Billy Joel Rarity: "Rollin' Home" CD

[Bill Tyler]

For those who want to complete their Billy Joel collection try locating
the following Japanese Import that recently found in the "used bin":

"ROLLIN' HOME"
"Also includes 'Revenge is Sweet'"
Billy Joel with ATTILA / The Hassles

Japanese Import "Made in Germany"
Label: PILZ Japan K. K.
Catalog # 449809-2

List price 1,600 Yen; UPC code: 4 936685 980923
(from add on Japanese spine)

Track listing

Attila (BJ vocals and "wah wah" organ)
1. California Flash
2. Wonder Woman
3. Revenge is Sweet
4. Amplifier Fire:
Part I-Godzilla
Part II-March of the Huns
5. Rollin' Home
6. Tear This Castle Down
7. Holy Moses
8. Brain Invasion

The Hassles (probably recorded late 70's w/o BJ or keyboards)
9. E. A. R.
10. Rabbitt
11. The Tough Boy
12. Enough is Enough
13. Extra Extra
14. Crossing the Door

F.A.Q.

1. No I will not sell my copy or auction it on eBay.

2. I bought used ($10) in Minneapolis, MN (Sat. 5.Feb.00).

3. No artists credit information at all, just tracks and two old photos
of BJ on cover (one take from the Attila album cover).

4. Attila

Attila tracks sound like NOTHING Billy has ever done as "The Piano
Man." No piano, only organ. Instrumentation appears to be drums, bass,
organ (with overdubs), maybe guitar.

Vocals are CLEARLY BJ, circa early 70's --but not as you've heard him
before. Hard "Art Rock" style that is nearly a cross between BJ and
Spinal Tap (lyrics like "I'll be the dinner, you be the wine"). Organ
solos and use as lead instrument suggest Billy at the "helm."

5. The Hassles

Recording quality seems too high to be "before" Attila (very crisp,
unlike other late 60's early 70's recordings). Instrumentation includes
synthesizer sounds (and disco styles) more typical of the late 70's and
80's. Few, if any keyboards. Vocals do not appear to include BJ.
Music is pure rubbish including poor lead singing.

I would appreciate any details from other fans about this album and
related facts (such as recording date, original recording label,
musicians, song authorship). As noted above, as a Japanese import,
there is no additional track or recording information except artist and
track titles.

Thanks,

...Bill

[john.me...@gmail.com]

Your answer is here
http://pupuplatters.tumblr.com/post/105025879919/the-tough-boys-my-journey-with-carlo-trenta-and

Suffice to say the "bonus" cuts are unrelated to Billy Joel, or The Hassles.

[john.me...@gmail.com]

Further to my response, I figure the link may be dead by the time anyone reads my URL. So here's the entire article

The Tough Boys: My Journey with Carlo Trenta and Billy Joel

December 12, 2014

There's something to be said for mystery. It can keep the flames of curiosity burning for ages, and if you're easily obsessed like me, you will not rest until your questions are answered. I've never made it a point to listen to music that no one else knows about. It just works out that way sometimes. I have always had a tendency to sidestep what's hot at the moment and possessed a genuine curiosity about music on the fringe and a desire to learn about records that people have shunned, buried or forgotten about (or have tried hard to forget). In my years of seeking out music, some of the best weirdo stuff has come from discount racks, bargain bins and piles of unwanted records. I've come across some strange items, but only once have I purchased an album that promised an artist on the cover but delivered someone else on the recording, a mistake the crappiest bootlegs in existence manage to avoid. It turned into an unlikely puzzle that took 20 years to solve.

The Bosom Buddies theme song turned me on to Billy Joel as a kid, and around the time I was in high school, I learned of Billy's pre-fame band Attila through an interview I saw on TV. With the baffling LP cover displayed onscreen for a few seconds, Joel probably cringed inside as he named the record's more incredibly titled tracks, "Amplifier Fire" and "Brain Invasion", with little comment as he seemed to psychically push the interviewer on to the next topic. This was more than enough to grab my attention. Turns out Billy is pretty embarrassed by Attila and has never said more than a few sentences at one time about the project. The bizarreness of the band's music combined with Billy's reported attempts to keep the record out of peoples' hands by buying up all the copies has given it a pretty strong cult following. It used to be fairly hard to find. In the internet age, you can snag a used copy on eBay and listen to the record in its entirety on YouTube while you wait for the LP to arrive. Attila is non-existent in the world of conventional, just-the-hits-please Billy Joel fandom, but its underground immortality is perpetuated by a new generation of cult music lovers online. The band is archived, dissected and discussed on weirdo music blogs and comment threads. "Holy Moses" was given the jazz treatment by an experimental trio featuring two bass clarinetists. Some armchair music historians have gone so far as to claim that Billy Joel was a key figure in the development of the "blast beat", a drum pattern frequently employed by grindcore bands (and supposedly birthed by Attila drummer Jon Small halfway through "Brain Invasion"). It's all as wacky and fascinating as the music itself.

