It's time to give Billy Joel the respect he deserves

2019 is a year full of milestones for Billy Joel, who begins this week with his 70th birthday. February marks the 40th anniversary of his Grammy Award of the Year. 52nd Street, while October will be 30 years since its release Stormy Front and millions of people found themselves trying to remember all the words of "We did not light the fire". But you may not realize these things because for some reason Billy Joel will not get the respect he deserves.

But what are these reasons? Joel, just like Bruce Springsteen, Bob Seger or so many other basic titles you could hear on classic rock radio stations, was a companion. In any biography of any musician, you will see that their career usually began in the 60's or early 70's, either by writing songs for bigger stars or in Garage groups that may have had a small regional success. , then tried and failed to reinvent itself, eventually landing on something that stuck. Joel's previous attempts included her stint in the blue-eyed soul band The Hassles to her strange period of "psychedelic bullshit" in the Attila band, which lies somewhere between hard rock and prog, and was his failed attempt to do what Hendrix did. but "with a piano."

Yet, Joel, more than any of his contemporaries, still faces many negative reactions to date. Of course, when you are rich and you succeed and you have become tabloid food for your wedding (number two out of four) with a supermodel, you are publicly fighting against depression and addiction and have had several car accidents, people have more than enough ammo. And yes, Joel's music is really not for everyone. It is not heavy, not really experimental; He is a pop songwriter influenced by elements of the Brill Building, George Gershwin and Ray Charles. He is perhaps too sentimental, even hokey, like the classic songwriters he imitated, which is understandable. Yet the vitriol directed towards Joel, as a Tablet The 2017 article titled "Billy Joel, The Donald Trump of Pop Music" shows that some people will never succeed in getting the Piano Man. Beginning with a quote from James Baldwin before turning to a brief review of one of Joel 's shows at Madison Square Garden, the writer, Liel Leibovitz, has sharpened his guns and is ready to work from the beginning. He calls Joel's music "an unskilled and soulless" and "singularly ugly" in what has to be one of the toughest jobs in pop culture this year.

Leibovitz was not the first to target the singer-songwriter, and he will certainly not be the last; it is a kind of ancestral tradition. In 2009, Ron Rosenbaum, writing for Slate, called him "The worst pop singer of all time". Robert Christgau, who gave Joel's first three albums to C degrees, finally made it a B- L & # 39; abroad, while taking advantage of the opportunity to call Joel "spoiled kid" and "as friendly as your once rebellious and still tolerant uncle, who seems odd to believe that OPEC was designed to ruin his air-conditioning business . respond by tearing critics of Christgau at concerts. Other reviews of his albums in the 1970s were lukewarm, often accompanied by compliments backwards: "Although I'm not a fan of everything Joel publishes," wrote for Timothy White Rolling stone in 1981, "I love her roundness."

No one ever wanted to fully admit to enjoying his music. Billy Joel has never really been in fashion, and it's something he loves. He was never the sound of the day throughout a career that has seen hard, soft, punk rock, new wave and hip-hop, and Joel never seemed to care about it. This is one of his great qualities. the other is that he wrote a ton of songs that will last no matter what people mean. Chuck Klosterman, in a profile of 2002 for the New York Times Joel "never seemed cool." Fifteen years later, I was wondering if he would revise this statement. Just look at a picture of Joel from the late '70s to the' 80s to see his paces, whether it's classic Nike running shoes or black leather jackets, suddenly become lighter. His cool-dad style, like Paul Simon or characters from Nora Ephron's romantic comedies, is in fashion.

Of course, he has enough money to take a private helicopter from his home on Long Island to Madison Square Garden (and annoy his neighbors in the process), and yes maybe he plays occasionally at the hokey, but this hokiness is what is great American Songbook was built on. From the Gershwin brothers and Jerome Kern to the current magnetic fields, the biggest American songs still contain a play on words and foolishness.

Will Stegemann grew up 25 minutes from Joel's hometown of Hicksville. Long Island is a strange hodgepodge of the five boroughs of New York; it is at once the aim of a thousand jokes told by the townspeople and of the place where New Yorkers go to escape the heat of summer. As Stegemann points out in the Last piece with shea A concert documentary, Joel sums up being a Long Islander as "feeling perpetually as being close to New York, but also millions of miles away from him." Stegemann, however, was among those who did not like Joel's music despite the hometown of the hero status singer. For 30 years, he loved him badly, but could "no longer explain why." So he launched Billy Joel's "A Year of the Year" project, where Stegemann spent 365 days listening to all of Billy Joel's songs "trying to understand his massive call and why I loved him so much. As a long-time fan, I read until the end when Stegemann was found at a Joel concert at the Hollywood Bowl, "singing happily with the rest of the crowd."

I have read almost all of Stegemann's articles for exactly the same reason. Joel hates the peace that reigns every year, even though Joel has not released an album of original rock songs since 1993. River of dreams (2003 saw the release of his first and only album full of classical compositions, Fantasies and delusions), but unlike the few thousand words that writers tend to disdain to reject Joel and all his work, Stegemann took a whole year to better understand an artist for whom I grew up. It was a good way of thinking, I thought: listen and try to understand instead of hating. The world could use more of that.

A little over a decade ago, I found myself in a Lower East Side hotel interviewing Mick Jones from The Clash, and I had a moment that put my childhood love for Joel's music with everything what followed.

