I went into a record store the other day with my two young kids and my 7-year-old son took a shine to GLASS HOUSES by Billy Joel, to the cover, which depicts Mr. Joel in a leather jacket about to hurl a stone at a guess what and just maybe at his own small reflection in the glass. It made perfect sense to me that my son wanted it and it was cheap, why not? Wasn’t Billy Joel (before Keith Jarrett) the second reason I learned to play piano, the first being Cindy Hsu and her Für Elise and her Maple Leaf Rag and her glasses? So we took it home and played it and it even starts with the sound of breaking glass in case you weren’t convinced Mr. Joel wasn’t kidding. I enjoyed watching how much my son enjoyed it. He’s a good listener to records. He actually sits in front of the stereo and listens like it matters. Watching him listen to GLASS HOUSES I understood that album all over again as a pre-teen fetish: almost every song keeps its love object at a distance and the ones that don’t don’t make sense. The most incongruous song on the record is CLOSE TO THE BORDERLINE and it makes perfect sense that it’s so theatrically “tough'“ and has so little to do with every other song on the record: it’s actually about being an adult. The second worst song is the sleepy-weepy closer, THROUGH THE LONG NIGHT, another song about adulthood — and marriage? — that has no place here. The cover put us on notice about what to expect: pointless adolescent frustration organized into a rather too-too comprehensive theme. If one had to spell it out, the message the cover of GLASS HOUSES brings is this: Be careful who you throw shit at, kid — it might just be an older, highly diminished you.
And on the back of the record, well, well, well, there’s a picture of Mr. Joel looking out from inside, through the now broken glass, like, '“Well, did that make you feel as good as you thought it would? Didn’t, did it? Interesting.”
The bitch in me wants to say, “If only,” but I bought this album when I was a thirteen-year-old boy with a piano and some vague information about female anatomy and I loved it. If it had been more passionate, it would have scared me. If it had been more mature, I wouldn’t have understood it. So now I sit and wonder: how far have I really come in 46 long years? I’m beyond GLASS HOUSES but unsure in a whole new way about what men and women build when they meet, court, kiss, fuck, marry, mate and die. What that love IS.
The most wise and adult song about being thirteen is THIRTEEN by Big Star.
Won't you let me walk you home from school?
Won't you let me meet you at the pool?
Maybe Friday I can
Get tickets for the dance
And I'll take you, ooh ooh
Won't you tell your dad (to) get off my back?
Tell him what we said 'bout "Paint It Black"
Rock and roll is here to stay
Come inside where it's okay
And I'll shake you, ooh ooh
Won't you tell me what you're thinking of?
Would you be an outlaw for my love?
If it's over let me know
If it's nowhere I can go
I won't make you, ooh ooh
The reason this is wise is it lays bare the helplessness of the old situation with appropriately vanquishing grief. You don’t think when you hear this song a thirteen-year-old is singing. You know it’s a grown man singing in sympathy with his younger self, with sympathy for that self’s lack of real power, with admiration for his nerve, the nerve to believe rock and roll was here to stay, the nerve to ask, “Will you be an outlaw for my love?” The nerve to think he could even appear to be able to make anyone do anything. This is a song about someone wanting to connect who can’t and I bet Alex Chilton knew he was singing from his own grown inadequate self when he wrote it. That’s the difference between Alex Chilton and Billy Joel in these artifacts. Chilton knows he hasn’t grown up. Joel thinks he has. Joel thinks the yearning of a teen is the same as the yearning of a man; in his case, maybe it was. As for Chilton, he knows he still doesn’t have, as he writes THIRTEEN, the tools to connect he thought he’d have by now but he does have wisdom. He knows boys yearn for girls (or boys, or both) and men yearn to yearn like they did when they were young. He was 24 when he knew that, and he died at 59.
At the end of the day, though, what I wish for my son, the listener to songs, certainly isn’t the oversexed impotence of Billy Joel or the melancholy of Alex Chilton, God bless him. They’re both using time machines, in their ways, and the rule was when we started, I remember: NO TIME MACHINES! So what I want my son to listen to as he grows and forms without knowing he’s forming it his own way of wishing for big love is THE PROMISE by Tracy Chapman.
If you Wait for me Then I'll Come for you Although I've traveled far I always hold a place for you in my heart If you Think of me If you miss me once in awhile Then I'll return to you I'll return and fill that space in your heart Remembering Your touch Your kiss Your warm embrace I'll find my way back to you If you'll be waiting If you dream of me Like I dream of you In a place that's warm and dark In a place where I can feel the beating of your heart Remembering Your touch Your kiss Your warm embrace I'll find my way back to you If you'll be waiting I've longed for you And I have desired To see your face, your smile To be with you wherever you are Remembering Your touch Your kiss Your warm embrace I'll find my way back to you Please say you'll be waiting Together again It would feel so good to be In your arms Where all my journeys end If you can make a promise If it's one that you can keep I vow to come for you If you wait for me And say you'll hold A place For me In your heart A place for me in your heart A place for me in your heart A place for me in your heart
It’s the purest love song I know. It doesn’t claim more strength than it has, it doesn’t strut or flex, but it has strength. It hasn’t already given up and stand there begging for you to sympathize with its loss, to give it credit for a thing that’s already happened. It offers plainly in the present and asks plainly in the present and stays there. It doesn’t overpraise. It just says Hi, I’m ready to give this, this much, and asks if an arrangement can be made. It wants a good deal but it wants a good deal. It’s hopeful but wise, specific and expansive, realistic and infinitely extending on the tightrope of its own sincerity and willingness to engage in a conversation it knows it can’t control. It asks a big question.