Billy Joel, Thirty-Three-Hit Wonder (2024)

“Did you tell Brian to take my popcorn away?” he asked her. “Did you say, ‘Don’t give him the popcorn?’”

“I would never—”

“He’s been with me for fifty years,” Joel said.

“I didn’t tell him to take it away,” she said. “What I said was I didn’t want it to exist in the first place. It was really gross.”

“It’s not really gross,” Joel said. “I like the popcorn.”

They sat outside until almost 2 A.M. and then headed for bed.

People tend to assume, given the recent burst of reputational favor and vigor in performance, that Joel must be sober, that the narrative of redemption must rest on abstinence. But not everyone can be George Jones. Joel steers clear of spirits, he says, and just drinks wine, in moderation. “I think of it as a food group,” he told me. At one lunch, we each had a glass of Chianti. At another, we had a little sake. He ordered sashimi; he was hitting a steak house later with some friends. He likes to eat. “I’m with the Jack Nicholson school, that it’s this flat-belly sh*t that’s ruining America,” he said. “I don’t think there’s anything more pathetic than a man on a diet.”

He is sensitive about the alcohol thing. He cops to having had lots of problems in the past, drinking to excess, behaving like an ass. He chalks it up to Long Island, the culture of day’s end at the local pub. In the old touring days, the whole band boozed it up, and often they were the last ones standing in the hotel bar, Billy at the piano, crew gathered around with a few stragglers and girls, singing Sinatra and the Beatles: not exactly “Hammer of the Gods.” He claims not to have ever really got into drugs, though they certainly tried things, including heroin, on a 1981 swing through Amsterdam; in videos of concerts from the mid-eighties the clothes and the hair styles alone seem to scream “Cocaine!” You’ll hear Long Islanders tell old stories about the time they saw Joel at this or that Huntington bar, the man not looking his best. There were, in the past decade, a couple of interventions and a couple of stints in rehab, in 2002 and 2005. Still, he rejects the A.A. approach and favors the kind of self-moderation that A.A.’s devotees cluck at.

Elton John, who did a number of tours with Joel, told Rolling Stone in 2011, “Billy’s a conundrum. We’ve had so many cancelled tours because of illnesses and various other things, alcoholism...He’s going to hate me for this, but every time he goes to rehab they’ve been light...When I went to rehab, I had to clean the floors. He goes to rehab where they have TVs. I love you, Billy, and this is tough love.”

“Elton is just being Elton,” Joel responded to Rolling Stone. But he was pissed. According to a biography of Joel by the Rolling Stone writer Fred Schruers—the book was originally intended as an as-told-to autobiography, but at the last minute Joel, increasingly uneasy about revealing so much of himself, pulled out and sent back his advance—Joel wrote Elton John an angry note: “What gives you the omnipotent moral certainty and authority to justify the public humiliation of anyone—especially of someone to whom you should, at the very least, consider according a modicum of honor?” He signed off, “We are done.”

Whether it’s denial or a hard-earned aversion to the intrusions of the celebrity-media complex and its twelve-step pieties, Joel greets most booze-related reports or questions with a flash of annoyance. He has protested that a trio of car accidents, in the early aughts, weren’t actually booze-related. It was dark, it was icy, he’d had eye surgery, the Citroën 2CV is a tricky little car. But it is true that these incidents coincided with a rough patch in his life—one of many over the years, the catalyst usually a breakup or a divorce. He takes it hard. His friends and collaborators give these periods a wide euphemistic berth. Schruers, in the biography, tells the story of an intervention led by friends in the summer of 2009, at the house on Centre Island. The friends brought along a trained counsellor, and Joel turned on him: “Now, who the f*ck are you? Who the f*ck do you think you are?”

We don’t often side with the intervenee, but there’s something to be said for defiance. As one of his biggest hits has it, “I don’t care what you say anymore, this is my life. Go ahead with your own life and leave me alone.” The song’s peppy electric piano—and its presence on the old cross-dressing sitcom “Bosom Buddies”—disguises a sentiment that is at the core of Joel’s outlook on his place in the world. When he plays “My Life” in concert, it can seem rote, but the anger at the heart of it, misplaced or not, gives it a pulse.

