An innocent man lambasted by the critics.
A long-time struggle with alcoholism. There's a lot of sadness behind the music of this piano man.
Billy Joel's father, Helmut Joel,
grew up in Nuremberg, Germany. By the mid-1930s, the Nazis began actively persecuting Jews,
so Helmut fled Germany with his parents. The family first arrived in Cuba in 1939,
before finally settling in New York City in 1942. According to Fred Schruers biography,
Billy Joel, Helmut was drafted into the United States Army a year later in 1943.
Joel's father, who adopted the more American name Howard, returned from the war a changed man. He
married Rosalind Nyman and soon after, on May 9, 1949, they had a son – William Martin Joel.
Howard traveled frequently for work and was rarely around. Billy's parents divorced
when he was young, and his father moved back to Europe where he eventually raised a new family.
This impacted young Billy. The singer said in Schurers' biography:
"Without my own father around, I was constantly searching for my own identity.
In some ways, this can free you up – you can be anything you want.
But in other ways, you may not feel that you ever have a center."
The silver lining? Although his father was a classical pianist, Billy believes that
had he stayed, he would have discouraged him from becoming a professional musician.
Billy Joel's constant tinkering on the family piano caused his mother to insist on
paying for piano lessons despite having little money, according to the biography Billy Joel.
What started as a chore soon became his greatest passion. Unfortunately, music was not viewed as
masculine in the early 1960s -– a time when boys were expected to play sports and act tough. To
make matters worse, his piano teacher also taught ballet. Joel recalled in Schruers' biography,
"When I walked down the street with my piano books, I'd get these kids shouting,
'Billy, where's your tutu?' They'd knock the books out of my hand and smack me around.
So I took up boxing, and I got pretty good at it."
Billy Joel joined the amateur circuit as a teen,
and went on to win 22 of his matches. When bullies came after him on the street,
he would fight the biggest guy. They left him alone after that. His boxing career ended when
his opponent broke his nose during his final match, giving him his signature appearance.
Following an affair with the girlfriend of his best friend and bandmate, Jon Small,
Billy Joel lost his friend, lover, band, and house. He was forced to move back home at age 21,
which was, according to Joel, a complete sign of failure, according to the biography Billy Joel.
"It got a little scary when I was about 21.
I says, 'Wow! Am I going to be able to make a living?'"
One night in 1970, he called Small up to apologize. Small went over to see
him and found Joel lying on the floor of his mother's house and rushed him to the hospital.
Billy recalled in Schruers' biography,
"The next thing I remember, I woke up in the hospital and learned that they
had pumped my stomach. I thought to myself, 'Oh, great, I couldn't even do this right.'"
He tried again a few weeks later, using a different method. Following the second thankfully
unsuccessful attempt, Joel checked himself into a psychiatric hospital for three weeks.
Around this time he penned the lyrics to his song "Tomorrow is Today,"
which many friends believe doubled as a suicide note. Billy told Sirius XM of the song,
"I was really depressed at the time I wrote that.
Now, from this perspective, I can say, 'What did he know, he's 21.'"
In 1985 he released the song "You're Only Human
(Second Wind)" with all proceeds going toward a teen suicide prevention program.
In order to succeed as an artist, Billy Joel recognized that he needed to release an album.
He teamed up with Artie Ripp, the owner of Family Productions Records,
who was willing to take a chance on him. Together, they recorded Joel's first solo album. Cold Spring
Harbor was released in 1971 -– but something had gone terribly wrong in the mixing process.
At a listening party with his friends, Joel faced the horrible realization that everything
was sped up — including his vocals. One friend even compared him to Alvin and the Chipmunks.
To make matters worse, Ripp had run out of money and was unable to correct his error.
Angry, Joel attempted to sever ties with him, but, unfortunately, he was still locked into a contract
with Family Productions. Reluctantly, Joel toured on the album in late 1971.
In 1972, Billy Joel moved to Los Angeles to escape his record deal. To pay the bills,
he took a job as an entertainer at The Executive Room on Wilshire Boulevard, assuming the stage
name Bill Martin. For six months, he worked at the piano bar almost every evening until 2 a.m.
Joel made decent money and the drinks were free. His brief stint there inspired his most
famous — and autobiographical — song: an unassuming limerick-laced waltz called "Piano
Man." The song's characters, as well as their various struggles, were all based on real people.
It is a surprisingly uplifting song in which the characters, despite their failed dreams,
listen to music to, quote, "forget about life for a while."
Billy Joel loves motorcycles. The singer owns hundreds of vintage and custom bikes,
which he keeps in a garage in Oyster Bay. On April 15, 1982, Joel was riding his motorcycle down New
York Avenue. Jim Boyer, Joel's sound engineer, happened to be driving behind him and witnessed
a car strike the front of his motorcycle. The wheel jerked sideways, pinning Joel's hand between
the handlebar and the gas tank before he was flung from the bike, landing on the road many feet away.
He was taken by ambulance to the local hospital and later transported via helicopter to Manhattan.
His hands were in bad shape. In addition to a dislocated wrist, his left thumb was pulverized.
Even after reconstructive surgery, he lost his distal phalanx -– the bone at the tip.
"Someone ran a red light and I had an accident where I lost the bone in this thumb."
