I've only watched a few episodes of Colbert's The Late Show . . . mostly because it comes on so late. And I'm just not that much of a dvr and watch it later guy. I've found that I'm more of a dvr and delete it later guy.
But thanks to the wonders of The You Tub, I occasionally catch a glimpse of a little something something of interest. Just now it was a 9:43 segment with Billy Joel. Ah, Billy Joel.
I knew "Piano Man" from the radio when it came out, of course--it was impossible not to know it in 1973. And I liked it quite a bit. But it wasn't until Chana Bass let me stay in her apartment for a couple of days before I went into the army (October of 1976) that I heard the album. And it really peeled my brain. Especially "Captain Jack," which was so full of anger and contempt. My kind of song, for sure. I was also extraordinarily fond of "Worse Comes to Worst," which was a lot more optimistic than you'd think, and pretty damned catchy as well. Come to think of it, that's still one of my favorite Billy Joel songs.
So it was good to see Billy again. All 67 years of him. Then Colbert said something that astonished me: he said that Billy Joel hadn't released any new pop albums since 1993. What? I figured that it was a joke, but if it was, Joel slipped right into it. So I took a look around and lo and behold . . . Billy Joel's last album was Fantasies & Delusions from 2001, which (1) is an album of classical compositions, (2) I have on CD, and (3) I have never listened to--not even once. (WTF is up with that? I don't know, but if I can find it, ahmo listen to it now.) And the album before that was 1993's River of Dreams. So no joke. Wow. And then Colbert asked Joel why he hadn't released any albums since then . . . and Joel said something along the lines of, "I said what I had to say." Again, wow visions. Billy Joel is the Béla Tarr of pop music.
I also took the opportunity to look over Joel's discography, and saw that of his 13 albums, I at one time or another had 10 of them. Which made me wonder why I stopped buying his albums, since I really liked all of the 9 early ones and played the living shit out of them. Dunno.
Cold Spring Harbor (1971)
Piano Man (1973)
Streetlife Serenade (1974)
Turnstiles (1976)
The Stranger (1977)
52nd Street (1978)
Glass Houses (1980)
The Nylon Curtain (1982)
An Innocent Man (1983)
The Bridge (1986)
Storm Front (1989)
River of Dreams (1993)
Fantasies & Delusions (2001)
I do remember seeing the video for "A Matter of Trust" (from The Bridge) on MTV and liking it quite a bit. And of course I knew "We Didn't Start the Fire" from Storm Front. And I remember thinking that the cover to River of Dreams was really groovy . . . but I don't think I heard any songs from that album.
So of course now I am burning to hear lots of Billy Joel. Oddly enough, I was just looking at a nice box set of his stuff at Half-Price Books on Saturday. I almost bought it because it had cool shit like demo versions of "Piano Man" and other stuffs. But I wasn't it that Billy Joel zone at that moment. How much you want to bet that it's all gone now?
That's how it is on this bitch of an Earth.
(Which is one of the kind-of-sums-it-all-up-for-me things that Vladimir says in Waiting for Godot.)
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