criticism of coolness; by and large, the musical component of rock isn’t nearly as important as the iconography and the posturing and the idea of what we’re supposed to be experiencing. If given the choice between hearing a great band and seeing a cool band, I’ll take the latter every single time; this is why the Eagles suck. But it’s the constraints of that very relationship that give Billy Joel his subterranean fabulousity, and it’s why he’s unassumingly superior to all his mainstream seventies peers who got far more credit (James Taylor, Carole King, Bruce Springsteen, etc.). Joel is the only rock star I’ve ever loved who I never wanted to be (not even when he was sleeping with Christie Brinkley). Every one of Joel’s important songs— including the happy ones—are ultimately about loneliness. And it’s not “clever lonely” (like Morrissey) or “interesting lonely” (like Radiohead); it’s “lonely lonely,” like the way it feels when you’re being hugged by someone and it somehow makes you sadder.
Now, I know what you’re thinking: What about that godawful current events song that seemed like a rip-off of R.E.M. (1989’s “We Didn’t Start the Fire”)? What’s lonely about that, you ask? Well, my response is simple—I don’t count that song. I don’t count anything that comes after his An Innocent Man album, and I barely count that one. And aesthetically, this is totally acceptable. Unless they die before the age of thirty-three, nobody’s entire career matters, and we all unconsciously understand this. If you’re trapped in a Beatles-Stones debate, it’s not like anybody tries to prove a point by comparing Help! to Steel Wheels. BlackSabbath is the most underrated band in rock history, and that designation isn’t weakened by 1994’s Cross Purposes. Even guys who make relatively important albums in the twilight of their artistic life—most notably Bob Dylan and Neil Young—are granted unlimited lines of critical credit simply for not making albums that are completely terrible. The unspoken (though much-denied) conceit of everybody who loves rock ’n’ roll is that nobody old and rickety can be relevant at all, so anything remotely close to social consequence is akin to genius; that’s why Love and Theft was classified as “classic” in 2001, even though it would have been nothing more than “solid” in 1976. So no one is denying that Billy Joel has put out crap for as many years as he put out quality. But it doesn’t matter, because he never had the responsibility of staying cool. His crappiest albums (The Bridge, River of Dreams, etc.) can just be separated out and ignored entirely. Unlike Lou Reed or David Bowie, “Billy Joel” is not a larger pop construct or an expansive pop idea. Billy Joel is just a guy. And that’s why—unlike someone like Jeff Buckley—his records wouldn’t seem any better if he was dead.
What I’m saying is that there are no conditions for appreciating Billy Joel. I’m not sure loving an album like Glass Houses says anything about me (or about anyone). And in theory, this should make it a bad record, or—at best—a meaningless artifact. It should make liking Glass Houses akin to liking mashed potatoes or rainy afternoons. You can’t characterize your self-image through its ten songs. I was eight when that record came out in 1980, and I vividly recall both my sister Teresa (who was nineteen) my brother Paul (who was eighteen) playing Glass Houses constantly, which was normally unthinkable; Teresa liked the Police and Elton John, and Paul liked Molly Hatchet and Foreigner. The only albums they could play when they were in the same room were Cheap Trick’s At Budokan and Glass Houses. Retrospectively, the unilateral Cheap Trick fixation made perfect sense: Cheap Trick was good at being cool for everybody. They rocked just hard enough to be cool to metal kids, they looked just cool enough to be New Wave, and Robin Zander had the kind of hair that semimature teenage girls wanted to play with. Even today, the Cheap Trick logo stands as the coolest-looking font in the history of rock. But none of those qualities can be applied to Glass Houses, now or then; in theory, there is no way that record should have mattered to anyone, and certainly not to everyone.
However, even I liked that record, and I was eight. And I didn’t like records when I was eight; I mostly liked dinosaurs and math. This was all new. But what’s even weirder is that I could relate to this album. And I can still relate to it—differently, I suppose, but maybe less differently than I realize. What I heard on Glass Houses (and what I still hear) is somebody who’s bored and trapped and unimpressed by his own success, all of which are sentiments that have never stopped making sense to me.
