houses says anything about me (or about anyone). And in theory, this should make it a bad record, or—at best—a meaningless artifact. It should make liking Glass Houses akin to liking mashed potatoes or rainy afternoons. You can’t characterize your self-image through its ten songs. I was eight when that record came out in 1980, and I vividly recall both my sister Teresa (who was nineteen) my brother Paul (who was eighteen) playing Glass Houses constantly, which was normally unthinkable; Teresa liked the Police and Elton John, and Paul liked Molly Hatchet and Foreigner. The only albums they could play when they were in the same room were Cheap Trick’s At Budokan and Glass Houses. Retrospectively, the unilateral Cheap Trick fixation made perfect sense: Cheap Trick was good at being cool for everybody. They rocked just hard enough to be cool to metal kids, they looked just cool enough to be New Wave, and Robin Zander had the kind of hair that semimature teenage girls wanted to play with. Even today, the Cheap Trick logo stands as the coolest-looking font in the history of rock. But none of those qualities can be applied to Glass Houses, now or then; in theory, there is no way that record should have mattered to anyone, and certainly not to everyone.

  However, even I liked that record, and I was eight. And I didn’t like records when I was eight; I mostly liked dinosaurs and math. This was all new. But what’s even weirder is that I could relate to this album. And I can still relate to it—differently, I suppose, but maybe less differently than I realize. What I heard on Glass Houses (and what I still hear) is somebody who’s bored and trapped and unimpressed by his own success, all of which are sentiments that have never stopped making sense to me.

  It’s always difficult to understand what people think they’re hearing when they listen to the radio. This was especially true in the 1970s, when there seemed to be no difference between what was supposedly “good music” and what was supposedly “bad music.” WMMS, the premiere radio station in Cleveland during the Carter administration, was famous for playing Springsteen’s “Born to Run” every Friday afternoon at exactly 5:00 P.M. For years, that was the station’s calling card. And this was done without irony; this song was supposed to serve as the anthem and the spirit for working-class Northeast Ohioans. Eventually, that’s what “Born to Run” became. But what nobody seemed to notice is that this song has some of the most ridiculous lyrics ever recorded. Half the time, Springsteen writes like someone typing a PG-13 letter for Penthouse Forum: The lines “Just wrap your legs round these velvet rims / And strap your hands across my engines” is as funny as anything Tenacious D ever recorded, except Bruce is trying to be deep.

  Now, it’s not like this song is necessarily terrible, and it’s certainly better than everything on Born in the U.S.A. (except “Glory Days” and maybe “I’m Goin’ Down”). But it’s difficult to understand why “Born to Run” is considered a higher poetic achievement than Meat Loaf’s “Paradise by the Dashboard Light” or Van Halen’s “Runnin’ with the Devil,” two equally popular songs from the same period that expressed roughly similar themes while earning no cred whatsoever. So the real question becomes: Why did this happen? Part of it is probably based in fact; I suppose Springsteen is “more real” (or whatever) and took a legitimately emotive risk with his earnest eighth-grade poetry; referring to your guts as “my engines” may be idiotic, but I have little doubt that Bruce really thinks of his rib cage in those terms. However, Springsteen’s sincerity only mattered if you had a predetermined opinion about what he was trying to accomplish. David Lee Roth might have been sincere, but he was just a cool kid trying to get laid; Meat Loaf might have been sincere, but he was just a fat goofball who was cool in spite of himself. But Bruce was trying to save you. He appealed to the kind of desperate intellectual who halfway believed that—when not recording or touring—Springsteen actually went back to New Jersey to work at a car wash. Before he even utters his lyrics, people accept his words as insights into their version of existence. Had Bruce written “Paradise by the Dashboard Light,” people would play it at weddings.

  Once again, I want to stress that I have no qualms with how this process works. I’m not interested in trying to convince anyone that they should (or shouldn’t) adore whichever denim-clad icon they choose. However, this abstract relationship between the perception of the artist and the appreciation of his product unfairly ghettoized Billy Joel while he was making the best music of his career (and some of the best music of the late seventies and early eighties). Because Billy is not “cool,” like Elvis Costello—and because he’s not “anticool,” like Randy Newman—Joel was perceived as edgeless light rock. All anybody noticed was the dulcet plinking of his piano. Since his songs were so radio-friendly, it was assumed that he was the FM version of AM. This is what happens when you don’t construct an archetypical persona: If you’re popular and melodic and faceless, you seem meaningless. The same thing happened to Steely Dan, a group who served as the house band for every 1978 West Coast singles bar despite being more lyrically subversive than the Sex Pistols and the Clash combined. If a musician can’t convince people that he’s cool, nobody cool is going to care. And in the realm of rock ’n’ roll, the cool kids fucking rule.

