We continue our look back at the music of 50 years ago…..
It’s a fascinating story …the story of Billy Joel’s first record. After a stint in a mental hospital and a suicide attempt the year before…Joel wanted to become a songwriter for other people. Folks in the music business told him to record an album…well, I’ll let him tell it…
He reportedly had a listening party with his friends and got so pissed when he heard it he took the Lp off the turntable and hurled it down the street like a Frisbee.
Joel had signed a terrible deal with a producer named Artie Ripp who owned Family Productions. The deal would plague Joel for years and it was Ripp that mixed the master tapes wrong. How bad did it sound….
Here’s what the original version of Everybody Loves You Now” sounded like…
Here is the fixed version from years later…with some added instrumentation…
I won’t torture you with any more of the original LP. The mixing problem obscured the fact that the songs weren’t bad. “She’s Got A Way” and “Everybody Loves You Now” would later appear on the live LP “Songs From The Attic” but the rest were rarely, if ever heard again.
Joel had yet to form his band that would be with him through the 70’s. This Lp has a number of studio vets on it including Larry Knechtel (taking a break from “Bread”), Joe Osborn and Jimmie Haskell on the string arrangements. Sneaky Pete Kleinow pulls out his pedal steel on “Turn Around” and Wings drummer Denny Siewell plays on a couple of cuts as well. The songs cut personal…especially “Tomorrow Is Today” a song he wrote about his depression and attempted suicide.
It took two more years before Columbia gave Joel a shot in the studio and the result was the “Piano Man” LP. The rest, as they say, was history.
Here is Cold Spring Harbor in its “fixed” remix from 1983.
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