Billy Joel At Forty

A Collegial Conversation, 1989

The Long Island Music and Entertainment Hall of Fame (LIMEHOF) museum opened a new exhibition over Thanksgiving weekend, "Billy Joel/My Life: A Piano Man's Journey." The museum is at 97 Main Street, Stony Brook, NY 11790. Inductees to LIMEHOF include Joel (charter member, of course), and, as of November 2022, me. This was not on the horizon in 1989.

I had spent nearly 15 years already covering Billy Joel for the only newspaper that matters to him: Newsday, the Long Island newspaper. If you want to know why Billy Joel is so important to Long Island, it's because he's the one star who never left. Bad times during his early career exile in Los Angeles chronicled in the Piano Man album made him say goodbye to Hollywood for good. He's the hometown hitmaker who never left home again.

After reporting on six shows in Russia (three in Moscow, three in the former Leningrad/St. Petersburg) in three weeks in August, 1987, it was agreed I no longer would review Joel's shows, though I would occasionally travel to do pertinent interviews (Seattle/Tacoma, 1991).  

But when his Storm Front album was coming out in 1989, it was time to get together again for an interview. This was the interview at the Italian restaurant in the West 50s that I wrote about in “Being the Billy Joel Beat.”

I'm sure we talked about "We Didn't Start the Fire," the annoying-to-many rhyming history lesson that was the nation's No. 1 single around the time of our meeting. But we didn’t fuss over it. Over a bottle of red (we skipped the bottle of white), we talked broadly about what we really thought was our encroachment into middle age.

When were younger than yesterday: At the National Hotel, Moscow, 1987. Now on display at LIMEHOF in Stony Broo0k.

Both proud of being born in the baby-boom anchor year of 1949 (Bruce Springsteen is also a "49-er"), Billy had already turned 40 a few months earlier on May 9. I would turn 40 in December (Sagittarius section). In those days, that marker was a big deal. Maybe it still is, I'm almost too old to remember!

WR: SO MUCH HAPPENED WHEN WE WERE 20. THE SUMMER OF 1969 (Woodstock, moon landing) WAS OUR HALFWAY POINT...

BJ: We'll be 50 when the millennium comes. This age group is going to represent what the majority age is. We are the vanguard of the new middle age, and the new old age. I think things are going to be very different for us as opposed to our parents when it comes to old age.

I don’t know, maybe it's me. I look at people who are 40, they don’t look so old to me. When I was 20, people who were 40 were over the hill! One foot in the grave! Is it because people are taking better care of themselves, or we're aging better because we have better nutrition, I don't know what it is.

People used to write off 4O, I just see it as a new beginning. I had more of a trauma with  with 30 than I did with 40. When we were younger it was "don't trust anyone over 30." It was the big dividing line. Forty I just kind of sailed right in.

WR: WHAT WAS HAPPENING WHEN YOU WERE 30?

BJ: We were having salad days, really. it was right on the heel of The Stranger and 52nd Street just prior to the Glass Houses album. Having a big boom in record success.I think my marriage [to his first wife, and manager, Elizabeth Weber] was starting to unravel around then, 1979, it wasn't the happiest time. Looking back on it, it should have been a much happier time. Record success doesn't translate into happiness. I don't think it has anything to do with it. I think what you're doing and who you're with, that's the quality of your life at that particular time. I had a house in Oyster Bay, things were getting very complicated. [The part of Oyster Bay in which Joel was living was an affluent area not far north at all from his hometown of Hicksville.]

YOU MUST HAVE HAD AN ENORMOUS AMOUNT OF MONEY COMING IN?

I'm assuming there was. I really wasn't aware. I know we were living in a nice house, my wife was going out and buying all kinds of nice stuff. I never really went out and did that. I never took comfortably  to consumerism.

ARE YOU RECONCILED TO THE POSSIBILITY THAT NO MATTER HOW GOOD A RECORD YOU MAKE, YOU MIGHT NEVER SELL THOSE KIND OF NUMBERS AGAIN?

Oh yeah, they were just numbers I was trying to grasp. If you sell 7 or 8 million albums, try to grasp 7 or 8 million people. You can’t. It's beyond my comprehension. I can understand platinum album, I can understand, biggest selling record, at that time, in Columbia Records history. That's all nice. But 7 million? You can have a number one album with 2 million, or 3 million. Or you can have a successful record that doesn't sell that many. You know what? Once it's out of my hands, it becomes [abstract] to me. Once I finished making a record, it's no longer really mine anymore, and I tend to disconnect myself from it. I hope it does really well, I hope alot of people get to hear it. But I'm already thinking of the next thing. It's almost a little post-partum, when you finish a record you think is really good, you're on that last joyride roll. At the end of the record, part of you is saying, I wonder if I can do this again, recapture that feeling. Because it doesn't always happen that way.

Somebody at Columbia Record pointed out, they said you know, Billy, you're always a threat. You could put out an album that sells 1.5-2 million copies, and then the next one could sell 8 million. I seem to have had nine lives in this business. I've been doing it as a solo artist since 1970-1971, so that's almost 20 years just being a solo artist, being able to have success, whether it's been high on the charts or lower on the charts, I've been a survivor in that respect. So it doesn’t worry me.

