Featured Essay: Life in a Glass House

by Mike Barthel

The problem, for fourth-grade Mike, was that my music teacher wanted me to bring in an album I loved—but I didn’t like pop music. While the girls in my class sported Guns ’n’ Roses denim jackets and karaoked Bon Jovi, my listening habits involved audiobooks, old comedy albums, and Time-Life compilations of early rock hits from the 50’s. Needing to bring in something, anything, my dad gave me an LP of Billy Joel’s Glass Houses. “I think you’ll like it,” he said, and this, for better or worse, is where my path to becoming a music critic began. He was right; I took to the album immediately. Something like “You May Be Right”—with its Buddy Holly riffs, Chuck Berry solos, and talk of motorcycles—fit better with my anachronistic understanding of rock ’n’ roll than the menacing howls of Axl Rose or the neon synths of the Jov. 

But “Right” wasn’t my favorite song from the album. That honor went to “It’s Still Rock ’n’ Roll to Me,” in which Joel argues that then-ascendent sounds like punk and new wave aren’t the bold “year zero”-style breaks with tradition that critics were framing them as, but were part of the continuous evolution of rock itself. In doing so, he nods to the boomer critique of the subcultural eruptions of the late 70’s as empty signifiers concerned only with fashion, but refuses to fully embrace it—unsurprising for someone who’d poked fun at nostalgia as consumerist kvetching back on Turnstiles’ “All She Wants to Do Is Dance”: “Well, you wish you were back in the good old days / When tomatoes were cheaper / And you never heard the words of your favorite songs / Through a three inch speaker.” Joel had lived through both early rock and the reaction against it; you can see why he’d have a point of view, even if it was an odd subject for a pop song. What’s less clear is why it would appeal to a nine-year-old who hadn’t really listened to any other music, let alone early punk and new wave. (Did I imagine myself some tween Jon Landau?) As the type of kid who was more likely to read his way through the library’s biography section than to successfully learn a dance, I think I liked that Joel’s song looped the music into a larger and longer story, into bigger questions. It was a song, but it was also an argument about the place of artistic revolutions in the scope of history.

Joel did not write it to be a music critic, though; he wrote it to say “fuck you” to the critics, who have, for a very long time, not been fond of him. The new documentary, Billy Joel: And So It Goes, makes a compelling case for Joel as an artist, and has triggered some reevaluations. But it also pretty clearly demonstrates why he and the critics didn’t connect. After the film spends two hours carefully laying out the profound ways Joel’s first wife, Elizabeth, shaped not only his career but his art, Joel’s only comment on the dissolution of their marriage—as he lay in the hospital recovering from a motorcycle accident!—is three words: “it was sad.” Yeah, man, it was. It’s the kind of emotional reticence that I’ve long experienced with the older generation of my dad’s family—who just happen to be from Long Island.

Joel was a tough sell for rock critics because he was working more in the vein of Broadway composers than singer-songwriters, giving us character studies instead of self-revelation. The funny thing is that, as we learn from the movie, many of the songs are based on Joel’s own life, which adds an additional layer of meaning onto the songs, often to their benefit. (Joel is a very “I know songwriters who use subtext and they’re all cowards” sort of lyricist, which suggests his closest contemporary is Chappell Roan.) The chorus of “You May Be Right,” for instance, is more or less a direct quote from Elizabeth; Joel had driven home drunk on his motorcycle, and she was worried he would die. It’s all the more profound given that, two years later, he did in fact nearly lose the use of his hands in a motorcycle accident. That Joel continues to perform the song triumphantly in concert as a defiant assertion of individualistic independence, even when it was in fact a dare for God to strike him down that God 100% called his bluff on, is a testament to the way he seemed to contain his emotions in songs and then separate from them entirely. That he could shout “turn out the lights!” and have it mean not his own impending death but a crowd-pleasing lighting cue to plunge the arena into darkness. To make the darkness work for him. (It also shows how much more he cares about the audience’s experience of the songs than his own.)

As a depressed person myself, Joel’s self-evident depression and inability to move beyond it seemed, for many years, like a profound bummer, a frustrating inability to get outside himself—to understand the evident beauty in what he’s created. (“Life isn’t a musical, it’s a Greek tragedy,” he says in the film, but doesn’t that just make it a Sondheim musical? And aren’t those lovely?) But the film makes clear that depression and the songs are intertwined. Joel was almost certain to have some mental health issues, given his abusive absentee father, early poverty, and cultural isolation; indeed, before his career took off, he twice attempted suicide. After “Piano Man,” he could effectively offboard his depression into the collective consciousness, writing pop hits about his father, his failed marriages, his children, his fear of failure. (It’s why so many Joel characters are losers.) The problem was that, once he stopped writing songs in the 90’s, he collapsed into addiction. The past catches up with you, whether you want it to or not.