I grew up listening to Joel. I had a picture of him on my wall when I was a kid; my dad dropped me off at my mom's playing "The Longest Time" from 1983 An innocent man (one of the few really tender memories that I have of my dad growing up), and the first CD I bought is Joel's 1989 album Stormy Front. Somewhere along the way, I threw myself into punk and I did this boring thing to teen: I swore anything on the radio, but I could never really get myself get rid of my love for Joel. At one point before the time of Wikipedia, I noticed that the producer credited with the album that gave us the title "We did not light the fire" was Mick Jones. For about a decade, I had the idea that it was actually the same Mick Jones, who was part of one of the greatest composers teams in rock history with Joe Strummer – to find out at sometime in your twenties. was Mick Jones from Foreigner Group.

Once, I talked to (Clash) Mick Jones in an attempt to break the ice, guessing the guy of one of the biggest punk bands of all time, one of the legends of the genre supposed to be against everything that Joel defended, would find it funny. Instead, Jones, who until then had been jovial and perhaps a little drunk, had become very calm and serious. "Billy Joel," he looked at me, "This is the great American songwriter." I did not bother to ask if Jones was pissing me off or not, but it did not really look like that. I left feeling satisfied, believing that Joel had the respect of a member of The Clash.

No matter if Jones joked, he's right: Billy Joel is one of the greatest American songwriters. His production of the 70s was enough to plant this flag. He did one of the best things to do to be one of the best songwriters by writing an iconic ode to a place. Robert Johnson sang about "Sweet Home Chicago," Aaron Copland composed his Appalachian SpringAllen Toussaint had his moving tribute to the southern nights; Billy Joel thought that the city, which had a thousand songs already written about him, only needed one more song and delivered "New York State of Mind" in 1976. Turnstiles. He was getting closer and closer to the respect he deserved; Even Christgau had to admit that "Joel's craftsmanship was improving" on his fourth album.

Yet it was not the album, the path Born to run A year earlier, it was for Springsteen, the one that had made it from popular to massive. Joel's career was at a crossroads. He had fired the producer James William Guercio and took charge of Turnstiles alone. It was not bad at all, with a few songs that would become hits in the compilation of hits, but it was not The One.

By the summer of '77, Joel had enough names to play Carnegie Hall, like everyone else, from Duke Ellington to the Beatles. He opened the concert in early June with the latest song from his latest album, which, forty years later, sounds almost like in Nostradamus in his dystopian prophecy: "Miami 2017 (See Lights Turn Off on Broadway)" recalls Joel, joking with the crowd. those that it is supposed to mention that it is forbidden to smoke, but if they have to do it, they have to "put it in cut" before entering the "state" New York spirit. Everyone applauds, they all seem to know the song now, and they feel exactly the same way, because he sings how much he loves the city in which he plays. Then he announces the fourth song as "a whole new thing". That's sweet: a sweet rock number of a guy who likes to play the hard, a tribute to his wife Elizabeth Weber that he was supposed to not like as much. A few months later, after recording in a New York studio with Phil Ramone for his next album, Joel announced to Phoebe Snow and Linda Ronstadt, both recording in the same building , that he was considering dropping it. The two women told him that he was crazy, that he should keep it. "I guess girls like this song," Joel explained as a reason for choosing "just as you are" L & # 39; abroad. He finally released the first single from the album when it was released in September of the same year.

For an album that would become the one that really made Billy Joel, L & # 39; abroad is a bit strange, in a bad mood and not what you could expect from an album that created a superstar. Even the title is a bit odd, sharing a name with Albert Camus's 1942 novel, which speaks of a man who seems indifferent to everything; he shows little emotion after the death of his mother, after killing a man, and finally seems to find comfort in the fact that he will be put to death for his crime. Although Joel's album is not linked to a general theme, a feeling of discontent reigns throughout this film.

We start with grocery clerk Anthony, who keeps his pennies for a day in the future. He "moves" before a heart attack (ack, ack, ack), then discovers how the unknown in question is each of us, it's the secrets we will never reveal. We listen to two friends drinking a bottle of white and a bottle of red at an Italian restaurant, discussing how things collapsed for the king and queen of prom after high school. Scroll the disc to side B and Joel's "Vienna," one of Joel's favorites, ends with one of his greatest hymns, "Only the Good Die Young," to begin. As a young Jewish child who pinned a girl who went to a nearby Catholic school when I was a teenager, I have to admit that the idea of ​​a very Jewish guy who is trying to convince a girl named Virginia, who was shown a statue and told her to pray for her to see contact with him because sin is fun. I've talked a bit to myself, at the age of 15 years old. He continues with another tribute to Weber, who divorced in 1983 with "She's Always a Woman".

L & # 39; abroad is filled with classics. This is one of the first albums I can remember having heard in my childhood. Billy Joel has grown a lot in my life. This is not my favorite. I appreciate it, but I always go back to the car rides with my father when I was a kid where we always played An innocent man. I did not know then that Joel's album was full of tribute to Motown, Stax and the old rock and roll of the 50s; I was too young to understand that so many of his great songs were inspired by everything from Ray Charles to girls' groups. Nor could I know that Joel, who was freshly divorced from Weber, "felt like a teenager again", because, well, you probably would be too if you were a rich rock star who slept with Christie Brinkley.

Even if you could explain it to me when I was four or five years old, I probably would not have made fun of it. At this point, Joel already had his hooks in me – that's how he works. Maybe you are born nostalgic, or maybe you become a reality. That's the big chicken or egg question that I can not answer, but I think I can explain why I loved Billy Joel's music for so long. Listen to any album and it's really like sitting in a bar with an old friend: one minute, he talks about love, then, he gives you a lesson in post-war history by rhyming everything.

Billy Joel is for the nostalgic and for those who can admit they are a little tacky, and that's fine. He is probably the last of his kind: a guy who can sing millions of people. There will always be great composers, of course. But Joel, with his singer combination and The singer-songwriter is a rare artist at the moment. Anyone who has watched him play at Madison Square Garden or at other stadiums in recent years can attest to the fact that no one does it better.