Joel has not released an album of new pop material since 1993. Since then, he has written and recorded just one song, “All My Life,” an ill-advised Sinatra-ish tribute to his then wife Katie Lee, which was released on People’s Web site on Valentine’s Day in 2007. He has been almost meticulously unproductive. He has rebuffed offers from various producers and executives (“the Resurrectionists,” Joel calls them) to record standards or old pop cuts, or even to rearrange his own stuff and present it anew. By all accounts, there is no shoebox full of lyrics or hard drive of latent hits. Instead, during that time, he gave the public a blur of concert tours, as well as a trove of appearances, at colleges and in concert halls, where, in a master-class setting, he talked with charm and intelligence about his life and work until it all hardened into shtick.

In those years, meanwhile, he has also occasionally been presented as a caricature of a has-been, a Dean Martin figurine, his frailties chronicled closely in the tabloids, with an uncertain combination of malice and love. Joel has an idea for a musical called “Good Career Move,” in which the record companies realize they can increase the value of their back catalogues by knocking off their artists, one by one. He hasn’t benefitted from a spectacular flameout (to say nothing of death), and instead has had to settle for muddling forward, as the world bends both away from and toward him.

Joel has often said he’s calling it quits. In 2010, two years after he closed down Shea Stadium with two sold-out shows, and a year after another fitful world tour with Elton John, he sent a letter to David Rosenthal, his band’s musical director and keyboardist, to share with the band. He likened himself to a professional ballplayer who couldn’t hack it anymore; he was taking himself off the field. The pain in his hips—he was born with dysplasia, and spent decades jumping off his piano every time he played “Only the Good Die Young”—had got to the point where he could hardly walk. “Turning sixty, the end of his marriage to Katie Lee, the hip pain: it was a combo platter of sh*t,” Cohen said. “It got really dark.” Cohen was accustomed to a certain ebb and flow in Joel’s enthusiasm for the game. Still, he said, “At the beginning of that break, I told everyone, ‘I think this is it.’”

But it wasn’t. At the Hurricane Sandy relief concert at the Garden, in December, 2012, he and the band went out, rusty, and delivered a muscular mini-set. Watching on TV, I realized that I hadn’t really thought much about Joel in years, yet here he was on a bill with the Stones, the Who, Bruce Springsteen, and Paul McCartney, and, on this occasion, anyway, and with respect, he was better than all of them.

Afterward, Joel felt that he might not be done after all. It was time to rouse the elephant. As it happens, in the cyclical nature of things, he, or perhaps his reputation, was entering a waxing phase, and suddenly he began to enjoy a popular revival and an upgrade from punch line to national treasure. So there he was last year at the Kennedy Center with a gaudy ribbon around his neck and, on his face, a stunned expression of embarrassment and pride (and his fellow-honoree Herbie Hanco*ck, the piano man’s piano man, at his elbow) as a series of singers performed incongruous renditions of some of his hits. This summer, Joel sold out Fenway Park, Wrigley Field, Citizens Bank Park, in Philadelphia, and Nationals Park, in D.C., and, despite the sparse schedule (three shows a month), was the fourth-highest-grossing pop act of the season, behind One Direction, Jay Z and Beyoncé, and Justin Timberlake. Next month, he’ll be at the White House, as the winner of the Gershwin Prize for Popular Song. The honors accrue. In July, he nabbed Newsday’s “That’s So Long Island” tournament, beating out bagels, Jones Beach, and Billy Crystal. All the while, he’s doing the Garden gigs, grossing two million-plus per and basking in the glow of nostalgic outings, date nights, and dads turning daughters on to the radio fodder of their youth—no one quite ready to wave Brenda and Eddie goodbye. In a way, Joel has become what Sinatra once was—in Cohen’s words, “the hood ornament for the greatest city on earth.”

“He won,” Cohen said. “He’s one of those guys who won.”

