What’s Under That Kilt Wonder Woman?

Blind Joe Death called me up yesterday to ask me if I had ever heard of the Attila LP. He told me that the critics say it is the worst album ever recorded. Not the worst heavy metal album, or rock album, or experimental psych-prog-what-you-might-call-it album, but the worst album of all time. Gee, I thought. That’s kinda harsh. Obviously I’ll have to squeeze in a listen of this thang.

“Do you know who was in Attila?” He said.There was a pause. Attila? Damn that name sounded familiar. “Billy Joel”, he said. Oh right, it was that post-Hassles nightmare album. The ultimate 1970s duo concept: A screaming Hammond B3 and drums!

Crap it might be as a concept piece (if the album art doesn’t make you howl, the song titles and lyrics certainly will) it is not that bad. As Blind Joe Death put it, “It is really heavy!” Check it out and decide for yourself:

This Attila review by the Palestinian Light Orchestra brought me a lot of laughs:

Billy Joel – genius or gerbil?

Speaking of the whole worst-album-of-whole-time debate, here’s one that ends up being spoken in hushed tones around that particular round table. I believe that anyone who’d maintain this album is among the worst ever has 1) never heard this record and 2) never heard Billy’s more recent work.

This is a power duo record. I love duo’s from this era – Population 2, Silver Apples, Suicide, the Carpenters. Something about the duo format allows the ego to shine through in truly inspired form. This one is a perfect example.

Billy is clearly under the spell of Hendrix in the same manner that Keith Emerson was. He’s all over that Hammond organ, using delays and wahs and distortion and volume to coax balls to the wall obnoxiousness out of it from start to end. The drummer, the unfortunate Jon Small, pounds his hands to nubs trying to keep up. If this sounds ham fisted, it is, but not necessarily in a bad way.

This is Billy Joel, though. Some of the songs are pretty dire. But not in the way you might expect – there are remarkably few glimpses of the self-pitying and shrill Joel of the pop charts on display here. The only example I catch is the third song, where he goes off on some “KICK THEIR FACES IN” rant. More weird than anything in this context.

I think the cover of this album is a good metaphor for what’s found in the grooves. Who ever thought that dressing the lads as Vikings in a meat cooler would symbolize an organ-led duo named after a Mongol conqueror. Similarly, who’d have thought to take a Long Island kid from a blue-eyed soul band (the Hassles) and make him into the American Keith Emerson? Of course, it fell on its face. If BJ hadn’t have become what he became, it would be exactly the sort of forgotten mediocre slab of vinyl that passes around these blogs with attendant hyperbole.

They say in American life, there are no second acts. They were wrong on this one. After Billy broke up the band by stealing the drummer’s wife (didn’t she look at the pictures on the album? The drummer is the GOOD looking one. She must have been an uptown girl), he tried to off himself by drinking a bottle of some cleaning solution. Then, he got busy.

If there were a Nuremberg tribunal for crimes against art, Billy would be next to Patrick Nagel and Sandra Bullock on death row. I can’t believe anyone ever listened to, and liked, such utter shit as Piano Man and that goddam “heart attack-ack-ack-ack” song. And We Didn’t Start the Fire is almost certainly the bottom of the top 40 barrel.

Don’t hold that against Attila, though. This is the high point of Billy’s career.