"Say goodbye to Hollywood...say goodbye my baby..."

In 1988, as a teenager, Songs In The Attic was one of the first live 'rock' LPs I ever heard. I learned a bit later that Billy Joel compiled it to showcase songs that sounded dramatically different when played live, from their studio recordings. It's certainly true about "Say Goodbye To Hollywood". The studio version, recorded on his LPTurnstiles (1976), generally thought to be his best LP, never gives any inkling of the anthemic, grand vulnerability of its live performances. The best of these performances of the song is the one captured on Songs In The Attic.

Songs In The Attic, released in 1981, is an excellent souvenir of live performances of songs from LPs before his first big hit LP, the No. 24 UK/No. 2 US The Stranger (1977). Consequently, familiar hits from later well-known LPs The Stranger, 52nd Street (1978), Glass Houses (1981) and An Innocent Man (1983) are not found on it. Even so, the performances on Songs In The Attic are picked well, with care, revealing a very decent songwriter putting in some very decent paces in live concerts. Most of the performances are definitive, representative of the best possible Billy Joel sound you can hope to hear, and the songs are definitely among his finest songwriting hours.

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In "Say Goodbye To Hollywood", there's a vulnerability for those who actually dig deeper into its lyrics. Strangely, this may not be evident to the casual listener or on the first listen, and if you don't actually look closer, you might never feel it at all. Billy Joel had always showed he was capable of this;  even so, it would be hard to find a song on his earlier LPs (or even later LPs) that captured it as well as this one. In later years, he would strike further out in this direction in his best ever song, "The Stranger", in 1977, but "Say Goodbye To Hollywood" remains, for me, still his finest hour. It would be accurate for me to say that except for "The Stranger" and a couple of other songs from later LPs, he would never better the quality of "Say Goodbye To Hollywood".

Somehow, somehow, the opening scenes in Billy Wilder's romantic, dark film Sunset Boulevard (1950) are evoked by the song, probably because of its anthemic feel, its hint of a deeper aura of romantic vulnerability, and also because both film and song are definitive statements about Hollywood. The anthemic feel is heightened by the drum intro, grandstanding sax solo and the strident guitar jangle, not to mention the repeated entreaties on the phrase "say goodbye to Hollywood". For me, the song is also redolent of other classic films - Billy Wilder's The Lost Weekend (1945) and Joseph L Mankiewicz's All About Eve (1950; the song is especially evocative of Bette Davis in that film).

The lyrics essentially seem to hint at pleas to find 'realness' and 'soul anchors' (kindred spirits, if you like the phrase) in eventually unreal, tinsel, glittering Hollywood. Such inner loneliness (tending to delusion), we suspect, though often felt by people in showbiz, is but rarely, if ever, addressed by the rewarding successes of career and celebrity. The opening scene in Sunset Boulevard says it all; "Say Goodbye To Hollywood" only hints, dimly but firmly, at scenes like that.

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Bobby's drivin' through the city tonight
Through the lights in a hot new rent-a-car
He joins the lovers in his heavy machine
It's a scene down on Sunset Boulevard
Say goodbye to Hollywood
Say goodbye, my baby
Say goodbye to Hollywood
Say goodbye, my baby

Johnny's takin' care of things for a while
And his style is so right for troubadours
They got him sitting with his back to the door
Now he won't be my fast gun anymore
Say goodbye to Hollywood
Say goodbye, my baby
Say goodbye to Hollywood
Say goodbye, my baby

Movin' on is a chance you take
Any time you try to stay - together
Say a word out of line
And you find that the friends you had
Are gone forever
Forever

So many faces in and out of my life
Some will last
Some will just be now and then
Life is a series of hellos and goodbyes
I'm afraid it's time for goodbye again
Say goodbye to Hollywood
Say goodbye, my baby
Say goodbye to Hollywood
Say goodbye, my baby

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Other live performances of the song, though not as definitive or evocative as the one that appears on the album:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RQ5Nek7HFqw

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pOBQC0w4Mms (this one has very good amateur shots of Hollywood, I'd say essential to what I've written in this post. There is a photo of the legendary, ornate staircase in the last scene in Sunset Boulevard where Gloria Swanson speaks her famous line, "I'm ready for my close-up, Mr. De Mille!")