Billy Joel, the Rock Star from Hicksville
BILLY JOEL, the rock and pop star, was born in 1949 as William Martin Joel and raised in Hicksville, Long Island. As a teenager, he was prone to depression, didn’t feel very handsome or musically gifted, but by 2022 he’d sold 160 million records, and was one of the richest entertainers on earth. He’s had 33 Top Forty hits, and he wrote every one of those songs himself.
Both of his parents were Jewish and loved music; Howard Joel and Rosalind Nyman met at City College, at a Gilbert & Sullivan show. By the time Billy was eight, his parents had divorced; his father, an immigrant, returned to Europe. His mother raised him and Billy’s sister, taking a series of low-paying jobs, at a time when there was a stigma to being a single mother.
Rosalind was determined to give her children “Culture,” or as Hicksville pronounced it, “Culchah.” WQXR radio playing classical music. Singing aloud, and going to musical shows. Piano lessons were mandatory. Billy hated them; he wanted to be playing baseball, fooling around outside. But he did always love music. Tired of playing the easier pieces of Beethoven, he started composing fake Beethoven pieces and practicing those. He knew they had to be pretty good or his mother would catch on. Pulling that off gave him the idea that he could compose.
Fabian, Frankie Avalon and the other Top 40 pop stars were too tame for him. He didn’t like Pat Boone either, selling his religious agenda. He liked working-class bands: the Kinks, Otis Redding, James Brown, and Jackie Wilson. He loved Ronnie Spector and the Ronettes — but also jazz and classical music. He loved the British band the Zombies.
Billy was 14 when the Beatles hit, and looking back later he decided that 14 was the perfect age to hear the Beatles for the first time. They were working class guys, but with long hair and perfect melodies.
His childhood home was full of women. It was sort of sad having no father figure at home, but it also struck him that many of his friends were afraid of their fathers. Billy never had that problem; his father was always off in Europe. And he knew that his father was a superb piano player; that was at least a tenuous link between them. In time, he would visit him, often in Vienna, and the music there inspired him to write the song “Vienna.”
Billy wasn’t cool, and had big mood swings. Girls at school didn’t seem to like him. He had a crush on a Catholic girl named Virginia, whom he later immortalized in “Only the Good Die Young” (“Come on, Virginia, don’t let it wait. You Catholic girls start much too late…”)
When he was 14 or 15, some guys he knew were putting together a rock band, and needed a piano player. Billy said okay, not knowing what to expect. The first gig was at a church dance, the band was tight, the kids on the dance floor were clapping along. Bill realized that a girl he had a huge crush on was actually eyeing him with interest. She’d never looked twice at him before, but when he played the piano with the band, now — just maybe — she might want to be his girlfriend.
The night ended, Billy still dazed but full of the adrenaline of playing and meeting this girl’s eyes. He thought he was playing for free but a priest gave each guy in the band 15 bucks. Childhood was abruptly over; Billy Joel decided that night to be a professional musician.
As he turned 16 and 17, he started playing more and more gigs, often on school nights and not getting home until 2:00 in the morning. Getting up at 7:00 a.m. and trudging off to high school was just barely possible, and sitting through trigonometry class was not. So he started cutting classes, sneaking into the school auditorium and playing its beautiful Baldwin grand piano.
Occasionally, a custodian would ask him, from 50 feet away, what he was doing in there. Billy would bluff it out, insist he’d been given permission to rehearse for a student show. The custodian would shrug and go away. Then one day a teacher named Chuck Arnold walked right up to the piano, and asked Billy what the hell he was doing there, and Billy realized he wasn’t going to be able to bluff his way past this guy.
“Please don’t report me to the principal!” Billy pleaded.
Chuck Arnold said he wouldn’t — on one condition: that Billy take his Music History class. Billy did, and it became his favorite class, by a very wide margin.
Though he was Jewish, his part of Hicksville was very Catholic, and he went to Mass, and even tried once to make a confession. He attended Protestant services with his mother, but still got beaten up by a neighborhood kid called Vinny because “Yo, Joel, you killed Jesus.” To deal with Vinny, Billy Joel took boxing lessons, fought in the ring until he got his nose broken, and over time, became something of “a greaser.” His friends hung out on the Village Green, priding themselves on toughness, a knowledge of motorcycles, “scoring” with girls, needing no help and taking no crap from anyone.
Without letting the other greasers know, he kept taking classical piano lessons, and after 12 years, he was quite good. He could have been a concert pianist, but didn’t want to be. He wanted to WRITE music, and he wasn’t about to compete with Bach, Beethoven, and Mozart.
So it was popular music he focused on.
In 1972, he decided to move out to Los Angeles, told by people he trusted that L.A., was the center of the music industry. There he signed a record deal for his first album, Cold Spring Harbor. It was a terrible deal; in exchange for a small advance, he signed away the rights to all of the music. Like so many young musicians dealing with lawyers for the first time, he didn’t really read the contract before he signed it. Paperwork was an abstraction to him; he lived and breathed music, and he was sophisticated there. In legal matters, he was an innocent and the record company took full advantage.
He tried to tour to support Cold Spring Harbor but he was working for a bad promoter and no one in the band got paid. He wanted to buy fancy cigars and high-end motorcycles, but he was just about broke. He’d thought he was a star when he got an album deal but now his career was dangling.
