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

by Steffen Radlmaier

  And the Rheinische Post wrote this about Joel’s interpretation of Igor Stravinsky’s ballet The Rite of Spring at the Düsseldorf Symphony Concert (with clarinetist Sabine Meyer as star guest) on April 3, 2006: “It was indeed remarkable how conductor Alexander Joel took all the superficial snappiness away from the work. That is not to say he took away the bite from the Rite of Spring, but he did focus very heavily on the long phrasing and the vocal dimension. A smart move, since musicologists have long since identified a catalogue of Russian folksongs in the score.”

  Every conductor works with the orchestra in his own way. There are strict conductors and charming ones, level-headed conductors and emotional ones. But without the necessary expertise, empathy and authority, it just doesn’t work. Alexander Joel tries to win over the orchestra musicians in a friendly yet assertive manner. “I’m not a macho and I don’t like the authoritarian style. In this respect, I have been influenced by my professor Georg Mark, who also taught me a lot about idealism in this profession, in which there are also quite a lot of charlatans.”

  Alexander has attended master classes by renowned conductors such as Hans Graf, Gustav Kuhn and Sergiu Celibidache – and learned from them all. He has also learned from Fabio Luisi, whom he once asked for the secret of his success. “Luisi answered, ‘If I don’t like something, I ask politely whether we could perhaps try it again. And if it still doesn’t work, I ask again and again until it does.’ And that’s what I do as well: I ask politely but I never give in.”

  He believes that the conductor and the orchestra are partners who can only reach their musical goal by working together. But how do you make the orchestra play how the conductor wants them to? “That’s the big challenge. The chemistry definitely needs to be right. Orchestras are like women: sometimes there’s a spark, sometimes there isn’t. But you can’t explain it in the same way as erotic attraction. In an ideal case, the orchestra, choir, conductor, soloists and the music merge together as one.”

  In past years, Alexander Joel has achieved a lot and developed a large repertoire, both in opera and on the concert stage: He made his debuts with the Staatskappelle Dresden, the Deutsches Symphonie-Orchester Berlin and the Tokyo Symphony Orchestra, he opened the 150th season at the Teatro Municipal de Santiago de Chile with a new production of Don Carlos, conducted a new production of Gounod’s Faust at the Deutsche Oper am Rhein, the rerun of Verdi’s Macbeth in Dresden, La Bohème in Hamburg and Tosca in Berlin. At the Bayerische Staatsoper Munich he conducted all the performances of Die Entführung aus dem Serail (The Abduction from Seraglio) during the Mozart Year, including the concerts on Mozart’s 250th birthday and at the Munich Opera Festival. He has also previously appeared as guest conductor at the Finnish National Opera in Helsinki, the Cologne Opera, the Komische Oper Berlin, and the Teatro Regio di Parma.

  The critics praise his casual, exciting, passionate and yet precise style. And he is very popular amongst the orchestra musicians, due to his likeable yet assertive manner. Alexander Joel generally works with all his physical strength, prancing about and jumping on the podium, making great gestures to illustrate the flow of the music, enticing and leading the orchestra with elegance and charisma, immersing himself fully in the music whenever things are going well. Georg Mark says of his pupil, whom he calls Sasha: “He is a perfectionist. And he has an incredible talent for observation – he adopts the best skills of the conductors he admires and works them into his own unique style.” Alexander Joel – a real eclectic too.

  New Challenges

  In the mid-90s, Billy Joel also began to concentrate more on classical music, something that he’d already got to know as a child. Going through a period of personal crisis and meeting up with his brother, who was devoting himself greatly to orchestral music and opera, may have had something to do with this.

  In a Rolling Stone interview he once said: “I started out learning classical music from the age of 4. Then when I got to be 13, this hot seductress in shredded fishnet stockings swept me away: I had a passionate affair with rock and roll. I’m 48 now, so it’s getting old. But the music I’m writing now isn’t that different from what I’ve written all along. The piano interlude before “The Stranger” is classical. “She’s Always a Woman” is a baroque piano piece. “The Longest Time” was written originally as a classical piece, like Haydn. I’ve been doing this all along.”120

  Influences and quotations from classical music can indeed be heard in many of Joel’s songs, all of which were composed on the piano: “The Longest Time” is reminiscent of Haydn, whilst the orchestration in “The Ballad of Billy the Kid” is evocative of Copeland and Morricone. And the chorus of “This Night” is an extended musical quotation from Beethoven’s Sonata Pathetique. As he himself admits, “I’ve Loved These Days” sounds like Chopin, “Storm Front” sounds like Schumann and “Lullabye” sounds like Beethoven.

