Billy and the Joels--The American rock star and his German family story

by Steffen Radlmaier

  Billy Joel remembers: “Yeah, I encouraged Alex and said: ‘You don’t choose to be a musician. Music chooses you. You don’t have a choice. If this is what you must do, then that’s what you will do. It’s in you like your sexuality. It’s like someone doesn’t choose to be homosexual, it’s part of who they are.’ But I suggested he make a compromise that would make everyone happy.”

  After hours of debating, Alexander – with the help of his mother – was finally able to persuade his father to allow him to suspend his studies for one year, in order to prepare for the conducting entrance exam. But only on the condition that he would go back to King’s College if it didn’t work out with his music studies.

  Alexander prepared like a madman, and applied to the best place he knew. In 1990 he began studying piano (and later composition) at the Vienna Academy of Music and, in 1991 started his conducting studies at the Vienna Conservatory of Music. To be on the safe side, Alexander had applied to both the Academy of Music and the Conservatory, in order to increase his chances. This turned out to be a lucky move, as he failed the entrance examination for conducting at the Academy of Music. The frustrated applicant had already booked his ticket back to London but, shortly thereafter, the Conservatory offered him a place. He’d jumped a very important hurdle: “I’d always thought: ‘If you make the entrance exam, then somehow things will work out.’”

  Helmut, Alexander, Alexa and Billy Joel in Vienna, 1995 · © Steffen Radlmaier

  Billy and Alexander Joel in Vienna, 1995 · © Steffen Radlmaier

  Separation and Farewell

  The judiciary war with Billy Joel’s former attorneys and manager escalated in 1992. The artist, who’d had to learn from his mistakes, spent most of that year involved in legal matters such as court proceedings, advisory sessions and witness statements. The whole thing had become very complicated.

  Frank Weber’s dodgy dealings were just the tip of an iceberg that became increasingly visible as investigations continued. Joel’s attorney Leonard Marks uncovered more and more irregularities, the bill of indictment grew bigger and was no longer directed at Frank Weber alone. It turned out that there were a whole number of parasites who had profited from Billy Joel’s millions. Charges were now also being pressed against Rick London, the husband of Frank and Elizabeth Weber’s sister. He had worked for Billy in various capacities – as road manager, advisor and, lastly, as video producer.

  After declaring bankruptcy, Frank Weber tried to turn the tables on Billy Joel by instituting proceedings against him for breach of contract to the sum of 33 million dollars, but the lawsuit was quashed, just as was his lawsuit against Christie Brinkley, who had allegedly undermined the bond of trust between him and Billy.

  Meanwhile, Elizabeth Weber was suing her ex-husband for three million dollars, money she was owed from their marriage contract, from royalties and a pension entitlement. This was soon settled. Then Frank Weber sued his sister for money that she owed him. Elizabeth returned the favor by suing her bankrupt brother.

  The battle for Billy Joel’s millions developed into unsavory mudslinging, which was very soon fought in the public eye.

  No surprise then, that Billy Joel later observed with disgust:

  “The situation had knocked me back so far that I questioned my capacity to write anymore. I mean, if you lose your faith in humanity, what are you gonna write about? How much you hate everyone? How life is a cesspool? I don’t want to do that.”109

  To cap it all, the FBI entered the investigations into Frank Weber, who was suspected of engaging in corrupt financial dealings with Billy’s former attorneys Grubman, Indursky, Schindler & Goldstein. This led to Billy Joel and Leonard Marks filing a lawsuit against Alan Grubman in September 1992 to the sum of 90 million dollars. He was accused of breach of trust, breach of contract and conflict of interests. This was because Grubman‘s firm – one of the most powerful in the U.S. music branch – represented not only the artist but, without anyone knowing, his record company Sony Music too. If a record company is paying a firm of attorneys on a regular basis, what do the artist’s concerns matter? Would that not mean representing the interests of both parties would inevitably lead to a conflict of interests? That was the question that kept the music industry interested in this precedent case.