So he returned to Los Angeles licking his wounds, and got a gig at the Executive Room, on Wilshire Boulevard. He played there for three years, 1972–1975, as “Bill Martin,” watched the poignant, drinking and posing of the patrons, and turned his observations into his best-known song, “Piano Man.” (“They’re sharing a drink they call loneliness — but it’s better than drinking alone.”)
Remorseful about having moved out to Los Angeles, in 1976, he returned to New York. In 1977, he cut another album “The Stranger.” He had high hopes for it… but he’d had high hopes for the previous four albums, and none of them had sold much.
But “The Stranger” was a smash. “Only the Good Die Young,” “Just The Way You Are”, “Movin’ Out,” “She’s Always a Woman,” “Vienna” and Scenes From an Italian Restaurant” all became hits and crowd-pleasers in concert. He wrote a song about the old days on the village green (“Cold beer, hot lights, my sweet romantic teenage nights”) and sang it with swagger. “The Stranger” became one of the biggest selling albums in music history, and promoters offered big money for him to tour.
Billy Joel was now very suddenly a rock star, with long, immensely profitable tours, devoted fans and groupies — and detractors and rock critics judging his work. He had all the money he wanted to buy fine cigars and high-end motorcycles, and wondered if those were the right things to buy.
Friends who saw him before a show, how relaxed he was, puttering around, often asked him how the hell he could unleash all that energy, turn on the rock star persona so suddenly. Joel would reply that the harder thing is to shut off the rock star persona AFTER the show, how to put the monster back in the cage. He’s more interested in the quiet man behind the monster. (“We all have a face that we hide away forever, and we take them out and show ourselves when everyone has gone.”)
He also missed the anonymity he’d taken for granted before. He could be a fly on the wall in those days, an observer taking notes that might later become a song. Now, he couldn’t stand still in public or people would ask for a picture, an autograph. He didn’t mind a little of that but when it came over and over again, especially if there was an arrogance about the request… he’d get pissed.
Another thing he hated about playing live was the arrogance of certain members of the audience. There was Billy, looking out at the crowd, and he couldn’t help noticing how many guys in the front row looked like rich, arrogant jerks, middle-aged white guys, sitting back with an expression on their faces that said: ‘Play for me, Piano Man. Entertain me.’
So Billy Joel stopped selling tickets to the front row of his shows. Instead, he had his roadies go up to the cheap seats just before a show, and give away front row tickets to people they thought Billy and the band would like to see, younger people, especially beautiful young women.
Composing songs remained a minefield. “New York State of Mind” came to him in 20 minutes, a gift that appeared right in front of him one day, almost complete, and put up no resistance as he captured it. A breeze. But other times, he’d sit down at the piano to write and suddenly the piano looked like a black-and-white monster with 88 gleaming teeth. He’d work for an hour and come up with nothing. Scolding his talent didn’t work. Begging didn’t work, either.
He had to start by hunting tunes, tracking and STALKING them. He’d play a fragment which sounded brave and good the first time but the second time it was noisy and undercooked. Even his better melodies teased him by being stubbornly unfinished. Friends would tell him ‘Composing sounds like a mysterious process…’ and Billy would say, ‘It’s not pleasant enough to be mysterious.’
When it went badly, he’d find reasons to delay, make coffee, sharpen a pencil… He stopped dressing properly, quit keeping up appearances. One trick he learned was to book the recording studio for a certain date. With that deadline, he locked himself in. Finally, with great effort, he’d hammer out ONE song he liked. Others would come much more quickly and easily, once he’d gotten that first song done.
When an album’s worth of songs were nearly done, he’d dress properly again, ditch the delaying tactics, and tinker with the song order, trying to make one song kick off the next, and the next…
Touring is not an easy life. He’s had both hips replaced, has twice been in drug rehab, and has been married four times. The trouble with rehab, the first time, was that he still had that greaser mentality: ‘Who needs help? Not me.’
The trouble with marriage for him has been the constant traveling. Not enough time with the wife and a life that’s too transitory for his wives to want to travel with him. It was his first wife, Elizabeth Weber, who inspired, “I took the good times, I’ll take the bad times. I’ll take you just the way you are.”
Even now, as a rock star, he feels like a greaser from Hicksville, and proud of it. He’s fought to preserve the fishing rights of Long Island commercial fishermen. He writes about unemployed factory workers. He doesn’t claim to be a “spokesman” for anyone — but he also rejects the idea that a rich musician can’t relate to the unemployed. After all, he joined his first band in 1964 and for a dozen years made peanuts. Those were the years that formed him, years when there was no safety net, nobody looking after him. He did landscaping and pumped gas to bring in money between gigs.
By 2018, he was in love with his fourth wife, helping to take care of their two young kids, not touring — but had a once-a-month gig playing Madison Square Garden. Capacity crowds of 20,000 screamed and cheered for him at the Garden. It took him just 15 minutes by helicopter to get to the Garden from his estate on the North Shore of Long Island.
Joel was struck by a comment that Neil Diamond made, that Diamond had finally forgiven himself for not being Beethoven. Billy Joel decided that was his problem, that he’d NEVER forgiven himself for not being Beethoven. He is still somewhat mystified why his songs and his concerts are so popular. Maybe, he says, it’s because he’s screwed up and doesn’t pretend otherwise, and audiences like to know that the headliner is just as lost as they are. But he’s proud of his toughness, and he likes to end his shows by telling his fans, ‘Don’t take crap from anyone!’