The dark genius of Billy Joel, the most underrated man in rock

Telegraph

2 days ago

Has Billy Joel been underrated? It might seem an absurd thing to suggest. The American singer-songwriter is among the top 30 best-selling artists in pop history; he's had 33 hit singles, sold 160 million records, won multiple Grammy, Emmy and Tony awards and ranks as the fourth-most-popular solo artist in America of all time. Yet at the height of his 1970s and Eighties fame, he was something of a critical whipping post, a purveyor of 'self-dramatising kitsch'.
A new two-part documentary, Billy Joel: And So It Goes, attempts belatedly to redress such critical disdain. 'I had a chip on my shoulder,' Joel admits in the documentary, recalling when the pugnacious superstar would tear up reviews on stage and phone critics personally to scold them. He casts it back to childhood bullying during an impoverished upbringing in Long Island, New York. 'I learnt life is a fight. And that was a good lesson to learn.'
And So It Goes is packed with fantastic never-before-seen footage, home movies, candid snapshots, intimate backstage and domestic scenes – as well as compelling studio and live performances, with musical luminaries queuing up to laud his talent, including Paul McCartney, Sting, Don Henley and Bruce Springsteen. ('His melodies are better than mine,' the Boss admits.)
I have always had a soft spot for Billy Joel. At the height of punk, when he was perceived as one of the least cool musicians on the planet, I loved his 1977 album The Stranger, for its sharp, romantically observed songs of everyday life. The mixture of romanticism and cynicism in his greatest work strikes a powerful chord, from pugnacious rockers such as My Life to the epic sweep of Scenes From an Italian Restaurant and Vienna.
Such worldwide smash hits as Uptown Girl, We Didn't Start the Fire and River of Dreams have fixed his place in the top 30 best-selling music artists of all time, even though he effectively gave up writing songs in 1993 and has recently had to cancel all his upcoming tour dates due to ill health.
The documentary arrives with unfortunate timing. In May, the 76-year-old revealed that he was suffering from fluid build-up in his brain that affected his 'hearing, vision and balance'. The condition is called normal pressure hydrocephalus, though Joel claimed he is 'not deathly ill' and has undergone surgery in the hope of making a recovery. 'They keep referring to what I have as a 'brain disorder', so it sounds a lot worse than what I'm feeling.' Yet it seems quite unlikely that he will ever be back on the road again.
One might conclude from the documentary that it is about as much as Joel would have expected from life. 'I've had a lot of hard lessons,' he ruminates, contemplating struggles with drugs and alcohol and three divorces. 'I realised life doesn't always have a happy ending.'
There is a surprising darkness at the film's heart, with a persistent undercurrent of downbeat fatalism. 'Life's not a musical, it's a Greek tragedy,' is how Joel sums up his philosophy. 'I always felt like an outsider,' he says of a childhood as the only Jewish family in an Italian neighbourhood, raised by a single mother after his father deserted them when Joel was eight. 'We were the discard family on the block. We didn't have a new car, we didn't have a dad, we were the Jews, we didn't have any money, sometimes we didn't have any food.' ('There was poor, and there was Billy Joel poor' confirms lifelong friend Jon Small).
His mother's moods swung between depression and euphoria, and she was 'probably bipolar', according to Joel's older sister, Judy Molinari, but 'no matter how poor we were, she knew Billy had to have his piano lessons'. Their father was a frustrated classical concert pianist, who once knocked Joel unconscious for rocking up Beethoven's Moonlight Sonata. 'He was a very dark man,' recalls Joel. 'He told me once as a kid 'life is a cesspool.'' Following his parent's divorce in 1957, Joel didn't see his father for 16 years.
One of his greatest songs, Vienna, was inspired by an ultimately frustrating reunion with his father, whom he tracked down in Austria with a second family (he has a half brother, Alexander Joel, who grew up to become a respected orchestral conductor). It was there he learnt the devastating history of the Joel family, formerly wealthy German industrialists who lost everything during the rise of the Nazis and were mostly wiped out in the Holocaust.
Joel reveals a love-hate relationship with his own art. He describes songwriting as 'a lonely job', and confesses 'I see the piano as this big black box with 88 teeth trying to bite my hands off.'
Each episode is two and a half hours long, and, frankly, five hours in the company of Billy Joel is a lot. It is leavened by humour, thankfully, and not all of it based around the physical appearance of a pop superstar who always manages to look like he hates getting his picture taken. He looks positively ill during his first wedding, to Elizabeth Weber in 1973 ('I had reservations,' he admits).
