through being cool

I'd like to dedicate this post to our cyber-buddies, the good people at Last Night An MP3 Saved My Wife, which closed it's doors last week. Our brethren in the fight against against accepted notions of what's "cool", I like to think they'd approve.

One thing you need to know is that there are NO guilty pleasures on DominoRally - these tracks are the ones that we are truly passionate about. Sometimes it'll be new stuff, sometimes old but whatever it is you have our cast-iron guarantee that whoever has posted it LOVES it. Case in point: Billy Joel's attempt to meld Bruce Springsteen to side 2 of 'Abbey Road'.

Billy Joel - Scenes From An Italian Restaurant


This is a brilliant song, a kind of mini-opera. It has been pointed out to me that I like songs where there are many different tunes going off at once, and that's what's going on here. After an almost Clayderman-esque piano intro, it's "A bottle of white, a bottle of red, perhaps a bottle of rose instead..." - there's even an accordian (at the time, Billy's band would set up a table on stage, break bread and raise a glass of wine to the audience - Beck Who??). The sort of sax break that normally makes me want to commit mass-murder comes in but it's so New Yoik, isn't it?

At 1.44 a great gear-change - to paraphrase what oxbow said in his Status Quo post, if you're not bouncing about in your seat at this point then you're a fool.

At 2.48 - the best bit! It makes me insanely happy everytime we get to the story of Brenda and Eddie (Ben Folds who??). This is also the bit where, in the Broadway production that always accompanies this song in my head, the lights suddenly go down, coming up just as suddenly as the rollerskating dancers start to zoom around Billy's piano.

At 6.00, we're back at the restaurant, the strings give me chills. It's quite, quite tasteless and shameless but I genuinely love it all the same.

We stole most of the ideas contained in "Scene's From An Italian Restaurant" wholesale for the Johnny Domino song "This One's For The Kid" - sorry, Billy! It too starts off like the final number of a Broadway show (can't you just see the dancers, high-kicking their way across the stage??) and it all get's a bit Starlight-Express at 3.15.

Johnny Domino - This One's For The Kid



Vist Billy Joel
Buy 'The Stranger' by Billy Joel
Visit Johnny Domino