While the accident did impact his playing, it did not end his career.
Tired of tedious business dealings, Billy Joel appointed his wife,
Elizabeth Joel, as his manager in 1975. For years, while staying out of the spotlight,
she helped build Billy's career into a great success. But it strained their marriage.
In an attempt to save the relationship, he fired her and appointed her brother,
Frank Weber — a trusted friend and father figure — as his manager.
Following his motorcycle accident in 1982, Elizabeth came to his hospital
room with an attorney. It was the last straw for Billy. He told Schruers,
"I'm in a hospital bed and you're shedding crocodile tears and bringing
me a contract that completely screws me? You don't do that to somebody."
Joel subsequently filed for divorce. Elizabeth was demanding during the divorce,
angling for royalties and real estate and even suing her own brother at one point.
To this day, she still makes royalties off his early albums.
And it wasn't over. Following a 1989 audit, Billy made the horrific discovery
that Weber had stolen millions of dollars from him over the years,
committed fraud, made faulty investments in his name, and had given out countless
loans. Billy fired him and sued him for $90 million but only made $8 million back.
His lawyer, Leonard M. Marks, told People that the financial scandal was one of the worst he'd seen.
Compared to other rock stars, Billy Joel is relatively straight-laced.
Sure, he's tried drugs. But in the end, he always decides to self-medicate with plain old alcohol.
Joel told Fred Schruers in Billy Joel,
"No matter what, alcohol was always there for me. The truth is,
I don't know much about sobriety. I know a hell of a lot about drinking."
Joel first checked himself into rehab in 2002 after drinking heavily for three months straight
but only stayed for a few days. After the experience,
the singer joked to The New York Times:
"To me, a musician going to rehab is like a normal person going to get his teeth cleaned."
Elton John, his friend and touring partner, chimed in on his issues,
citing Joel's alcoholism as a reason for canceled shows and claiming he needed more serious rehab.
Then, in 2005, after a series of car accidents, his then-wife, Katie Lee, expressed concern,
so Billy checked himself into the Betty Ford Center.
This time he stayed for a month and focused on getting better. Joel told People:
"It was one of the best things I ever did."
Billy Joel has loved and lost ... repeatedly. His first wife, Elizabeth Weber, inspired many of his
early songs. Billy wrote "Summer, Highland Falls" about their tumultuous relationship,
singing, "[I]t was either sadness or euphoria." He also briefly dated model Elle Macpherson,
though he always knew the relationship wouldn't last.
Joel wrote the song "And So it Goes" about his failed relationship with Macpherson.
By far his most famous relationship was with supermodel Christie Brinkley,
who he met in 1983. The two became friends and later married in 1985,
conceiving their daughter, Alexa Ray Joel, on their wedding night. Billy told Fred Schruers
that his album An Innocent Man was "a tribute to Christie." She also starred in the video
for "Uptown Girl" and painted the cover art for the album River of Dreams. However, the
marriage fizzled in 1994 due to a combination of heavy touring and Brinkley's desire to move west.
Billy then married aspiring culinary star Katie Lee,
33 years his junior, but they divorced in 2009.
Shortly after, he met equestrian Alexis Roderick, and they married in 2015. Billy told Schruers,
"You can have all the money in the world. Without the girl, it doesn't mean a [...] thing."
He remains friends with all of his ex-wives, even Weber.
Billy Joel hasn't released a new album since 1993's River of Dreams.
According to Fred Schruers' biography, Christie Brinkley often jokes that she was his muse,
as Joel hasn't written many new songs since their divorce. But Joel has other reasons.
"What was the main reason you stopped writing songs?"
"I couldn't be as good as I wanted to. It was driving me crazy."
For one, he became bored with pop music, telling The New York Times:
"I wanted to write something other than the three-minute pop tune.
Very nice box to be in for a while, but then it becomes like a coffin."
His struggle with alcohol also factored in. Joel told Vulture:
"Drinking was one of the reasons I stopped writing songs. I would drink
to try and ease the pain of not being as good as I wanted to be."
In the absence of liquid courage, he found he wasn't as willing to deal
with the pain of coming up with lyrics. He told Howard Stern,
"The worst thing about songwriting is the struggle. I love having written. I hate writing."
As it happens, River of Dreams also came out shortly before his divorce from Brinkley,
prompting the drama-obsessed media to look to his lyrics for fodder. Joel told ABC News,
"I said, 'Wait a minute,
I don't want to rip myself open and let everyone see everything.' It was no longer comfortable."
Billy Joel is as hated as he is loved. Even at the peak of his career, he had critics. In a
piece for the New Yorker, Robert Christgau called Joel "a force of nature and bad taste." Meanwhile,
Ron Rosenbaum devoted an entire piece to bagging on Joel titled "The Worst Pop Singer Ever."
Search the internet and you will find a plethora of scathing writeups on the Piano Man spanning his
entire career. A particularly popular critique is that he is "derivative." Joel clapped back
at this one during his 1999 induction into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame, saying,
"Well, I'm damn guilty. I'm derivative as hell."
He added that if that were grounds for elimination, many of the people
in attendance wouldn't be there. The criticism used to get to him, and he was once known to rip
up bad reviews on stage. Nowadays, Billy Joel doesn't care what you say anymore.