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Over the years I had wondered if my love for Billy Joel was a mere novelty effect, if I would’ve imprinted duckling-like on the first pop album I really engaged with, no matter what it was. The details I learned in the movie about his mental health struggles made it more clear why I felt a sense of kinship. But I always knew there was a personal connection there, in Long Island. I grew up in central New York, but my dad was from Farmingdale, and every year we’d go down to visit his family. Sometimes we’d make it into the city, but New York was magical in a way that had been handed to me in movies and TV shows, midtown twinkling at Christmastime in Home Alone 2 or Upper West Side condos suffused in ancient magic in Ghostbusters. I knew the deal. 

But Long Island was its own mysterious world, one I came to without any preconceptions from pop culture. (I wouldn’t listen to De La Soul until I was in my 20’s—I’m a pop late bloomer!) It was, of course, suburban, and per the alt/indie/punk subcultures I was increasingly drawn to as I got older, therefore a wasteland of bland conformity. But it was too particular for that, too dense, packed with cultures and structures and opportunities—I could get the Village Voice there, I could get indie records and imports, I could see local bands who weren’t just playing blues-rock—all built up in the past 50 years or so, a big difference from my upstate wasteland of spread-out farms and gazebos and Americana and even older Native culture. On maybe the greatest album ever made about Long Island, Fountains of Wayne’s Utopia Parkway, the song “The Valley of Malls” could in theory be about California or Seattle or anywhere. But I always see the same thing when I listen to it: the Walt Whitman mall in Huntington. It’s a place with history, the first indoor mall in the state, built in the 60’s with a Japanese garden inside, and linked to Whitman’s nearby birthplace, with “Leaves of Grass” carved into its walls. And it’s huge, a mile long, stretching seemingly endlessly along the roadside. It feels like its own valley. Go down the road a little further south (not Utopia Parkway itself, but sorta-kinda parallel to it) and you hit an amusement park, Adventureland, the subject of a movie; behind that is a cemetery, with John Coltrane’s grave. Then there’s an airport, where they tested fighter planes in WWII, and then the bay, with a view of Robert Moses’ racist fever dream of Jones Beach. A whole world in 15 miles. It may or may not be a good one, but it’s rich enough that it deserves to be captured.

Fountains of Wayne, like Joel, struggled with critical approval at first, and for similar reasons. Both wrote precisely composed character-based songs that weren’t about big stupid teenage feelings, or the brave subcultural heroes of punk and punk-descended songs who never seemed to need health care or regular jobs to feed their kids, bless their hearts. (The teenage feelings song on Parkway is about driving in from Long Island to get stoned and see a Metallica laser show at the Hayden Planetarium.) To not write about these people—to not write about, if we’re being honest here, our parents, to care only about our most heroic vision of ourselves—came to seem, as I delved further into criticism, like a profound failure of empathy. And to not write about the peculiar charms of these places—which are, if we’re being honest here, the places where we grew up—is to claim that they’re not real. The denial of mainstream America by its countercultures was in many ways a denial that these central places had any history, any limits. But they did and they do. They are collapsing now.

Joel’s character studies hide himself, to some extent, but they also show his empathy, his interest in the world as it is rather than the mythical non-place of art in its heroic mode. In the movie, he explains that “New York State of Mind” has the lyric “I’m taking a Greyhound on the Hudson River line” because he wrote the song on a greyhound on the Hudson River line. That literalism is profound because it is specific. By insisting on his own particular normal existence, Joel makes art that represents the lives of the people listening to it. That may sound like a hand-wavy idealized claim until you look at the audience at his endless sold-out MSG shows, the multigenerational families all singing along to his songs from thirty, forty, fifty years ago. My first time in an Indiana bar sometime in the early 00’s, “Jack and Diane” came on the jukebox, and every single young person in there stopped what they were doing and sang along, like Rock-afire animatronics: hardly real, controlled by a power outside themselves. Mellencamp is part of the culture of Indiana—which is to say the people and the land—in the way Joel is of Long Island. It is real; it has material effects. It lives within bodies. 

All of which is to say that I loved Billy Joel because I loved my dad. I loved that he’d moved 300 miles away from Farmingdale to some little rural town (the Hudson River line would only take you part of the way) to raise his family, to raise me. And I loved the glimpse into his native Long Island, mythical and vanished in his telling, an expanse of aircraft factories and potato fields when he was growing up. (Though nowhere near as mythical and vanished as the Brooklyn he left as a small child, and his beloved, betrayed Dodgers.) Joel’s worldview was one I recognized in my dad and in other men his age, one forged in the hardscrabble experience of their youth and nurtured in the strange postwar transformation of high art into middlebrow culture, mass audiences turning out for 19th-century symphonies, tortured literary novelists making the cover of Time on a regular basis. It’s demonstrated succinctly by Joel’s story of his father catching him playing the Moonlight Sonata in a rock style and hitting him so hard that he lost consciousness. It was not an easy worldview to exist with—“life is a cesspool,” Joel’s dad told him as a boy; very punk rock—and thrown into disorienting relief by the stable careers Joel and his white Long Island peers often ended up in, caught up in lawsuits and heart disease and retirement funds rather than their parents’ battles with Nazis and narratively generative alcoholism. While the boomers’ much-derided nostalgia stems, at its most narcissistic, from a conviction that their childhoods were superior to the present, and pop products catering to it claim obscenely that the past can be recaptured (Jeff Goldblum in The Big Chill atoning for his celebrity journalism sins by running a plantation in South Carolina with his activist friends from college), at the same time that nostalgia expresses an anxiety that the adult culture of their parents was more substantial and serious than their own, that those silent WWII survivors led more meaningful lives than theirs. That the old ways of seriousness, precision, and respect for the past are lost, and can never be recaptured, classical music and the Old Masters devolved into winged haircuts and comic books. In it, I recognize my father’s suspicion of art with too few chops and with too much visual flair (he loves that Joel could nail the close harmonies of doo-wop), and I’ve spent my career as a critic writing against and around that view, just as Joel spent his career writing against and around the high-art values of his classically trained father. We are set by our birth on a path determined by our family and time and place that we cannot escape; we can only express. 

