Tuesday 9pm: Feature LP: Billy Joel – The Stranger (1977)

The Stranger is the fifth studio album by American recording artist Billy Joel, released on September 29, 1977 by Columbia Records. It was the first of Joel’s albums to be produced by Phil Ramone, whom he would go on to work with for all of his albums up until his 1986 album, The Bridge.

Recorded within the span of three weeks, The Stranger was released a year following Joel’s previous studio effort, Turnstiles, which had sold modestly and peaked low on the US charts, prompting Columbia to consider dropping Joel if his next release did not sell well. Joel wanted the album to feature his newly-formed touring band that had formed during the production of Turnstiles, which consisted of drummer Liberty DeVitto, bass player Doug Stegmeyer and saxophonist Richie Cannata. Seeking out a new producer, he first turned to veteran Beatles producer George Martin before coming across and settling on Ramone, whose name he had seen on albums by other artists such as Paul Simon.

Spending six weeks at  No. 2 on the US Billboard 200, The Stranger is considered Joel’s critical and commercial breakthrough. Four singles were released in the US, all of which became Top 40 hits on the Billboard Hot 100 charts, including Movin’ Out (Anthony’s Song) and She’s Always A Woman (both no. 17). “Just the Way You Are”, the album’s breakthrough single which was inspired by Joel’s wife at the time, Elizabeth Weber, peaked at No. 3, aided by a performance on an episode Saturday Night Live and 2 Grammy awards in 1978 for both Record of the Year and Song of the Year. “Only the Good Die Young”, a song about a boy coming on to a Catholic woman, initially sold poorly but received a performance boost following apparent controversy surrounding the lyrics’ subject matter, and ultimately peaked at 24 on the US charts. Other songs from the album, such as “Scenes from an Italian Restaurant” and “Vienna”, have become staple songs of his career and are frequently performed in his live shows. It remains his best-selling non-compilation album to date, and surpassed Bridge Over Troubled Water to become Columbia’s best-selling album release, going on to pass over 10 million units worldwide. It was ranked at  No.  70 on Rolling Stone’s list of the 500 greatest albums of all time. Wikipedia

1. “Movin’ Out (Anthony’s Song)” 3:30
2. “The Stranger” 5:10
3. “Just the Way You Are” 4:52
4. “Scenes from an Italian Restaurant” 7:37
5. “Vienna” 3:34
6. “Only the Good Die Young” 3:55
7. “She’s Always a Woman” 3:21
8. “Get It Right the First Time” 3:57
9. “Everybody Has a Dream” 6:38

Tuesday 6pm: Artist Countdown – Billy Joel Top 55 @billyjoel

William Martin “Billy” Joel (born May 9, 1949) is an American pianist, singer-songwriter, and composer. Since releasing his first hit song, “Piano Man,” in 1973, Joel has become the sixth best-selling recording artist and the third best-selling solo artist in the United States. His compilation album Greatest Hits Vol. 1 & 2 is the third best-selling album in the United States by discs shipped.

Joel had Top 40 hits in the 1970s, 1980s, and 1990s, achieving 33 Top 40 hits in the United States, all of which he wrote himself. He is also a six-time Grammy Award winner who has been nominated for 23 Grammy Awards throughout his career. He has sold over 150 million records worldwide.

Joel was inducted into the Songwriters Hall of Fame (1992), the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame (1999), and the Long Island Music Hall of Fame (2006). In 2001, Joel received the Johnny Mercer Award from the Songwriters Hall of Fame. In 2013, Joel received the Kennedy Center Honors, the nation’s highest honor for influencing American culture through the arts. With the exception of the 2007 songs “All My Life” and “Christmas in Fallujah,” Joel stopped writing and releasing pop/rock material after 1993’s River of Dreams. However, he continues to tour, and he plays songs from all eras of his solo career in his concerts. – Wikipedia

1	The River of Dreams
2	Uptown Girl
3	We Didn’t Start the Fire
4	My Life
5	Tell Her About It
6	You’re Only Human (Second Wind)
7	All About Soul
8	I Go to Extremes
9	Just the Way You Are
10	Honesty
11	An Innocent Man
12	It’s Still Rock and Roll to Me
13	All Shook Up
14	She’s Always a Woman
15	The Longest Time
16	A Matter of Trust
17	You May Be Right
18	Leave a Tender Moment Alone
19	Movin’ Out (Anthony’s Song)
20	Modern Woman
21	Allentown
22	Pressure
23	Piano Man
24	The Downeaster ‘Alexa’
25	Don’t Ask Me Why
26	And So It Goes
27	This Is the Time
28	Keeping the Faith
29	Big Shot
30	Lullabye (Goodnight, My Angel)
31	Leningrad
32	The Night Is Still Young
33	The Entertainer
34	To Make You Feel My Love
35	She’s Got a Way
36	Say Goodbye to Hollywood
37	Goodnight Saigon
38	Baby Grand (with Ray Charles)
39	Back in the U.S.S.R.
40	Only the Good Die Young
41	Sometimes a Fantasy
42	The Stranger
43	James
44	Travelin’ Prayer
45	No Man’s Land
46	This Night
47	That’s Not Her Style
48	Hey Girl
49	A Room of Our Own
50	Scandinavian Skies
51	All for Leyna
52	Shameless
53	Until the Night
54	Worse Comes to Worst
55	The Ballad of Billy the Kid

