the rix mix

Super Bowl journal

1. Read Jeffrey Deever police procedural featuring loathesome serial killer.
2. Fell asleep.
3. Woke up. Had an Instant Breakfast with whole milk.
4. Checked e mail.
5. Looked at my space on myspace. One new friend.
6. Read more Deever.
7. Turned on TV, watched Lynyrd Skynyrd with two original members perform "Gimme Three Steps" on Craig Ferguson's post game show. Craig exclaimed, "that's real rock & roll."
8. Looked at Yahoo sports page to find out who won game.
9. The guy hired to sing The National Anthem at the Super Bowl was in Miami two days before the event & submitted to a 30 minute media session over a song expected to clock in at about 90 seconds. I wondered how many millions had been bet on the over/under.
10. Current temperature: 12 degrees.

Whenever I read the statistics of Billy Joel's career - albums sold, charting singles, tour earnings - I'm a bit surprised. He always seemed like a second tier talent, fine melodic sense, good singer, excellent grasp of song structure, strong bandleader. A confident, professional songwriter who made records, not a charismatic superstar. In all his biggest hits he was channeling or directly imitating some other performer or style. He did this even in his early band, The Hassles, a Rascals + Vanilla Fudge group. Later he simulated Aaron Copland, Paul McCartney, Elton, Springsteen, Randy Newman, Steely Dan, Paul Simon, Four Seasons, even a bit of Dylan. Most of songs reminded me of something else & sounded obviously derivative, but stripped of any musical idiosyncracies. "You May Be Right," "Innocent Man"" & "We Didn't Start the Fire" just annoyed me. I liked "Allentown" because the song had an awkward cyclical movement that wouldn't let you tune out the downbeat, observant lyrics. The only stumble in the lyric is when he looks for a dactyl & finds "chromium." But in 1982 I preferred rock & roll by dead end city kids to pop songs about them. The astounding worldwide scope of Joel's success has always puzzled me. Even driving ambition, hard work & good timing doesn't account for it. Maybe his greatest talent is convincing huge numbers of paying customers that he really is just a guy playing piano & singing. He looked almost modest compared to the other big arena acts of his 20 prime years - too long a time at the top to be an accident or a lucky break. I paid little attention to him, but it didn't matter - his music was an unavoidable part of the ambient cultural soundtrack. One couldn't get away from it.