Oh, the irony. I had an email from The Lodgeman on 10th March asking for the story of Scenes from an Italian Restaurant by Billy Joel explaining, “I’m playing both in one of my forthcoming Vinyl Frontier nights: ‘Your Best: Story Songs’ and although I know it tells a story I know nothing about the background.” Less than 24 hours later I get an email from Ticketmaster informing me that the Billy Joel concert I had tickets for in June is cancelled due to Billy Joel undergoing surgery and has been rescheduled for one year later. The Lodgeman will, no doubt, be pleased to hear that I’m not cancelling writing the story of arguably one of his best-known songs despite it never being released as a single.
It’s hard to think of another act who has an album-only track that is as well-known and as popular as many of his big hits. Having seen Billy last year in Cardiff, I can now understand how he can set the scene of so many of his songs, especially the autobiographical ones like Piano Man which I wrote about back in March last year. One of the highlights of a Billy Joel concert is that he is happy to give over the stage to a few of his musicians so they can showcase their talent. During the River of Dreams, there was an interlude of River Deep Mountain High as performed by the multi-talented Crystal Taliefero who was amazing and had so much energy. Tina Turner would have been so proud. Even Ike would have been impressed even though he had no part whatsoever on the Ike & Tina Turner version. The other jaw-dropping moment was when Mike DelGuidice gave a stunning performance of Nessun Dorma with Billy accompanying him on piano. Mike had formed a Billy Joel tribute band called Big Shot and Billy was so impressed when he saw him, he offered him a place in his touring band and has been with him since 2013.
Billy traditionally composes the music first then adds lyrics afterwards. Billy’s original inspiration for the song was the three-song medley that ended the Beatles’ Abbey Road album – Golden Slumbers-Carry That Weight-The End, three bits of songs assembled to make a finished item. Scenes From an Italian Restaurant is in three parts too, Billy explained the opening line, “I was in a restaurant and the waiter came up to me and said, Bottle of white? Bottle of red? Perhaps a bottle of rosé instead?” The restaurant, which has since closed down, was the Fontana di Trevi on West 57th Street in Manhattan, New York just opposite Carnegie Hall. In an interview with USA Today in 2008, Billy explained. “It was for the opera crowd, but the Italian food was really good. They didn’t really know who I was, which was fine with me, but sometimes you would have a hard time getting a table. Well, I went there when the tickets had gone on sale for my dates at Carnegie Hall, and the owner looks at me and he goes, in an Italian accent, ‘Heyyy, youra that guy!’ And from then on, I was always able to get a good spot.” In the same interview, Billy explained in more details how the Beatles helped, “I had always admired the B-side of Abbey Road, which was essentially a bunch of songs strung together by 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.”
The opening lines, over the simple piano intro, seem to set the scene of a seductive restaurant between a romantic couple, but we soon learn in the first verse that it’s actually two old school mates meeting up and reminiscing about their younger days. ‘, Got a good job, I got a good office, I got a new wife, got a new life, And the family is fine…etc’. Billy explained to Jason Scott in American Songwriter, “The song started out as, well, the middle part was called The Ballad of Brenda and Eddie and that section is the main course. I use a lot of food analogies. I’m a food oriented guy. What I was trying to get across is we all know, I’m sure, there were people who peaked a little too early in life. When we were in high school, there were the people we thought who were so cool. I used to think, ‘Man, I wish I was that guy’. He had the perfect pompadour. He always had great clothes, the coolest shoes. He always went out with the coolest girl, and he was always the most popular guy. Then, I saw him at the 10-year union, and this guy was like a caved in ashtray.” The second verse is the old chums remembering how they used to hang out at the Village Green and how they wore leather jackets and tight blue jeans as well as the cold beers and their romantic teenage nights out.
The hors d’oeuvre is complete and after a beautiful lamenting saxophone segue and a change of pace from the keyboard, we arrive at the main course, the story of Brenda and Eddie. A young couple who were the queen and the king of the prom and rode around in the open top car, (very reminiscent of a scene from Grease) having the time of their lives and eventually fall in love with aspirations of a great future together and marry in the summer of ’75. They are doing well, they buy a luxury apartment with ‘paintings from Sears’ and a water bed and ‘lived for a while in a very nice style’, but then….things went wrong, noting, ‘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’ and then comes the realisation that ‘they can never go back there again’ as the protagonist describes, ‘Ohh, and that’s all I heard about Brenda and Eddie can’t tell you more, ’cause I told you already and here we are waving Brenda and Eddie goodbye’. We are left with the image of not knowing anymore about Brenda and Eddie to a rousing chorus of Ohh, ohh, ohhh-oh, Ohh, ohh, ohhh-ohs, but then we are stopped in our tracks and the musical pace slows and we return to the familiar piano intro and the closing lines, ‘Bottle of red, Ooh, a bottle of white, whatever kind of mood you’re in tonight, I’ll meet you anytime you want In our Italian restaurant’ as the piano and saxophone outro paints a picture of complete emptiness.
This seven and a half minute epic has never been issued on a single but remains one of Billy most enduring and celebrated songs. The rousing applause and cheering at every live appearance proves the point.
The song originally appeared in Billy’s 1978 album The Stranger as well as a number one Greatest Hits compilation despite never having been a hit. It has been used in a 2018 film documentary called Three Identical Strangers where three young men who were all adopted meet each other, discover they were all triplets separated at birth and set about trying to find out why. In 2019, Scenes From an Italian Restaurant became the title of an Anthology of Billy’s life which MGM and Universal music got together to produce and feature various characters in a number of Billy’s songs. That scene from that Italian restaurant seems to live on.