Billy Joel in 1977.
Artwork Maillet/Sony Music Archives/HBO
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Artwork Maillet/Sony Music Archives/HBO
Fandom, like stardom, invitations mythmaking. So I am unable to be sure I am proper after I say my appreciation of Billy Joel took off someplace round 1983, at a home the place I used to be babysitting. They’d a VHS copy of Billy Joel: Dwell From Lengthy Island, a reside efficiency recorded in December 1982. I did not know that the explanation his left thumb was bandaged, and the explanation he saved shaking his hand prefer it was hurting, was the horrible motorbike accident he’d had earlier that yr that cemented the top of his marriage and his working relationship together with his first spouse and supervisor, Elizabeth Weber.
The private and the inventive not often reduce aside cleanly.
I did not actually care concerning the private; it was the piano taking part in that labored on me. Once I was rising up, my mother performed ragtime in our home, so I had a delicate spot for pianists. (We will not communicate of the boy upon whose piano I used to lean within the method of Lucy and Schroeder.) I solely ever noticed Joel reside as soon as, on the Spectrum in Philadelphia when he was touring for The Bridge in 1986 and 1987. However this was my favourite music in highschool, and in faculty, and past. I knew each phrase — really, each phrase. I knew the story about how his first album, Chilly Spring Harbor, was ruined in manufacturing. I realized a simplified model of “Summer time, Highland Falls” on our lounge piano. I owned, on cassette, the 1970 album launched by his hair band, Attila.
The brand new two-part HBO documentary Billy Joel: And So It Goes, directed and produced by Susan Lacy and Jessica Levin, will get consideration for what it has to say about his private life. Not as a result of it is an exposé; quite the opposite, the undertaking had his cooperation, with all of the questions that association raises. As Eric Deggans wrote, there may be plenty of confession (from him) and forgiveness (from others) in these 5 hours or so, and that may be touching whereas additionally scary some skepticism. It is not all people who can have all 4 of his wives seem in a documentary like this and appear to be at one thing like peace with those he isn’t married to anymore, a minimum of sufficient for them to take part.
That looks like a credit score to them, given the tales they inform about occasions when he was not nice to be married to. “An excessive amount of ingesting, for a very long time” is a theme that comes up again and again within the tales of each Weber and Joel’s second spouse, Christie Brinkley.
Realizing plenty of the anecdotes, understanding I did not should be satisfied of his affect, and understanding I used to be not invested in his marriages and motorbike accidents, I wasn’t positive I wanted this undertaking. However I did, because it seems. To study his inventive course of now that I am older and have performed extra creating of my very own, to rethink what I knew and did not know of his biography, to replicate on his cultural positioning with extra distance, and particularly to excavate what it was about these specific data that caught to me so stubbornly.
A music biography about music
If the documentary has a thesis, it is that Billy Joel constructed a profession on an particularly potent mixture of three strengths: songwriting (particularly melodies), piano taking part in and reside efficiency. That final one is typically neglected, nevertheless it’s necessary; I do not suppose it is a coincidence that I grew to become a fan after I watched a video of him performing reside. Within the ’70s, ’80s and early ’90s, when he was releasing studio albums, he was energetic and loose-limbed on stage — leaping and working, dancing, joking round with the band. He was high-energy and theatrical, charismatic, playful and humorous, despite the fact that within the final couple of a long time, his picture has been of a person seated at a piano at Madison Sq. Backyard.
Billy Joel in 1981.
Dan Weeks/Billy Joel Archives/HBO
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Dan Weeks/Billy Joel Archives/HBO
None of it might have been something with out songwriting. And So It Goes attracts strains for individuals who know this music nicely, forwards and backwards between what you heard and the place it got here from. Typically that is about lyrics: He considerably reluctantly owns the truth that “Stiletto,” from 52nd Road, written late in his first marriage, is “type of a nasty track” about that relationship. (Weber dryly refers to it as “considered one of my favourite songs of all time.”) Typically it is about complete albums: He says he needed to write down Glass Homes, a extra rambunctious document than his others as much as that time, partly as a result of he was beginning to play large arenas and needed music for these settings. Typically it is about manufacturing and personnel: He modified bands late in his profession after having the identical guys with him for a few years, on the urging of a brand new producer. (The previous band members, just like the ex-wives, do not current as bitter. That does not imply they weren’t damage.)
