Billy Joel - Glass Houses

I suppose there's a "Piano Man" pun somewhere to be had here - and I'm trying my best to type one, but I'm using the wrong kind of keyboard.

Yeah, sorry.

Back in the summer of 1980, Glass Houses had firmly become part of my musical landscape. Oddly enough, I didn't have my own copy at the time - everyone I knew had one, so I figured I was in the clear. I remember people talking about how Billy Joel had gone new wave, and there are some tunes where he's playing things pretty close to the flavour of the day. Then again, a song like "Don't Ask Me Why" would have been right at home on his 1977 release The Stranger.

Looking back with the benefit of hindsight, you can hear Billy Joel slowly moving with the times. Glass Houses was truly the logical successor to 52nd Street, where songs like "Big Shot" and, to a lesser degree, "My Life" were setting the stage for what was to come. This was a guy who could basically do what he wanted musically and get away with it - to a point. There's no forgiving An Innocent Man (1983). That's an album that should have remained a vanity project, something he sent to his friends as a Christmas present and kept from the general public.

Anyway, back to Glass Houses. I know I'm throwing stones, but frankly they're not very big - more like a few pebbles - and I'm not throwing them very hard.

Now, I've had the CD for a long time, but I haven't sat down for a concentrated listen in years. I know I try not to pick up albums I already have, as that was part of my deal with the wife, but sometimes you find something that's just too good to pass up. Finding a dollar-bin copy with the liner notes intact was one of those times. Now, whoever had this before me was not a gentle soul. There are a couple of decent scratches, but they're light enough not to pop too badly, and nothing skips.

Glass Houses was produced by Billy's longtime producer Phil Ramone and backed by his core band: Richie Cannata on saxophones, flute, and organ; David Brown on lead guitar; Russell Javors on rhythm guitar; Doug Stegmeyer on bass; and Liberty DeVitto on drums. These guys were great players and part of the total package.

Listening to the album now, the majority of the up-tempo songs (the really good ones) are on side one. It's full of songs that have become classics. Frankly, I don't know why "All for Leyna" wasn't a hit. Then the whole first side would be like a mini greatest hits album. Side two takes a more Billy Joel approach. (I know that's a cop-out, but really, the guy is his own genre to a point, and when he's just being himself, he sounds like - well, Billy Joel.) Who else could pull off a song like "C'etait Toi (You Were the One)"? Billy Joel, that's who. Of course, as soon as I make a generalization and say side two is the mellow stuff, there's "Close to the Borderline," which, while not one of my favourite songs, is still a rocker. Just not as good as the rest of side one, so onto side two it went. The only song that makes me scratch my head a little is the album's closer, "Through the Long Night," which, while a very pretty song, feels like a Paul McCartney castoff.

Regardless, here I am over forty years later listening to the piano man. It was like he knew I was in the mood for a melody, and he got me feeling alright.

La, la-la, di-di-da
La-la di-di-da da-dum

Billy Rankin - Growin' Up Too Fast

Growin' Up Too Fast was never widely released on CD (if at all), and it was one of the albums I really wanted to get back after a basement flood wiped out my vinyl collection in the '90s (when no one really gave a shit about records, and my insurance gave me a couple hundred bucks for an appraised $10,000 collection). Way back in 1984, my (dearly departed and greatly missed) buddy Dave let me borrow his cassette copy, which included a bonus track of "Get It On (Bang A Gong)." When I eventually bought the album, I didn't know it was a bonus track, or even what a bonus track was. If that sentence was hard to read, just go back and skim it. I'm sure you'll get the gist. I'd find out later Billy was an off-and-on-again member of Nazareth and wrote some absolutely killer songs for them. At the time, though, all I knew was this guy laid it out cold with the opening cut, "Baby Come Back," then proceeded to lay down one killer tune after another bef...

Styx - Paradise Theater

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Gary Numan - The Pleasure Principle

"Cars" was really the only song I knew by Gary Numan. I knew the name of the album the song came from. Over the years bits and pieces of trivia are accumulated, but in terms of his music it was still distilled down to one song ... It would be too easy to write Mr. Numan off as a one hit wonder, and I suppose in terms of actual chart hits this was his defining moment as a solo artist. Of course this really means nothing, as Gary Numan would drop an album a year pretty much through to the end of the '80s. He'd then slow down a little but continues to make music. While The Pleasure Principle was Gary Numan's debut solo release in '79, he actually cut his teeth on a couple of albums in a band called Tubeway Army, first with the band's self titled release in 1978, and then on Replicas that came out in April of '79. By the end of Tubeway Army's run most of the band would follow Gary into his solo career. Paul Gardiner who had been with Gary from the beg...

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