This Day in Rock ‘n’ Roll History (NY-Inspired Billy Joel Scores With ‘Turnstiles’)

May 19, 1976—Though Billy Joel did not achieve the chart-topping LP that executives desired on his fourth studio album, he staked out the sound that paved the way for later success—and created what many feel was a high-water mark in his career as a singer-songwriter—with Turnstiles.

A week or so ago, The New York Times created a hornet’s nest with a list of the 30 greatest living songwriters that some (like critic Ted Gioia) derided as methodologically suspect. Predictably, even more readers complained that their choices didn’t make the roundup, with Joel among the most glaring omissions. 

(See this podcast with the Times critics debating this egregious exclusion and others, in a manner that YouTube respondents variously assailed as “smug,” “insufferable,” “oblivious,” and “unbelievable.”)

I know that the Piano Man’s output has, for some reason, not always won critical acclaim. You can count me among his longtime fans. It’s not just that his concerts have been electrifying, but his recordings display to the utmost his skills as a lyricist and musician. Turnstiles is a prime example.

This album also represented his attempt to wrest creative control of his material in the most decisive fashion. His label, Columbia Records, suggested that he work with James William Guercio. This producer, manager, and songwriter, through such acts as Chicago, Blood, Sweat and Tears and the Buckinghams, was at the time an influential proponent of jazz rock—or, as I noted in this prior blog post, “brass rock,” characterized by a driving horn section.

At the Caribou Ranch recording studio in Colorado, Guercio was exerting tighter control over his productions. In Joel’s case, the producer pushed for studio musicians, including from Elton John’s backup band.

After listening to these sessions, Joel decided that, though this studio hires might have benefited the English superstar, it wasn’t what he wanted. He called the sessions off, and pressed his case with Columbia for a backup group of his own to work on his next album.

To make doubly sure that he got what he wanted, Joel took over the producer’s chores as well. That turned out to be a mixed blessing. He may have come closer to the sound he wanted, but, as he recalled in a 2009 Billboard interview, “I’m not a producer. I’m a good partnering producer when I work with somebody like Phil Ramone or Mick Jones; I have a lot of ideas. But I don’t know technically always what I should be going for.”

The real benefit came from the comfort level he felt from working with what became the “Billy Joel Band”: bassist Doug Stegmeyer, drummer Liberty DeVitto, guitarists Russell Javors and Howie Emerson, and saxophonist Richie Cannata. It was like what another up-and-coming Columbia artist, Bruce Springsteen, had wanted and gotten, with the now-legendary E Street Band.

Because he permanently parted ways with those backup musicians a couple of decades later, Joel didn’t achieve the longevity and camaraderie that The Boss gained with his “Band of Brothers.” But for the time they played together, there was a drive and cohesion to his sound.

Equally important for Joel, after three years of feeling lost in Los Angeles, the longtime Long Island resident moved back east. The title of this new collection, Turnstiles, was a celebration of that decision.

(Incidentally, the cover of the album was shot in an actual abandoned subway station. The assorted non-Joel figures in the photograph were meant to suggest people associated with different songs, so the teenaged girl with the headphones, for instance, represents “All You Wanna Do Is Dance.”)

Joel’s move back home also was something of an act of defiance against anti-New York sentiment in the nation. The singer-songwriter decided it was time for a change when he saw the notorious 1975 New York Daily News headline at the height of the bankruptcy crisis: “Ford To City: Drop Dead.”

On vinyl, Joel reacted with a dystopian piece of science fiction, "Miami 2017 (Seen the Lights Go Out on Broadway)." After 9/11, it became an unexpected anthem of resilience for the metropolis. Now, we are almost a decade after the future that he imagined.

If "Miami 2017” seemed tailor-made for arena rock, “New York State of Mind” felt more like its natural setting was a small jazz club. Indeed, it has become something of a pop standard, covered by the likes of Tony Bennett, Carmen McRae, Mel Torme, Barbara Streisand, Shirley Bassey, and Diane Schuur with Stan Getz.

I embraced two other songs because in some ways they reminded me of the work of two cultural figures I was just beginning to enjoy.

With backup singers, castanets, strings, and especially an opening drumbeat reminiscent of “Be My Baby,” “Say Goodbye to Hollywood” was Joel’s tribute to “Wall of Sound” producer Phil Spector and then-wife Ronnie. (In fact, the latter released her own estimable cover version a year later, noting in interviews that she identified with the song’s theme of a break from California following her divorce.)

The other cultural figure I thought of was F. Scott Fitzgerald, on “I’ve Loved These Days.” So many of the images and themes evoked here—spending beyond one’s means, pearls, caviar, foreign cars, champagne, and cocaine—could have been drawn from the pages and life of the author of “The Great Gatsby.”

One other tune deserves special attention, as Joel would return to its main concern later in his career: “Summer, Highland Falls.” Named for the upstate New York town where Joel stayed upon his return from the West Coast, the song functioned as an emotional taking stock and recalibration.

