“All summer, I was just taking in a lot of things – friends who would be splitting up, and others who would be getting together. The reason I called the album The Stranger wasn’t just because of the song. Each song on it seemed to have some kind of strangeness, some kind of alienation about it.”

Billy Joel – from the liner notes of The Stranger – 30th Anniversary Edition

The Stranger isn’t my favorite Billy Joel album – that honor goes these days to Turnstiles (1976) with Songs in the Attic (1981) being a close second. The Stranger is however, the first album that turned my head (and then the doctor told me to cough, weird) and made me a quote/unquote Billy Joel fan.

The Stranger marked a turning point in Billy Joel’s career and finally notched a successful album on Joel’s musical resume, which was a good thing. According to Joel, it’s likely that he would have been dropped by Columbia if the album had been a failure.

Prior to release, The Stranger was in line to become Joel’s fifth album without a major hit. But as we all know, the exact opposite happened, and The Stranger was a massive hit, and even picked up a Grammy Award for “Just The Way You Are.”

Sony/Legacy celebrates the 30th anniversary (although the celebration comes a bit late) with a special CD/DVD box set that features the obligatory remastered version of the original album, and a boatload of juicy extras, including a bonus live CD featuring a disc worth of Billy and band recorded live at Carnegie Hall in 1977.

An additional DVD features Billy’s famous 1978 appearance on the Old Grey Whistle Test, a longtime favorite in the trading circles, commercially available for the first time. The DVD also includes a couple of promotional videos, and a 30 minute documentary covering the making of the album.

Sure, there are the expected essays and remembrances as well, and that’s where this set really shines, is with the expanded material and extras. It’s unlikely that anyone will be buying this set to hear a remastered version of an album that they already own – you’ll be buying this set for the live stuff – that is the rock and roll carrot that dangles with this set, for sure.

It would have been nice to get the complete Carnegie Hall show, and it’s hard to understand why that didn’t happen. With Joel opening up the vaults quite a bit in recent years, hopefully we’ll get a proper commercial release of a full-length Billy Joel show from “back in the day” sometime soon. There are certainly plenty of great radio broadcasts from over the years as a start, and who knows what other treasures are sitting in the vaults.

All you need to know:

Overall, from a content standpoint, the set pales slightly by comparison to the similar Legacy box set treatment given to Bruce Springsteen’s Born To Run, a set that featured a great full-length E. Street Band gig from the time period, AND a 90 minute documentary.

From a packaging standpoint, The Stranger 30th Anniversary Edition is fantastic with reproductions of the Carnegie Hall poster, Joel’s lyric notebook featuring the original handwritten lyrics, and of particular note is the great book featuring liner notes by David Fricke from Rolling Stone, and some really cool photos, all printed on glossy pages. The bonus live material sounds (Carnegie Hall) and looks (Old Grey Whistle Test) fantastic. Noted producer Frank Filipetti did a pristine job mixing the Carnegie Hall material, and it sounds great.

There are some exclusives at retail for The Stranger box, and Best Buy is my recommended retailer on this set – purchase the set at Best Buy, and you’ll get a bonus 5 track live disc featuring 5 live tracks recorded at Nassau Coliseum on December 11th, 1977. Well known as a famous radio broadcast, the Nassau tracks are heard here for the first time from the original master tapes, and the bonus EP features a great version of “Summer, Highland Falls.”

Listen to this….

Speaking of famous radio broadcasts, here is the first Billy Joel “bootleg” that I ever got my hands on, and it’s still my favorite. Recorded at the C.W. Post Campus in New York on May 6th, 1977. This show is a magical glimpse into what it was like to attend a Billy Joel concert in 1977. I got goosebumps listening to this show, hearing Joel introduce “a brand new song, a premiere I guess…..I’d like to dedicate this to Christiano’s Restaurant, this is called Scenes From An Italian Restaurant. ”

Can you even imagine being in the audience for a song premiere like THAT?

While it has been years since Billy Joel’s last album of “popular music,” Joel continues to play shows and will celebrate the end of an era with a pair of shows at New York’s famed Shea Stadium on Wednesday and Friday. The Billy Joel concerts will be the final concert events at Shea prior to the permanent closing of the legendary stadium.

Billy Joel
C.W. Post Campus
Brookville, NY
5/6/77

originally broadcast by WLIR-FM

Complete Zipped Download

Disc 1
1. Miami 2017
2. Somewhere Along the Line
3. Summer, Highland Falls
4. Piano Man
5. Scenes From an Italian Restaurant
6. James
7. Angry Young Man
8. NY State of Mind
9. Traveling Prayer
10. Traveling Prayer cont.
11. Just the Way You Are
12. The Entertainer
13. You Are My Home

Disc 2
1. Root Beer Rag
2. She’s Got A Way
3. The Ballad Of Billy The Kid
4. I’ve Loved These Days
5. Captain Jack
6. Worse Comes to Worse
7. Ain’t No Crime
8. Say Goodbye to Hollywood
9. Weekend Song
10. Souvenir

Relevant Links:

Billy Joel’s official website

A great Billy Joel fan site

Stuff To Buy:

Purchase The Stranger 30th Anniversary box set from Best Buy or Amazon.

Greatest Hits Volume 1 and Volume 2 – purchase from Amazon

Songs in the Attic – purchase from Amazon

Turnstiles – purchase from Amazon

Billy Joel discusses the 30th Anniversary Edition of The Stranger