Saturday, February 28, 2009

THE NYLON CURTAIN - Billy Joel


The Nylon Curtain
Billy Joel
1982


It only takes one great idea to make a great album. Billy Joel’s The Nylon Curtain has two. As hinted at by its cover of identical silhouetted houses, it’s a quasi-concept album exploring the theme of the dark side of suburbia (which, to save space, I’ll be referring to as DSOS.) Musically, it harkens back to the late 60’s and specifically recalls the style of The Beatles.

To place the album in context, Billy Joel had just released Glass Houses in 1980, which was his attempt to echo the then contemporary New-Wave movement. In 1983, he would release An Innocent Man, delving into the late 50’s early 60 roots rock and doo-wop he grew up with. The results were uncannily authentic and the best retro-album I’ve ever heard.

It was in the middle of this highly creative period of exploring different musical eras that The Nylon Curtain came about. Billy Joel, of course, had already developed his own sound, coming to fruition in his excellent The Stranger. This is key because, only incorporating The Beatle’s style into his own, could lead to an innovative work. Most efforts to simply sound like The Beatles result in fun, but inconsequential bands like The Smithereens.

As far as The Nylon Curtain as a concept album goes, it can only be loosely viewed as such. It does not tell a narrative story or reference particular characters, but does keep coming back to its lower income suburban setting and a family struggling to make sense of the American dream in an environment where pain and regret lay just underneath the idyllic surface.

If this theme sounds familiar, it’s not because you’ve heard it on other albums, but because of its recurring presence in later movies. David Lynch’s Blue Velvet may have been the first of the DSOS films, but it was most successfully realized in Sam Mendes’ 1999 Best Picture winner, American Beauty, a film that owes more than a small debt to The Nylon Curtain. It’s not that the plot points are the same, but Kevin Spacey’s protagonist could easily be the narrator of “Pressure” or “A Room of Our Own.”

Let go through this track by track. The first single, “Allentown” is a perfectly constructed song and one of the best of Joel’s career. The Beatle echo is slight, but its highly melodic pop feel would make the Fab Four proud. It provides an actual locale for the album and there’s no reason to think that all of the DSOS songs don’t also take place in Allentown. While most of the album will deal with suburban decay on a personal level, “Allentown” is about the decay of the town itself. Unemployment and the decline of industry leads to an overt questioning of the American dream and why this generation isn’t reaping the benefits their parents had.

“Laura” is Billy Joel trying to channel John Lennon at his most White Album bitter. The narrator’s relationship to Laura is so dysfunctional as to be rendered comic. If later songs are about a failing marriage, “Laura” shows it all going wrong in the courtship. It’s a relationship, not based on love, but the need to be loved. There’s a constant, sometimes violent imagery of being trapped – “these careless fingers, they get caught it her vice, till they’re bleeding on my coffee table.” By the end of the song, our narrator is completely emasculated, asking, after making his girlfriend sound like a she-devil, “How can you hang up on someone that needs you that bad.”

Joel abandons the Beatle sound for a few tracks starting with the synth driven “Pressure.” The second single from The Nylon Curtain is about tension and sounds tense. The narrator’s breakdown here results not just from home life, but a work environment where “you’re just like everybody else.” Innocent domestic pop culture references like Sesame Street, Time Magazine and Peter Pan are rendered sinister in the context of the song.

Shifting gears to “Goodnight Saigon,” we come across one the most unique songs in the Joel catalog. More Andrew Lloyd Weber than British Invasion, this tribute to Vietnam veterans has the pomp and power of a great musical theater curtain closer. It’s also the song the most critics of Billy Joel hone in on as, in their view, Joel is singing from a point of view he knows nothing about, never having served in Nam. Well, that’s why it’s called writing and not all songs need be autobiographical. The fact that “Goodnight Saigon” is sincere and without irony may be a problem for some, but I feel it only adds to its charm.

Featuring some of his most assured vocals, “She’s Right on Time” is The Nylon’s Curtain’s hidden gem. Both musically and lyrically, it’s a mirror image of “Laura.” Here, Joel celebrates his love’s return while, this time, leveling venom at himself – “A man with too much tension, far too many sins to mention.” The fact that the narrator has torn out his telephones is a wonderful contrast to the earlier songs repeated telephone imagery.

“A Room of Our Own” may sound like a holdover from Glass Houses, but its DSOS lines are among the most vivid on the album. At this point, the narrator and his now wife are in full conflict. To a solid rock beat, everyday differences between man and wife are exaggerated and made irreconcilable. Again the Lennonesque bitter humor reveals itself: “You’ve got diamonds and I’ve got spades. You’ve got pills and I’ve got razor blades. You’ve got yoga honey, I’ve got beer. You got overpriced and I got weird.”

The Beatle sound rejoins the Lennon-influenced lyrics in “Surprises.” What constitutes the surprise may be left to our imagination, but it brings the narrator to the conclusion that the dream is over. Perhaps he’s admitting to an affair or just falling out of love. Whether the relationship is too end or continue in unhappy silence is also not clear, but while the open conflict of “Laura” and “A Room of Our Own” revels in its dark humor, “Surprises” is more somber with a note of regretful acceptance.

This acceptance may be why “Scandinavian Skies” seems to abandon the DSOS motif altogether. Its clever world geography wordplay is offset with the most severe cribbing of the Beatle sound on the entire album. The musical source is clearly “I am the Walrus” and it’s a ballsy move to come so close to the originals influence. Joel gets away with it, first, because it’s a damn good song and, second, because he’s been teasing the Beatle sound throughout and here comes clean.

“Where’s the Orchestra?” is a bit anti-climatic after all this. This quiet sad song about broken dreams, is actually much sadder in the context of the whole album. The little hint of the “Allentown” melody at the very end is an appropriately Beatlesque touch of bringing an album full circle.

Billy Joel may have better individual songs than those on The Nylon Curtain, but he has never before or since put together such an ambitious and meaningful work.

1 comment:

Anonymous said...

The Smithereens are hardly an inconsequential band...