Fandom, like stardom, invites mythmaking. So I can't be certain I'm right when I say my appreciation of Billy Joel took off somewhere around 1983, at a house where I was babysitting. They had a VHS copy of Billy Joel: Live From Long Island, a live performance recorded in December 1982. I didn't know that the reason his left thumb was bandaged, and the reason he kept shaking his hand like it was hurting, was the terrible motorcycle accident he'd had earlier that year that cemented the end of his marriage and his working relationship with his first wife and manager, Elizabeth Weber.
The personal and the creative rarely cut apart cleanly.
I didn't really care about the personal; it was the piano playing that worked on me. When I was growing up, my mom played ragtime in our house, so I had a soft spot for pianists. (We shall not speak of the boy upon whose piano I used to lean in the manner of Lucy and Schroeder.) I only ever saw Joel live once, at the Spectrum in Philadelphia when he was touring for The Bridge in 1986 and 1987. But this was my favorite music in high school, and in college, and beyond. I knew every word — truly, every word. I knew the story about how his first album, Cold Spring Harbor, was ruined in production. I learned a simplified version of "Summer, Highland Falls" on our living room piano. I owned, on cassette, the 1970 album released by his hair band, Attila.
The new two-part HBO documentary Billy Joel: And So It Goes, directed and produced by Susan Lacy and Jessica Levin, will get attention for what it has to say about his personal life. Not because it's an exposé; on the contrary, the project had his cooperation, with all the questions that arrangement raises. As Eric Deggans wrote, there is a lot of confession (from him) and forgiveness (from others) in these five hours or so, and that can be touching while also provoking some skepticism. It's not everybody who can have all four of his wives appear in a documentary like this and seem to be at something like peace with the ones he's not married to anymore, at least enough for them to participate.
That seems like a credit to them, given the stories they tell about times when he was not pleasant to be married to. "Too much drinking, for a long time" is a theme that comes up over and over in the stories of both Weber and Joel's second wife, Christie Brinkley.
Knowing a lot of the anecdotes, knowing I didn't need to be convinced of his influence, and knowing I was not invested in his marriages and motorcycle accidents, I wasn't sure I needed this project. But I did, as it turns out. To learn about his creative process now that I'm older and have done more creating of my own, to reconsider what I knew and didn't know of his biography, to reflect on his cultural positioning with more distance, and especially to excavate what it was about these particular records that stuck to me so stubbornly.
A music biography about music
If the documentary has a thesis, it's that Billy Joel built a career on an especially potent combination of three strengths: songwriting (especially melodies), piano playing and live performance. That last one is sometimes overlooked, but it's important; I don't think it's a coincidence that I became a fan after I watched a video of him performing live. In the '70s, '80s and early '90s, when he was releasing studio albums, he was active and loose-limbed on stage — jumping and running, dancing, joking around with the band. He was high-energy and theatrical, charismatic, playful and funny, even though in the last couple of decades, his image has been of a man seated at a piano at Madison Square Garden.
None of it would have been anything without songwriting. And So It Goes draws lines for people who know this music well, back and forth between what you heard and where it came from. Sometimes this is about lyrics: He somewhat reluctantly owns the fact that "Stiletto," from 52nd Street, written late in his first marriage, is "kind of a nasty song" about that relationship. (Weber dryly refers to it as "one of my favorite songs of all time.") Sometimes it's about whole albums: He says he wanted to write Glass Houses, a more rambunctious record than his others up to that point, partly because he was starting to play big arenas and wanted music for those settings. Sometimes it's about production and personnel: He changed bands late in his career after having the same guys with him for many years, at the urging of a new producer. (The former band members, like the ex-wives, don't present as bitter. That doesn't mean they weren't hurt.)
Connections are plentiful between his life and his songs, and as he says, he doesn't really operate in simile and metaphor that much — he writes like he talks. And he often writes songs about, or at least songs inspired by, things that are happening. Why was he writing so much about the West and about California in the early 1970s? Because he and Weber had moved out there. Why did he sound so much like he kinda hated it? Because he kinda hated it. Why does he sometimes come off in his own lyrics like a petulant jerk? Because sometimes he was being a petulant jerk. Why did he write such gorgeous love songs while he was married to Weber? Because he was deeply in love with her, and he loved to write about her and write to her, and he dumped everything into songs at that time: anger, love, resentment (so much of that), relief. And why was there often such a measure of self-loathing in the words he sang? Well.
Meet the (first) wife
Elizabeth Weber is, if not the hero, at least the co-protagonist of the first of the two installments of the documentary. The break between the film's two parts happens at their divorce, which divides his career into the Elizabeth era and the post-Elizabeth era. It would be easy — it was easy — for people to draw her as a killjoy or as controlling, because she was his manager while they were married, and because everyone agrees she was the designated adult when the band was touring (and drinking). She was dealing mostly with men in the music business, and few of them took her seriously, both because she was a woman and because she was the artist's wife. She didn't get to be in a celebrity supercouple in the same way Brinkley did; she didn't get to be a cover girl. She worked on his career, really hard, when he wasn't really famous yet, and she caught a lot of static for it.