DO YOU FEEL TOO YOUNG TO BE A SURVIVOR?

Yeah. I think in terms of [Irving] Berlin, or Shostakovich, these guys who live to be 90 or 100 years old, I feel like I'm in the early part my composing, my productivity as a musician. You can be a musician until the day you kick off. You don't necessarily have to be on the cutting edge, or a celebrity, or a rock star to be a musician. That is just one phase of it. I don't intend to stop making music just because I’m not a commercial recording artist.

I THINK ABOUT IT IN MY WRITING CAREER, TURNING 40 . . . BEING A ROCK CRITIC. WHEN I STARTED I WASN'T YET 20, I I GOT PAID $14 FROM THE BERKELEY BARB REVIEWING THE ROLLING STONES, IKE & TINA TURNER, AND B.B. KING AT THE OAKLAND COLISEUM.

That's just what i was doing. I got $15 a pop.

I DIDN'T KNOW YOU WERE WRITING FOR MUSIC MAGAZINES!

I was working for Go magazine. And Changes. Remember Changes? I only did it for about six months. As a reviewer, I liked everything.  I think I was carried away with getting the free ticket, being shown  to a good table, getting free drinks, getting extra attention from the band's manager, being schmoozed . . .I said, 'gee this is a great gig, $25 a pop for writing this is my opinion.'

Then they gave me an album to review, Super Session with Al Kooper. And I didn't like the record. I really slagged it. He can't sing, he can't play, I hate this record. Then I saw it in print, it looks different in print than it does on your notepad. It's official, authoritative. It freaked me out. I thought the the guy was gonna be looking for me to punch me out. I said, I can't do it, it's not me. I quit right then. It took a particular intestinal fortitude to lay it on the line, and stand by it. I wouldn't blame Kooper to this day, though, if he came up and punched me in the nose.

THERE WERE TIMES IN OUR RELATIONSHIP WHEN YOU'D GET UPSET ABOUT WHAT I'D WRITE. ARE YOU LESS THIN-SKINNED THAN YOU USED TO BE ABOUT CRITICISM?

I've thickened up. I'll still get bugged when they question the motivation. If they don't like the music, which is a matter of taste, or if they dont like my voice, which I can understand, because I don't like my voice . . . Sometimes I can look back, there are songs I don’t like. Right now, I can't stand "My Life." There are certain songs I think i could've done better, or maybe left out altogether.  

The only thing i get my back up about is when people question the motivation: "He cranked these things out to make a commercial record." Which I've never done. Those are the things that bother me.

If someone doesn't like you because you've rubbed them the wrong way, l've learned to see that in the first paragraph; no matter what I did, this person wouldn’t like it. But I don't see myself as a stylist. I see myself primarily as a writer who does funny things with his voice: the butcher, the baker, the candlestick maker, whatever I feel like that day.

STORM FRONT HAS SOME STYLISTIC EXERCISES. THE TITLE SONG REMINDED ME OF STEELY DAN.

You know what I was going for? The Memphis Sound. The challenge of that song was, you know that song, [Peter Gabriel's]  "Sledgehammer"? The success of that record has to do with how slow can you go and still groove. "Sledgehammer" has this thing, I don't know how you're gonna translate this (hums a key riff and punctuates it with a hand-slapped beat on the table). If you went one hair slower, the record would drag; If you went one hair quicker, it wouldnt have the same groove. So with "Storm Front," to me, it's a Memphis groove. And we had the Memphis Horns playing on it.

There's homage on the record, no doubt about it. "Shameless" is an unabashed homage to Jimi Hendrix. The tempo on "Down Easter Alexa" is based on rowing; it's a backwards beat. The rhythm goes instraight 8s,  but what's on the record is 1/3. Columbia Records wants me to do "I Go to Extremes" on "Saturday Night Live."

WHEN YOU WERE TALKING ABOUT THE [WORKING LOCALS ] IN THE HAMPTONS WHO CAN'T AFFORD A HOUSE THERE, IT'S THE SAME IN THE REST OF THE ISLAND. PEOPLE WHO GREW UP THERE CAN'T AFFORD TO BUY THEIR PARENTS HOUSES; THEY GET MARRIED AND MOVE INTO THE BASEMENT OF THE HOUSE THEY GREW UP IN.

I met a guy the other day out in Montauk, he's the same age as me and was a good friend when we were in high school. He was one of the high school heroes, all the girls wanted to go out with him, he went into the Marines, big strapping guy. I saw him in Montauk. He lives in a camper. He's the same age as me. He said, Billy, for me the American Dream is dead. There’s no way I can afford to buy a house. I can't live on Long Island the way my parents did. He's got his kid in the camper with him. As far as I can recall, he was saying, I'm waiting for my kid to be old enough to take care of himself, then I'm outta here. It really chilled me. There are a lot of people like that, falling through the cracks.