It’s always difficult to understand what people think they’re hearing when they listen to the radio. This was especially true in the 1970s, when there seemed to be no difference between what was supposedly “good music” and what was supposedly “bad music.” WMMS, the premiere radio station in Cleveland during the Carter administration, was famous for playing Springsteen’s “Born to Run” every Friday afternoon at exactly 5:00 P.M. For years, that was the station’s calling card. And this was done without irony; this song was supposed to serve as the anthem and the spirit for working-class Northeast Ohioans. Eventually, that’s what “Born to Run” became. But what nobody seemed to notice is that this song has some of the most ridiculous lyrics ever recorded. Half the time, Springsteen writes like someone typing a PG-13 letter for Penthouse Forum: The lines “Just wrap your legs round these velvet rims / And strap your hands across my engines” is as funny as anything Tenacious D ever recorded, except Bruce is trying to be deep.
Now, it’s not like this song is necessarily terrible, and it’s certainly better than everything on Born in the U.S.A. (except “Glory Days” and maybe “I’m Goin’ Down”). But it’s difficult to understand why “Born to Run” is considered a higher poetic achievement than Meat Loaf’s “Paradise by the Dashboard Light” or Van Halen’s “Runnin’ with the Devil,” two equally popular songs from the same period that expressed roughly similar themes while earning no cred whatsoever. So the real question becomes: Why did this happen? Part of it is probably based in fact; I suppose Springsteen is “more real” (or whatever) and took a legitimately emotive risk with his earnest eighth-grade poetry; referring to your guts as “my engines” may be idiotic, but I have little doubt that Bruce really thinks of his rib cage in those terms. However, Springsteen’s sincerity only mattered if you had a predetermined opinion about what he was trying to accomplish. David Lee Roth might have been sincere, but he was just a cool kid trying to get laid; Meat Loaf might have been sincere, but he was just a fat goofball who was cool in spite of himself. But Bruce was trying to save you. He appealed to the kind of desperate intellectual who halfway believed that—when not recording or touring—Springsteen actually went back to New Jersey to work at a car wash. Before he even utters his lyrics, people accept his words as insights into their version of existence. Had Bruce written “Paradise by the Dashboard Light,” people would play it at weddings.
Once again, I want to stress that I have no qualms with how this process works. I’m not interested in trying to convince anyone that they should (or shouldn’t) adore whichever denim-clad icon they choose. However, this abstract relationship between the perception of the artist and the appreciation of his product unfairly ghettoized Billy Joel while he was making the best music of his career (and some of the best music of the late seventies and early eighties). Because Billy is not “cool,” like Elvis Costello—and because he’s not “anticool,” like Randy Newman—Joel was perceived as edgeless light rock. All anybody noticed was the dulcet plinking of his piano. Since his songs were so radio-friendly, it was assumed that he was the FM version of AM. This is what happens when you don’t construct an archetypical persona: If you’re popular and melodic and faceless, you seem meaningless. The same thing happened to Steely Dan, a group who served as the house band for every 1978 West Coast singles bar despite being more lyrically subversive than the Sex Pistols and the Clash combined. If a musician can’t convince people that he’s cool, nobody cool is going to care. And in the realm of rock ’n’ roll, the cool kids fucking rule.
In fact, I sometimes suspect that if I had first heard Glass Houses five years later than I did—when I was, say, thirteen—I might have hated it before I even put the needle down. The whole metaphor behind the cover shot (“Look! I’m self-reflexively throwing rocks at my identity!”) might have seemed forced, and the skinny tie he’s wearing on the back cover would have seemed like something from the Knack’s closet, and everybody hated the Knack in 1985 (including, I think, the actual members of the Knack). But because I was too young to understand that rock music was supposed to be cool, I played Glass Houses in my basement ad nauseam and—in that weird, second-grade way—I studied its contents. My favorite song was “All for Leyna” at the conclusion of side one, where Billy claimed to be, “Kidding myself / Wasting my time.” However, I mostly listened to side two, which included “I Don’t Want to Be Alone Anymore” (where Billy enters a relationship only because his female acquaintance is bored with dating), “Sleeping with the Television On” (where Billy expresses regret for being a “thinking man,” which is already how I viewed myself at the age of eight), and the pseudo-metal “Close to the Borderline” [22] (where Billy suddenly becomes Frank Serpico). Certainly, it’s not as if Billy Joel was the first artist who ever sang about being inexplicably depressed. But he might be the first artist who ever sang about getting yelled at by his dad for being depressed, which is less a commentary on his father and more an