But the documentary makes clear that there is very little chance Joel would have had the career he did without her. She handled business when he wouldn't, and she had instincts about music, too, sometimes instincts that counterbalanced his: Those interviewed are in agreement that nobody was sure "Just The Way You Are," which supercharged Joel's career in the late 1970s, should be a single off The Stranger or should even appear on the album except for her. (And Linda Ronstadt, when she heard it. And Phoebe Snow. Notice a pattern?) So whatever control Joel had over the production of the documentary, it doesn't prevent the first half from functioning in part as a correction of the record in favor of his first wife, to whom he hasn't been married in more than 40 years.
According to Elizabeth Weber, by the way, when they broke up professionally and personally in the early '80s, Joel insisted on hiring her brother Frank as his next manager, which she advised against. Years later, Joel sued Frank Weber for $90 million, claiming he misappropriated large amounts of money.
The problem of cool
Stories about pop musicians often run into internecine battles over what is cool and what is not. When I was young, I didn't care whether liking Billy Joel was cool — most of what I liked (musicals, Harlequin romances, writing) wasn't cool. But I think I always knew he cared deeply and couldn't help it. Rock critics mostly hated him: As critic Steven Hyden explains in And So It Goes, even though everybody knew he could write a melody, he was nothing like the anti-establishment punk music they were championing at the time he got famous, and a lot of them took his position as a top-seller with Columbia Records as adequate evidence that he was the despised establishment, the enemy.
But to him, he was a kid who grew up poor with a single mom, the rare divorced family in his neighborhood, the rare Jewish family in his neighborhood. He got badly burned by his first record contract, he loved rock and roll, and he was never comfortable or accepted in the California scene where some people thought he belonged in the '70s, with guys like James Taylor and Jackson Browne. (In the documentary, musician and producer Danny Kortchmar notes that it was hard for Joel and his music to fit in out there, maybe because he was "too New York," a loaded phrase if ever there was one.) He made the kinds of music he really liked, writing about all the things he was interested in.
In Joel's mind, what did he ever do to deserve to be treated like he was soft? Or phony?
And the more it bothered him that critics hated him, the more they hated him, because nothing is less cool than being bothered that people don't think you're cool and actually complaining about it. If you weren't a grasping try-hard before, buddy, well, you are one now.
It got nasty: He would rip up reviews on stage, and in retrospect, some of those reviews seem overheated and a little disingenuous themselves. (On screen, we see a pan of the retro-flavored An Innocent Man record that questioned how this guy dared to think he had the right to imitate the great Frankie Valli — and misspelled it as "Frankie Vallie.") There was a gaudiness to some of the thumbs-down takes, as if there were points to be earned by making them as devastating as possible. Artists are not the only ones who could stand to get over themselves now and then, after all, and critics are not immune from obsessing over their own standing.
Bruce Springsteen and Paul McCartney talk kindly about Joel and his music in And So It Goes, both helpfully identified in their chyrons as "MUSICIAN." So do Pink, Sting, Nas, Garth Brooks and Itzhak Perlman. I would like to believe that no part of Joel still looks at that and thinks, "See? They think I'm cool."
Misery loves ... music
Something that Hyden says late in the documentary struck me as particularly wise and probably relevant to my teenage self: that Billy Joel writes about "existential dissatisfaction." He writes songs about why nothing is happening, or why everything feels empty, or why something fell apart. Hyden also points out that a lot of these songs work at least as well coming from a guy who's 70 as they did from a guy who was 30. Maybe that's why Joel's career and his music have lasted so long, and why he was a hit at Madison Square Garden for a decade, up until the summer of last year. Being unfulfilled, as a topic, doesn't age as strangely as some pop themes might. Restlessness endures, as does love.
That restlessness also shows up in Joel's tendency to complain, which he acknowledges. It has blown up in his face a lot — with critics, yes, but Weber also says that writing "The Entertainer," which was a list of grievances against his record company, served only to alienate people who were trying to help him. It's a kind of ouroboros of self-sabotage, where the inability to ever be satisfied pushes satisfaction farther and farther away.
Maybe it's this sense of searching and never quite finding, of making mistakes that hurt yourself as much as anybody, that made this perfect teenager music for me. Maybe I should have been focused on rebellion, but I was too moody to muster the energy.
Joel doesn't write songs anymore. He says he just ran out of things he wanted to say and got tired of the structure of pop music. He's married again, he has kids with his current wife, and he says he's trying to be the kind of dad he didn't get to have. Things aren't easy: He shared in May that he'd been diagnosed with normal pressure hydrocephalus, a brain condition doctors told NPR is treatable, but often ignored. He's not performing, at least for the moment, while that's being managed.
But the first thing I did after I finished watching the documentary was to go back to the albums and start at the beginning. The words are mostly still in there somewhere, stuck in the back corners of the bottom drawers of my memory, in that way where you couldn't write them down on a blank sheet of paper, but if the music starts playing, they seem to materialize in your mouth, line by line, right before it's time to sing them out loud in the car. I am humming these songs in my kitchen. I am wishing I had seen him live a few more times. I am wishing I had gotten better at the piano.
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