Oddly, the album that has been disowned by Joel and is generally regarded as a stain on his career has been repackaged in a number of strange, less-than-official releases through the years. Most are credited not to Attila but to Billy Joel, obviously to capitalize on his famous name. Some of the records even feature shots of snappily-dressed solo-era Joel on the cover, giving the record buyer false hope that the music within employs the light melodic craft of "Piano Man" or "Just the Way You Are." Attila has only been released with the artist's permission once, on Epic Records in 1970, and I am certain that it will never see a sanctioned release again.

In the mid-'90s, I unexpectedly stumbled upon a sketchy looking reissue of Attila at Phar-Mor, a pharmacy/general store located in the American Mall in Lima, Ohio. It was a cassette titled Revenge Is Sweet and was credited to "Billy Joel with Attila." The cover was simply a close-up of Joel's face, young and innocent, and the tape contained the complete Attila album (with the first two songs flipped, for some reason). I was always attracted to the bizarre and obscure and I was a BJ enthusiast, so naturally, this was up my alley. This was a tape that wouldn't be found on the HOT NEW RELEASES rack in any popular music store. It wasn't even good enough to be featured prominently in Phar-Mor. One look at the packaging of this reissue told me that it is not authorized product. It even delivered a tiny PSA: "Stop drugs!" It was illicit, seedy and wrong. The music itself was almost beside the point. A freakshow is intriguing. "Uptown Girl" is not.

After subsequent trips to Phar-Mor, I discovered that this cassette had a few variations with different album titles, covers and track listings, but they were all products of "Creative Sounds, Ltd." and all credited to Billy Joel first, Attila and the Hassles (another pre-fame group) second. What turned out to be of particular interest was the CD version, named after the Attila track "Rollin' Home." It claimed to be a "double album" and supposedly contained tracks from Attila as well as the Hassles, reinforced by a photo of Hassles-era Joel on the cover. But I knew something was up just by looking at the titles of the Hassles tracks: "E.A.R.", "Rabbitt", "The Tough Boy." Those can't be Billy Joel songs, can they? Of course, this piqued my interest and I got the CD.

I don't remember what my first reaction was hearing the "Hassles" tracks. Even before the vocal kicked in on the first track, a psychedelic new-wave ditty entitled "E.A.R.", I knew it wasn't Billy Joel. Listening to the rest, I knew that they were never hits for whomever they belonged to. Compared to Billy Joel, they practically sounded like they were from another planet. I thought they were totally freakish. As time passed, they grew on me a little. I imagine the first emotion most people felt upon hearing them was hatred. Instant, seething hatred, because the songs are so un-Billy Joel-like. It may have prompted some to remove the disc from their player and stomp it or throw it out their car window. "Music is pure rubbish including poor lead singing" is how one disgruntled Billy Joel fan described the songs on an old alt.music message board. I may have been the only person in the world who listened to the fraudulent Hassles tracks more than once and developed an interest in the musicians behind them.

Many things made these songs intriguing to me. With no band photos or credits, my speculation was based only on the songs, and it was also one of my first encounters with "independent" music. In my area coming up, there was no local music scene or a band you knew that recorded an album. I didn't get into punk and alternative rock for a few years, and at the time, I had no point of reference for a batch of quirky songs clearly not born on a major label. The vocalist sounded like a guy who was a little too old to be singing about tough punks and space bunnies. I could picture him on public access television, hosting a monster movie marathon wearing those spiral eye glasses as someone at the control board triggered every cheesy video warp, ripple and morph available at his fingertips. The tracks were in a tight new-wave vein but still miles away from the impeccable Phil Ramone-produced nuggets found on Glass Houses. They had more in common with the bouncy irreverence of "Rock Lobster."

