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.

Quote of the Day (William Butler Yeats, on ‘The Innocent and the Beautiful’)

“The innocent and the beautiful
Have no enemy but time.”—Nobel Prize-winning Irish poet-playwright William Butler Yeats (1865-1939), “In Memory of Eva Gore-Booth and Con Markievicz,” originally published in 1927, reprinted in The Collected Poems of W.B. Yeats, edited by Richard Finneran (1989)

Quote of the Day (Ring Lardner, on Baseball)

"Baseball is a game where a curve is an optical illusion, a screwball can be either a pitch or a person, stealing is legal, and you can spit anywhere you like except in the umpire's eye or the ball.”—American sportswriter, short-story writer, and playwright Ring Lardner (1885-1933), Lardner on Baseball (2003)

This Day in Baseball History (Death of Harmon Killebrew, Unassuming But Feared Slugger)

May 17, 2011— Harmon Killebrew, as eager-to-please a personality as ever to step onto a baseball diamond, yet so feared for his home run prowess that he earned the nickname “Killer”—died at age 74 of esophageal cancer at his Scottsdale, AZ home.

For most of two decades, it was Killebrew’s misfortune to play—first in Washington, DC, then in Minnesota—for owner Calvin Griffith, who low-balled him at salary time. 

After he retired, misfortune often took a more dire financial form: car dealership and car leasing firms whose failure ultimately, despite his healthy sums from sports memorabilia appearances, pushed him towards bankruptcy in 1993.

Killebrew was honest enough to admit feeling stressed by all of this, but he soldiered on, demonstrating why he was liked and respected not just by fellow baseball players but by sportswriters, who finally elected him to Cooperstown, after three missed tries, in 1984.

Though nothing like the versatile “five-tool player” (hitting for average, hitting for power, speed, arm strength, fielding ability) held up as the beau ideal of everyday players, Killebrew possessed one skill in abundance: slugging home runs.

The 573 round-trippers he amassed at the end of his 22-season career ranked fifth at the time of his retirement. Even that statistic doesn’t indicate the frequency, consistency and force with which he punished the ball.

Starting with the Washington Senators, then moving when the team became the Minnesota Twins before closing out his career after one season with the Kanas City Royals, Killebrew recorded eight 40-home run seasons and 44 multiple home run games. He led the AL in home runs six times, walks four times and RBI three times. 

Named to 13 All-Star teams, he was selected Most Valuable Player for the American League in 1969, when he led the Twins to the American League West Division championship.

Ossie Bluege, the farm system director who scouted and signed him for the Washington Senators, observed: "He hit line drives that put the opposition in jeopardy. And I don't mean infielders, I mean outfielders." 

Griffith took note of these tape-measure homers: “He would hit the ball so blooming high in the sky, they were like a rocket ship going up in the air.”

That bat was what kept Killebrew in the lineup game after game, year after year, despite a glove that most observers of the game thought was suspect. But in his defense, he never spent enough time at one position to master it. 

According to Mark Armour’s post shortly after Killebrew’s death, “he was repeatedly shifted between three defensive positions throughout his career, getting 44% of his starts at first base, 33% at third base, and 22% in left field.”

Off the field, Killebrew’s benevolence sprang from a belief that “The most important reason that we're here on Earth is to love and help one another.” To that end, he became involved in several charitable activities, including:

*helping to establish, in Sun Valley, ID, the Danny Thompson Memorial Golf Tournament (named after a Twins teammate who died of leukemia);

*creating the Harmon Killebrew Signature Classic Golf Tournament to benefit the American Red Cross; and,

*starting the Harmon Killebrew Foundation, a fund-raising charity.

Spiritual Quote of the Day (St. Francis de Sales, on the Need to ‘Keep a Calm, Restful Spirit’)

“Anxiety arises from an unregulated desire to be delivered from any pressing evil, or to obtain some hoped-for good.…Therefore, whensoever you urgently desire to be delivered from any evil, or to attain some good thing, strive above all else to keep a calm, restful spirit, steady your judgement and will, and then go quietly and easily after your object, taking all fitting means to attain thereto. By easily, I do not mean carelessly, but without eagerness, disquietude, or anxiety.” —St. Francis de Sales, Bishop of Geneva and Doctor of the Church (1567-1622), Introduction to the Devout Life (1609)

Quote of the Day (Zadie Smith, on Exclusivity and ‘The Life of the Few’)

“Don't let your fellow humans be alien to you, and as you get older and perhaps a little less open than you are now, don’t assume that exclusive always and everywhere means better. It may only mean lonelier. There will always be folks hard selling you the life of the few: the private schools, private planes, private islands, private life. They are trying to convince you that hell is other people. Don't believe it. We are far more frequently each other's shelter and correction, the antidote to solipsism, and so many windows on this world.” — Novelist-essayist Zadie Smith, Commencement Speech at the New School, New York, May 23, 2014

This week, we are reading the comments of some university commencement speakers, and it will continue like this for several days or so.

But Ms. Smith’s reminder from a dozen years ago bears keeping in mind, perhaps now more than ever. Barriers of class, ethnicity, race, religion, and politics should not be as rigid as physical structures in blocking access to each other.

The image accompanying this post, of Zadie Smith announcing the five 2010 National Book Critics Circle finalists in fiction, was taken on Jan. 22, 2011, by David Shankbone.

Quote of the Day (W. H. Auden, on Propaganda)

“Propaganda is a monologue which seeks not a response but an echo.”—Pulitzer Prize-winning English-born American poet-critic W. H. Auden (1907-1973), “A Short Defense of Poetry,” originally delivered at the International PEN Conference in Budapest, October 1967, printed in The New York Review of Books, Jan. 30, 1986

Over two days in Beijing this week, two 24/7 practitioners of propaganda, Donald Trump and Xi Jinping, met. These leaders of America and China, so used to employing this “monologue” on their countrymen, wielded it on their foreign counterpart.

Don’t be fooled into thinking that these efforts were aimed at establishing their countries as superpowers. Rather, in their blatant legacy-building, these septuagenarian strongmen were engaged in the final rites of their own cults of personality.