  Now, instead of pop songs, his interest is directed towards instrumental music: “One day I lay down in my library, where I have a really nice old analogue stereo system, and I put on the Beethoven symphonies and I let them pound over me. I was almost emotionally beaten. After I did that, I said: ‘I’m nothing, I haven’t done anything’. I remember being in the same feeling when I was first listening to Led Zeppelin. After listening to Beethoven I started to become interested in trying to compose music which was instrumental, with no words.”

  Joel’s love of rock and roll has lessened with age. He had always been interested in all sorts of genres, styles and variations – rigid categorizing was always completely alien to him. But in spite of his huge success he never felt fully comfortable in his role as a rock star – he just wanted to be a musician.

  Another pivotal moment in his creative transformation was his personal experience after his separation from Christie Brinkley. What bothered the doting father most was that his daughter Alexa would no longer be growing up with him. He tried to handle the pain and sadness of the separation through his music.

  “I started with a piece called “Soliloquy (On a Separation)”, which is on the piano album. It was based on a lyric theme “We Say Good-bye”. When we got divorced my daughter came to me and I’d missed her so much. I watched the car take her away to go back where her mother was. The music is saying what I’m feeling. I don’t feel the need to write words. It’s like painting a moustache on my own painting. Even when I wrote pop songs, I always wrote the music first and then I’d try to decode what’s in the music.”

  Billy emphasizes that, unlike most of his colleagues, he has always written the music first and then the lyrics. “To write instrumental music is quite natural to me. Now I have to learn how to develop a theme. In pop music you have only three and a half minutes to do the whole thing. I said: ‘That’s too confining, I’m in a box. I have to go out of this box.’”

  His thoughts on songwriting and composing, on rock and roll and instrumental music, on the relationship between lyrics and melody – in short, on the musical tools of the trade – were the subject of a series of talk-concerts that he gave – as already mentioned – at many American universities starting in the late 80s. Billy Joel wanted to pass on his experiences in the music industry to the next generation, and used these events to provide valuable insider tips to young people wanting to build a career in music in its widest sense. His pedagogical concern was motivated by his own bad experiences; as a newcomer, the boy from Hicksville also had to learn the hard way. “At that time there was nobody you could ask. I even wrote to the Beatles once, but instead of advice all I got back was a couple of autographed photos. Of course, that wasn’t really what I wanted.”

  These practical and entertaining lectures were called “Evenings of Questions and Answers … and a Little Music”. “I like speaking to college audiences because they ask great questions. And what you say is relevant to their lives. You really can’t just give an answer that is good for your recording career or that’s self serving. You can
be totally unselfconscious and self-effacing, completely giving in a teaching way. I’ve got all this information up in my head that I can share. I’ve made every mistake you can make in this business a couple of times over and survived to tell the tale. Why not help some young girl or guy who’s starting out to avoid the same mistakes I made? I just want to help. I want to help because I sure could have used the advice when I started.”121 Indeed, to this day there has probably been no other rock star who has spoken so willingly and continuously about himself and his work – even to his fans – as Billy Joel, and who still manages to keep his private life as much to himself as he does.

  Of course Joel’s record label was not too pleased with his new priorities – after all, they were planning to release a new rock album. In 1997, in the absence of any new songs, the label released the third part of his Greatest Hits. As a selling point, for the first time ever, the album contained three new cover versions, including “To Make You Feel My Love”, a previously unreleased love song by Bob Dylan. There was also “Hey Girl”, an old soul number by Carole King and Jerry Goffin, as well as “Light as a Breeze”, a song by Leonard Cohen that Joel had recorded for the tribute album “Tower of Songs”.

  Apart from that, Billy Joel only did things that he enjoyed that year. He concentrated on his private life, worked on his own compositions at home on Long Island, performed concerts every now and then and went on tour with his friend Elton John once more. Joel told Rolling Stone magazine back then: “I respect him a lot. He’s a very caring man. Around the time I was getting divorced, I thought one of our shows at the Meadowlands was canceled – there was a big storm. I was home in East Hampton (N.Y.), and I had a couple of bottles of wine. Then at the last minute, the gig was on. I flew in, went onstage, and I was bombed. I’m tying Elton’s shoelaces together. I’m lying on top of the piano like Michelle Pfeiffer in The Fabulous Baker Boys. I’m falling down. And I think I am so hysterically funny.

