"...sounds like a fucked up baseball game"
Joel himself has gone on record as describing the album as "psychedelic bullshit"
"I was in a two-man group. We were heavy metal, we were going to destroy the world with amplification, we had titles like 'Godzilla', 'March of the Huns', 'Brain Invasion'. A lot of people think [I] just came out of the piano bar... I did a lot of heavy metal for a while. We had about a dozen gigs and nobody could stay in the room when we were playing. It was too loud. We drove people literally out of clubs."
—Billy Joel, Interview with Billy Joel by Dan Neer in 1985
Q: Is it true that after the failure of [your heavy metal band] Attila you tried to kill yourself by drinking a bottle of furniture polish?
A: That’s true. Yeah, I was suicidal. I was 21. It’s a tough age. Things hit you really hard. A relationship with a girl had ended and I was devastated, and then it didn’t work out with the recording we did, and I just figured the world didn’t need another failed musician. You take yourself so seriously—you’ve got your head so far up your ass you can’t see straight.
Q: But why did you use furniture polish?
A: I was just lookin’ for poison. I looked in my mother’s closet and there was bleach, and it had the skull and crossbones, and then there was furniture polish. And at the time I thought, Well, the furniture polish will probably taste better than the bleach, so I’ll drink the furniture polish. And all I ended up doing was farting furniture polish for a couple of days and polishing my mother’s chairs.
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Do you know where to get a copy of it?
ReplyDeleteIt's pretty hard to find and typically really expensive. It did, however, get reissued under Billy Joel's name as an album called "California Flash". Same recordings, way cheaper.
ReplyDeleteAbout ten million times better than anything else he has ever recorded.
ReplyDelete