Connections are plentiful between his life and his songs, and as he says, he would not actually function in simile and metaphor that a lot — he writes like he talks. And he typically writes songs about, or a minimum of songs impressed by, issues which are taking place. Why was he writing a lot concerning the West and about California within the early Nineteen Seventies? As a result of he and Weber had moved on the market. Why did he sound a lot like he kinda hated it? As a result of he kinda hated it. Why does he typically come off in his personal lyrics like a petulant jerk? As a result of typically he was being a petulant jerk. Why did he write such beautiful love songs whereas he was married to Weber? As a result of he was deeply in love along with her, and he beloved to write down about her and write to her, and he dumped the whole lot into songs at the moment: anger, love, resentment (a lot of that), reduction. And why was there typically such a measure of self-loathing within the phrases he sang? Effectively.
Meet the (first) spouse
Elizabeth Weber is, if not the hero, a minimum of the co-protagonist of the primary of the 2 installments of the documentary. The break between the movie’s two elements occurs at their divorce, which divides his profession into the Elizabeth period and the post-Elizabeth period. It will be simple — it was simple — for folks to attract her as a killjoy or as controlling, as a result of she was his supervisor whereas they had been married, and since everybody agrees she was the designated grownup when the band was touring (and ingesting). She was dealing largely with males within the music enterprise, and few of them took her significantly, each as a result of she was a lady and since she was the artist’s spouse. She did not get to be in a star supercouple in the identical means Brinkley did; she did not get to be a canopy woman. She labored on his profession, actually laborious, when he wasn’t actually well-known but, and he or she caught plenty of static for it.
However the documentary makes clear that there’s little or no probability Joel would have had the profession he did with out her. She dealt with enterprise when he would not, and he or she had instincts about music, too, typically instincts that counterbalanced his: These interviewed are in settlement that no one was positive “Simply The Method You Are,” which supercharged Joel’s profession within the late Nineteen Seventies, must be a single off The Stranger or ought to even seem on the album besides for her. (And Linda Ronstadt, when she heard it. And Phoebe Snow. Discover a sample?) So no matter management Joel had over the manufacturing of the documentary, it would not forestall the primary half from functioning partly as a correction of the document in favor of his first spouse, to whom he hasn’t been married in additional than 40 years.
In accordance with Elizabeth Weber, by the best way, after they broke up professionally and personally within the early ’80s, Joel insisted on hiring her brother Frank as his subsequent supervisor, which she suggested in opposition to. Years later, Joel sued Frank Weber for $90 million, claiming he misappropriated giant quantities of cash.
The issue of cool
Tales about pop musicians typically run into internecine battles over what’s cool and what’s not. Once I was younger, I did not care whether or not liking Billy Joel was cool — most of what I preferred (musicals, Harlequin romances, writing) wasn’t cool. However I believe I all the time knew he cared deeply and could not assist it. Rock critics largely hated him: As critic Steven Hyden explains in And So It Goes, despite the fact that all people knew he may write a melody, he was nothing just like the anti-establishment punk music they had been championing on the time he received well-known, and plenty of them took his place as a top-seller with Columbia Data as enough proof that he was the despised institution, the enemy.
However to him, he was a child who grew up poor with a single mother, the uncommon divorced household in his neighborhood, the uncommon Jewish household in his neighborhood. He received badly burned by his first document contract, he beloved rock and roll, and he was by no means snug or accepted within the California scene the place some folks thought he belonged within the ’70s, with guys like James Taylor and Jackson Browne. (Within the documentary, musician and producer Danny Kortchmar notes that it was laborious for Joel and his music to slot in on the market, possibly as a result of he was “too New York,” a loaded phrase if ever there was one.) He made the sorts of music he actually preferred, writing about all of the issues he was fascinated by.
