Music: Against the American Grain

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The Nylon Curtain, on the other hand chucks simplicity out the window, along with much of the high artifice of Billy Joel's estimable pop skills. His melodies may still offer abundant evidence of the composer's admiration for Paul McCartney, but Joel, this time around, is after something like a Top Ten equivalent of The Deer Hunter. These songs are full of steel mills and missed chances and the memories of a war that will never retreat to a safe distance. "Remember Charlie/ Remember Baker," Joel sings in Goodnight Saigon. "They left their childhood/ On every acre." Behind the nylon curtain is childhood's end, a state of purgatorial cold storage where the album's protagonist, after punishing romances and puzzling flights of escape to nowhere, finds himself sitting in the balcony at a show he cannot understand, asking, "Where's the orchestra?/ Wasn't this supposed to be a musical?" Bleak songs for barren times, perhaps. But Joel and Springsteen keep their balance as they take their high-wire walks across the black pit. These are two pure products of America who have not gone crazy, probably, like William Carlos Williams himself because they can set that madness to a different kind of music. —By Jay Cocks