Billy Joel’s album The Stranger was a really big deal during my sophomore year in college. The album came out just as classes started in September of 1977 and spent six weeks in the #2 position on the Billboard 200 top albums chart. It spawned a number of hit singles, including “Just the Way You Are” (#3), “She’s Always a Woman” (#17), “Movin’ Out (Anthony’s Song)” (#17), and “Only the Good Die Young” (#24). Many of the other songs on the album, while not released as singles, have become true classics over time, including today’s classic song of the day, “Scenes from an Italian Restaurant.”
Billy Joel has always been somewhat cinematic in his writing, and that is definitely the case with “Scenes from an Italian Restaurant.” It starts with a bit of a prologue, a slow section with two old classmates meeting up a a local Italian restaurant (“A bottle of white, a bottle of red”). It then transitions to an uptempo interlude filled with small talk between the two characters that evolves into them reminiscing about the past (“Do you remember those nights hanging out at the village green?”).
That leads to the main section of the song, the narrator relating the story of Brenda and Eddie, two high school sweethearts who had an intense but ultimately doomed romance. The song ends with a reprise of the first section, with one of the two characters telling the other, “I’ll meet you anytime you want at our Italian restaurant.”
The plot of that middle section, which Joel calls “The Ballad of Brenda and Eddie,” is a nice little story song. It details how Brenda and Eddie started out as high school sweethearts (“the King and the Queen of the prom”), got married (at “the end of July” in 1975), tried to make a go of it (“They got an apartment with deep pile carpets and a couple of paintings from Sears”), but “started to fight when the money got tight” and “got a divorce, as a matter of course.” That’s all he wrote about Brenda and Eddie, and that’s all that needed to be said.
In writing this song, Billy Joel was inspired by the Beatles, in particular the suite of songs on the back side of the Abbey Road album. In fact, “Scenes from an Italian Restaurant” was actually three separate songs, or bits of songs, that Joel pieced together into what became an impressive little suite. Here’s how he remembers it:
“I had always admired the B-side of Abbey Road, which was essentially a bunch of songs strung together by (producer) George Martin. What happened was The Beatles didn’t have completely finished songs or wholly fleshed-out ideas, and George said, ‘What have you got?’ John said, ‘Well I got this,’ and Paul said, ‘I got that.’ They all sat around and went, ‘Hmm, we can put this together and that’ll fit in there.’ And that’s pretty much what I did.”
“Scenes from an Italian Restaurant” was the last song (track 4) on side 1 of The Stranger. It ran 7:37, which is probably why it was never released as a single. It still got lots of radio play, however, especially on album-oriented FM stations of the day, and remains one of Billy Joel’s most popular songs today.
The song is also a favorite in concert, which leads us to today’s daily bonus video of the day. It’s Billy Joel and band playing “Scenes from an Italian Restaurant” live in concert at Long Island’s Nassau Auditorium on December 29, 1982. And here we are, waving Brenda and Eddie goodbye…