Billy Joel has never really been hip. He is widely loved but also, in many quarters, coldly dismissed. The critics got on him early. “Self-dramatizing kitsch” (Dave Marsh); “A force of nature and bad taste” (Robert Christgau). The contempt embedded in the lyrics of “Piano Man,” toward the patrons at the bar and the whole enterprise of entertaining people with music, soured many on him from the start. Joel wasn’t what the critics were looking for in the mid-seventies, when punk was knocking on the door. Their notions of authenticity, however flimsy, didn’t allow for his kind of poppy piano tristesse. One slam on him used to be that he was derivative, aping other voices or styles, or else mercenary, a soulless craftsman exploiting his technical and melodic agility to churn out insidious confections for the purpose of making money. These charges he has answered over and over. In the old days, he’d tear up reviews onstage. He used to call critics on the phone and scold them. (“You can’t know what I was thinking when I was writing that song.”) In his mind, he wasn’t trying to write hits. He just wrote songs that he hoped would sound good together on an album. The record company picked out the singles.

And it did a good job: he had thirty-three Top Forty hits. That’s an awful lot—about twice as many as Springsteen, the Eagles, or Fleetwood Mac. Some were schmalz, others were novelties, but a crate of them are songs that have embedded themselves in the great American jukebox and aren’t going away anytime soon. If you hate them, fine. A lot of people, even some rock snobs, love them still. I’m tired of “Piano Man,” too, but “Scenes from an Italian Restaurant” gets me every time. “Summer, Highland Falls” is for real. As for derivative, Joel won’t deny it; he loved the Beatles, Ray Charles, Otis Redding, and Smokey Robinson, so why not try to sound like them? At his Rock and Roll Hall of Fame induction, in 1999, he was introduced by Ray Charles. Joel said, “I know I’ve been referred to as derivative. Well, I’m damn guilty. I’m derivative as hell.” He said that if the Hall of Fame disqualified candidates on the basis of being derivative, “there wouldn’t be any white people here.”

In a Slate tirade a few years ago, “The Worst Pop Singer Ever,” Ron Rosenbaum wrote, “No career re-evaluations please! No false contrarian rehabilitations! He was terrible, he is terrible, he always will be terrible. Anodyne, sappy, superficial, derivative, fraudulently rebellious.... Billy Joel’s music elevates self-aggrandizing self-pity and contempt for others into its own new and awful genre: ‘Mock-Rock.’” He called Joel “the Andrew Wyeth of contemporary pop music.”

When I mentioned this to Joel, he said, “What’s wrong with Andrew Wyeth?”

Joel and his camp have the view that they have outlasted the haters. Pressed, he theorizes that maybe they didn’t like his voice. But he doesn’t like his own voice, either. He also doesn’t think he’s much of a piano player. Mediocre left hand.

Jon Landau was one of those critics, prior to becoming Springsteen’s manager, in 1977. “People, including myself, generally found him too glib and slick,” Landau told me. There was also a bias against hits. “As time has gone by, we’ve been proved wrong,” Landau said. “He’s one of the most musically astute composers of that era.” He said that when Springsteen joined Joel onstage for an Obama fund-raising concert, in 2008, and played a bunch of Joel’s songs with Joel’s band, he came off and told Landau, “Those songs—they’re built like the Rock of Gibraltar. Until you play them, you don’t realize how well they play.”

Springsteen had the band, the stage act, Clarence Clemons, a Svengali (Landau), and sex appeal. Joel was cute in his way, back in the day, but, as he said, “I look like the guy who makes pizza.” His default expression was a kind of petulant scowl. Onstage he could be enthralling, but he had the disadvantage of sitting at a piano. He often wore a jacket and tie—in earth tones. As for managers, Joel had some real doozies in the early days—including his first wife’s brother, who left him nearly broke—but in many respects he is one of rock’s great loners. He has gone most of his career without a reliable sounding board. He writes alone. What he has (now, at least) is a handful of loyal business associates, band members, and crew. Cohen told me, “Bruce had Landau, the guy saying, ‘Come see Kong.’ Billy never had a guy.”