He has been frank in admitting that lines like “It’s either sadness or euphoria” recognized the manic depression with which he has battled through much of his life, even at the height of his success—a condition he explored later in “I Go to Extremes” and “You’re Only Human (Second Wind)”.

Though the album only peaked at #122 on the U.S. Billboard chart on its release, songs from Turnstiles helped solidify his growing acclaim as a top-notch live performer, as exemplified from several from the LP being included on his first live collection, Songs in the Attic (1981). Eventually it reached platinum status.

Joel did not produce another LP until 1993 with River of Dreams. Like Turnstiles, that marked a watershed of sorts, as it turned out to be his last collection of original pop tunes. 

His concert partner Elton John admonished him to sit down and write some more, but if Joel felt his creative well had run dry, it’s hard to take issue with his decision to take this turn in his career. It would only have invited more critical derision than he’d experienced already.

This Day in Rock ‘n’ Roll History (Joni Mitchell Hits Commercial Peak With ‘Court and Spark’)

 

Jan. 17, 1974— Many fans of Joni Mitchell who knew her best as a folk music artist must have heard her sixth studio album, Court and Spark, with some astonishment. 

Her music had long depicted the conflict between love and emotional autonomy. But this new collection of 11 songs reflected her desire for creative freedom beyond musical boundaries, too, as she added new rock ‘n’ roll and jazz textures to what she called her “chords of inquiry.”

The prior year had passed without the release of a Mitchell LP, the first time this had happened since the start of her recording career. It was not a vacation, nor even an emotional withdrawal and regrouping after crushing end of a love affair, as had happened before For the Roses.

Instead, she took to trying out new sounds, and testing which musicians could help her achieve these looser, breezier rhythms. Even many of the Southern California rock musicians that Mitchell had befriended had trouble with concepts that sounded too abstract to them.

The turning point came when session musician Russ Kunkel suggested she find a jazz drummer. She found not only a jazz drummer, but an entire ensemble: Tom Scott’s L.A. Express, whose musicians played on the entire album.

The extended studio recording sessions turned out to be time well-spent. The first single from Court and Spark, “Raised on Robbery” (maybe my favorite song from the LP), benefited from the horns from LA Express and Robbie Robertson’s lead guitar licks complementing Mitchell’s breathless, saucy vocals.

But it was the follow-up, “Help Me,” which became the only record by the Canadian-born singer-songwriter to crack the Billboard “Hot 100,” peaking at #7 and helping the LP achieve platinum status.

Well, you can’t have everything. One thing Mitchell could have used a bit more of was recognition from the recording industry as a whole. 

But Court and Spark won only one Grammy out of four nominations: Best Arrangement Accompanying Vocalist(s), for “Down to You” (given to Mitchell and Tom Scott), losing out to Olivia Newton-John for Record of the Year and Best Female Pop Vocal Performance and to Stevie Wonder for Album of the Year.

Much too much ink was spilled in the Seventies on Mitchell’s love life, including in relation to Court and Spark. At a half-century remove, it all feels stale and beside the point.

What matters now—and it should have then—was not her romantic, but her creative, restlessness.

Critics who charged Mitchell with being merely autobiographical and self-absorbed now had to reckon with a lyricist whose powers of observation were never more apparent, fully a match for the watercolor “The Mountain Loves the Sea” that this former art student used for the cover of her latest album.

Readers may point to other examples on the album of her growing tendency to look outward, but these are mine:

·       * “Raised on Robbery,” inspired by Mitchell witnessing a hooker attempting to pick up a man in a Toronto hotel bar who’s more focused on a hockey game;

·       * “Free Man in Paris,” informed by Mitchell’s trip to Paris, watching then-boss David Geffen of Electra-Asylum Records seeking a short respite from his normal round of “dreamers and telephone screamers”; and

·       * “People’s Parties,” in which the singer-songwriter evoked compassion for the kind of people she met at Southern Cal social gatherings who, though seemingly possessing “a lot of style,” are desperately hiding their insecurities, including the “photo beauty” who all of a sudden is “crying on someone’s knee.”

Equally remarkable were arrangements that didn’t make the final cut for Court and Spark. One track I have in mind is this extraordinary, extended “Piano Suite” of “Down to You / Court and Spark /Car on a Hill,” which Mitchell finally released on Archives Vol. 3: The Asylum Years, 1972-1975, this past fall.

In a few years, Bob Dylan would evoke those cursed “to know and feel too much within,” a group that certainly included Mitchell. An eighth grader when Court and Spark was released, I read its printed lyrics without grasping the struggle it took to put them to paper, or to sing them before thousands.

I was even less able to comprehend her album-to-album evolution, the complex chords she wove around her delicate, intricate lyrics, or the dizzying variety in tones displayed in this career pinnacle. All of that could only come from a musician who, though analytical and introspective, also delighted in fun and collaboration. 

But somehow, I still managed to absorb enough of what she was trying to convey to know Mitchell was something special.

Within only a couple of years, Mitchell had become so enamored of jazz arrangements that, with Mingus (named for the jazz innovator with whom she collaborated before his death from cancer), she had more or less left folk and rock—really, the pop mainstream of the time.