  Elton took me out to lunch the next day. He goes, ‘Are you OK?’ I said, ‘Yeah.’ He said, ‘No, you’re not! You were blitzed that night.’ He’s clean and sober. I was embarrassed. I guess I had been going through a tough time.

  He took me into his arms and said, ‘Is there anything I can do? I care about you.’ I will never forget what a kind person he was. You hear all these wacky stories about Elton: that he’s crazy, has hissy fits, whatever. But Elton John, he’s got a big, big heart.”122

  In that same interview, he also spoke out about the problems aging rock stars faced on tour: “We don’t want to be traveling salesmen. I don’t want to end up like Willy Lohman [in Arthur Miller’s play “Death of a Salesman” (author’s note)]. I’m fed up. That has nothing to do with music anymore. I don’t want to be a rock star, but an artist. The alternative bands of today who say they want to be anti-stars, they can’t understand that it was the same with us, we hated that crap too. But today Elton John works on Disney musicals, Paul Simon’s working on a musical and Bruce Springsteen’s doing John Steinbeck with a guitar. We all try to find a way of expressing ourselves that is in keeping with our age.”

  At that time, Joel had a new business idea that emerged from his lifelong love of boats and the sea. For decades he had been an enthusiastic amateur skipper and recreational angler, and owned several motorboats. Rather than driving from Long Island to New York City, he often preferred to take his boat.

  Whilst at college, he had studied technical drawing and often found pleasure in designing ships in the classic design of the 1920s to the 1940s. He worked on the first designs on tour, hurriedly scribbled on menus and hotel stationery. The small retro “Shelter Island Roundabout” motorboat was modeled on the old yachts and ships sailed by Long Island’s oystercatchers, but fitted out with modern technology and powerful motors. “I wanted it to look like a boat, not like an aerodynamic hotel room.”

  The small boat construction company Coecles Harbor Marina, specialist craftsmen, brought Joel’s plans to life, initially for his own private use, and later also for other wealthy buyers. Since then, several boat models have been made based on Billy Joel’s (patented) design. And in his opinion, they not only look great – they also drive well too. “It’s like the ’56 Buick my father had. The people used to say that the GM cars in the 40s and 50s used to drive like ships. Now I know what they meant.”123

  The rock star is also proud to be supporting an old industry on Long Island with his successful Shelter Island Roundabout (450 HP). Since 1996, around fifty such boats have been sold (at a starting price of $350,000). Joel also had the fishing boat “Alexa” and the speedboat “Vendetta” built for himself.

  Even though he had announced his retirement from the rock business several times and had taken up composing instrumental music, Billy Joel was still performing rock concerts at the end of the 90s. This included two performances with other stars at Carnegie Hall for Sting’s Rainforest Foundation environmental project.

  And at the end of the century that saw the invention of rock and roll, honors for the rock star’s life work came rolling in: in 1999, the 50-year-old was presented with the American Music Award and the Recording Industry Association of America Diamond Award. He was also inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame, at the same time as Paul McCartney and Beatles’ producer George Martin, as well as Bruce Springsteen, Curtis Mayfield and Dusty Springfield. At the gala show in New York’s Waldorf Astoria Hotel, Joel was introduced by his idol Ray Charles, and then joined by Paul McCartney in a duet of “Let It Be” at the subsequent jam session. Something nobody could ever have predicted back in 1964.

  Unsurprisingly, Billy Joel celebrated the end of the millennium (and his tour) on stage with his band: “2000 Years: The Millennium Concert” took place on New Year’s Eve at the sold-out Madison Square Garden in New York. This concert in Joel’s birthplace was a lavish celebration. In addition to the tour band (Liberty DeVitto, Crystal Taliefero, Mark Rivera, Tommy Byrnes, David Rosenthal and David Santos), three brass players (including Richie Cannata) and a backing choir were involved. The concert opened to a recording of “Ode to Joy” from Beethoven’s Ninth Symphony and, of course, featured the song that gave the concert its name, “2000 Years”. The concert lasted even longer than usual and, on top form, the entertainer complemented his well-known hits with some lesser-known songs and a few cover versions, including the Rolling Stones’ “Honky Tonk Woman”. The entire concert was released on the live double album “2000 Years”, which met with almost unanimous praise from music critics.

