Joel originally considered keeping the song off the album, as he dismissed it as a "gloppy ballad" that was out-of-place compared to the rest of the album. Ramone disagreed, and brought Linda Ronstadt and Phoebe Snow into the studio to prove that it was worth including. Upon hearing the song, the two artists both praised it, thus convincing him to feature the song. The 7 minute epic "Scenes from an Italian Restaurant", which follows a pair of young lovers from Long Island named Brenda and Eddie who go through a failed marriage, is three different, shorter songs: "The Italian Restaurant Song", "Things Are OK in Oyster Bay" and "The Ballad of Brenda and Eddie". Joel stitched the three songs together, inspired by the similar approach taken with side two of the Beatles' Abbey Road and by Freddie Mercury and Queen with "Bohemian Rhapsody", while Ramone helped intertwine them with backing orchestration. The song "Vienna", which opens up the album's B-side, was inspired by a trip Joel took to Vienna, Austria to visit his father a few years after starting his music career. While there, he found that Austrians had a vastly different outlook on life than the one he was familiar with in America. As he recalls, Joel had this realization after taking notice of an old woman sweeping out on the city streets, telling his father that he pitied the woman for having to do such a menial and unimportant task; Joel's father responded by explaining that the woman was giving herself a sense of worth by doing a service that helped everyone rather than "sitting at home wasting away". Joel tried to make the song feel Viennese in nature and compared it to the work of Bertolt Brecht and Kurt Weill, specifically The Threepenny Opera. "Only the Good Die Young", which is sung from the point-of-view of a boy trying to appeal to an abstinent Catholic woman, was inspired by a girl named Virginia Davis who Joel had a crush on in high school. According to Joel, he saw Davis looking at him while he was playing in his high school band, The Echoes, which was the event that had him "completely hooked" to the prospect of being a musician. "Only the Good Die Young" was written by Joel while opening for the Beach Boys in Knoxville, Tennessee, at which point it sounded slower-pace and more akin to