Gretta Ray Has a Way

Redeeming Billy Joel and the Splendors of Hitting Rock Bottom

A friend of mine who lives in Los Angeles was meditating with an app that included a cover of Billy Joel’s “Vienna” by a 24-year-old Australian woman named Gretta Ray, just piano, vocals, and a voice that sounds soothing for a meditator and anesthetized to the fully sentient. It is an astonishing performance, surpassing the original and leaving us to confront the flaws of its creator along with our own.  Like many music critics, I have a Billy Joel problem.  In childhood, I loved him, and the craft is unmistakable in ballads like “She’s Got a Way,” self-hating incel anthems like “Captain Jack” or “Big Shot,” which I still find hysterically funny, and which I belted out on the piano the first time I was invited to a party at Elaine’s.   This is not about the problem in the obvious deterioration in drivel like “Uptown Girl” or “We Didn’t Start the Fire,” but how much you buy it and whether it squares with your experience.  I love many versions of sentimentality.  I love rom coms and the Great American Songbook.  “Every time we say goodbye, I die a little / Every time we say goodbye, I wonder why a little.”  Cole Porter was his own factory of lines like this, and you’d have to have a heart of stone to resist its charms.  But Ira Gershwin also rhymed “the man I love” with “and so all else above.”  Ira only collaborated with the best, so a weak line with a strong melody—melodists came no stronger than his brother George or Vernon Duke—can get away with murder.

Now we must descend to go back to Billy Joel.  My childhood memories of The Stranger—the Joel album, not the Camus novel, though they both speak of a kind of emptiness—are still tender.  The trouble began at 17, when I took a job as a restaurant pianist, where I worked four-hour shifts.  Because I lack classical technique and I am equipped with lousy posture, these gigs became physically painful.  This was 1990-1991 in Dallas, and the most requested songs were “Memory,” “New York, New York,” and “Piano Man.”  I had never minded “Piano Man” before, but now its sentimentality filled me with contempt.  I was contemplating why Bill Evans and Glenn Gould, with the agony that accompanied their pianism, turned to drugs, and why I didn’t, so was left with this Hunger Artist routine.  “Man, what are you doing here?” asks Billy Joel.  Good question.  The song didn’t know my pain, and wasn’t even honest about the whole endeavor since it valued pleasing the crowd over something real.

But the more I think about what’s wrong with Billy Joel, I must confront what’s wrong with myself.  The guy has great craft when he wants to use it.  He and I both love The Beatles, and I hear that influence in the haunting melody of “She’s Always a Woman,” though the lyrics are a poor man’s “Just Like a Woman,” and, in some ways, it is even more of a problem than Dylan’s beautiful but cruel classic.  “She’s Always a Woman” makes a general statement about a gender.  It’s a great pop hook, but he’s basically just checking the anatomy and making that be the final summation. Billy, they’re not all the same.  A song of praise for the generic female, from an expert witness. Billy Joel is only an expert on what Billy Joel wants, and we can feed into it or not. He has not been creative or introspective for a long time.  He has not released an album in 30 years and can still fill Madison Square, busting out the oldies.

But this leads us to “Vienna,” which is not only beautifully crafted, but lyrically honest.  Billy Joel’s father abandoned him at 8, and he chased him down when he was in his 20s.  Joel senior was a Jewish refugee from the country where Hitler was born, then went back there for some reason that the author of “It’s a Matter of Trust” never figured out.  “Who knows, but when the truth is told, that you can get what you want or you can just get old.”  This song is on the album called The Stranger, and maybe he and Camus had something common.  Camus opened The Myth of Sisyphus proclaiming, “There is but one truly serious philosophical problem, and that is suicide.”  Billy Joel tried it in his early 20s, around the time he confronted his deadbeat dad and had a psychedelic group that didn’t make it.  And with all that success, he’s still that guy.  He went through a stage where he, favorite son of Hicksville, was crashing cars into trees in his good old Long Island, marrying 23-year-old models, getting trashed, not writing, just crowd pleasing.

I can’t judge someone else’s emptiness too harshly if I’m going to be honest with myself.  Billy Joel’s sweaty unctuousness was palpable, there is a reason he brought joy to so many people, which had to be dominated by those who make no distinction between sentimentality and sentiment.  Which brings me to this remarkable cover of “Vienna,” as good as Joel will ever get, by this young woman who strips it of its neediness completely.  She is blonde and remote, like Nico, except that she has euphony, a natural musicality that is harder to find these days with the people who break through.  She’s just playing the piano and singing—no spectacle but the music itself.  You get the words and music without the sweaty guy who will self-destruct if you don’t love him right now.  My friend found this on a meditation app.  The content of the song is the opposite of meditation.  It is Billy Joel seeking out his father in Vienna, a place that gave us the best music before the worst human calamity, to get answers, which he doesn’t get.   He puts out the song in 1977, the b side of “Just the Way You Are.”  “Just The Way You Are,” which contains a sweet Phil Woods alto solo, is simple—don’t ever change, baby.  “Vienna” is the messed-up truth.  You will never get answers, and all the women and drugs and booze in the world won’t make this right.  They could do the opposite.  And this young Australian woman takes it all in stride, even in stride piano.  She’s heading to the meditation app, where people will try to clear their minds of whatever is messing them up and find their chi or whatever, while the content of this moment of Zen is about how nothing will ever be made whole.  But the chords follow each other with such persuasion.  This is how it is, and this is how you are going to hear it.  Is Billy Joel overly maligned by music critics like me or overrated by the people that made him rich and famous?  This Billy Joel without the Billy Joel is stunning.  I have been playing on the piano and singing it over and over, and its devastation continues to be powerful.  It shows what he could really do if he could just tell an honest story with no phony resolution and put those chords together exactly where they need to be.  There’s an accordion solo on the track that is meant to invoke Weil and Brecht—the sound of Vienna itself—that is the only corny imperfection on the track, but that is gone in the Gretta Ray version. The song is over in a few minutes.   After that, Billy Joel is stuck with himself, just like you are stuck with yourself.  This is a guy who nearly killed himself because he wasn’t successful.  This is your meditation guide, but only in this version. Gretta Ray has a way about her.

A few years ago, I was doing research on Buddhism and was led to an app called Head Space. I was instructed to think about embracing everything in my life and accepting it.  Dear Reader, I was in a public place, and when I tried to do this, I started crying and could not stop.  I never finished Head Space, and I never did figure out how to embrace everything.   I’m Sisyphus, pushing up that boulder.  I’m the piano man, hustling for tips.  No one really knows anything.  I am a stranger afraid, in world I never made.  We are thrust into this world, and we only have control over so much, until we have no control over anything.  It’s a pretty bleak proposition, and “Vienna” was unusually blunt about it.  I wish I could meditate with my friend in LA, but it does not come naturally for me.

You've got your passion
You've got your pride
But don't you know
That only fools are satisfied?
Dream on
But don't imagine they'll all come true

The guy who wrote this is not the voice on the meditation app.  I love this song and its cover, but I know too much to get too chill with it.

Leonard Cohen thought that Billy Joel’s version of “Light as the Breeze” was better than his own, but then being Leonard Cohen means not being too satisfied with yourself, which is very un-Billy Joel.  “You Want it Darker,” sang Leonard at the end.

Do you think this is dark?  Do you want it darker?  The good folks at Substack are updating their technology that will allow me give you a multimedia post that brought me to a place even darker than this song, premium subscribers only.  Stay tuned…