52nd Street

So that was the, that was the...

And I had a couple of Billy Joel, like 52nd Street.

There was a couple of eight tracks that I had that I used to play the hell out of, um, until the tapes broke, and then y- you know, start all over again.

What, what else is on that top 10 list? I mean, I know Fleetwood Mac is at the top of that, but, like, that was...

and that suddenly became a problem I felt qualified to solve.

So, I borrowed a cassette copy of 52nd Street, and I studied it.

Not listened casually, studied.

I listened hard to that record because apparently teenage Dave had developed a sophisticated romantic strategy.

And that raises a question I think is worth asking.

Does it matter why a record first gets our attention? A movie soundtrack? A girlfriend? A boyfriend? A friend friend? A commercial? A cool jacket? Somebody we want to impress? If it gets us to actually listen, maybe the doorway doesn't matter as much as what happens after we walk through it.

I didn't become a lifelong Billy Joel fanatic because of those four dates, but 52nd Street became permanently attached to a very specific version of me, Junior Year Dave, cassette in hand, trying to reverse engineer romance with a piano.

Music is good at preserving versions of ourselves we'd otherwise lose.

He had an album in the 70s.

He's called 52nd Street.

And there was from a line in the song.

It goes something, something, something on 42nd Street.

Ramone was not an obscure producer hired to conduct an experiment.

He had produced Paul Simon's Grammy-winning Still Crazy After All These Years and helped transform Billy Joel's career with The Stranger and 52nd Street.

Herb Alpert had suggested him because Karen needed somebody accomplished enough that she would not simply recreate Richard Carpenter with a different face.

Ramone's approach could hardly have been more different from Richard's.

Oh, wow.

Wasn't 52nd Street the first ever CD commercially produced? The

first pop CD that was manufactured in Japan was 52nd Street,

yes.

Wow.

Phenomenal album.

Follows it up with 52nd Street in 78.

That was the Grammy Album of the Year for the Grammys.

And number one, both peaking and year-end.

So the producers landed on Billy Joel's 1970 hit, My Life.

Of course, the piano-driven declaration of autonomy from his critically acclaimed album, 52nd Street, one of his best albums.

The song had already spent time in the top five of the Billboard Hot 100, and so they thought it was a perfect fit.

But there was one practical catch.