Released 35 years ago this month, at the midpoint
(to date, anyway) of his recording career, BillyJoel’s An Innocent Man was more of a throwback than his other LPs. It
didn’t riff off current events, as The
Nylon Curtain’s “Allentown” had the prior year with its angry evocation of
Rust Belt decline. It didn’t nod in the direction of the latest hip rock trend,
as Glass Houses did toward New Wave.
Instead, it harked back to the songs of the Long
Island singer-songwriter’s childhood and youth in the last Fifties and early
Sixties. The music of that earlier era had given him a means of escape from a
sometimes miserable boyhood as the son of a Jewish refugee from Nazi Germany
and the product of a broken home.
All of that might have been enough for the “angry
young man” of the Seventies to enjoy the success now coming his way. But here
was another one: After his 10-year-old marriage had concluded, he had fallen in
love again with a supermodel.
An
Innocent Man quickly shot up the Billboard charts,
climbing as high as #4, then stayed in the upper stratum for “The Longest
Time.” Much of that was due to its mother lode of singles—six of which made the
Top 40, with three of those entering the Top 10. (One song from four years
before was a stylistic precursor to this collection: “Until the Night,” his 52nd
Street evocation of Phil Spector’s “Wall of Sound.”)
It was natural that the tune that launched this hit
parade was “Uptown Girl,” released a month after the album’s release. The video
of this Four Seasons homage had to
feature Joel, one of the least photogenic male stars of the rock era, but it
also made full use of his beloved. It may have been the most preposterous entertainment
pairing since Arthur Miller and Marilyn Monroe. (Actually, it was originally
about Elle Macpherson, whom Joel had been dating just before this, but I guess
he got his blond Sports Illustrated swimsuit
supermodels mixed up.)
The video features pretty simple choreography to
accommodate its leads (presumably, Ms. Brinkley had learned a few more steps 30
years later when she played Roxie Hart in the musical revival of Chicago) and
the final sequence is pure fantasy. (When was the last time you recall a wealthy
young lady climbing onto a motorcycle and wrapping her arms around a grease
monkey?) But it was as irresistible as an ice-cream cone for all that.
I didn’t have cable TV till the end of the Eighties,
so the only times I saw videos from that era was when I was in a hotel while
vacationing. (I was in Orlando, gearing up for the holidays, when I saw Hall
and Oates’ bug-eyed video for “Jingle Bell Rock.”) I only knew most of the
songs from An Innocent Man in the
old-fashioned way: through my ears, not my eyes. On that basis, it became my
most heavily played Billy Joel LP of the Eighties.)
The long run of the album wound down in September
1984 with the release of its last single, “Leave a Tender Moment Alone.” This
may be my favorite song of the album, chiefly because it featured a performance
by perhaps the world’s best harmonica player at the time, Toots Thielemans of
Belgium.
My favorite Billy Joel albums were ones he recorded
early in his career: Piano Man (1973)
and Turnstiles (1976). But producer
Phil Ramone was able to capture Joel when he was loosest and happiest in his
relationship with Christie, so An
Innocent Man continues to yield pleasure all these years later.