  In fact, I sometimes suspect that if I had first heard Glass Houses five years later than I did—when I was, say, thirteen—I might have hated it before I even put the needle down. The whole metaphor behind the cover shot (“Look! I’m self-reflexively throwing rocks at my identity!”) might have seemed forced, and the skinny tie he’s wearing on the back cover would have seemed like something from the Knack’s closet, and everybody hated the Knack in 1985 (including, I think, the actual members of the Knack). But because I was too young to understand that rock music was supposed to be cool, I played Glass Houses in my basement ad nauseam and—in that weird, second-grade way—I studied its contents. My favorite song was “All for Leyna” at the conclusion of side one, where Billy claimed to be, “Kidding myself / Wasting my time.” However, I mostly listened to side two, which included “I Don’t Want to Be Alone Anymore” (where Billy enters a relationship only because his female acquaintance is bored with dating), “Sleeping with the Television On” (where Billy expresses regret for being a “thinking man,” which is already how I viewed myself at the age of eight), and the pseudo-metal “Close to the Borderline”1 (where Billy suddenly becomes Frank Serpico). Certainly, it’s not as if Billy Joel was the first artist who ever sang about being inexplicably depressed. But he might be the first artist who ever sang about getting yelled at by his dad for being depressed, which is less a commentary on his father and more an illustration of how Joel couldn’t deny that he had no valid reason to be unhappy (yet still was). When I eventually learned that Joel tried to kill himself in 1969 by drinking half a bottle of furniture polish (how Goth!), I wasn’t the least bit surprised. Joel’s best work always sounds like unsuccessful suicide attempts.

  Glass Houses sold seven million records, mostly on the strength of its singles “You May Be Right” and “It’s Still Rock and Roll to Me.” These songs are okay, I guess, although they never struck me as being particularly reflective of anything too important. They felt (and still feel) a tad melodramatic. They seem like they’re supposed to be “hit singles,” which means they sound like they’re supposed to be experienced in public. Because Joel has no clear connotation as a public figure, these songs don’t gain any significance by being popular. That paradox is even more evident on Joel’s 1982 follow-up album The Nylon Curtain, an opus with three decent songs that lots of people know by heart—“Allentown,” “Pressure,” and “Goodnight Saigon”—and six amazingly self-exploratory songs that almost no one except diehard fans are even vaguely familiar with.

  Granted, I realize that I’m making a trite, superfan-ish argument: I constantly meet people who love some terrible band (usually the Moody Blues) and proceed to tell me that the reason I fail to understand their greatness is bec
ause I only know what I’ve heard on the radio. Most of the time, these people are completely wrong; while the finest Led Zeppelin songs (for example) are all obscure, the most important Zep songs are “Whole Lotta Love,” “Immigrant Song,” and “Stairway to Heaven.” These are the tracks that define what Zeppelin was about, beyond their tangible iconography as a loud four-piece rock band. Houses of the Holy is a great (small g) album, but those aforementioned three songs are why Led Zeppelin is Great (big G). This is true for most artists. So that being the case, it seems strange to advocate Billy Joel’s Greatness (big G) by pointing to unheralded songs off The Nylon Curtain, an album that only sold one million copies and was widely seen as a commercial disappointment. Logically, I should be talking about 1973’s “Piano Man,” his bread-and-butter tour de force and the one Joel song that’s forever part of the cultural lexicon. But that deconstructive angle wouldn’t work in this particular case; to argue for Joel’s import on the strength of “Piano Man” would make him no more consequential than Don McLean or Dexy’s Midnight Runners. “Piano Man” now belongs to everybody, and most of that everybody couldn’t care less about its source. Saying you like “Piano Man” doesn’t mean you like Billy Joel; it means you’re willing to go to a piano bar if there’s nothing else to do.

  Meanwhile, saying you like “Immigrant Song” (or even just saying that you don’t hate “Stairway to Heaven”) means you like Led Zeppelin—and to say you “like Led Zeppelin” means you like their highly stylized version of cock-rock cool. It means you accept a certain kind of art. Pretty much everybody agrees that Zeppelin is—at the very least—cool to mainstream audiences, so their timelessness and significance is best defined by their best-known work. That’s how it works with cool artists (Miles Davis, Iggy Pop, whoever). But—as I’ve stated all along—Billy Joel is not cool.2 Even though “Piano Man” is autobiographical, it’s not important that he’s the guy who wrote the words and sang the song; I’m sure it would be just as popular if Bernie Taupin had come up with those lyrics and Elton John had released it as the second single off Madman Across the Water. Because there’s nothing about Joel’s personage that’s integral to his success, he’s one of the only hyper-mainstream pop artists who’s brilliant for reasons (and for songs) that almost no one is aware of.

  Which brings me back to The Nylon Curtain. The reason I generally dismiss the popular songs on this record is because they seem like big ideas that aren’t about any specific person, and Joel is better when he does the opposite. “Allentown” has a likable structure, but it’s just this big song about why baby boomers supposedly have it rough. “Pressure” is the big keyboardy Bright Lights, Big City coke song; “Goodnight Saigon” is the big retrospective Vietnam song that’s critical of the war but supportive of the people who fought there, a distinction nobody seemed to put forward until they starting reading Time-Life books in the early 1980s. All of this is fine and painless, and my assumption is that these three songs are the tunes conventional Joel proponents adore. But it’s two other songs—“Laura” and “Where’s the Orchestra”—that warrant a complete reinvention of how hipsters should look at Joel as a spokesman for the disaffection of success.

