1977: Billy Joel, The Stranger
By Tony DeGenaro
“This is the beginning of sadness, I think to myself
as I explore the universe in my sneakers.”
- Billy Collins, “On Turning Ten”
I think a central part of the experience of being a young person is imagining what it is like to be an older person. At least for me, curious, bookish, that’s how I explored myself at the onset of my first decade and well into middle school. The idea of cool, of meaningful adult relationships – far more than the hands holding & kissing of romantic relationships wholly different than whatever my parents were up to in their romantic life as a couple – was defined in some, in retrospect, categorically uncool ways.
For example, my older brother being merely five months my senior didn’t have his finger on the pulse of subversive punk music, nor did he have a leather jacket to hand down to me; we both wore the same lame Land’s End windbreakers. It’s a rite of passage, we music fans have, to listen through a sibling’s musical tastes, or as I was later on, bestowed bountiful mix CD from an Uncle, or, if your parents were cool, to crate-dig through the parts of their record collection too precious to downsize between moves from an apartment in Cleveland to a house in Youngstown, and then again to the quiet suburb of Poland by the time I was competent and curious enough to operate their Sears AM/FM radio, double-recorder tape decks, turntable monstrosity of a machine. A number of my formative albums were in that crate, but none resonate with me still as Billy Joel’s The Stranger.
And now all this talk of cool comes to a head: much writing has been done on the coolness of Billy Joel, or rather, Billy Joel’s lack of coolness. I don’t agree, I think Billy Joel is a cool guy – he has a leather jacket, he looks good in a suit, and he has some pals, that is if the album art of The Stranger is telling us the truth. In 2002, after getting my first portable CD player and The Stranger (so my parents could finally retire their old Sears machine, and Joel’s LP, once and for all) I thought Billy Joel was cool. Now, nearly twenty years later, I half remember reading a hit piece on the poor guy that said “Billy Joel makes rock and roll music for theater kids.”
I was thinking about this recently as we crossed the one-year anniversary of the terrible COVID-19 pandemic and how disheartening, especially early on, the wildly mixed public reaction to the disease and various quarantine measures set in place. Last year, I found more time than I was usually afforded to just sit and think, and in my small apartment, had to work harder to find joy. I took refuge in my records.
Not only did the album’s familiarity provide comfort, I also started noticing how relevant The Stranger felt during the pandemic. Even looking at the album art – Joel in his suit, shoeless, sitting on a bed flanked by boxing gloves, looking at a mask – there it was right on the album’s cover, the signifier of so many things, the ubiquitous MASK. I’ll let modern readers project our current reality to make of that what you will, but in a 2008 making-of documentary, Joel said that “the boxing gloves, I don’t remember why we did that, it was sort of a reference to a past life, but it was all very symbolic I suppose. I don’t remember exactly what I was thinking at the time.” He laughs, takes a long pause, deadpans: “I was, you know, different.”
However, I am not. “The Stranger” is still my favorite title track, it so nicely ties together the narrative and musical themes of the album, and while “Moving Out (Anthony’s Theme)” both proceeds it and calls itself a theme, “The Stranger” uniquely re-opens the record with Joel’s iconic whistle line. These themes: unfamiliar, mistrust, hiding behind a mask echo so insidiously in 2021 that it’s a wonder we aren’t trying to figure out how Billy Joel time traveled back in the 70s.
In that documentary, Joel talked about how The Stranger was a make-or-break record, having felt that Cold Spring Harbor suffered from bad mastering (he said it was sped up, “it made me sound like a chipmunk”), and that Piano Man & Streelife Serenade featured session players, who while talented musicians, but lacked the cohesion of Joel and bassist Doug Stegmeyer, drummer Liberty DeVitto, and Richie Cannata, saxophonist, who would come together for Joel’s self-produced Turnstyles. “I’m not a technical expert,” Joel said, “I just know what I’m looking for but I don’t know how to get it.”
If Joel’s music is musical theater, he’s the actor. Producer Phil Ramone (SP?) is the director. Having seen The Stranger’s rhythm section at the legendary Carnegie Hall shows in July 1977, Ramone wanted to harness their contagious chemistry and record as much of the album as possible live in the studio. Both Joel and Ramone talked about how close – literally on top of each other in the case of the long arm of Stegmeyer’s bass guitar. This made isolating the audio tracks difficult, Joel calls the sound “organic” – I think part of that closeness, something so difficult to imagine in 2021, is what gives The Stranger its warm collegial harmony.
The back of the album sleeve captures the friendliness of the group: Ramone and DeVitto arm-in-arm, all Yankee jersey and wine bottle standing above a seated Stegmeyer, Cannata, and Billy Joel, drinks, food, and smiles spread out on a plastic checkered tablecloth everybody with an Italian grandma knows the touch of. Looking at the back of the album last year as friends’ birthdays passed by with little occasion was heartbreaking. What I wouldn’t have given to have been able to reminisce about the good old days with my friends.
