On the Charts: Dave Matthews' "Big Whiskey" Tops Eminem

The Big News: America got their fill of Big Whiskey and the GrooGrux King as the Dave Matthews Band's latest album scored one of the biggest opening weeks of 2009, selling 424,000 copies to knock Eminem's Relapse out of Number One. GrooGrux marks the fifth consecutive DMB album to top the charts. Relapse fell to Number Two with another 141,000 LPs sold, while 311's Uplifter took third with 59,000 copies. Green Day's 21st Century Breakdown and the Hannah Montana: The Movie soundtrack filled out the Top Five.

Debuts: Supergroup Chickenfoot's self-titled debut and Taking Back Sunday's New Again narrowly missed out on the Top Five party, placing at Six and Seven respectively. Rancid's Let The Dominoes Fall placed 11th, Elvis Costello's Secret, Profane & Sugarcane scored the 13 spot, Eels' Hombre Lobo grabbed 43 with 10,000 copies and the Jeff Buckley live document Grace Around the World entered at 124. Also of note is Neil Young's massive Archives, Vol. 1 (1963-1972), which sold 5,000 copies and took 102 despite its heavy price tag.

Last Week's Heroes: Eminem's encounter with Brüno at the MTV Movie Awards seemed to help the rapper's sales as Relapse only dropped 33 percent in sales from the previous week — not a significant dip considering it's been on sale for three weeks. The MTV Movie Awards also helped out Kings of Leon, who saw sales of Only By The Night jump 50 percent, rising from 15 to 12. Next week, we'll see if The E.N.D. from the Black Eyed Peas can "Boom Boom Pow" Big Whiskey out of the top spot and if Sonic Youth's 16th album The Eternal scores the New York band their highest ever chart position.

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Song Stories

“Piano Man”

Billy Joel | 1973

Billy Joel’s first hit, “Piano Man,” was – ironically – an autobiographical lament about how his first album wasn’t a hit. When Cold Spring Harbor didn’t take off, Joel briefly became a lounge pianist in Los Angeles, and this song, about that experience, expressed his frustrations and fears at the time: “And they sit at the bar and put bread in my jar/And say, ‘Man, what are you doing here?’” “It was all right,” Joel said later, about the gig. “I got free drinks and union scale, which was the first steady money I’d made in a long time.”

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