Besides, I’ve realized: There’s no accounting for taste. You’ll probably find just as many people like my music as hate it. You can be the most popular rock star ever and your music can be as successful as you like, but there’ll always be people who find it boring. It’s also a good thing, because it means your music is having an effect – positively or negatively. There’s a lot of music I don’t like, but it doesn’t mean it’s bad music.”
Like a boxer, he always picked himself up after all the defeats and setbacks. “We are born fighters like our grandfather, we don’t give up easily”, says Alexander Joel. The two brothers are very close and very similar in many respects. In addition to their passion for music, they also share a similar sense of humor. But one subtle difference cannot be overlooked here: One grew up in the USA without a father and fought his way to the top of the rock scene, a self-made man without any qualifications; the other had a sheltered childhood and an extensive education in Europe, before going on to start a career in classical music. One has a great past behind him, the other has a great future ahead of him.
And there is something else the men of the Joel family have in common: they are always on the go – traveling is part of their jobs. And they are all masters of the art of repressing personal relationships and problems. This is most obvious in the case of Karl and Helmut Joel, who were so cursed by fate and mostly kept their feelings to themselves. But Billy and Alexander too, who appear so open, so outgoing and so communicative, rarely let anyone get close to them in reality. Perhaps this character trait is a way for these particularly sensitive men to protect themselves, out of fear of getting hurt.
Just as in every family, there are certain sensitive areas and taboos for the Joels. “A family is very important to me,” says Billy Joel. “There are all types of families now. There are extended families, there are broken families, gay families and so on. I realized that my family is not that different from other families. You watch television – and all looks perfect. But it’s not like that: Families they fight, they have all kinds of trauma and difficulties, they don’t all get along; one side of the family doesn’t like the other side of the family. That goes on and on like this. But family is the first thing you recognize that you actually have, and you take that with you through your whole life. I haven’t given up the idea of a family, in the sense of belonging.”
This global superstar, who has remained the same good ol’ boy from Hicksville in spite of all his fame and fortune, gets all the support and trust he needs from his family and old friends. He has also known most of his small personal team for many, many years. He knows he can rely on them.
Billy Joel’s worldwide success is also a heavy burden on the family: all of them have to measure up to him, whether they know it or not. The pressure of success is huge for Billy himself too: after all the hits, platinum albums, honors, sales and audience records, what comes next? In terms of creativity, too, it was he who once set the standards by which he is now judged. The expectations are enormous.
The same goes for Alexa Ray Joel, who is attempting to develop her own identity as a musician and to emerge from her father’s mighty shadow – no easy feat!
Whilst Alexa has chosen exactly the same field as Billy, Alexander Joel is working in a wholly different music sector. The classical industry has its own rules. There, pop is still the antithesis of serious. For that reason he fights against the ‘little brother’ image that he is so often wrongly ascribed. The conductor has made it this far on his own steam, and many experts predict a great future ahead of him. He certainly has the necessary talent for it. In contrast to the pop industry, age barely plays a role in his profession. On the contrary – they say that conductors only reach their prime in later life, when they have gained enough experience.
Billy Joel had always longed for his father’s approval, since he never really took pop music seriously. He would have given anything to have his father admire and support him the way he did Alexander. “I read somewhere that he’s proud of me, but he’s never told me that”, explains Billy. “He always had trouble expressing his feelings. I also think he didn’t have a particularly close relationship with his father. We tend to become like our fathers, whether we want to or not. I was more influenced by my mother’s father, who was a very communicative person. And also by my mother, who compensated for my father’s lack of communication by being over-communicative. It’s strange how different they were. My father didn’t talk about anything and my mother talked about everything.”
Perhaps the fundamentally different characters of his parents go some way to explaining Billy Joel’s complex personality. “I think I have something from both parents. I can be cynical and sarcastic like my father and I have a certain bitterness. Sometimes I’m in a dark mood, this comes from my father, too. Therefore I’m very thankful for my mother. She has this wonderful outlook: Life can be such a wonderful thing. She sees beauty in the garden, the trees, in the natural wonders. She sees beauty in music, in her friends, she even sees beauty in me! I Think I have this, too: I’m always hopeful. The world is still hurting itself, but we have such great possibilities today.”
Rosalind Joel never married again and lived all her life on Long Island, not far from her famous son. Her adopted daughter Judith Anne also has a house there. In addition to his luxury estate on the island, Billy also owns a townhouse in Manhattan and a (winter) holiday home in Miami. He lived there with his young ex-wife Katie and two small pugs called Fionoula and Sabrina. “I used to look at the fabulous homes on Long Island and think ‘What kind of bastard lives there’. Now I’m one of them. It’s really crazy: My grandfather was a very rich man and then lost nearly everything. My father always had bad luck. And now I’m richer than my grandfather ever was. I like that about America. That something like that is possible.”