  Joel wanted The Nylon Curtain to be like a mid-period Beatles record, which would be like me wanting this book to be as good as Catch-22. But “Laura” and “Where’s the Orchestra” really are as good as most of what’s on The White Album. This is because the first song says things so directly that its words shouldn’t make sense to anybody else (and yet they do), while the latter is so metaphorically vague that anybody should be able to understand what he’s implying (yet I’ve listened to this song for twenty years and still feel like I’m missing something).

  “Laura” is about a relentlessly desperate woman (possibly his ex-wife, possibly someone else, possibly somebody fictional)3 who is slowly killing the narrator by refusing to end a relationship that’s clearly over. Making matters worse is the narrator’s inability to say “no” to Laura, a woman who continues to sexually control him.

  Now, the reason I keep using the term narrator(as opposed to Billy) is because this amazingly personal song never makes me think of the person who’s singing it. Whenever I hear “Laura,” I immediately put myself in Joel’s position, and he sort of disappears into the ether. It’s almost as if Joel’s role in the musical experience is just to create a framework that I can place myself into; some of Raymond Carver’s best stories do the same thing. The Laura character has specific—but not exclusionary—traits (her behavior seems unique, but still somewhat universal), and the mood of Joel’s piano playing has a quality that jams hopelessness into beauty. This is a song about someone whose life is technically and superficially perfect, but secretly in shambles. It’s about having a dark secret, but—once again—not a cool secret. This is not a sexy problem (like heroin addiction), or even an interesting one (like the entanglements expressed in Rufus Wainright’s “Instant Pleasure” or Sloan’s “Underwhelmed”). It’s mostly just exhausting, and that’s how it feels.

  “Where’s the Orchestra” reveals the same sentiments, only sadder. The lyrics are one long allusion to watching a theatrical production that isn’t satisfying, and virtually anyone can figure out that Joel is actually discussing the inexplicable emptiness of his own life. The words are not subtle. But it paints a worldview that I have never been able to see through, and there has never been a point in my life—be it junior high, college, or ten minutes ago—when this song didn’t seem like the single most accurate depiction of my feelings toward the entire world. In fact, sometimes I tell people that they will understand me better if they listen to “Where’s the Orchestra?” And you know what? They never do. They never do, and it’s because they all inevitably think the song is actually about them.

  That’s what all of The Nylon Curtain is really about, I think: the New Depression, which started around the same time this album came out. People have always been depressed, but—during the early eighties—there just seemed to be this overwhelming public consensus that being depressed was the most normal thing anyone could be. In fact, being depressed sort of meant you were smart. And in a larger sense, Joel’s music was documenting that idea from the very beginning. A song like “Honesty” (on 1978’s 52nd Street) implies that the only way you can tell whether someone really cares about you is if they tell you you’re bad. “So It Goes” (a ballad released in 1990 but actually written in 1983) has Joel conceding that every woman who loves him will eventually decide to leave; “Scenes from an Italian Restaurant,” off The Stranger, is about how the most perfect relationships are inevitably the most doomed. Joel’s music always has an undercurrent railing against the desire for perfection. Another song off The Stranger—“Just the Way You Are”—proves that sentiment twice (once cleverly, and once profoundly).

  To this day, women are touched by the words of “Just the Way You Are,” a musical love letter that says everything everybody wants to hear: You’re not flawless, but you’re still what I want. It was written about Joel’s wife and manager Elizabeth Weber, and it outlines how he doesn’t want his woman to “try some new fashion” or dye her hair blond or work on being witty. He specifically asks that she “don’t go changing” in the hopes of pleasing him. The short-term analysis is that this is a criticism of perfection, but in the best possible way; it’s like Billy is saying he loves Weber because she’s not perfect, and that he could never leave her in times of trouble.

  The sad irony, of course, is that Joel divorced Elizabeth three years after “Just the Way You Are” won a Grammy for Song of the Year. Obviously, some would say that cheapens the song and makes it irrelevant. I think the opposite is true. I think the fact that Joel divorced the woman he wrote this song about makes it his single greatest achievement.

  When I hear “Just the Way You Are,” it never makes me think about Joel’s broken marriage. It makes me think about all the perfectly scribed love letters and drunken e-mails I have written over the past twelve years,
and about all the various women who received them. I think about how I told them they changed the way I thought about the universe, and that they made every other woman on earth unattractive, and that I would love them unconditionally even if we were never together. I hate that those letters still exist. But I don’t hate them because what I said was false; I hate them because what I said was completely true. My convictions could not have been stronger when I wrote those words, and—for whatever reason—they still faded into nothingness. Three times I have been certain that I could never love anyone else, and I was wrong every time. Those old love letters remind me of my emotional failure and my accidental lies, just as “Just the Way You Are” undoubtedly reminds Joel of his.