Movin' Out

So on Sunday we went to a ballet. No kidding. An honest-to-Darwin ballet, although I think it’s actually billed as a musical; either way, it’s not the kind of thing that I would usually do. On the other hand...this was neither your usual musical nor your usual ballet - I don’t think. My experience with musicals, since high school ended, has been fairly limited, and pretty much begins and ends with The Sound Of Music, which is the only musical that I actually enjoy.

But a funny thing happened on the way to the Murat - a few years back now, that wacky Twlya Tharp decided she was going to put together a stage production (the production notes say that the thing was “conceived by” Twyla Tharp - okay) that revolved around some of the better known “characters” in Billy Joel’s songs. I think it takes a pretty good songwriter to craft songs that actually make you think of the subjects of those songs as characters.

Right off the top of my head, I’m having trouble thinking of many other songwriters whose songs make me think of characters - or characters that seem as real as the characters in Billy Joel songs. Some Bob Dylan songs leap to mind - probably most people would agree with “Tangled Up In Blue” and “Hurricane” as the most notable examples, although since the latter is about real people I sort of discount it; and there are some Beatles songs that certainly fit the bill. Actually, there are lots of Beatles songs that fit the bill - “Eleanor Rigby,” “Ob La Di, Ob La Da,” “Lucy In The Sky With Diamonds” - although I think the best example has to be “Rocky Raccoon.”

Discounting “Hurricane,” the only song in that list that has characters that feel remotely real, in the tangible sense of the word, is “Tangled Up In Blue.” But Anthony working in the grocery store...saving his pennies for someday? Brenda and Eddie, who had had it already by the summer of seventy-five? Virginia, who is told that it’s better to laugh with the sinners than cry with the saints because the sinners are much more fun?

Yeah, those cats feel real to me. Does it have anything to do with the fact that Billy Joel is a New Yorker? Damn straight it does. (Due respect to Bob Dylan, but he ain’t a New Yorker. You gotta be born and raised on those mean streets. Perhaps I am mistaken and someone can correct me...but I don’t operate under the assumption that there are any mean streets in Hibbing, Minnesota.) I was born right here in Indianapolis, Indiana, but there is something about New York that resonates in my soul. My Dad is from Bayonne, New Jersey, which is close to New York, though not of it. Some kind of yen for the Big Apple probably passed through the blood. The fondness for beer certainly did.

But anyway...it’s not just the New York connection. There’s also a college connection. Everybody can think back to college and probably think right away of three or four songs - maybe even three or four albums - that form the beginning of the soundtrack of their college years (and if that’s not a Rob Gordon “all time top five” blog post waiting to happen, I’m sure I don’t know what is). One of those albums for me (while technically a compilation and not a real album) is the first two volumes of Billy Joel’s greatest hits. (Yes, there are two new songs on the album. Don’t even get me started on what a bunch of shit it is to put one or two new songs on a greatest hits package.)

I have a somewhat bizarrely selective memory. I think I recall staying up all night (or most of the night) in college once while Billy Joel songs played in the background from one or the other of those CDs. I remember for sure playing hearts with Heather and Jason and Kristen in Kristen’s basement and at some point hearing the song “Don’t Ask Me Why.” The jazz band in high school played “Just The Way You Are” one year. I still think it’s the most overrated Billy Joel song ever. Storm Front and its quasi-megahit “We Didn’t Start The Fire” closed out the 80s just as I was really beginning to get into pop music. (And that’s pop as in “short for popular,” not the bubblegum crap, although I did like some of that back then. But let’s not dwell on that - nor on the fact that Debbie Gibson was my first concert.)

Billy Joel was also the back end of a double-concert weekend in the spring of my freshman year in college. Both shows were at Market Square Arena, and it’s still the only time I’ve ever gone to back-to-back concerts. The front end of that weekend was Rush, touring to support Counterparts. Best. Show. Ever. Also at that Billy Joel show? Amy, though I didn’t know her yet and had only even met her once to that point. She was in the front row with one of her friends from college. Why? Billy Joel apparently has - or had - a lackey who walks the crowd before the show and gives front row tickets to hotties. Two girls from the dining hall I worked at that year were also at that show and were in the front row.

One last Billy Joel memory...the Grammy awards (I think) for whichever year he would have been invited to play “The River Of Dreams.” There’s a long pause in the song between the second verse and the third chorus, and he held that pause for at least twice as long when he played on the show, and muttered into the microphone, “Valuable advertising time going by...valuable advertising time going by...valuable advertising time going by.”