Billy Joel no longer has anything to prove – either to himself or to others. After having been through three failed marriages, since 2010 he has been in a steady relationship with finance broker Alexis Roderick, 32 years his junior. And the Yellow Press soon had their headlines when it was announced that Billy was once again to become a father in the summer of 2015. At a 4th of July party in the same year, Billy and Alexis surprised everyone by announcing their marriage, and, on 12 August, baby daughter Della Rose came into the world.
“I can’t say that I’m happy with everything,” says Billy. “I have regrets. I would like to have done something different in my personal relationships with people. I’ve done things that men do, that hurt people and I wish I would have never done those things. But I’m also content with what I did with my life. I did what I was supposed to do. I followed my path and I stayed with it and I worked very hard on it. I put everything I have, my soul, into what I do. So when I look back on that, I’m content with my life, I’m at peace with that. I did as well as I wanted to do. I have frustrations about always wanting to be better, and was sometimes frustrated that it wasn’t as good as I wanted it to be. That’s the sign of an artist: always trying to improve […]. Artists always want to be better. There’s a certain frustration in being an artist, I recognize that. But I did the best I could. I could have done better. I can’t say that I’m happy, but I’m content with most of my life.”
What’s the thing about happiness? Tolstoy’s novel Anna Karenina opens with the famous sentence: “Happy families are all alike; every unhappy family is unhappy in its own way.” Can the Joels be described as a happy family? Billy Joel says: “I don’t really believe that there is a thing like a completely happy family. I think that’s a Hollywood fabrication. Every family has its ups and downs. People are looking for happiness, but that’s an extreme. Like sadness. Eastern cultures are based on searching for contentment. Contentment has been given a bad name, for many people it means you are saddling with something. Happiness comes from time to time like sadness. No one is happy all the time, except the crazy. Only the insane are happy all the time. A happy f
amily is a wonderful thought, but I don’t believe it. It turns out that everybody I know proved this to me. Everybody has family troubles sometimes. It’s constantly in flux.”
The worst thing that happened to Billy Joel was the disappearance of his father. His pride and joy are his two daughters. Helmut Joel said: “The breakdown of my marriage was the worst thing to happen to me; my two sons are the best.” The fact that they both grew up to become musicians brought him great satisfaction. That was his dream career, too, after all. But Adolf Hitler and the Nazis threw a spanner in the works. Who knows how things may otherwise have turned out.
Afterword
This story plays out in Nuremberg and New York, in Berlin and Auschwitz, in Havana and in Vienna. It’s about an American musician – and about German history. War and peace. Sturm and Drang. Rock and Roll. It’s about success and failure, businessmen and profiteers, about happiness and sadness, about politics, terror and music.
The fate of the Jewish Joel family is mirrored in the history of the 20th century in a most remarkable way. However, in contrast to many stories of this kind, this one has a happy end.
I became aware of this story completely by coincidence: Listening to the U.S. military radio station AFN one day in 1994, I heard that American superstar Billy Joel would be giving an open-air concert at what used to be the Nazi Party rally grounds in Nuremberg. The trouble was, this concert was only accessible to U.S. soldiers and their families and, thus, not open to the German public. An unusual concert situation and one very similar to Bob Dylan’s legendary first concert in Germany, which also took place on the former Nazi rally grounds in 1978.
I began to get curious: Billy Joel had never given a concert in Nuremberg before, and rumor had it that the Joel family had their roots in Franconia, the administrative district in which Nuremberg lies.
For Americans only: Billy Joel on stage, Nuremberg, 1994 · © Günter Distler
This fact was practically unknown to the outside world. Some American newspaper articles and reference books – the World Wide Web and Google didn’t exist at the time – did refer to the Joels as having German roots, but always in connection with Jews who originated in the then German region of Alsace. Colmar was the town originally thought to be the home of the Joels. However, the journalists in America had confused the Alsatian town with the tiny Franconian village of Colmberg, near Ansbach. This was the place the Joel family originally came from, something I discovered only later. Karl Amson Joel had built up a very successful clothing company in Nuremberg; but in 1938, he and his wife and son Helmut had to flee Nazi Germany. As it happened, this horrible affair turned out to be their good luck. They survived Hitler’s dictatorship and the Second World War. Many of their relations found their death in concentration camps.
As coincidence would have it, my wife was friends with a German woman who was married to a GI in America, and who was back visiting Nuremberg on holiday. This friend was able to use her husband’s ID-card to smuggle me into the cordoned off, tightly controlled concert site. Only a few German onlookers had gathered on the steps of the Zeppelintribüne grandstand on this warm summer day.
It was during this extraordinary concert that, for the very first time, I heard Billy Joel himself say that his father had grown up in Nuremberg and had had to hurriedly flee from the Nazis exactly 60 years previously. He dedicated the song “Vienna” to his father, who was now living in the Austrian capital. “I hope this Nazi shit will never happen again” exclaimed the energized entertainer to a rather surprised audience.
