Billy Joel
“Got To Begin Again”
Cold Spring Harbor
1971, Family Productions
This Exit: In the suburbs on Long Island, Billy Joel is the working-class bard. He is what Springsteen is to New Jersey and Woody Guthrie to the rest of America—a hero and a heritage. His legacy will likely select 1977’s The Stranger as his best. In my opinion, his best is 1983’s An Innocent Man, while his “coolest” is 1980’s Glass Houses (“If Johnny Cash is ‘The Man In Black,’” wrote Chuck Klosterman in Sex, Drugs, And Cocoa Puffs: A Low Culture Manifesto, “then Billy Joel is ‘The Man In Burnt Orange’”), with 1986’s The Bridge his most mature. None of these albums, however, are brilliant. The least known Billy Joel album is his first, Cold Spring Harbor, released in 1971 to minimal fanfare and a now famous mastering error that slowed everything down, altering the sound of Joel’s voice and nearly doubling the length of each song. Listen It contains the original version of the classic “She’s Got A Way,” a subsequent live recording of which topped the charts in 1981 when it was reintroduced on Songs In The Attic, a collection of live material. I’ve outgrown my dependency for his melodramatic pop ballads, and my connection with his vast songbook has been reduced to nostalgia, but there are moments on Cold Spring Harbor (like “Turn Around,” “Got To Begin Again,” and the instrumental “Nocturne”) when the twenty-two-year-old songwriter accompanying himself on piano (the overdubs were introduced along with the corrected speed when the album was remastered in 1983 for Columbia Records) displays a bleakness and apparent lack of concern for FM radio hit-making and pop idolatry that is perennial, and like nothing he ever recorded again.