The lyrics were often tongue-in-cheek and had a goofy, novelty quality to them. This could have been a prefab skinny-tie band playing at a frat party in some comedy film from the early '80s. Were they serious or joking? Were these songs demos? I assumed they were, because I didn't understand how tracks that ended up on a legitimate album could have been misfiled as Billy Joel. As I mentioned before, this was the only time I'd bought a CD or tape that contained a different artist than advertised. Was there a lawsuit? Shouldn't it have been withdrawn? Maybe the compilation coordinator wasn't that sharp on music and couldn't tell that the Hassles tracks were not Billy Joel. More than likely, there was no compilation coordinator. Still, someone had to pluck the orphan tracks from an illegitimate source and give them the green light. The incompetence was fascinating, and the fact that the disc existed at all was almost unbelievable. For BJ, I imagine the only thing more embarrassing than Attila was that it was available on CD with a batch of weird songs credited to him but performed by someone else (although I doubt he even knew of it). It was a perfect storm, and I my interest grew a little every day.

Also keep in mind that this happened when the internet, full of illustrations of men with shovels and jackhammers accompanied by the words PAGE UNDER CONSTRUCTION, wasn't a terribly useful tool yet. In my world, information about music could be found in books or old periodicals at the library. Difficult mysteries were nearly impossible to crack. Even harder was being a kid in a small town, cut off from streams of obscure music and people with deep knowledge about it. Culturally, it was like being on a deserted island. At this point, I was already cutting my teeth on music geekery, attending record shows, discovering the cool independent music stores in the area and frequenting the one book store that carried Billboard. I did what I could with the resources I had to satisfy my thirst, but the time and the place were serious limitations. Despite this, my curiosity continued to grow. In the late '90s, I learned some basic HTML coding and put together a little web page dedicated to Attila. While compiling information, I searched around online and still found no trace of the band behind the weirdo tracks on the Rollin' Home disc. Despite this, my webpage featured a section dedicated to the faux-Hassles. I secretly hoped the mystery band would step forward and send me an e-mail claiming responsibility, but no such luck. Years passed and occasionally I would revisit the songs and scour the internet for clues but would always come up with nothing. I knew I'd never figure out who did those songs. It was a cold case if there ever was one.

Then on November 4, 2014, some unknown force prompted me to Google Billy Joel and "Tough Boy" (one of the bogus songs), and one of the results was an Amazon review of an album by Joey Trentadue and King Chinook Band. After I read the title of the review, "Do you mean Billy Joel didn't record these songs after all???," I turned giddy knowing that I may have just cracked this impossible mystery. The review, written in March 2012, mentioned the Attila/Hassles CD that I had bought from Phar-Mor and also explained how the bogus tracks were tacked on to that disc. According to the review writer, they were released on an album credited to Billy Joel & the Hassels. When I first heard the CD, one of my theories was that the bogus tracks were by a band named the Hassles that had nothing to do with Billy Joel. The Joey Trentadue album on Amazon appeared to be a recent digital-only compilation. I was more determined than ever to find out the original source of the bogus tracks. I Googled Joey Trentadue and found a blog titled "Special Punk", dedicated to outsider music, with a review describing an album by Carlo Trenta & the Demons. It was clear from the review that this record was the legitimate home of the bogus tracks, and a commenter who posted that Carlo's true identity was Joey Trentadue confirmed it. After many years of wondering, the mystery was solved just like that, with the right Google search and a few mouse clicks.

How exactly did the music of Carlo Trenta become attributed to Billy Joel in the first place? The world may never know, but this is what I've dug up on the fiasco. Tough Boy, Rock Da Box, Trenta's album and the original source of the Hassles-attributed Rollin' Home tracks, was released on his own label CJT Records in 1981. CJT was short-lived and appears to have only issued two other recordings: 7" singles of Trenta with unidentified band performing loopy C&W originals worthy of inclusion on Songs in the Key of Z. The Tough Boy, the album credited to Billy Joel & the Hassels but containing six Trenta songs (and Attila's "Holy Moses", naturally), was somehow released a year earlier on Koala Records (also released on Koala was Hour of the Wolf by the legitimate Hassles, credited to Joel and re-titled Country Boy, a Tough Boy companion piece of sorts). Other than the mention in the online review of the Joey Trentadue compilation, I have only seen one trace of the existence of The Tough Boy. I did a thorough search on Gemm, Discogs and other sites, and I came across an eBay auction from 2011 for the LP. It sold for $75. I reckon this is the ultimate weirdo Billy Joel collectible, containing only one track that can be properly credited to the man.

