If Brenda and Eddie Hadn't Divorced...
Mar. 14th, 2019 09:58 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
elrhiarhodanThey'd be grandparents by now.
Okay, so that was sort of random. Sorry (not).
I was listening to Billy Joel (as one is wont to do when one lives where I live and is feeling nostalgic), and Scenes from an Italian Restaurant started to play. You know this song, right?
But those aren't really the lyrics that stick with you, it's the middle, the "Ballad of Brenda and Eddie" that everyone really remembers:
As the song goes:
I was ten in 1975, and twelve when the song was released in 1977. That year, it played so constantly and was so much part of the Long Island zeitgeist that people swore they knew the real Brenda and Eddie. The "Village Green" and the "Parkway Diner" are/were real places in the Levittown/Hickville area (the Village Green still exists, I'm pretty sure that the Parkway Diner closed in some time in the late 1970s). But that's beside the point.
What really grabbed me when I was listening was that it's now 2019, forty-four years after Brenda and Eddie married and divorced. If they'd stayed married, they'd probably have had grandchildren by now. Maybe even great-grandchildren. They'd been part of the last generation that married young, had every expectation of having a better life than their parents, but failed miserably.
Set the song in the 1950s, no one would have been horrified at the pair getting hitched right out of high school - the horror would have been about the divorce. But a mere twenty years later, the divorce is the most blase moment of the song.
A lot of people who think they know a lot about music say that Billy Joel is second-rate, that he's nothing compared to Bruce Springsteen. Those people can go squat for all I care. Bruce and Billy might be contemporaries, but they are completely different kinds of musicians. Bruce is a rocker, Billy is a song man. One rages against the world, the other mourns the human condition.
Thus endth the lesson.
Okay, so that was sort of random. Sorry (not).
I was listening to Billy Joel (as one is wont to do when one lives where I live and is feeling nostalgic), and Scenes from an Italian Restaurant started to play. You know this song, right?
A bottle of white, a bottle of red
Perhaps a bottle of rose instead
We'll get a table near the street
In our old familiar place
You and I, face to face
But those aren't really the lyrics that stick with you, it's the middle, the "Ballad of Brenda and Eddie" that everyone really remembers:
Brenda and Eddie were the popular steadies
And the king and the queen of the prom
Riding around with the car top down and the radio on
Nobody looked any finer
Or was more of a hit at the Parkway Diner
We never knew we could want more than that out of life
Surely Brenda and Eddie would always know how to survive
As the song goes:
They lived for a while in a very nice style
But it's always the same in the end
They got a divorce as a matter of course
And they parted the closest of friends
I was ten in 1975, and twelve when the song was released in 1977. That year, it played so constantly and was so much part of the Long Island zeitgeist that people swore they knew the real Brenda and Eddie. The "Village Green" and the "Parkway Diner" are/were real places in the Levittown/Hickville area (the Village Green still exists, I'm pretty sure that the Parkway Diner closed in some time in the late 1970s). But that's beside the point.
What really grabbed me when I was listening was that it's now 2019, forty-four years after Brenda and Eddie married and divorced. If they'd stayed married, they'd probably have had grandchildren by now. Maybe even great-grandchildren. They'd been part of the last generation that married young, had every expectation of having a better life than their parents, but failed miserably.
Set the song in the 1950s, no one would have been horrified at the pair getting hitched right out of high school - the horror would have been about the divorce. But a mere twenty years later, the divorce is the most blase moment of the song.
A lot of people who think they know a lot about music say that Billy Joel is second-rate, that he's nothing compared to Bruce Springsteen. Those people can go squat for all I care. Bruce and Billy might be contemporaries, but they are completely different kinds of musicians. Bruce is a rocker, Billy is a song man. One rages against the world, the other mourns the human condition.
Thus endth the lesson.
Brender & Eddie
Date: 2019-03-14 05:01 pm (UTC)I do remember that Billy Joel's 52nd Street was the first album of his that I ever bought with my own money. I was babysitting and was allowed to listen to the music there and I think Billy Joel was the only name I recognized in their record collection and I just listened to that album over and over and decided I needed to buy a copy for myself. (That would have been the very early 80s so it wasn't a new album at the time. I've always been behind the times.)
Re: Brender & Eddie
Date: 2019-03-14 05:14 pm (UTC)I think that it might have gotten a lot more play locally (I grew up on Long Island, not too far from where Billy Joel had lived). But at 7+ minutes, it's not radio friendly - then, BoRhap wasn't either!
no subject
Date: 2019-03-14 05:43 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2019-03-14 05:56 pm (UTC)The Boss is THE BOSS for a reason, but I just hate when people throw shade on Billy because he's a songman, not a rocker. It's like saying the Mick is superior to Elton. They are two completely different species.
no subject
Date: 2019-03-17 04:24 am (UTC)♥