In Joel’s thoughts, what did he ever do to need to be handled like he was delicate? Or phony?
Billy Joel in 1962.
Billy Joel Archives/HBO
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Billy Joel Archives/HBO
And the extra it bothered him that critics hated him, the extra they hated him, as a result of nothing is much less cool than being bothered that folks do not suppose you are cool and really complaining about it. In the event you weren’t a greedy try-hard earlier than, buddy, nicely, you might be one now.
It received nasty: He would rip up opinions on stage, and looking back, a few of these opinions appear overheated and a bit of disingenuous themselves. (On display, we see a pan of the retro-flavored An Harmless Man document that questioned how this man dared to suppose he had the fitting to mimic the nice Frankie Valli — and misspelled it as “Frankie Vallie.”) There was a gaudiness to among the thumbs-down takes, as if there have been factors to be earned by making them as devastating as doable. Artists should not the one ones who may stand to recover from themselves at times, in any case, and critics should not immune from obsessing over their very own standing.
Bruce Springsteen and Paul McCartney discuss kindly about Joel and his music in And So It Goes, each helpfully recognized of their chyrons as “MUSICIAN.” So do Pink, Sting, Nas, Garth Brooks and Itzhak Perlman. I want to consider that no a part of Joel nonetheless seems at that and thinks, “See? They suppose I am cool.”
Distress loves … music
One thing that Hyden says late within the documentary struck me as significantly sensible and doubtless related to my teenage self: that Billy Joel writes about “existential dissatisfaction.” He writes songs about why nothing is occurring, or why the whole lot feels empty, or why one thing fell aside. Hyden additionally factors out that plenty of these songs work a minimum of as nicely coming from a man who’s 70 as they did from a man who was 30. Possibly that is why Joel’s profession and his music have lasted so lengthy, and why he was a success at Madison Sq. Backyard for a decade, up till the summer season of final yr. Being unfulfilled, as a subject, would not age as unusually as some pop themes would possibly. Restlessness endures, as does love.
Billy Joel (middle) with Doug Stegmeyer, Jeff Schock, Rick London and Tim McCarthy in 1979.
Billy Joel Archives/HBO
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Billy Joel Archives/HBO
That restlessness additionally reveals up in Joel’s tendency to complain, which he acknowledges. It has blown up in his face quite a bit — with critics, sure, however Weber additionally says that writing “The Entertainer,” which was a listing of grievances in opposition to his document firm, served solely to alienate individuals who had been attempting to assist him. It is a type of ouroboros of self-sabotage, the place the lack to ever be happy pushes satisfaction farther and farther away.
Possibly it is this sense of looking and by no means fairly discovering, of creating errors that damage your self as a lot as anyone, that made this excellent teenager music for me. Possibly I ought to have been centered on insurrection, however I used to be too moody to muster the vitality.
Joel would not write songs anymore. He says he simply ran out of issues he needed to say and received bored with the construction of pop music. He is married once more, he has children together with his present spouse, and he says he is attempting to be the type of dad he did not get to have. Issues aren’t simple: He shared in Might that he’d been recognized with regular stress hydrocephalus, a mind situation docs informed NPR is treatable, however typically ignored. He isn’t performing, a minimum of for the second, whereas that is being managed.
However the very first thing I did after I completed watching the documentary was to return to the albums and begin at first. The phrases are largely nonetheless in there someplace, caught within the again corners of the underside drawers of my reminiscence, in that means the place you could not write them down on a clean sheet of paper, but when the music begins taking part in, they appear to materialize in your mouth, line by line, proper earlier than it is time to sing them out loud within the automobile. I’m buzzing these songs in my kitchen. I’m wishing I had seen him reside just a few extra occasions. I’m wishing I had gotten higher on the piano.
