How to Talk to Your Children About Billy Joel
OK, I admit it, I like him. Do I have to hand in my Punk card now?
Take Billy Joel, please.
You may have recently watched, whether out of avid fandom, slightly bored curiosity or sheer masochism, the new two-part, five-hour-long HBO Max documentary on the Piano Man’s life, Billy Joel: And So It Goes. The doc seemingly covers nearly every notable and obscure moment in the Chronicle of Billy, way before he morphed into a latter-day Burl Ives lookalike, from his 1950s childhood in a Levitt home in suburban Hicksville, Long Island through his parents’ divorce and his father’s disappearance from his life when he was a child, followed by two suicide attempts, membership in three unsuccessful bands, one motorcycle accident, 13 studio albums, seven live albums, 19 compilation albums, 45 music videos, marriage to four wives, the siring of three daughters, the playing of 150 shows at Madison Square Garden, and over 150 million albums sold.
If you grew up on Long Island like I did you pretty much have to be a Billy J fan, the way Jerseyites are obligated to stan Bruce. He’s ours; we get the local references in the lyrics, we get him. His image as an honest, straightforward, self-deprecating, no-bullshit New Yorker (Despite All His Success) is a cornerstone of his appeal. That said, I’m well aware of his rep among music critics and hipsters in general, who for many years considered (and some may still consider) Joel to be doubleuncool in the extreme: a musical plagiarist, an inauthentic trend chaser, a syrupy, sentimental slob just this side of Manilow, for starters. I love you just the way you are, so I’m leaving you for Christie Brinkley. Yo! That kind of thing. If you remark “Billy Joel seems to be everywhere these days,” the haters might come back at you with “Yeah, so is black mold.” Joel, as I said in print once, “has been dismissed by some as a suburban rebel, a pretender, a generator of imitation rock ‘n’ roll for people who don’t like the real thing. A rougher-edged Neil Diamond, or Springsteen’s flip side, take your pick.”
Billy Joel himself knows all this, and to his credit, owns up to it. In the documentary, he talks about looking at his public persona from the outside: “I’m tired of being this Billy Joel guy,” and so on. He has a healthy sense of humor about his place in the world.
A few days ago I posted this question on Threads:
Is it possible to like Billy Joel and still retain a fraction of punk cred? Asking for a friend.
And well, it was on. Although some answers were just a flat “no,” some of the responses I received could collectively make a decent case for the affirmative in a hypothetical Cambridge Union debate, “Resolved: Billy Joel is punk rock.” Here are some of them:
“Yes. Because liking Billy Joel in the face of de-credding by punk aficionados is, in itself, the essence of punk.”
“Maybe being nice to Billy Joel is the real punk rock.”
“Unapologetically liking what you like is the most punk thing ever.” [As I see it, this is the correct answer. Listen to what you want, and don’t worry about whether or not others consider it “cool.” What are you, 14?]
“Billy Joel opened 52nd Street with a song about doing coke and living to excess while hammering out a tune on the piano. You’re fine. (I have Billy Joel and Descendents on vinyl)”
“Yes. Any time you choose music made by people who know what the hell they’re doing, you win.”
“I played CBGBs in a punk band in 1994 on a Saturday night, we opened for Unsane. To me Billy Joel is an entertainer (who) spans decades and has been through the fire of life and his songs make people happy. To me that’s punk AF. All the punk rockers I know love each other, their families and friends and we all have been watching that doc because he makes us happy.”
“Should anyone confront you, tell them you thought he was Billie Joe Armstrong.”
“ ‘My Life’ is still punk af.”
“I fucking LOVE Billy Joel. So, if not, we'll have to hand in our punk cards together!”
“If you really were punk you'd post a link to 'movin out' without any commentary and we'd all just know. But clearly you are a poseur and everyone already knows, your attempts at punk cred are futile.”
“PuhLEEZE. Joel took his sound from the street, the doo-wop corners to CBGBs. His attachment to melody may have dulled the edge of punk messages that he tried on Glass Houses or Nylon Curtain, but it all comes from the same place.”
“Dirty, broke punk crowd? No. Do the right thing, push back against authoritarianism, all while remaining decent humans punk cred? Yes.”
“It’s not punk to seek validation. The Ramones covered the Beach Boys. The Beach Boys were not cool when this happened.”
Someone posted a link to this notorious video: “Billy Joel flips out in Moscow in 1987.” (Stop lighting the audience!)
My personal favorite response: “Of course. I like the Sex Pistols and Billy Joel. I like X and Mel Tormé. I like the Damned and Ella Fitzgerald. I like Tchaikovsky and Bach and the Clash.” (Now there’s a member of my tribe.)
