Billy Joel

Musician

• Born: May 9, 1949
• Place of Birth: Bronx, New York

One of rock and roll’s most talented, versatile, and musically accomplished artists, Joel produced a wide variety of hits throughout the 1970s, 1980s, and 1990s. Remaining an influential figure in the music world into the twenty-first century, though he largely did not release new music, he continued to perform his catalog live.

Early Life

The paternal grandfather of Billy Joel was a successful Bavarian businessman who fled from his home in Nuremberg, Germany, in 1938, when the Nazi Party began to persecute Jews. He lost his property but saved himself and his family, who used forged passports to gain entry into Switzerland, Cuba, and finally, in 1942, New York. Joel’s father, Helmuth (Howard), was fifteen when he escaped Germany and vividly remembered the sounds of a German training camp near the family’s home. Howard enlisted in the US Army during World War II and returned to Bavaria in April 1945, where he took part in the liberation of the Dachau concentration camp.

Returning from the war, Howard married Rosalind Hyman, who came from a family of well-educated British Jews. They shared a love for classical piano but seldom observed Jewish religious traditions. Joel would later say that his circumcision was as close as his parents came to religious observance; Joel himself is also non-observant, though he has expressed a connection to and fondness for New York Jewish culture.

Joel was born in the Bronx on May 9, 1949. However, shortly afterward his parents moved to Levittown on Long Island. He was weaned on classical piano music, able to play bits of Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart at age three, and compose music and lyrics at age six. His early teachers included the noted pianist Morton Estrin and the musician-songwriter Timothy Ford. Growing up, Joel avoided sports and devoted himself to music. The fact that Joel’s piano teacher also ran a ballet school caused him to be teased in high school. As a result, he took up boxing and became quite skilled. He entered the Golden Gloves, amateur boxing competitions, and won twenty-two of twenty-four bouts. However, a broken nose in his last fight convinced him to quit.

It was the appearance of the Beatles on The Ed Sullivan Show in 1964 that lured Joel to popular music. He began playing at a piano bar and joined the Echoes, a group with which he cut several records as piano accompanist and played night shows. He left the Echoes in 1967 to play for the Hassles, a Long Island band. In 1971, the group disbanded, having achieved little success. One complicating factor was that Joel fell in love with the group leader’s wife, Elizabeth Weber Small. She divorced her husband and married Joel in September 1973. The marriage lasted for nearly nine years.

Life’s Work

In 1971, Joel signed a recording contract with Paramount Records, releasing his first album, Cold Spring Harbor, named after a village in northern Long Island. Meanwhile, “Captain Jack,” a song that he had sung in a live concert and that had strong drug connotations, slowly became a popular underground hit on the East Coast. At around the same time, Joel went to the West Coast to eke out a living singing in piano bars under the name Bill Martin. His trying experiences were incorporated in his song “Piano Man,” which became a top-twenty single release. His album The Stranger, released in 1977, kept on selling, and by 1985 it was Columbia Records’s top-selling album.

For his next album, Glass Houses (1980), Joel won best rock male vocal performance at the Grammy Awards. It was his fifth Grammy in three years. In 1981, he released Songs in the Attic, a collection of tunes from his concert tours, which soon became his fourth consecutive top-ten album. One year later, despite a motorcycle accident, he completed a new album, The Nylon Curtain, which reached number seven on the Billboard album chart and was nominated for a Grammy Award for album of the year. An Innocent Man, released in 1983, contained ten brand-new songs, rose to number four on the Billboard album charts, and was nominated for a Grammy Award for album of the year. It seemed everything Joel touched turned to gold, including the rerelease in 1983 of a remastered version of his first album, Cold Spring Harbor.

In 1985, Joel married supermodel Christie Brinkley, who gave birth later that year to their daughter, Alexa Ray. Although divorced nine years later, they remained on friendly terms. After completing a new album, The Bridge (1986), Joel planned a history-making tour of the Soviet Union, giving three live performances in Moscow and three in Leningrad. In 1989, he released the album Storm Front and, four years later, produced River of Dreams. Composed of new songs, it topped the Billboard album chart.

Following the break-up of his marriage to Brinkley in 1994, Joel toured widely, both on his own circuit, to places such as Australia and Japan, and on tour with Elton John. In 2002, he won a Tony Award for best orchestration for his work in Moving Out, a musical based on twenty-four of his songs that was a smash hit on Broadway for the next three years.