Tuesday 8pm: Feature Artist – Billy Joel

William Martin Joel (born May 9, 1949) is an American singer-songwriter and pianist. Commonly nicknamed the “Piano Man”, he has written several pop songs, many of which focus on the piano as a primary instrument.

Born in the Bronx, New York, and raised on Long Island, New York (both places which have heavily influenced his songs), Joel took part in two short-lived bands, The Hassles and Attila, before beginning a solo career in 1971 with his first solo release, Cold Spring Harbor. In 1972, Joel grabbed the attention of Columbia Records after a live radio performance of the song “Captain Jack” became popular in the West Coast, prompting him to sign a new record deal with the company and release his second solo album, Piano Man, which contained his first hit single of the same name. After releasing two more albums, Streetlife Serenade and Turnstiles, Joel released his critical and commercial breakthrough album, The Stranger, in 1977; this album became Columbia’s best-selling release, selling over 10 million copies and spawning several hit singles, including “Movin’ Out (Anthony’s Song)”, “Just the Way You Are”, and “Only The Good Die Young”. A year later, Joel’s album 52nd Street was his first album to peak at #1 on the Billboard 200 charts. After receiving slack from critics for being soft and releasing too many slow ballad songs, Joel released his seventh studio album, Glass Houses, in an attempt to further establish himself as a rock and roll artist. His next album, The Nylon Curtain, was released in 1981, and stemmed from a desire from Joel to create more lyrically and melodically ambitious music. An Innocent Man, released in 1983, served as an homage to genres of music which Joel had grown up with in the 1950s, such as Rhythm and Blues and doo-wop. In 1993, Joel released his twelfth and final solo album, The River of Dreams. He went on to release Fantasies and Delusions, a 2001 album featuring classical compositions composed by Joel and performed by British-Korean pianist Richard Hyung-ki Joo. Joel also provided voiceover work in 1988 for the 27th animated Disney film, Oliver & Company, in which he provided the voice of the character Dodger.

Across the 20 years of his solo career, Joel produced 33 Top 40 hits in the US, all of which he wrote himself, and three of which (“It’s Still Rock and Roll to Me”, “Tell Her About It”, and “We Didn’t Start the Fire”) managed to top the charts. He is also a six-time Grammy Award winner who has been nominated for 23 Grammy Awards. With over 150 million records sold worldwide, he is one of the best-selling artists of all time as well as the sixth best-selling recording artist and the third best-selling solo artist in the United States. His 1985 compilation album, Greatest Hits Vol. 1 & 2, is one of the best-selling albums in the US.

Joel was inducted into the Songwriters Hall of Fame (1992), the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame (1999),[8] and the Long Island Music Hall of Fame (2006). In 2001, Joel received the Johnny Mercer Award from the Songwriters Hall of Fame.[9] In 2013, Joel received the Kennedy Center Honors, the nation’s highest honor for influencing American culture through the arts. Since the advent of his solo career, Joel has held a successful touring career, holding live performances across the globe in which he sings several of his written songs. In 1987, he became one of the very first artists to hold a rock and roll tour in the Soviet Union following the country’s alleviation of the ban on rock and roll music. Despite retiring from writing and releasing pop music following the release of The River of Dreams (with the exception of the two singles “All My Life” and “Christmas in Fallujah”, which were released in 2002 and 2007, respectively), he continues to tour, with the Madison Square Garden in Manhattan frequently serving as a performance spot. Joel has been in several relationships, including marriages to Elizabeth Weber Small, model Christie Brinkley, and Katie Lee, all of whom he divorced from; he is currently married, since 2015, to Alexis Roderick, his 4th spouse. – Wikipedia

Monday 10pm: Debut LP Lounge with Willie B

Tonight, April 30 at 10pm Eastern time (US) RadioMaxMusic will be presenting the first, (hastily assembled) episode of “The LP Lounge”. A spin-off of my regular show The Vinyl Resting Place. Our plan is to play complete LPs, one side at a time – interrupting the music only as needed to turn the record over.

These will be the actual vinyl LPs, purchased over the counter, at the time of their release. In most cases – the only way to hear the particular versions we offer, is to have those original LPs. You see, while the songs, and even the specific recordings you’ll hear have been re-issued in some digital format – the LPs we are spinning are of the original quadraphonic releases of these albums.

Tonight we serve up The Isley Brothers 3+3 and Billy Joel’s Piano Man. – I think we’ll have time for a bonus track from Mr. Joel as well.