  This legal crime thriller gradually found its way into the limelight and was just what the media was looking for. Leonard Marks talked about the case on a TV talkshow, whilst Alan Grubman engaged the services of a PR agency in order make public his version of affairs. This was the battle of David and Goliath in a more contemporary version: The Artist versus The Music Industry.

  However, there was no clear winner in the end: Weber was ordered to pay 700,000 dollars plus interest to Billy Joel. Grubman settled with the singer out of court, paying him a lump sum of three million dollars, which actually came from Sony Music and not Grubman himself. They agreed to keep quiet about the details, so both sides were able to feel they’d won the battle. There was, however, a public sequel to the affair, with Grubman claiming never to have agreed to the three-million-dollar deal with Billy Joel. It was supposedly a coincidence that Sony Music had transferred the said amount just as Billy Joel was abandoning his lawsuit against Grubman.

  Whatever the case, the years of litigation that had so strained the nerves of all parties were finally over. According to Stan Soocher, author of “They Fought the Law”, the proceedings brought Billy Joel a total of approximately eight million dollars – a mere fraction of the original amount involved.

  By now in his mid-forties, the affair didn’t fail to leave its mark on the singer, who’d achieved multi-millionaire status with his music. On top of all this were the by now overt tensions in his marriage. Despite all the problems, he somehow found the strength to start work on a new album: “River of Dreams” was released in 1993, and turned out to be one of the most personal and most successful albums in Billy Joel’s long career. Furthermore, it remains his last pop/rock album to date and, thus, a kind of musical legacy – something that wasn’t anticipated at the time. The portrait on the cover was in fact painted by Christie Brinkley.

  On this album, Billy Joel addressed the frustrating experiences he was going through in an extraordinarily diverse way. Loss of trust, disappointment, despair, faith, love and hope. It is the self-portrait of a man in a deep crisis of spirit. “At the beginning, I was searching for justice. By the end, I’ve realized that nobody gets any justice; all we have is faith in something – in ourselves, in love, in humanity. But the record starts off very bitter, angry and pessimistic. I’m aware that people perceive me as this highly successful rock star married to Christie Brinkley, and who am I to get the blues? But I did have the blues. I’m as human as anyone else – just a lot luckier.”110

  The album took unusually long for Billy Joel to make, almost a year. It was produced by Danny Kortchmar, an experienced guitarist who had previously worked with James Taylor, Carole King and Neil Young, among others. Richie Cannata was once again involved after a break of several years; he was now running a successful studio on Long Island. Some of the tracks from “River of Dreams” were recorded there; the initial sessions were recorded by Billy and the band in a converted boat house in the east of Long Island.

  “River of Dreams” was a huge success: The gospel-influenced title song circles like a stream of consciousness around the creative process and the power of dreams, and also has a very spiritual level. “I still feel very much like an atheist in the religious aspect of things. But there are spiritual planes that I’m aware of that I don’t know anything about, that I can’t explain. That’s why I think musicians are so revered and so important to our culture: We’re the wizards, we sort of reveal a little bit of this extra-powerful communicative force. I recently rediscovered that I was enchanted with music and the creative arts as a little child because I thought there was an element of alchemy in them.”111

  Billy
also addressed his marriage problems in some of the songs. “Blonde Over Blue”, “A Minor Variation”, “All About Soul” and “Lullabye (Goodnight, My Angel)”. “Lullabye” is a moving goodnight-song for Alexa, composed like a classical piano piece. In this song a father is assuring his small child that he will always be there, no matter what happens. It doesn’t take much to imagine how this song applied to the family situation at the time: It describes the trepidations of a daughter who doesn’t want her parents to separate, and the bad conscience the father feels, wanting to spare his daughter the experience of being a child of divorced parents.

