Today’s classic song of the day is “Allentown” by Billy Joel. The track was included on his 1982 album, The Nylon Curtain, and released as a single in November of that year. The single went to #17 on the Billboard Hot 100 and #14 on the Cash Box Top 100.
“Allentown,” written by Mr. Joel, is about how the real town of Allentown, Pennsylvania, has dealt with the decline of the steel manufacturing industry and the closure of Bethlehem Steel. Joel started writing the song, originally titled “Levittown” (after the town next to where he grew up on Long Island), back in the late ’70s. Some of the original lyrics went like this:
Well we’re living here in Levittown
And there’s really not much going down
I don’t see much when I look around
The grass is green, the trees are brown
And we’re living here in Levittown
I can see where he was going with this but it really didn’t get there. Kind of boring, actually. Fortunately, Mr. Joel was later inspired to change the title and topic of the song when reading about the decline of the Lehigh Valley steel industry. Here’s what he said about “Allentown”:
“This song is about young people living in the Northeast of America. Their lives are miserable because the steel factories are closing down. They desperately want to leave… but they stay because they were brought up to believe that things were going to get better.…
“I know people who moved to places like this, to these boom towns. They were promised a job, and it didn’t work out. The whole romanticism of unions and factories has gone right down the toilet. But it’s still a hopeful song. What I’m saying is that it’s getting hard to stay here, but we’re American and we’re going to stick it out. We have hope, but we don’t have that limitless boundless future outlook that our parents had after the war. There’s been a monkey wrench thrown in the works.”
The success of “Allentown” was helped by its music video, directed by Russell Mulcahy (with choreography by Kenny Ortega, later of High School Musical fame), which received heavy rotation on MTV. During the peak of the song’s airplay, the mayor of Allentown awarded Mr. Joel the key of the city but later suggested the singer donate some of the song’s royalties for music scholarships in the town.
He apparently never did.
