Liverpool Sound and Vision Rating 9/10

For anyone in the U.K. or Europe who loved their music to have an American twist then the Summer of 1983 saw Billy Joel, one of the biggest music artists ever from the United States, have perhaps arguably the most commercially incredible time of his career to date as he released the stunning An Innocent Man onto the music world.

The previous September Billy Joel had released the superb The Nylon Curtain and perhaps with a naïve hindsight, it must have been a time in which the musician was at his most productive, to bring out two highly rated albums within a year of each of each other, tour with them and deal with all the tiny details of putting an album together takes some doing, an almost super human effort of musical knowledge and knowing exactly what fits the time.

An Innocent Man is exactly that, an album that deals with time. Specifically the life time of Billy Joel and the music that inspired him in his younger years. Whereas The Nylon Curtain was almost akin to a dystopian look at the life of America, a critique on the way that America had changed from being the land of the free to the land of the watched, a land in which millions were losing their livelihoods and their homes and perhaps a sign that Billy Joel was angry about what he saw.  An Innocent Man turns that around and sees the piano man look back with more than a pinch of nostalgia at what made America great after the Second World War, it’s capability to make great music and records. Music that crossed every race, creed and colour and despite the growing racial tensions that would come to the head in the following decades; the music was new and thrilling on both sides of the Atlantic.

Unlike The Nylon Curtain, An Innocent Man captured this social reflection, the journey that Billy Joel perhaps undertook to remind his fans and the wider world that America wasn’t always the world’s so called policeman. The front cover of the new offering is one of the most evocative of the period and visually one of the most compelling and unadulterated alongside Glass Houses that Billy Joel was to have as an lead as a cover art.  The black and white image of the musician in reflective pose alludes to the times in which he sings of, he frames the thought of the era in a way that to have done so in colour would have been seen to be diluting the effect he was striving for. Shot on the steps of 142 Mercer Street in New York’s Soho, Billy, dressed in black matching his setting, sits tellingly with his eyes fixed on his name, written in yellow and one foot raised on a different step but tellingly just above the album’s name in an act that looks as if he is just about keeping his boot from treading upon his reputation of being an innocent man. If the album cover was this evocative then the music inside suggests brilliance, a nod to the genius that resides within.

The differing styles that litter the album and the esteem in which Billy Joel holds them are heard in every note. From soul to doo-wop and good old fashioned rock and roll, the songs have their own distinct personality and make the album an absolute dream, a saunter along the musical promenade in which the head acknowledges that both the heart and soul want to jive, dance and throw themselves completely into.

The album starts in fine style with the track Easy Money and sees Billy Joel sing of the fascination of gambling in many forms, from the images of horse racing, greyhounds, card tables and dice in which he just asks for a chance to make some “easy” money. The thrill of the gamble in which he can’t say no to but the clue to the song is that he is not just gambling with his wages but that of his marriage. Throughout the song, the narrator says that he can take the losing as long as he wins; he is not prepared to work for the hard cash just the thrill of the chase. He mentions his wife just the once throughout and in it he says “Let me call my wife so I can tell her I’ll be late.” Instead of saying I will call my wife, an assertive thought process and in which there is a modicum of possibility that she will talk him out of it, by saying let me… there is a pleading, an imploring nature in which the listener is wondering if what’s holding him back is not the friends he is with but the ever diminishing respect that his wife feels for him, by pleading with the addiction he has already lost. He plays the tables, the slot machines and the horses at the track but he acknowledges that he will come back as either a “Bum or a King”. This line can be alluding to Shakespeare’s As You Like It (Act II; Scene VII) In which Jaques monologue speech which asserts that “All the worlds a stage, And all the men and women merely players…And one man in his time plays many parts…”

If the album is about a time in which Billy Joel is looking back in time then he acknowledges that by being a Bum or a King in the space of a twist of a card or the right combination dropping in on a slot machine then the way he his dealing with life as a gambler suggests that he knows he is merely a player!

The idea of being a man out his depth and believing that he should be in better class of society resurfaces with the excellent track Uptown Girl, which was covered in 2001 by Westlife but didn’t have the same pull on the imagination as the original, a great single which reached the heady heights of Number 1 on the U.K., New Zealand, Irish and Australian charts and was a top five hit on America’s Billboard Hot 100. Whether the song was made by the video or the video captured the essence of the track doesn’t matter but hand in hand it made one of the most exciting songs of the year. The image of Billy Joel clad in mechanic’s overalls, grease over his face and dreaming of the girl of his dreams, the superb Christie Brinkley, and her turning up in a car gave Uptown Girl the chance for any teenage lad at the time to believe that they too, no matter their social status, were capable of being with one of the most beautiful women in the world. Again there is an element of the dreamer about the song. Someone prepared to gamble for what he wants most in the world. Whereas in Easy Money, it was thrill of the chase for lucre, in this song, the desire was always for a woman. The singer tells the listener that he can’t buy her rich expensive items but that one day his ship will come in, this alludes to the idea that he is prepared to work for the woman he loves but is still going to dream that his riches, perhaps even by having married the wealthy socialite, will come along one day.

In an album that was bursting at the seams with great tracks, great musicianship, notably from Billy Joel himself, Liberty DeVitto on drums, Doug Stegmeyer on bass and the sublime Mark Rivera on alto and tenor sax, the final song, Keeping The Faith is perhaps one of the most underestimated but tantalising songs on the album. Away from the commercially successful of the album track An Innocent Man, the thumping power of The Longest Time and the buoyancy of Tell Her About It, Keeping The Faith is a marvellous example of a song that delves back into the history of the man’s musical upbringing. The sounds of pre-1963 America give the singer the reason to suggest that he will stay true to the upbringing and ideal that he first heard in his youth. He suggests that people may have may look at him and say that the music of the past should be left there, that it had no merit in the Ronald Reagan era of American politics, that the world had changed in the 30 years since the music first gained momentum.

The singer though refutes this by saying that the past is something that never hindered him, “It never got in my way.” However as with anyone, it is the past that has shaped how the person is today. Without the past, the person you have come to be makes no sense. Somebody’s actions in the present day can be seen to have been influenced by whatever happens in their own personal history. By adding little flourishes of items found in the sepia tinged world of the America, Old Spice aftershave, Sen-Sen, Lucky Strikes, the beauty of making out with a red-haired girl in the back of an American built Chevrolet, it gives the listener the appreciation that they can dream of what happened in the past without the fear of being called a modern social luddite afraid to grasp new technology, new products and new dreams. It is a song that immerses itself in nostalgia and is gratifying for its premise.

The Velvet Curtain may be lyrically the finest album of Billy Joel’s career but An Innocent Man captured something that may have believed to have been lost somewhere along the way, youthful innocence, virtue and incorruptibility. In a world that was overshadowed by war and threat of nuclear annihilation, that innocence was something to grasp hold of.

Ian D. Hall