  The new millennium saw the beginning of Joel’s new musical side. In February 2001, the benefit album “Music of Hope” was released in aid of the American Cancer Society. It featured orchestral music by Paul McCartney, Ray Charles and Billy Joel. His contribution was “Elegy: The Great Peconic”, played by the London Symphony Orchestra under the direction of David Snell. The piece was part of a 40-minute orchestral suite, “The Scrimshaw Pieces”, inspired by the history of Long Island’s whaling industry. “Scrimshaw” refers to a traditional handiwork; whalers in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries developed an engraving technique as something to pass the time, carving miniatures on whale bones and walrus tusks.

  That same year, Joel’s first classical album was released: a collection of twelve piano pieces entitled “Fantasies & Delusions”. The retired rock star showed himself to be a genuine late romantic, a kindred spirit of Chopin and Rachmaninoff.

  It was clear to Billy that these pieces were beyond his skill as a pianist. They were therefore recorded by the young virtuoso Richard Joo in June 2001 at the Mozart Hall in Vienna, where Joel’s father and brother were both living. The two met at the instigation of Alexander Joel: “I took advice from my brother. There was a lot I had to learn, and I had to ask a lot of questions. I wanted to ask the right people. I needed some instruction and guidance. Not that anyone wrote the notes for me, but a lot of times it was pointed out to me, ‘You can’t do that, you’re quoti
ng Chopin.’ Or Richard would say, ‘You shouldn’t play that, because that’s Ravel.’ And I don’t even know if I unconsciously knew it was Ravel. Part of me was saying to myself, ‘Hey, I must be pretty good if I’m writing Ravel.’ But they did help me to avoid making too many quotes. There are references to other classical composers. I think that’s normal. But the notes are mine, the themes are mine, the melodies are mine.”124

  Billy Joel admits that, in spite of his piano lessons, he is not very good at reading music, and often plays by ear. He composed the pieces on the piano before recording them. He then played back the compositions on a synthesizer, where they were digitally processed and transferred to a computer, which then printed out the finished scores. After that, he collaborated with an arranger to add the finishing touches.

  The album “Fantasies & Delusions” went straight to number 1 in the Billboard classical charts, to the astonishment and embarrassment of even the composer himself, who was in unfamiliar territory here. This prompted him to take on the role of someone who opens musical doors for the rock generation, arousing their interest in classical music.

  This late classical debut was overshadowed by an event in New York that was set to shock and change the entire world. On September 11, 2001, Arab terrorists hijacked four passenger jets and diverted two of them into the twin towers of the World Trade Centre. In the devastating explosion that followed, not only was a landmark of the city destroyed but American self-confidence was also dealt a lasting blow. A total of over 3,000 people lost their lives in these terrorist attacks.

  For Billy Joel, a passionate New Yorker, 9/11 is one of the three greatest catastrophes in his life – alongside his parents’ divorce and the breakdown of his own marriage to Christie Brinkley. His account of it is grim: “That was the worst thing I’ve ever seen in my life. I’m still depressed from that. It’s very difficult for me to get over. I didn’t experience war, I didn’t experience what happened at Pearl Harbor, or fighting as a soldier like my father did or my friends did in Vietnam. Ground Zero is perhaps the closest thing to this abomination. I think it’s about man’s inhumanity to man. It’s the proof that evil exists. The main political theme in most of my life was the Cold War. That didn’t end with a bang, it ended gradually; there was no big celebration. To me it was such a wonderful thing…then I realized: ‘Shit, it’s back. The devil is back. The evil is back’. This terrible notion of man’s inhumanity to his fellow man, the murder of the innocent, the atrocity. […] A lot of people, especially in New York, felt the same. The people here are very proud of New York, even from other cities in the States. My city was New York City, that was wonderland when we were kids, we didn’t want to be in the suburbs, we wanted to be in New York City. That was the place where everything was. It was a wonderful, perfect Disneyland. For that to happen left an open wound. To this day I say to my brother: ‘You always think that the sun shines out of your ass, because you are from Vienna.’ New Yorkers are quite similar. A lot of people feel the same as I do; they are depressed because of the terrorism.