Who is Billy Joel? A five -hour documentary does not know how to answer that question

Who is Billy Joel? He is known as a singer, as an entertaining causeur, passionately performer. But who is Billy Joel (1949, New York) really? A new, two -part documentary has now been published about the American artist, known for non -execiminable songs such as ‘Piano Man’ and ‘Goodnight Saigon’, And so it goesto be seen on HBO.

Would about five hours of archive images and interview fragments with Joel and his friends make clear who Joel really is? Or is that not an important question with an artist who, like a musical Houdini, Wrong himself from the boxes and always returned to a new genre, with increasingly larger hits? Because in this film it becomes clear: for him everything revolves around making music, composing, performing, recording.

Until the nineties, he was a single hit machine that was permanently on tour and made success albums at a rapid pace. He was always in the news, among other things as half of glamor couple with Christie Brinkley, the Supermodel from California with whom he was married for nine years. The period after the birth of daughter Alexa was the some time that Joel “didn’t feel like working.” For the first time in twenty years he took free.

The decades before he had made music uninterrupted, and strived for recognition. It was not about money and fame – he can’t handle that well – but about a deeper, personal need: to know that he is good enough, and that people appreciate him.

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His feeling of being the outsider arose as a child in Long Island, where his parents moved in the Bronx after birth. After his parents broke up at the age of seven, they were the only family in the block with separate parents. Father no longer contacted, there was little money, mother drank. The family was Jewish, that also made him an exception in the neighborhood.

Piano (male) as a save

The piano became his salvation, both professionally and personally. Billy always played piano, from the age of four. As someone notices in the documentary: “Billy is never at ease in a new room, unless there is a piano.” He played his own songs, inspired by compositions by Bach, Beethoven, Chopin. He started singing and, after a few attempts with bands-the Beatle-Esque The Hassels and rock band Atilla-became a solo artist. His songs were full of melody and harmony, his voice sounded full. Yet success was not forthcoming. Partly because he often changed style, so he did not get a clear musical ‘face’. Until the breakthrough came with song ‘Piano Man’ (1973), about the outsiders role of the pub pianist. From now on he traveled non-stop through the United States with his band.

He was loved as a tireless performer who runs away from behind his wing to play the guitar, to fall in split, and back on time for the next piano riff. With old friends from Long Island, he formed a close music group, who occasionally drove into a car room, and used many resources – witness the lyrics’I Wish Coke Was Still Cola“.

He would have world hits, including ‘Just the Way You Are’ about first wife Elizabeth Weber and ‘Uptown Girl’ about second wife Brinkley. He would win Grammy’s for albums like The Stranger and Glass Houses While he was criticized by reviewers as ‘too polished’. Eventually he could no longer tolerate the pressure of pop music. He stopped writing pop songs in the nineties, and devoted himself to his first love, the classical music from his youth. He made a well -received album with piano music written by him in ‘classical’ style, Fantasies & Delusions (2003). He announced his band members to stop performing, in 2010, because he wanted to take it easy during his fourth marriage. For the past ten years he gave more than 100 concerts in Madison Square Garden, New York.

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Search for his father

In the meantime, Joel played a personal issue in all those years, and the search for his father. After a series of failed attempts, he was informed that his father was staying in Vienna. The father Howard, born in Germany, who had fled to America with his parents for the Nazis, turned out to be returned to Europe after the divorce. There he had a new family, with a son, in Vienna, as Joel notes, the ‘music city’. He visited his father, but the contact was and remained difficult. Father, also a pianist, was a closed man. He calls it a disappointment.

Joel was more often ‘disappointed’ by loved ones in his life. For example, by his manager Frank Weber who used his money to buy houses and running horses for himself. When Joel had 5 million dollars tax debt and realized that Weber would never repay, he again started touring and making music again to earn back the money. That eventually led to a break in his marriage.

The break was also because Joel, Stepzoon Sean says, has difficulty expressing in conversations. He keeps his deeper feelings for his songs; Not only the candid lyrics, but also the music would be an impact of his emotion, Sean says.

Ultimately, the question “Who is Billy Joel turns out?” Even after five hours of material about his youth, his family history, his musical passions, the testimonies of his friends, and the – somewhat superfluous – contributions from admirers such as Paul McCartney (“Just the way you are”, I wanted to write that song “), Pink and Bruce Springsteen, not to be answered. Joel looks more like his father than he would wish.

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