I’ve been humming along with this song for decades, and then a few days ago, I realized…
The mathematical impossibility boggles the mind. They were going steady in 1975, and then they got married and saved up some money for a couple of years, and then got divorced in 1975???
Has this been discussed anywhere? Has Billy Joel ever addressed it?
I do realize that the phrase “se ven ty five” has a nice useful cadence to it, but still…
I always figured it to mean that they had had the best time of their lives by the summer of 75. So anything after that was worse. No idea how long it took them to realise it, though.
I agree with Uniqueorn: the narrator, looking back, realized that even at the peak of their relationship Brenda and Eddie were already doomed. I.e., they were the sort of people to succeed really well at adolescence but not at adult life.
And when their attempted transition to adult life crashed, they tried to refocus on their adolescent success but it didn’t work. “Then the King and the Queen went back to the Green, but you can never go back there again.”
So I’d guess they were married maybe two or three years—long enough for money to “get tight”, but apparently no kids or other major commitments—and then fell irrevocably apart.
(Oh, and I took the “couple of years” during which they saved up money to be before their marriage.)
This always stuck me as one of the worst of Billy Joels crimes against music and language. The way he treats the characters so that he can get in his zingers. He doesn’t like them very much, or think of them as interesting, but he’s writing this song about them. So he disposes of them in a couple of verses.
“Brenda and Eddie,” you say?
I really hate Billy Joel and never owned any of his albums, but “Scenes from an Italian Restaurant” is one of those god damn songs you can’t ignore if you’ve listened to any FM radio since the 1970s.
Because BJ sings like he has a mouthful of billiard balls, I always heard it as “Thunder and Eddie.” Which always made me think of “Johnny Thunder,” from The Kinks album Village Green Preservation Society. Johnny Thunder was another great Catholic rock n’ roll hero, like a lotta people in BJ’s songs. (I have no idea why Ray Davies wrote a Catholic rock song.)
So for 30 years I’ve been thinking “Thunder and Eddie!” Billy Joel might be a Long Island meatball, but he wrote a song about gay lovers real early on!
He can’t tell you more than he told you already
(psst They’re not real people. It’s ok.)
Yeah, it’s not like that fucking fuck McCartney, who introduced Eleanor Rigby in verse one and killed her in verse three.
And don’t bring up Maxwell Edison.
I’ve always like the tune actually. I always thought of Billy as eddie, rousing himself up from this stereotyped existence just long enough to come up with a nice melody, and then before we know it we are waving billy goodbye.
Just wanted to mention that the full story of Brenda and Eddie is told in the Twyla Tharp musical Moving Out, which is based on the songs of Billy Joel. I’m extremely biased since I love Billy Joel’s music, but I thoroughly enjoyed the musical. And I agree that Brenda and Eddie had had it already not because they got a divorce in '75, but because they had already peaked in high school.
“Scenes from an Italian Restaurant” is basically telling the same story as Bruce Springsteen’s “Glory Days”, John Mellencamp’s “Jack and Diane”, Sheryl Crow’s “Homecoming Queen”, Bryan Adams’ “Summer Of '69”, Meatloaf’s “Paradise by the Dashboard Light”, and Bob Seger’s “Night Moves” - some people peak at an early age and then their prospects fade away and the rest of their lives are a downhill slide.
Does anyone think Eddie is the one who’s got a new wife, life, and fine family; and who can’t believe Brenda is looking so good after all those years?
Or was that entire graduating class filled with couples who just couldn’t wait to get that first marriage under their belts and over with?
And am I the only one who thinks that at the closing movement of the suite Billy is singing “A bottle of reds; a bottle of whites”?
Honestly, I’ve always felt that Joel was working on three separate songs that had similar themes and didn’t feel any of them were complete. So he just combined them together and figured the whole would be more impressive than the parts.
I am still wondering whatever happened to that real estate novelist and Davy ‘whose still in the Navy’ from one of his other episodes. Billy Joel has his strengths as a musician and songwriter but character development isn’t among them.
Yes, yes, me, too
Well, yes…he’s admitted that his main influence for putting together these unfinished fragments was the medley that covered most of Side Two of Abbey Road.
I always thought the “narrator” of the entire song was an old friend of Brenda and Eddie’s, bumping into an old girlfriend and, despite being glad to see her again, thinking it’s for the best that they moved on to other things and partners who were better fits for them…unlike Brenda and Eddie, who thought that they could turn their high-school relationship into a lasting life together, but weren’t cut out for it.
No, I don’t think so; in the narrator’s conversation with his old classmate, he’s clearly referring to both Brenda and Eddie in the third person and commenting on them as someone who knew them back when. “There we were, waving Brenda and Eddie goodbye.”
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Or was that entire graduating class filled with couples who just couldn’t wait to get that first marriage under their belts and over with?
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There’s no suggestion in the song that the narrator married his high school sweetheart. All we know is that at some point he got married to somebody (probably before he “lost touch” with the friend he’s now talking to), and then divorced and remarried.
Remember, all of this is presumably supposed to be taking place many years after the 1975 events recalled in the song: long enough for the narrator to be surprised that his old friend “could ever look so good after so much time”. Probably the class of 1975 is supposed to be at least well into their thirties in the “present day” of the song’s setting: plenty of time to fit in a first marriage, divorce and remarriage.
This is pretty much the picture that always comes to my mind. As to the OP, I think the phrase “Brenda and Eddie had had it already by the summer of 75” is just the narrator editorializing in hindsight. They were still together and planning a wedding for the end of July, but unbeknownst to them, the marriage was doomed as their best years were behind them(pretty much what **Kimstu ** and **Uniqueorn **said).
It never occurred to me that the last verse is referring to bottles of red and white pills. It’s funny, but kind of doesn’t go with the portrait of a narrator that has a good life.
Yeah, now that you mention it, I’ve always wondered if that was a reference to “now we’ve graduated to popping pills” instead of drinking wine.
Eleanor was first introduced in She’s Leaving Home, but not by name, then she turns up again in Another Day, then we learn of her sad fate in her eponymous song. Take the three songs together and it’s a sad tale of a life of quiet desperation. Eleanor thought running away with the man from the motor trade would make her life better, but he dumped her shortly after, and she thought she couldn’t go back home and admit she was wrong, so she spent the rest of her life trying to find happiness, and it never came.
And I always pronounce the Billy Joel character as Brender.