Which is, by the way, what “We Didn’t Start the Fire” is about. 

***

My favorite Joel song is “Scenes from an Italian Restaurant.” It covers years of history in bursts of specific moments and specific details, like the department store where Brenda and Eddie bought their furniture. (Joel’s songs in this era were great about communicating character quickly through details of clothing, neighborhood, furniture, tires; the kind of stuff you might find at malls.) By the end, Joel’s gotten us to fist-pump our way through a tale of middle-class losers, and when the stately pomp of the intro returns at the end paired with a lush new orchestral sweep, it makes the act of drinking table wine at a red-sauce place (the ones you can only really find in the northeast) seem impossibly bittersweet, and deeply real in a way that the actual experience of eating spaghetti and meatballs does not. It turns the workaday act of doing the same thing in the same place for your whole life into an epic journey—and maybe it is, since that’s how culture is created, that’s how a place is created. Your individual place in it isn’t terribly meaningful, but the collective project is. As artful as the song is, those opening and closing sections could be a jingle for a local ad on WPIX or WFAN, too, and that only makes it bigger and more complex. My grandfather spent his last few years, blind from diabetes, listening to WFAN in the small Farmingdale house where my dad grew up, and Joel’s song implies all that, implies a whole world. 

It is also my lucky song. As a teenager, I won a massive stuffed flamingo at a carnival game while “Scenes from an Italian Restaurant” was playing. (Saying that I grew up in a place where the carnival played 70’s Joel songs tells you more than saying I grew up in northern New York State.) This is not a meaning that’s part of the song, because it’s only a meaning for me. But the fact that it could become part of my life, that Joel’s story could become part of my own story, is something that can only happen with popularist art like Joel’s, and this is something that critics sometimes forget, too, in our need to tell one story about art rather than the multitude of stories that emerge from the audience’s experience. It’s rare for a piece of art to be known by millions of people, and when it is, it sticks around, which means it shows up in lots of people’s lives at lots of different times—romance and its end, dances and graduations and births and deaths—like toothpaste, or carpeting. But I don’t remember the toothpaste I used the morning I won the flamingo, I remember the song that was playing, because songs have emotional resonance and narrative. Which means that a popular song accrues a collective meaning that would not exist were it not popular. 

Though there is, it turns out, quite a lot of Joel in the stories he tells, he ultimately became popular by insisting not on himself but on everyone around him, on the place where he grew up, the people he knew. (“Everything I write is influenced by someone else,” he says in the film.) It didn’t create its own culture in the way punk did, but it fit perfectly with the culture that was lived there, captured it perfectly. It makes it possible to use that music as a tie across time, between yourself and your parents, and in turn your own children, in the way I hear my dad in it and my dad hears the doo-wop from his own childhood—in the way Joel gave his father’s beloved Beethoven a writing credit on “This Night” after he took a little of the Pathétique for the chorus. It becomes part of how time becomes real to us, how it is felt. Nostalgia can be a trap, but it’s impossible not to experience time as a kind of loss, because those moments are, partially or wholly, lost; those people are lost; those memories are lost—Joel found his father in Germany as an adult, but he always remained emotionally closed off—remaining only insofar as we can inscribe them into the walls of our structures, like “Leaves of Grass” at the Walt Whitman Mall, into the land and the collective memory and the relationships between people. Yes, art matters because it’s a grand individual achievement, an honest and stylish expression of one particular soul. But it’s also the physical instantiation of a memory, a literal record of something expressed in the past and carried forward into the future, an envelope of cardboard and vinyl you can give to someone you love and have it live in their home, in their life, even after you’re gone. It’s a flamingo and a bottle of wine and a motorcycle ride and a blow to the back of the head and a three-inch speaker and the price of tomatoes and a conversation almost four decades ago that I’m remembering today because of Billy Joel, because Billy Joel is still here, to remind myself of what it was like back then. It’s still rock and roll. It’s always rock and roll.

MIke Barthel is a writer/critic/researcher/musician in DC. Fiction lotsa places. Writing a speculative novel and a book for DUP “Singles” about “Party in the USA.”

mikebarthelauthor.com
Making music as APOPHRA apophra.bandcamp.com*