Billy Joel, "Allentown"
Damn. Don't know what happened to the cover art for this song...but who cares--if you want to look at pretty pictures, go the my DeviantArt page!
Anywho, Billy Joel is one of my alltime favorite singer/songwriters: he's an amazing pianist, a great singer with a wonderfully powerful soulful voice, and--most importantly--one hell of a songwriter. I'm a big fan of narrative songs and artists such as John Prine, Bob Dylan, Neal Fox, and Warren Zevon have released some of my favorite storytelling jams. The stories of Sam Stone, Roland the Headless Thompson Gunner, and James Lewis (the Kid With Two First Names) are as gripping as any novel--maybe even more so, because they all have wonderful tunes to back them up.
One such song that both tells a great (if incredibly depressing) tale is, of course, Billy Joel's "Allentown" (from 1982's The Nylon Curtain--my favorite Joel album--or Greatest Hits Volume 2). I've been through Allentown, Pennsylvania--the decrepit old eastern-PA coaltown in which the song's set--and...well, these days it's not quite the post-industrial wasteland of despair, unemployment, and hopelessness that it was in the early '80s (which is when Joel wrote and recorded the song), but it's certainly a place scarred deeply by its industrial heritage. In 1997 when I passed through on my way to new York City, I saw the familiar sight of rusting steel mills and mining equipment looming on the horizon like the skeletons of biblical behemoths: the dead gods of a past age. The homes of those gods' former slaves are all permanently smokestained and sagging beneath the weight of industrial exhaustion and post-industrial depression. Though Allentown has begun to recover--today it might even be a pretty, clean place like Pittsburgh--the wounds of its barbaric mining past are still visible.
Which is why a song like "Allentown" is still viable today: its speaks of a past that's still there over your shoulder. Well, it is if you're from Allentown or anywhere in southwestern Pennsylvania (Fayette County reprazentin' right here, yo!). It speaks of what my grandfather went through from the 1940s through the 1960s: born and bred a coalminer, after the mine closed down he struggled for decades doing odd jobs because he simply wasn't trained to do anything but grub for coal in the hateful guts of the earth. Of course, even had he been a jack-of-all-trades, there still weren't any other jobs to be had in southwestern PA. It was a singularly depressing time.
Joel has done a great job of encapsulating all that what-are-we-going-to-do-now? depression, the sense of betrayal by their employers, that former miners like my grandfather and former steelworkers experienced after the deaths of their respective industries. But what makes "Allentown" a stonecold jam despite its somber subject matter is Joel's masterful melody and the little touches of industrial percussion that tint the song with an aural suggestion of the blue-collar Golden Age's steelyards and coal-tipples. You can dance to this song, or sit back and nod along soberly to it. It's both uplifting and spiritually crushing. But that's a testament to Joel's power as both a songwriter and musician.
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