Billy Joel: Songs From The Attic (Live) - 1981
You get two great early songs from his 1971 debut album, Cold Spring Harbor, in the beautifully romantic love song She's Got A Way and the lively Everybody Loves You Now.
From 1973's Piano Man we get the dramatic, semi-autobiographical The Ballad Of Billy The Kid, the lovely You're My Home and the titanic and moving drug taker's tale, Captain Jack. The latter is immeasurably superior here than in its 1973 studio version.
From 1974's Streetlife Serenade comes the muscular rock balladry of Streetlife Serenader and Los Angelenos and 1976's Turnstiles delivers the Spectoresque majesty of Say Goodbye To Hollywood, the pounding, energising rock of Miami 2017 (Seen The Lights Go Out On Broadway), the coked-out eulogy of I've Loved These Days and the simply sumptuous ballad, Summer, Highland Falls.
The sound quality is good throughout and maybe I should leave the last word to Joel himself, who wrote these sleeve notes that I have always loved -
"...however, Captain Jack plays with more more power and conviction when a roaring Philadelphia audience sets off a kind of internal explosion and the adrenalin screams through our veins - when Doug, David and Russell push their amplifiers into ear-bleeding overdrive and Richie floors the organ pedal like the accelerator on a '64 Corvette - when I feel piano strings snapping and breaking under the fingers in my left hand and Liberty literally tries to smash his drums into shiny metal bits of shrapnel. When we play Captain Jack we are actually committing and act of pure brutality.....passion was a critical deciding factor here. When we play I've Loved These Days we feel something akin to sensual pleasure...".
Quite.