As with another contemporary idiosyncratic female singer-songwriter, Laura Nyro, radio stations were not ready to give Mitchell much airtime for such jazz experimentation.

Mitchell didn’t care; she was impervious to the moans of record-company execs for more commercial fare, or record buyers who kept yelling in concert for past hits. As she told Cameron Crowe in a 1979 Rolling Stone interview:

“You have two options. You can stay the same and protect the formula that gave you your initial success. They’re going to crucify you for staying the same. If you change, they’re going to crucify you for changing. But staying the same is boring. And change is interesting. So of the two options, I’d rather be crucified for changing.”

This Day in Rock ‘n’ Roll History (Lewis Scandal Shows Why ‘Too Much Love Drives a Man Insane’)

May 22, 1958—With Elvis Presley drafted and in the Army until 1960, with two of his own songs massive hits, Jerry Lee Lewis seemed poised to assume the mantle of “The King of Rock ‘n’ Roll.”

But it all came apart when, landing at London’s Heathrow Airport for an upcoming UK tour, the rollicking singer-pianist acknowledged that he had a new, very young wife.

Follow-up details soon revealed that he had left out interesting details about what his prior relationship with “Myra” was (first cousins, once removed) and when they’d wed (five months before his divorce from his prior wife had been finalized).

Some defenders of the musician claimed that Lewis didn’t see what he had done as out of the ordinary, as his own sister had reportedly married at age 12. But the fact that he claimed Myra was 15 rather than her real age of 13 strongly suggests that he knew his action had run counter to larger cultural norms.

The ensuing scandal brought consequences, both short term (cries of “cradle-snatching” in half-full arenas, uncomfortable interviews with the UK police, and cancellation of the tour after only three performances) and long-term (derailing Lewis’ career stateside).

He not only never reached his expected zenith in the rock ‘n’ roll firmament, but even had trouble getting bookings for several years, with his nightly earnings dropping from $10,000 to $100. 

When he did come back, Lewis reinvented himself as a country music artist—perhaps the right genre for musicians who crooned about “heartaches by the number” and the fans who loved them.

I wrote briefly on Lewis' cultural impact in a blog post eight years ago. But perhaps nothing illustrates why this original rock 'n' roll wild man was considered so unmanageable--and such a danger by the older generation--than this career-defining episode.

“Too much love drives a man insane,” he declared in “Great Balls of Fire.” He sang it like an exultation, but it could have served better as a warning to himself to tread carefully around females—particularly young ones related to him.

Maybe it wouldn’t have mattered much. As he told Rick Bragg in an interview for the 2014 biography, Jerry Lee Lewis: His Own Story, Myra "looked like a grown woman, blossomed out and ready for plucking ... I thought about her being 13 and all, but that didn't stop her from being a full-fledged woman."

My first sustained exposure to the story of the scandal came in the form of the 1989 biopic Great Balls of Fire! starring Dennis Quaid as Lewis and Winona Ryder as Myra. Though he re-recorded for the movie several songs that Quaid lip-synched, Lewis reportedly loathed the finished product for its inaccuracies. (Consider this: It used as its source the autobiography of his now-ex, Myra.)

Myra Gail Lewis was not the first—and would not be the last—woman that her husband would wed. This was the third union for the 22-year-old musician, and he would go on to have four more before he died last October.

Nor was it the last time his personal life would explode. A later wife would die in their swimming pool under mysterious circumstances, and another one would die of a drug overdose less than a year later—mirroring Lewis’ own descent into addiction to prescription drugs and alcohol.

There is an element of “might have been” to Lewis after his disaster. But a similar feeling attaches to the careers of other early rock ‘n’ rollers like Chuck Berry (upended by his own sex scandal, less than two years later), Elvis (trotted out by “Colonel” Tom Parker in increasingly mediocre movies), and Buddy Holly (death in a plane crash).

To his credit, whether he was at the top or bottom, Lewis always pulled out all the stops at his shows. Indeed, his lack of inhibition was a through-line from the stage to his private life.

In the wake of the singer’s death last fall, Cameron Gunnoe offered this perceptive observation in a post on the blog “Culture Sonar”:

“While Lewis’ pathological commitment to his own explosive temperament would bring about a host of problems for the musician over time, it would also endue his stage show with an intensity and fervor by which audiences would be driven regularly to borderline hysterics.”

The impact of these live shows can be seen most readily, perhaps, in Elton John—and, indeed, the English rock ‘n’ roller tipped his hat to “Killer” with a cover of “Whole Lotta Shakin' Goin' On” in the 2003 Sun Records tribute album, Good Rockin' Tonight.

Sir Elton simply stated the obvious at the time of Lewis’ death: “Without Jerry Lee Lewis, I wouldn’t have become who I am today. He was groundbreaking and exciting, and he pulverized the piano. A brilliant singer too. Thank you for your trailblazing inspiration and all the rock ‘n’ roll memories.”