His second wife, supermodel Christie Brinkley, admits that she was almost put off by his 'Long Island bubble hair' and terrible clothes. He is a pop star who never had a good haircut – the pictures of Joel wearing chainmail and sporting shaggy ringlets and a droopy moustache in short-lived early Seventies heavy metal duo Attila have to be seen to be believed. By the end of the documentary, you might conclude that baldness is the kindest thing ever to happen to him.
Episode one is the most compelling but also the saddest, with a huge romantic arc, following the love affair that drove his career, and broke both their hearts. Joel met Elizabeth Weber-Small when she was married to his best friend and Attila bandmate, Jon Small. He was so ashamed of their burgeoning love affair he twice attempted suicide (first with pills, then with furniture polish) and wound up in a mental hospital. He wrote the whole of his tender 1971 solo debut album, Cold Spring Harbor, in a state of romantic longing.
When they eventually got together, Weber became the driving force in his career, taking on the role of his manager. She is the subject of such deathlessly romantic ballads as Just the Way You Are and Always a Woman, as well as the less flattering Stiletto.
Interviewed for the documentary, Weber talks about Joel with tenderness and insight, revealing that she left him because of his heavy drinking and the near-suicidal behaviour that led to a life-threatening motorcycle crash in 1982. 'I would have stayed,' she reveals. 'Like so many women before me, make that accommodation for someone you love. But there was no way I could stand by and watch him kill himself. I didn't have it in me. I felt very strongly that's where it was going.'
'It was sad,' is the most Joel can admit on the subject.
The second episode is a lot of fun, packed with delightful home footage shot by his second great love, the eternally bright-spirited Brinkley, who inspired Joel's most upbeat album, An Innocent Man, in 1983. There's a lot of witty patter, goofy backstage carry-on and fantastic music, with domestic bliss breaking out as the couple marry in 1985 and have a daughter, Alexa (also interviewed for the documentary).
But it all goes sour when his new manger (his ex-wife's brother, whom she warned him against) defrauds him of multi-millions, Joel starts drinking again, quits songwriting and breaks up with Brinkley. She gets emotional recalling the moment she told him how unhappy she was, and his response was to just snap, 'Yeah, fine, go.'
'It was a very sad time for me,' admits Joel now. 'I was so devastated.'
At which point viewers may realise they still have an hour to go of stints in rehab, falling out with Elton John (conspicuously absent from the documentary) over Joel's destructively heavy drinking during co-headlining tours, and another failed marriage, before we leave Joel in his fourth marriage (to Alexis Roderick, an equestrian and lawyer 30 years his junior, in 2015), with two young daughters (Della and Remy), sailing his beloved boat Alexa out to sea, and proclaiming hope for a future that we already know is about to be dashed by illness.
I met Joel in a hotel bar after a concert in Detroit in 1990 and spent a long and increasingly drunken night in his company. I really liked him. He was funny, self-deprecating and the life of our spontaneous party, getting on a hotel piano and leading a rowdy sing-along into the small hours. The next day, his tour manager accused me of having led him astray and revealed that Joel had lost his voice and would have to cancel that night's concert.
I realise now that was during a period when things were starting to go south again for Joel, who told me Brinkley had gone to stay with her parents in Hawaii. 'You can't have a fight with your wife when her parents own a beautiful beach house in Hawaii,' he joked. 'It's like any excuse to pack your bags and run home to momma.'
That humour percolates through And So It Goes, but so does the self-absorption and melancholy that seem to have haunted him all his life. His songwriting seems to have been a vital outlet for his deepest feelings, but he cut off that part of himself in 1993, exhausted by artistic struggle. As Sting admiringly points out, Joel is a master of song structure, and the documentary explores his compositional roots in European classical music, which Joel adores. 'I realised I've never forgiven myself for not being Beethoven,' he confesses.
It's clear that Joel's songs sprang from a deep well of often troubled emotions and experiences, reflecting the life of a man for whom music was a vocation, a burden and, perhaps, salvation. 'Everything I've done, everything I've lived through, has somehow found a way into my music,' says Joel. His place as an all-time great singer-songwriter cannot really be in doubt.