  “No Man’s Land” deals with the urban sprawl and environmental destruction with Long Island as an example; “The Great Wall of China” addresses a friend’s breach of trust (Frank Weber?), and “Two Thousand Years” looks back in time in anticipation of the future.

  “Famous Last Words” is the ironic and prophetic finale to the album: The rock poet admits that he has nothing more to say. It marked the end of a decisive chapter in the life of Billy Joel. At the age of 44 he drew a line under his activities as composer and songwriter – pop music was no longer of interest to him for the next few years. He looked for new compositional challenges, recorded the occasional new song, and was more or less satisfied with his role as ‘administrator’ and successful performer of his greatest hits.

  And there was another phase in his private life that came to an end at that time. Something that had been hinted at for quite a long time finally became official in 1993: After eight years together, Billy Joel and Christie Brinkley finally went their separate ways. The reasons for the separation can only be speculated upon: perhaps it was the arduous but enticing touring or maybe the legal battles at the beginning of the 1990s. Not to mention Billy’s increasing alcohol intake – his way of dealing with problems and bouts of depression. His mother remarked rather worriedly at the time: “If Billy could love himself like others love him, everything would be fine.”

  The public tends to have an entirely false impression of the day-to-day life of a so-called dream couple, as the singer once bemoaned in an interview: “People talk about ‘Billy Joel and his supermodel wife’ as if somehow, Christie and I don’t love and hurt and feel the same things that anybody else does. What do they think we do – walk in the door and fly around on gossamer and glitzy gliders? Don’t people realize that the minute the door closes, all of the silly rock-star/supermodel stuff goes right out the window? Then it’s just me and her and real man-and-wife time.”112

  They were divorced in August 1994. “I was in a difficult situation. Not because I was no longer with Christie, but more because she had the custody of my daughter. I was on the road all of the time – just like my father, I had been divorced – and just like my father, my ex-wife had custody of my child – just like things had been with my father. What was I to do? I was aware of the problem. Because I hadn’t had a father, I wanted to be a good father. I didn’t want my daughter to go through life without a father, as I did. I did everything I could to see my daughter as often as possible, even when I was on tour and she was living in Colorado. I think it was good for her. She understood my difficulties and is grateful that we could spend time together. We’ve talked about it. She knows how important it is for me to be a good father, maybe the most important thing in my life.”

  Billy and Christie at least managed to remain friends, particularly for the sake of their daughter, and have remained so until the present day. Shortly after the divorce, Christie Brinkley married businessman Rick Taubman, with whom she has a son. However, that marriage lasted less than a year.

  A few months after his divorce, Billboard magazine honored Billy Joel with its highest accolade: He received the Century Award for being one of the century’s most successful pop artists. The magazine’s December edition featured an extensive portrait of the singer, in which he admitted: “I’m probably happy with more than half of the recordings. The writer, I’m happy with; the singer, I’m never happy with. He always lets me down, because my heroes were always black singers and I’m not black. I’m just a little Jewish kid from Levittown who’s trying to sound black, but I’m not kidding me.”

  Professionally, things were going well for Billy: He found his refuge in his music and accumulated a great deal of money. “River of Dreams” was the first of his albums to make number 1 on the Billboard charts, achieving this in a very short time. The accompanying world tour began in the fall of 1993 and continued until the beginning of 1995, with just a few breaks.

  In the summer of 1994, Billy and his colleague Elton John got together for a very special coup: Under the motto “Face to Face” their joint concerts in America made the headlines and a lot of money too. Every single one of the arena shows sold out almost immediately.

  They’d had the idea for these concerts back in the 1970s in Amsterdam, but time constraints had always got in the way. Captain Fantastic and the Piano Man, the eccentric Englishman and the affable American got on well and had a great deal in common. In fact, so much in common that – much to their annoyance – people used to get them confused. They both played excellent piano and wrote great songs, both had lots of international hits and loved playing live. In addition, Elton John had also experienced the highs and lows of show business, and had had his own problems with drugs and alcohol.