In 2003, he began another concert tour with John. In 2006, after not releasing any new songs for thirteen years, Joel embarked on a whirlwind concert tour across the United States and Western Europe. Twelve different shows at Madison Square Garden resulted in a Columbia Records release of thirty-two songs, Twelve Gardens Live. In 2007, he wrote two new songs, "All My Life" and "Christmas in Fallujah," his first since the release of 1993's River of Dreams. He sold an autobiography to HarperCollins in 2008 but canceled the book's release in 2011, stating that he felt his music was the best expression of the ups and downs of his life. Joel continued to tour frequently throughout the first decades of the twenty-first century. In 2011, he was honored with a portrait in Steinway Hall, the first non-classical musician to be included; he received Kennedy Center Honors in 2013 and the Gershwin Prize for Popular Song in 2014.

The year 2014 also marked the beginning of what would become a record-breaking performance residency for Joel. Taking the stage monthly and repeatedly selling out shows at Madison Square Garden, Joel saw enough demand for his set that by 2018 he had performed for the one hundredth time at the venue. It was not until 2023 that he announced that he planned to conclude his residency in 2024, following his 150th show. After more than a decade without the release of new original music, he put out the song "Turn the Lights Back On" in early 2024, shortly before performing the track at that year's Grammys ceremony.

After a brief marriage to food critic and writer Katie Lee in the early 2000s, Joel married his fourth wife, equestrian Alexis Roderick, in 2015. Their first daughter, Della Rose, was born later that year, and their second daughter, Remy Anne, was born in 2017.

Significance

After catching public attention at the age of twenty-four with his song “Piano Man,” Joel quickly catapulted to fame as a singer-songwriter. His numerous albums have sold more than one hundred million copies, and thirty-three of his songs appeared on the Billboard Top 40 charts and top-ten hits chart throughout the 1970s, 1980s, and 1990s. Three songs reached the pinnacle of number-one hits on Billboard, and his greatest hits album reigns as the sixth bestseller in American music history. Nominated twenty-three times for a Grammy Award, he was a six-time winner, including a Grammy Legend Award. His genius was recognized with his induction into the Songwriters Hall of Fame in 1992 and into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame in 1999. He has received multiple honorary doctorate awards. Many of his songs relate to life experiences in New York, and his album Fifty-second Street (1978), his first number-one album, was conceived of as a day in Manhattan. It is perhaps fitting that on October 21, 2000, as the New York Yankees faced the New York Mets at Yankee Stadium in the opening game of the World Series, Joel sang the national anthem. He closed out the century’s end in New York with a gala Millennium Eve concert at Madison Square Garden.

Bibliography

Bego, Mark. Billy Joel: The Biography. Cambridge: Da Capo, 2007.

"Billy Joel Unveils First New Single in Decades 'Turn the Lights Back On' February 1, 2024." Billy Joel, 22 Jan. 2024, www.billyjoel.com/news/billy-joel-unveils-first-new-single-in-decades-turn-the-lights-back-on-february-1-2024/. Accessed 3 Sept. 2024.

Bordowitz, Hank. Billy Joel: The Life and Times of an Angry Man. Billboard, 2005.

Joel, Billy. "Billy Joel: The EW Interview." Interview by Kevin O'Donnell. Entertainment Weekly, 24 July 2015, ew.com/article/2015/07/24/billy-joel-ew-interview/. Accessed 3 Sept. 2024.

Paumgarten, Nick. "Billy Joel: Thirty-Three-Hit Wonder." The New Yorker, 27 Oct. 2014, www.newyorker.com/magazine/2014/10/27/billy-joel-profile-thirty-three-hit-wonder. Accessed 3 Sept. 2024.

Schruers, Fred. Billy Joel: The Definitive Biography. Crown, 2014.

Sisario, Ben. "Billy Joel Will End Madison Square Garden Residency in 2024." The New York Times, 1 June 2023, www.nytimes.com/2023/06/01/arts/music/billy-joel-ending-msg-residency.html. Accessed 3 Sept. 2024.

Smith, Bill. I Go to Extremes: The Billy Joel Story. Robson, 2007.