Founded in 1979, Koala Records was based in Hendersonville, Tennessee and specialized in no-budget compilations of famous musicians with album art that appeared to be created by a high school yearbook committee. Around 1982, the label folded after scandals involving the release of unauthorized recordings and a master recording tax shelter. Jack Millman, a musician and entrepreneur who, according to a Billboard article, supplied Koala with recordings, was found to be involved in the same tax scheme. One may assume that the Carlo Trenta songs ended up in Millman's hands and he slapped Billy's name on them and passed them onto Koala. Or, it was all the result of a clerical error and no one actually checked the recording (remember, no one could mistake Carlo Trenta for Billy Joel). Personally I think the latter is unlikely, because the song titles on Trenta's own version of his album differ from the titles on the Koala LP. Someone along the chain listened to the songs and created new titles from their lyrics for The Tough Boy. The validity of the recording still wasn't checked out by the time it got to Creative Sounds, Ltd., creator of Rollin' Home and a load of other budget releases by recognizable artists. In the early '90s, that label became involved in legal troubles similar to Koala's a decade earlier. I still think it's an amazing feat that the Trenta/Joel mixup survived into the compact disc age, but it unfortunately ended with the death of Creative Sounds, Ltd. near the end of the millennium.

I'm fascinated with stories like this. These journeys make record collecting worthwhile, and it makes me miss old bargain bins, wonderful sources of strangeness. They're still around at retail chains like Best Buy at Wal-Mart, but nowadays they are populated with familiar titles by familiar artists. I believe that true bargain bin items should be clipped, notched, holed or otherwise mutilated in some way. I stopped at a Big Lots recently to see what their discount music rack looked like, and sadly, it was uninspired. $5 CDs with no surprises, no bullet holed jewel cases, nothing weird. All of them even had that white seal on the top of the jewel case under the shrinkwrap with the album title and artist name, saving people the annoyance of physically flipping through the discs. Included in the collection were sanctioned remasters of Piano Man and An Innocent Man. No Rollin' Home. Meijer used to offer a fantastic wall of discount tapes and CDs, many of dubious origin. One of my favorite bargain bins was found at the short-lived Sun TV in Lima. Their bin contained cassettes for a mere ten pennies! I found a Stix Hooper tape in there and that led me to discover the Crusaders, a superior band in any musical circle. A musician who composed a popular hit for Garth Brooks released a solo album in the mid-'80s that promptly vanished, possibly because he was better suited as a writer than a singer. That was in the bin. Another tape contained songs that could have been The Weather Channel's Greatest Local Forecast Hits of the '80s. Every new tape, no matter how cheesy, was like food for my brain. Each cassette held unheard sounds, a curious story, a little adventure. The bin was not a source of great artistic works, but it satisfied my need to lay my hands on something a little different.

They can be pretty picked over, but these days, discount sections at second-hand music shops are still good sources for oddball and fringe albums. Every good record store has a discount area, and this is typically the section I seek out first. Items could be $1 (Dollarland at Used Kids in Columbus, Ohio), $0.50 (Reckless in Chicago), or in the case of Dave's Records (also in Chicago), a bank-breaking 25 cents per album. Dave's discount stack is located right by the front door for optimal browsing convenience. Often, the items on prominent display in these shops are inevitably different versions of records you already own: a foreign pressing, the 180-gram audiophile edition, a fresh remaster with a bonus 7" or some other kind of bait to get you to double dip. I'll admit that I take the bait now and again, but double and triple dipping encourages labels to endlessly rehash the same material and turns the buyer into a tunnel-visioned music consumer, only needing the most essential five-star albums in any genre and unaware of the incredible treasure trove of old forgotten records waiting to be found. Some are brilliant and many are terrible, but all have been quietly passed over and are practically begging to be listened to.

When I picked up that cheap Billy Joel CD, I never would have guessed that it would become such a huge source of fascination and curiosity, but it's a lesson that you can find unexpected surprises in the strangest places. Although I discovered the identity of the band behind those weirdo tracks, many questions remain. Is Carlo Trenta aware that his songs made it on to a record credited to Billy Joel in the early '80s? Does he know that this led to an appearance on a Billy Joel compilation that populated Phar-Mors across the country? Was he aware that his music, under the most bizarre circumstances, ended up exposed to more people than he could have ever imagined? All of this intrigues me, and I'll continue to chip away at the story (I did mail him a letter; it was returned undeliverable). Bargain bins are slowly going away, but there are many ways to seek out music. I will always be drawn to the odd, the freakish and the unwanted, and I'll always be that guy in the section of musical Charlie Brown Christmas trees. The hunt is satisfying. Be adventurous. Venture into unfamiliar territory and chances are, you'll find some treasures (and maybe a few bombs).

http://pupuplatters.tumblr.com/post/105025879919/the-tough-boys-my-journey-with-carlo-trenta-and