  “Face to Face” was a musical summit meeting and a locking of horns between friends. The concerts lasted almost four hours and were as much fun for the musicians as they were for the audience. Billy Joel and Elton John began the shows by each playing their greatest hits with their own bands, before joining forces for the second half of the show. They sat facing each other at grand pianos, which were hydraulically lifted onto the stage during the concert. It was an artistic duel and a challenge that lent wings to the evenly matched entertainers.

  On July 25, 1994, Neil Strauss of The New York Times wrote the following review of the first of five sold-out concerts in Giants Stadium, headed: “So Alike, so different”: “Even before Mr. Joel, who is 45, approached Mr. John, who is 47, with the idea for the “Face to Face” tour, the similarities between the two musicians were clear. Besides the fact that both have first names as last names, the two pianists are baby-boomers who grew up in planned suburban tract homes with fathers who were for the most part absent. Musically, the two gifted, idiosyncratic artists exist in the netherworld between pop and rock, where Broadway show tunes, classical compositions, ragtime, gospel and rock and roll mingle freely. Verbally (though Bernie Taupin wrote many of Mr. John’s songs), both are obsessed with mortality and history, the purity of rock and roll and the corruption of human beings. If the two are ambassadors for their countries, it’s only because they represent the stereotypes often associated with England and the United States, in particular the repression and manners of the former and the freedom and brazenness of the latter. On Friday, Mr. John seemed glued to his seat. Mr. Joel was all over the stage, twirling microphone stands, somersaulting off the drum riser and howling at the full moon. Mr. John tended to spice his songs with sweet blues vamps; Mr. Joel improvised long atonal romps. Mr. John had a voice like pure ivory skin; Mr. Joel sounded like the next day’s stubble. The nearly four-hour show, for an audience of 56,000, was more of a greatest hits retrospective than a showcase for new material. Mr. John, who is likely to tour on his own early next year after his next solo album comes out, played only three recent songs, “Can You Feel the Love Tonight” from “The Lion King” soundtrack and “Simple Life” and “The One” from his last solo album, “The One”. Mr. Joel, who wrapped up his “River of Dreams” tour last spring, performed only two songs from that album, the title track and “Lullabye (Good Night, My Angel)”. The concert had four sections, with Mr. Joel and Mr. John onstage together in the beginning, followed by Mr. John and his band, Mr. Joel and his band, and, for an encore, both musicians and their bands together. In each pianist’s own set, however, there was a lot of o
verlap. Mr. John, who was just a shadow of his former, flamboyant self, performed Mr. Joel’s “New York State of Mind”, and Mr. Joel played a very formidable version of Mr. John‘s “Goodbye Yellow Brick Road”. In Mr. John’s set, Mr. Joel came out to perform “I Guess That‘s Why They Call It the Blues”, one of the few songs in which his voice didn’t have the depth that Mr. John’s music requires. Mr. John faltered only on “You May Be Right”, in which his voice lacked the punch of Mr. Joel’s. During the encore, the pair demonstrated the expressive power of their chosen instrument by rocking out on Little Richard’s “Lucille” and Jerry Lee Lewis’ “Great Balls of Fire”, The metaphorical meaning of the song that followed, Mr. John‘s “Candle in the Wind”, a reflection on Marilyn Monroe’s death, was heightened by the wind, which swept through the stadium, extinguishing most of the lighters raised to the sky. Predictably, the set closed with Mr. Joel’s “Piano Man”, and it was here that the essential differences between Mr. John and Mr. Joel emerged. The song is Mr. Joel’s vision of the piano man: an underpaid, underappreciated tunesmith in a smoky barroom distracting the outcasts of society from their perpetual misery. For Mr. John, the piano man is a grand, jewel-fingered entertainer indulging in command performances for royalty.”

  Due to the huge success of the concerts, “Face to Face” was repeated triumphantly in 1998 and 2001/2: According to Billboard, “Face to Face” was the most successful tour series of all time.