And here, the enduring brilliance of “Scenes From an Italian Restaurant” reveals itself. A literal piece of theater, The Stranger’s long centerpiece has characters, dialogue, soliloquies, harmonies, so, maybe Billy Joel does make rock and roll music for musical theater, what of it! In a 1982 performance, Live from Long Island, Joel’s bandmates literally act out the introduction of the song – on stage – before performing their parts.
Listening to “Scenes From an Italian Restaurant” is always an act in wish fulfillment; at ten, the mature relationship of two kindred spirits discussion other relationships makes you imagine what its like to be an adult who doesn’t have a bedtime and can go eat whatever you want, whenever you want. It is a fairy tale about the ease of conversation, even conversations about difficult topics. There is no social awkwardness nor judgement in the way our main characters detail the rise and fall of Brenda and Eddie. It feels humane, and real, and real is – at least for me – something of an endless pursuit especially in the interactions with other adults.
There’s also a level of Boomer-era wish fulfillment; a lesser version of Billy Joel could preface live performances of this song with some blithe remark about how there isn’t a cell phone in sight of the checkered tablecloth at the Italian restaurant, nobody is bitching about how much to Venmo because so-and-so ordered the bottle of red but didn’t have even a sip from the bottle of white, and so on. While the retelling of Brenda and Eddie’s story is, I guess, a little invasive, it isn’t like the visiting friends are scrolling through their Instagram and Twitter feeds to dredge up benign signs of passive aggression in cryptic social media posts. At its most core, the “Scenes” are as humble as they are inane: two friends reconnect with tremendous ease and talk about the difficult lives of people they once knew. How nice does that sound?
Having turned 30 this past August, I found yet another layer of wish fulfillment within the song, 20 years into my enjoying it. By the time August rolled around the pandemic seemed more of an inevitability than something we could keep wishing away. Gone were the hopeful mid-March pleas of it’ll be over by Spring, the early-May just in time for summer; schools were outlining provisions for distance learning, the few ‘old normal’ tendencies that had sheepishly opened back up were (rightly) returning to a safe hesitation, but there was no mystery as to what the next season would look like. In terms of gathering friends, the luster of talking in a wide circle in a park, a field, a front yard, or a parking lot, was losing its bluster.
After the song sets up its “Scene,” Joel’s speaker says, “things are okay with me these days … got a new life / and the family’s fine.” Could you imagine feeling fine? Hard enough to picture meeting on a whim anywhere, let alone an “old familiar place” sitting “face-to-face.” What’s more ironic: in 2020 we were more equipped than ever to make socially distanced relationships work: smart phones’ near-ubiquity, Zoom and other teleconferencing technologies paired with some creativity revitalized the way friends could catch up. Basement Italian restaurant and dive bars be damned, we could stare into our computer screens at each other, until we couldn’t. With the newfound free time not having to physically go to work made, working from home quickly stole back.
What I’m saying is, despite having the best technology in the history of socializing we’ve had to socialize, the idea of sitting down at a table (“a table by the street” notwithstanding) is a profoundly seductive idea. Like many of us, I dreamed of the kind of good old days frivolity of what “Scenes From an Italian Restaurant” depicts: not of high school sweethearts’ Brenda & Eddie’s demise, but of the simple act of meeting a friend to drink and talk shit. Not in the group chat, not on a four inch cell phone screen, face-to-face.
Its baffling to me that this song is the centerpiece of The Stranger although today it makes sense. “The Stranger” talks about masks hiding our faces. “Vienna” talks about how necessary it is that we do not define ourselves by overworking, is a romantic-tinged appeal for self-care. And “Scenes From an Italian Restaurant” gives us a fantasy play of that thing we might miss so dearly: warm connection and our friends. As Joel waxes nostalgic, “cold beer, hot lights, my sweet romantic teenage nights.” We’ve lost a lot of time since March 2020, maybe we’re due a few drinks and more than a few laughs.
By all accounts, “Scenes From an Italian Restaurant” is a strange song, accordion solo and all, but it is a tender moment on a great rock and roll record. Is Joel cool, or corny? Who cares? Having read the lyrics in Joel’s own handwriting (another cool tie in with that 2008 box set) what’s clear is that in 1977, as in 2020, finding joy – finding comfort in conversation with friends – is difficult and an inescapable urge. As hard as it is to find joy, we might learn from “Scenes” to cling to it when we find it, even in the distant and virtual ways we are technically connected but intimately distanced, at least, until you and I can meet, face to face, once again, at our Italian restaurant.
Tony DeGenaro is a writing teacher at University of Detroit Mercy and youth arts instructor in Southeastern Michigan. He is a distance runner, baseball, and pop culture fan, and proud doggie dad to Desi the Dachshund. Read more of his work here, and say hi at tonydegenaropoetry.com