THE STRANGER
The Stranger is the fifth studio album by American singer-songwriter Billy Joel, released on September 29, 1977, by Columbia Records. While his four previous albums had been moderately successful, The Stranger became Joel’s true critical and commercial breakthrough, spending six weeks at number 2 on the US albums chart. Considered his magnum opus, it remains his best-selling non-compilation album to date, and was ranked number 70 on Rolling Stone’s list of the 500 greatest albums of all time. (More from Wikipedia)
Hiram Bullock, Give it What U Got – Hiram Bullock is a longtime New York session guitarist who played on some of the finest pop albums of the 1970’s, such as Billy Joel’s The Stranger and Steely Dan’s Aja (both released in 1977). He was also one of the bandmembers in the original incarnation of the World’s Most Dangerous Band that Paul Shaffer assembled when Late Night with David Letterman first went on the air in 1982. Beginning in 1986, Hiram Bullock released more than a dozen albums as a solo artist. Give it What U Got (1987), his second album is an enjoyable blend of jazz, rock and funk that he would perfect even further over time. The final track is an instrumental treatment of a Steely Dan song, “Pretzel Logic”, the title song to their third album, Pretzel Logic; “Pretzel Logic” was the follow-up single to their major hit “Rikki Don’t Lose that Number”.
(December 2015)