And, inevitably: “It’s still rock ‘n’ roll to me.”
A couple of people pointed out the customary exit line Billy shouts out to audiences at the end of his shows: “Don’t take any shit from anybody!” You never heard Neil Sedaka, Streisand, or Steve and Eydie saying that onstage, or even Sinatra.
In the end, nothing Joel ever did in his life, with the possible exception of the cover of that Attila LP, might have come close to the punkicity of not putting out any new songs after 1993’s River of Dreams LP until 2024, when he released “Turn the Lights Back On.” That came to be when one Freddy Wexler, a tunesmith 37 years his junior, approached Joel with a fragmentary song he’d written in his style that he wanted him to collaborate on, which Joel eventually did. Love it or hate it, it’s definitely a worthy addition to the canon. (The new single is a glaring omission in the otherwise exhaustive documentary; I can only surmise that its release came after the film was completed.)
The one time I saw Joel perform live wasn’t at Madison Square Garden; it was at the Worcester Centrum in Massachusetts on December 6, 1989, where I covered the sold-out show for the Quincy Patriot Ledger. It was the opening night of the Storm Front tour, his first tour in two years, which would eventually run through March 1991. At 40, Billy J was at one of his career peaks. As he made sure to tell the crowd, at that moment he had the number one album, single, and video in the USA (although “We Didn’t Start the Fire” was critically reamed as one of his worst songs ever and Joel himself didn’t think much of it musically, at one point comparing it to a dentist’s drill). At the same time, he wasn’t exactly sailing through life as a few months back he’d sacked his ex-brother-in-law/manager Frank Weber for majorly ripping him off and was forced to do this extensive tour to get out of a financial hole. He had also dismissed most of his longtime band except for his drummer and a guitarist and hired replacements (unfortunately not the Replacements), as he felt a shakeup was in order.
“To fans of the Rolling Stones, Ramones and Guns N’ Roses, he may not be a rocker,” I wrote in the Ledger. “But try telling that to any of the 15,000 at the sold-out Centrum last night…By the time Joel performed the encores of ‘Piano Man,’ ‘Matter of Choice’ and ‘Uptown Girl,’ among others, the crowd was sated, communal and arm-waving.” Given all that, who cares what some schlub from a newspaper says, right? (Joel did, for one; certain critics really got under his skin.) More from that review:
For more than 2 1/2 hours (there was no opening act), Joel delivered a stripped-down, impressive and yes, for the most part hard-rocking show. The pugnacious black-clad performer gave marathoners a run for their money in terms of endurance, vaulting around the stage for most of the show and, at one point, dancing on his piano and then doing a cartwheel off it…
Joel’s regular-guy appearance and manner is a touchstone of his appeal, and the attraction of speaking on behalf of the put-upon working class has not escaped him…Joel also specializes in serving up social attitudes and current events in an easy-to-comprehend format, only slightly vulgarized. In other words, he delivers the zeitgeist in pop shorthand.
For the consummation of this, look no further than his No. 1 single, ‘We Didn’t Start the Fire,’ which is little more than a laundry list of headline-grabbing names of the last four decades (and if the target audience is getting its outline of history from a Billy Joel song we’re all in deep trouble, but that’s not, of course, Joel’s fault).
[Side note: After the show I headed directly from Worcester to the Ledger’s offices in Quincy, banged out the review on one of their terminals so it could be in the morning edition (it being pre-Internet days), and finally drove home to my Allston apartment. It was quite late by then, maybe 3 or 3:30 in the morning, and I remember thinking to myself as I groggily headed north, “I’m getting too old to be doing this.” Reader, I was 30.]
In the end, I don’t think our Billy wants to be put in any boxes anyway. Whatever else you can say about him, he’s an American original, rough chapters, unfortunate musical detours and all. His massive success excludes any possibility of his being considered a cult artist, which I kind of feel he would have been okay with, but at this late stage it seems as if he’s finally at peace with himself and his legacy, in all its messiness and complexities. Also, most of the haters seem to have finally been exhausted by his persistence. “Okay already,” they seem to be saying, “enough is enough. Billy Joel is punk, fine, whatever.”
And after all, maybe the true blessing of discussing whether or not Billy Joel is a punk rocker was the friends we made along the way.
So, for my next post, do you think I should go into why I’ve never really cared for Elton John?
This is fucking GENIUS!!!! Although I still don't really like him, I have a NEW RESPECT for those that do. I did like We Didn't Start The Fire, because it sang it so fast.
And that, is how it's done! And don't take any shots from anybody!