Don’t let that term “Quadraphonic” Put you off – they sound just fine in Stereo, and, if you listen through headphones, you’ll even get some semblance of the surround field.

You can hear us through the pop-up player on the website http://www.radiomaxmusic.com, or via the TuneIn app. There are rumors we are available through Itunes as well.

So why dedicate a show to the LP, especially after discovering that some of my younger associates were unclear as to what the term LP meant? Well, perhaps a bit of a history lesson;

Record companies produced collections of 78 rpm records by one performer or of one type of music in specially assembled albums as early as 1908. Odeon is often said to have pioneered the “album” in 1909 when it released the “Nutcracker Suite” by Tchaikovsky on 4 double-sided discs in a specially-designed package. However, Deutsche Grammophon had produced an album for its complete recording of the opera Carmen in the previous year. By the time the second world war came around these record sets featured their own colorful paper covers and were in both 10-inch and 12-inch sizes, and could include either a collection of related popular songs, either by performer or style, or extended length classical music, including complete operas and symphonies. The result; when the LP came along and included multiple tracks, the name “album” came along too.

Both the microgroove LP 33 1/3 rpm record and the 45 rpm single records are made from vinyl plastic that is flexible and “unbreakable” (in normal use).

In 1930, RCA Victor launched the first commercially available vinyl long-playing record, marketed as “Program Transcription” discs. These revolutionary discs were designed for playback at 33 1/3 rpm and were pressed on a 16″ diameter plastic disc. These were primarily used for Radio – programs of 30 min duration could be stored or distributed for rebroadcast.

Vinyl’s had a lower surface noise level than the commonly used shellac and was not nearly as fragile. Of course some 78 rpm records were pressed in vinyl instead of shellac, particularly the six-minute 12-inch records produced by V-Disc for distribution to US troops in World War II.

Beginning in 1939 Dr. Peter Goldmark and his staff undertook exhaustive efforts to address problems of recording and playing back narrow grooves and developing an inexpensive, reliable consumer playback system. In 1948, the 12-inch Long Play (LP) 33 1/3 rpm microgroove record album was introduced by the Columbia Record Company at a dramatic New York press conference on June 21, 1948. In February 1949, RCA Victor released the first 45 rpm single, 7 inches in diameter, with a large center hole to accommodate an automatic play mechanism on the changer, so a stack of singles would drop down one record at a time automatically after each play.

Monday 9pm: Feature LP: Billy Joel – 52nd Street (1978)

52nd Street is the sixth studio album by American singer-songwriter Billy Joel, released in 1978. It was the first of four Joel albums to top the Billboard charts, and it earned him two Grammys. Three songs reached the Top 40 in the United States, contributing to the album’s success: “My Life” (#3), “Big Shot” (#14), and “Honesty” (#24). It was similarly well received by critics, earning the 1979 Grammy for Album of the Year. This Grammy was presented to its producer, Phil Ramone. Upon Ramone’s death, 52nd Street’s Album of the Year Grammy was passed on to Joel. Additionally, the album is notable for being the first to be commercially released on the compact disc format, reaching store shelves on October 1, 1982 in Japan (though it wasn’t the first work to be pressed on the format, being predated by Richard Strauss’s An Alpine Symphony and ABBA’s The Visitors).

The title is a reference to 52nd Street, which was one of New York City’s jazz centers in the middle of the century. Joel’s label was headquartered on 52nd Street (in the CBS Building) at the time of the album’s release. The studio where recording took place was also on 52nd Street, a block away from the CBS Building. – Wikipedia

Tuesday 11pm: Feature LP: Billy Joel – The Stranger (1977) @billyjoel

The Stranger is the fifth studio album by American singer-songwriter Billy Joel, released on September 29, 1977, by Columbia Records. While his four previous albums had been moderately successful, The Stranger became Joel’s true critical and commercial breakthrough, spending six weeks at number 2 on the US albums chart. Considered his magnum opus, it remains his best-selling non-compilation album to date, and was ranked number 70 on Rolling Stone’s list of the 500 greatest albums of all time.

Click here for Album contents on Wikipedia

Wednesday 7pm: Great Soul Performances 2: The 80’s with Bobby Jay

Once again it’s Wednesday; mid-week, (you know what we call it) and time for “Great Soul Performances 2: The 80s.” On the playlist: Michael Jackson, the Manhattan Transfer, Luther Vandross, Dynasty, Gene Chandler, Donna Summer, Debbie Harry & Blondie, the Capris, Billy Joel, Stephanie Mills and others. The show begins at 7PM ET, 6PM CT, 5PM MT & 4PM PT. I’ll be looking for you later this evening for “Great Soul Performances 2: The 80s” at the home of the greatest hits of the 60s, 70s & 80s, RadioMaxMusic.Com. Happy You Know What Day. Later ‘Gator!