On the Charts: "High School Musical 2" Scores Major Debut, Dave Matthews and Hip-Hop Heavyweights Hang In

The Big News: It was a tyker revolution this week, as kids invaded record stores to buy the soundtrack to High School Musical 2, which sold 615,361 copies in its first week of sales -- the second-biggest debut of the year behind Linkin Park's 622,827 opening week sales of Minutes to Midnight. The huge opening wasn't a shock, though: the Disney Channel's Friday-night debut of HSM2 attracted 17.2 million viewers, making it the most-watched basic-cable show ever. While they were in the buying mood, tweens (or, more likely, their kind parents) snapped up other kid-friendly titles, as the Hannah Montana 2 soundtrack jumped up to number two, moving 82,607 units, and the original High School Musical sountrack improved from number twenty-eight to sixteen.

Debuts: Dave Matthews and Tim Reynolds' Live at Radio City Music Hall finished at number three, selling 69,792 copies, while AFI's Davey Havok's side project Blaqk Audio entered the chart at number eighteen on sales of 29,057.

Last Week's Sales Heroes?: Hip-hop top-tenners UGK, Plies, Common and T.I. nearly all held onto top-ten positions this week, too, coming in at numbers six, nine, ten and eleven, respectively.

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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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