Flashback, August 1983: Billy Joel Scores Big With Throwback LP, ‘Innocent Man’

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.

If a guy can’t smile in the company of Christie Brinkley, he is wretched indeed.

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 52^nd 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.

Happy 60th Birthday, Piano Man!

In my teen and college years, there were three artists, backed by high-energy bands, whose work I would buy in a heartbeat: Bruce Springsteen, Bob Seger and Billy Joel. Though all three continue to tour, only Springsteen has continued to produce a consistent body of work in the studio to match his concerts.

I’ve never seen Billy Joel in concert, and these days, with much more going on in my life, I pursue concert-going opportunistically rather than religiously, as I did in my youth. I can’t imagine at this point that I’ll see him in concert. Yet, through live CDs, videos and TV appearances, I feel as if I have a sense of his all-stops-out style in front of an audience.

Today, as we toast The Piano Man, I thought this post might be a good way to tip my cap to him for a song catalogue produced over the course of nearly 20 years, in the face of often bitter, uncomprehending and even incomprehensible music criticism. (Billy Joel a “sellout”? Music tastes have about the shelf life of yogurt. There’s no way anyone can assure sustained popularity over the decades. The musical landscape is littered with dead careers testifying to that.)

Maybe there’s some jealousy involved. After all, like Arthur Miller, his talent not only brought him fame and riches but made him a symbol of hope that even a homely guy could get the goddess, the blond supermodel, The Uptown Girl.

Oh, yes: Christie is the other one in the photo. After a week of depressing male visages—General Grant, Woodrow Wilson, Arlen Specter, and C.P. Snow (a true egghead if there ever was one!)—I think my male viewers would kill me if I didn’t provide some visual relief. So, here it is.

(Female readers—judging from the list of recipients of these blog postings, I neglect them at my peril!—are hereby invited to nominate their favorite examples of M.E.C.—i.e., Male Eye Candy. No promises, but I’ll do my best to supply said images. But just remember—this is a family blog!)