Piano man Billy Joel back in spotlight
Bestselling musician returns to playing live
Billy Joel stepped onto the stage of Long Island’s Paramount Theatre last week feeling rather nervous. “I was wondering if I was going to be any good,” he admits. “Could I still do this?”
It was an understandable concern — it is 20 years since Joel’s last pop record, and 11 since he headlined in his native Long Island — but unnecessary: the show was ecstatically received.
“We played half a dozen songs that we rarely play and some that we have never performed,” Joel tells me via phone from his Long Island home. “You have to mix it up — only singing hits becomes really boring.”
It is an enviable problem to have. Billy Joel has sold more than 150 million albums, his greatest hits double album alone has shifted 23 million copies, and he is the third-biggest-selling solo artist of all time in the United States, bigger than Bruce Springsteen, Madonna and Michael Jackson. Which is pretty good going for someone who says he has a horrible piano-playing technique and is not a real rock star.
Billy Joel was born 64 years ago in the Bronx to an English Jewish mother and a German Jewish father who had fled the Nazis. Joel’s father was a classically trained pianist and Billy had lessons from the age of six. And then he saw the Beatles.
“I was 15 when I saw them, and I remember thinking they looked like me and my friends,” he recalls. “They looked like working-class stiffs — they didn’t look like they were fabricated in Hollywood.”
Joel began playing in local bands before releasing a debut album in 1971 that was indifferently received, and before 1973’s Piano Man provided his signature song and put him on the road toward superstardom. During the next two decades, he released a string of hit singles and albums, winning Grammy Awards for album of the year in 1978 and song of the year and record of the year for Just the Way You Are.
He dated Elle Macpherson and married another supermodel — Christie Brinkley — and in 1987 he became the first American rock star to play Russia since the building of the Berlin Wall. He seemed to have it all, but the one thing that eluded him was critical acclaim. Billy Joel has never been cool. One critic referred to him as “the sort of popular artist who makes elitism seem not only defensible but necessary.”
“When I was first starting out, I was considered hip for about two seconds,” says Joel, “and immediately after that I was naff — isn’t that the word?”
How does he feel about that now? “It’s a very superficial way to judge things,” he says. “Just to be cool doesn’t have a whole lot of substance to it anyway.”
That Joel is not accorded the critical respect accorded to peers such as Springsteen and Neil Young seems unfair: anyone whose back catalogue includes Piano Man, Movin’ Out (Anthony’s Song) and Only The Good Die Young ought not to need defending. Despite having written a boatload of songs that are now timeless standards, Joel became disillusioned with pop music.
“I did a few tours with Elton John,” he says, “and the show never changed — it was basically the two of us doing our greatest hits. It became stale and sterile.”
The craft of songwriting also began to lose its appeal. “I got bored writing popular music,” he says. “I just got tired of writing in the same format: it can’t be too long, it’s got to be played on the radio. It’s a box, and after a while that box becomes a coffin.”
There is one song he is not looking forward to singing live. “I am dreading doing Uptown Girl,” he admits, “because it’s going to destroy my throat. Once I do that song, it’s really hard to sing anything after that.”
The video for Uptown Girl featured his second ex-wife, Brinkley. Joel has talked in the past about how he took up music to compensate for his looks, which are more roadie than rock star.
“I have a face made for radio,” he tells me, “but I don’t care that I’m not a handsome guy — I want my girlfriend to be good-looking, not me.”
As a strategy, this has had mixed results: Joel has been married and divorced three times. His last wife — in conversation he uses “ex one” and “ex two” rather than names — was 33 years younger than him, and his current girlfriend is 32 years his junior. There was speculation that it was the emotional fallout from his divorces that led to a spate of car crashes between 2002 and 2010, which he claimed were due to wet driving conditions but which some attributed to drinking.
Joel is a private man who resents intrusions into his personal life — he recently returned the advance he had been given to write an autobiography when he realized his publishers were hop- ing for a sensationalist insight into his life.
“People want to know about your private life, your girlfriend, your habits: ‘None of your business!’” he tells me. “I feel like I gave enough away by writing the music — I opened up my soul, what else do you want?”
He describes starting to drink heavily in 2001. “I was in New York on 9/11, and it had a devastating impact on me,” he says. “It hit me like a ton of bricks. I went into a deep depression and started drinking. I lost faith in humanity.” So what restored his faith, I ask. “That girl who was shot by the Taliban [Malala Yousafzai],” he says. “She is the antidote. We need people like that. I get inspired by people like that.”
Pop no longer inspires Billy Joel. He lives quietly with his girlfriend and the 100 motorbikes that he keeps in his garage. People mostly leave him alone. He is still writing music, but it is abstract and classical and it may never be recorded or released.
“Just because I can put out albums and the record company would release them and people would buy them, that don’t mean I should,” he says.
When I ask him what he has listened to lately, he says Edward Elgar and Benjamin Britten. He doesn’t know who Arcade Fire is.
At the age of 64, Joel is embracing the music he grew up listening to before rock ’n’ roll entered his life. “I took classical lessons until I was 16 and then I stopped,” he says. “It’s like I fell in love with rock ’n’ roll — I met this girl with mascara and fishnet stockings and cigarettes and she dragged me away with her for a good 45 years — and now, all of a sudden, I have discovered the girl next door again and she looks pretty good.”
Is it hard for a rock star to return to civilian life?
“I don’t sit around saying: ‘Gee, I miss the adulation, I want the applause,’” he says, “but what I do miss is making music with other musicians.”
Which is why he’s returned to playing live.