But I digress. Several paragraphs ago, this was about going to the ballet on Sunday. By now, of course, you’ve puzzled out the fact that the show in question is “Movin’ Out,” which played the Murat this past weekend. It was a sort-of Valentine’s Day present for Amy. We don’t really do presents much anymore, at least not of the material kind. I have more than enough “stuff,” although I can never seem to get rid of any of it. I always tell myself that I’m going to read some of the books on my shelves and then sell or donate them...and yet the stack of library books next to my reading chair is always about a foot high.

Anyway...I had heard that “Movin’ Out” would be in town, but I assumed that tickets would be too expensive, or gone right away - the show was huge on Broadway and is on at least its second tour across the country. But when I checked Livemaster or Nationtickets - or what the hell ever - a couple of weeks ago, I discovered that both of those assumptions were wrong. Tickets were both available, and relatively cheap, at twenty-five bucks. That sealed the deal.

Unfortunately, I don’t have enough - which is to say any - experience with musicals or ballets of the live variety to really be able to review the production, except to say that I quite liked it. It’s a ballet in the technical sense because it’s a story acted out by players who don’t actually recite any lines; on the other hand, all of the musical numbers are actual songs sung by a band that was situated on a stage elevated above and slightly behind the dancers on the actual stage.

The story started out with Brenda and Eddie from “Scenes From An Italian Restaurant,” who got married and then divorced, as they did in the song; from there Brenda hooks up with Tony from “Movin’ Out (Anthony’s Song),” and there are a couple of characters called James and Judy who are also a couple (I think) and moved in the same crowd with Brenda, Eddie, and Tony. I don’t know the song with James and Judy, though. The fellows all wind up going to Vietnam (the lyrics in “Italian Restaurant” are changed slightly to have Brenda and Eddie get married in the summer of ‘65 rather than the summer of ‘75, because there was obviously no one being sent to Vietnam in 1975), one of them gets whacked, and then, even though “they couldn’t go back to the greasers,” all of the friends who survive manage to reconnect and move on with their lives.

The songs were mostly excellent, even if the guy singing them didn’t quite have the chops that Billy Joel had when he recorded the songs. That lack of chops in places took nothing away from the energy he projected, and was helped along by some very capable background vocalists - and it was clear that the singer, the “Piano Man,” don’tcha know, was channeling Billy Joel and doing a pretty good job for a dude who looked a lot more like John Popper than Billy Joel.

The best number was “We Didn’t Start The Fire,” and what you have to do immediately is forget the post-modern music video that you saw on MTV and even the somewhat goofy march of the lyrics. The number came during the first act, when the guys were in Vietnam, and the action on stage was a night battle, and the song was played as a relentless, heavy, chord-laden barrage that was practically a death march. Try to get your head around the lyrics of that song backed by the heavy guitars from R.E.M.’s Monster - not the poppy chords of “What’s The Frequency, Kenneth?” nor the acidic, sour drone of “Bang And Blame” or “Crush With Eyeliner,” but something more along the lines of “King Of Comedy.” And then throw in a dash of the Metallica album ...And Justice For All. Your head spinning yet? I think that was probably the idea.

The other exceptional musical number started with “Pressure” and stopped mid-song to go right into “Goodnight, Saigon.” It’s probably not a coincidence that those songs are back-to-back on the album they both appeared on (The Nylon Curtain). The latter is a very long song, and they didn’t play the whole thing, but they did do the most haunting lines - the ones that best spoke to the problem with the war in Vietnam:

They heard the hum of the motors
They counted the rotors
And waited for us to arrive

I didn’t follow along with all of the characters as well as I probably should have - that inexperience, again, with the form of the production (and I don’t think it helped that most of the guys looked an awful lot alike and so did the girls, except for the brunette, who I think was Brenda) - but it worked for me, mostly because I love Billy Joel’s songs. Amy was worried that I would not like hearing someone other than Billy Joel singing those songs, and I wondered ahead of time if that would be the case, but it wasn’t. Like I said, the “Piano Man” (credited as three different guys in the notes, although I believe the cast listing for our show said it was a guy called Jon Abrams) clearly had his role as troubadour down pat and did as good a job being Billy Joel as I could imagine being done by anyone who isn’t Billy Joel.

But here’s how I know that it really worked for me. Before we got our seats, we briefly perused the tiny souvenir stand set up in the theatre lobby. One of the items for sale was the cast recording on CD of the Broadway show. I thought before I saw the show that I would certainly not need a CD of, basically, Billy Joel covers, no matter how good they were. I have volumes one and two of his greatest hits, as well as a couple of other albums that I have ripped into iTunes - and I figured I could mix together a CD of the songs from the show if I wanted to re-live it. A day later, though...I’m not so sure. There was an energy to the show - actually, even though I hate this word because of its corporate connotations, there was a synergy to the show that elevated those songs in that combination to something more than they would be on a mix CD. I think that might be a very acceptable definition of art.