After reading one of my newspaper articles on the subject, Matthias Oberth (at that time a young employee in Nuremberg’s PR department) had the idea of booking Billy Joel for a first-ever public concert in his father’s native town. Further research had revealed that Billy’s father, Helmut, had retired to Vienna. Helmut’s former school-friend Arno Hamburger, now an alderman in Nuremberg, was able to make the necessary contact. In the commemorative year of 1995, fifty years after the end of the Second World War, the city of Nuremberg ultimately booked Billy Joel, along with his father and his half-brother Alex, for two memorable concerts. As a gesture of reconciliation, Billy Joel donated his fee to the newly-founded Nuremberg International Human Rights Award and to the Jewish community.
That was when I first met the Joels, and we’ve met up again many times since (in Nuremberg, Vienna and Braunschweig). It was also then that I produced a feature for the Bayerische Rundfunk (Bavarian broadcasting corporation) entitled “Wäschhändler, Weltbürger und ein Weltstar” (“Clothing Manufacturer, Cosmopolitan and a Superstar”).
Then things quieted down around Billy Joel, who had decided to take time out from the music business. One of the most successful solo artists on the international pop music scene, with more than 100 million records sold, he decided he’d had just about enough of rock and roll, and thus began writing instrumental music for piano. It wasn’t until 2006 that he was able to enjoy a sensational comeback, playing sell-out concerts in the USA, Europe and, eventually, throughout the rest of the world.
In the meantime, his younger half-brother was building himself an international conducting career. In July of 2007, Alexander Joel conducted a spectacular concert in Nuremberg’s Luitpoldhain – also once part of the Nazi rally grounds. A symbiosis of reconciliatory symbolism, Woodstock-feeling and Viennese waltzes, he conducted the Nuremberg Philharmonic Orchestra at a classical open-air concert in front of an audience of 60,000.
And since then, Billy’s daughter Alex Ray has also made her singer/songwriter début. The bottom line: Music is the common thread along which this dramatic family story winds.
Although I’ve been lucky enough to see Billy Joel in numerous concerts, I didn’t meet him personally until May 1995, in Nuremberg. Thanks to the help of his brother, I was able to interview him for long hours by telephone in October 2008. I visited him and his daughter Alexa in New York towards the end of October 2008, and I met him again in May 2013 at the Jazz Heritage Festival in New Orleans and in September 2016 in Frankfurt, where he gave his one and only concert in Germany for ten years.
A note about my methodology: apart from archive material and other relevant literature, I’ve also analyzed interviews Billy Joel gave to American music magazines. These have been marked accordingly. Quotes without source references have been taken from past personal interviews with family members, acquaintances and witnesses of the time period.
At this point I would like to thank all those who have helped me with their words and deeds in the writing of this book: First and foremost the Joel family for their patience and trust, and also all my other interviewees, especially Arno Hamburger and Rudi Weber, who are sadly no longer with us. Not forgetting Keri Aylward, Anne Borel, Thommie Bayer, Günter Distler, Dr Georg Leipold, Axel Linstädt and Norbert Treuheit. Last but not least, I would like to thank my siblings Andreas, Dominik and Verena Radlmaier, as well as my wife Josée, for all their invaluable help.
Steffen Radlmaier
Nuremberg, September 2016
Appendix
Annotations
(1) Baldwin, in: Here’s the Thing, June 2012
(2) Waddell, in: Billboard, January 2014
(3) Waddell, in: Billboard, January 2014
(4) Baldwin, in: Here’s the Thing, June 2012
(5) Goldman, in: The New York Times, May 2013
(6) Translated from Klemperer, p. 15
(7) Translated from Shirer, Berliner Tagebuch, 1934–1941, p. 22 et seq.
(8) Translated from Beauvoir, p. 167
(9) Translated from Greve, p. 62 et seq.
(10) Translated from Shirer, Aufstieg und Fall, p. 228
(11) Translated from Shirer, Berliner Tagebuch, 1934–1941, p. 68.
(12) Translated from Neckermann, p. 95
(13) Id., p. 96
(14) Id., p. 100
(15) Id., p. 97
&
nbsp; (16) Id., p. 97
(17) Id., p. 97 et seq.
(18) Translated from Sahl, p. 294
(19) Translated quote from Reinfelder, p. 218
(20) Translated from Schröder, p. 27 et seq.
(21) Translated from Schröder, p. 31
(22) Translated from Mann, p. 413
(23) Translated from Sahl, p. 386
(24) Translated from Mann, p. 632
(25) Gellhorn, translated quote from Stern, p. 399 et seq.
(26) White, December 3, 1994
(27) Ibid.
(28) Ibid.
(29) Schwartz, December 11, 1978
(30) White, December 3, 1994
(31) Translated from Neckermann, p. 178
(32) Id., p. 179
(33) Id., p. 193
(34) Id., p. 196
(35) Id., p. 197
(36) Id., p. 204
(37) Id., p. 243
(38) Translated from Veszelits, p. 284
(39) Translated from Kesten, p. 23
(40) Ahrens, April 23, 1998
(41) White, in: Rolling Stone, September 1980
(42) Robins, in: Newsday, August 2, 1989
(43) Quoted in Smith, p. 36
(44) An Evening of Questions and Answers, BR, 1995
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