Uptown girl billy joel instrumental
It’s as sentimental as it’s sharp, with a maudlin chorus that posits Joel as the magician who leaves them “feeling alright” (though there’s enough nuance there to question how straight he means that line).
#UPTOWN GIRL BILLY JOEL INSTRUMENTAL MOVIE#
Still only 24 when the track surfaced, Joel already seems a master of midlife ennui and regret, summing up each drunk’s problem in a line or two: the barman who reckons he could’ve been a movie star, the workaholic crippled by loneliness, the navy man who’ll never know another life. Joel’s signature tune, Piano Man comes on like a dark twist on the theme to Cheers, with Joel as the long-suffering pianist who doesn’t just know every patron’s name, but also their hang-ups, their frustrations, their broken dreams – everything that keeps them a regular. Piano Man was the result of this sojourn. Newly signed to Columbia, Joel traded life in the Big Apple for a six-month stint playing standards and taking requests in a Los Angeles drinking den, transforming himself into a barfly pianist/philosopher with a neat line in lachrymose ragtime. “Philadelphia has always been really good to me, something I can’t say about many other cities,” a typically cranky Joel told journalist John Kalodner of this turn of fate. With the failure of Cold Spring Harbor and all that preceded it still ringing in his ears, in April 1972 Joel cut a rousing, spiteful version of the still-unrecorded Captain Jack during a live session for Philadelphia radio station WMMR, which subsequently became their most requested track, and led directly to a new deal with Columbia Records. Inspired by a dealer who operated in the housing project across from Joel’s Long Island apartment, Captain Jack takes aim at suburban teens suckered in by the “glamour” of the Village scene, staring “at the junkies and the closet queens/It’s like some pornographic magazine”, a withering portrait of losers sitting at home, getting high and masturbating, concluding “Well, you’re 21 and your mother still makes your bed” (Joel was himself only 22 when he wrote the song). Sometimes – often – he sounds like a young fogey, as on Captain Jack, an acid, hilarious and despairing take on the drug scene.
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Cold Spring Harbor was not a hit.īilly Joel had lived plenty before he tasted success, which perhaps explains the jaundiced and downbeat tenor of many of his greatest lyrics. His debut album, Cold Spring Harbor, released in 1971, was mastered at the wrong speed, and upon hearing weird chipmunk tones where his vocals should have been, Joel ran into the street and hurled the vinyl into the air with anger. Done with bands, Joel then recast himself as a solo performer and singer/songwriter but if you think this is where his luck changes, think again.
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Overcome by the emotional turmoil, Joel attempted suicide by guzzling furniture polish this too failed. Attila were similarly ill-fated, though it wasn’t just “musical differences” that spelt their doom – Joel had pinched his bandmate’s wife, later marrying her. After two dismally selling albums, Joel bailed the Hassles in 1970 to become one half of Attila, a heavy-rock drums’n’keyboards duo who sounded like In Rock-era Deep Purple if they’d locked Ritchie Blackmore out of the studio.
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First he hooked up with the Echoes, who became the Emeralds and then the Lost Souls, exiting to join the Hassles, a Long Island R&B group who already had a recording deal. Billy Joel’s earlier grabs for fame hadn’t played out well.