Billy Joel Discography. Part 3 (2000-2005)

×

Billy Joel Discography. Part 3 (2000-2005)

Close

Although Billy Joel never was a critic's favorite, the pianist emerged as one of the most popular singer/songwriters of the latter half of the '70s. Joel's music consistently demonstrates an affection for Beatlesque hooks and a flair for Tin Pan Alley and Broadway melodies. His fusion of two distinct eras made him a superstar in the late '70s and '80s, as he racked an impressive string of multi-platinum albums and hit singles.
Born in the Bronx, Joel was raised in the Long Island suburb of Hicksville, where he learned to play piano as a child. As he approached his adolescence, Joel started to rebel, joining teenage street gangs and boxing as welterweight. He fought a total of 22 fights as a teenager, and during one of the fights, he broke his nose. For the early years of his adolescence, he divided his time between studying piano and fighting. Upon seeing the Beatles on The Ed Sullivan Show in 1964, Joel decided to pursue a full-time musical career and set about finding a local Long Island band to join. Eventually, he found the Echoes, a group that specialized in British Invasion covers. the Echoes became a popular New York attraction, convincing him to quit high school to become a professional musician.
While still a member of the Echoes, Joel began playing recording sessions in 1965, when he was just 16 years old. Joel played piano on several recordings George "Shadow" Morton produced – including the Shangri-Las' "Leader of the Pack" – as well as several records released through Kama Sutra Productions. During this time, the Echoes started to play numerous late-night shows.

Later in 1965, the Echoes changed their name twice – once to the Emeralds and finally to the Lost Souls. For two years, he played sessions and performed with the Lost Souls. In 1967, he left the band to join the Hassles, a local Long Island rock & roll band that had signed a contract with United Artists Records. Over the next year and a half, the Hassles released two albums and four singles, all of which failed commercially. In 1969, the Hassles broke up. Joel and the band's drummer, Jon Small, formed an organ-and-drums duo called Attila. In Attila, Joel played his organ through a variety of effects pedals, creating a heavy psychedelic hard rock album completely without guitars. On the cover of the band's eponymous album, both Joel and Small were dressed as barbarians; in an interview on the back of the album, Joel claimed to forget the name of his previous band and stated that he only "sweated" two things – perfecting his sound and the war in Southeast Asia. Epic released Attila early in 1970 and it was an immediate bomb and the duo broke up. While the group was still together, Joel began a romance with Small's wife, Elizabeth; she would eventually leave the drummer to marry the pianist.
After Attila's embarrassing failure, Joel wrote rock criticism for a magazine called Changes and played on commercial jingles, including a Chubby Checker spot for Bachman Pretzels. However, Joel entered a severe bout of depression, culminating with him drinking a bottle of furniture polish in an attempt to end his life. Following his failed suicide attempt, Joel checked himself into Meadowbrook Hospital, where he received psychiatric treatment for depression.

Joel returned to playing music in 1971, signing a deal with Family Productions. Under the terms of the contract, Joel signed to the label for life; the pianist was unaware of the clause at the time, but it would come back to haunt him – Family Productions received royalties from every album Joel sold until the late '80s. Joel refashioned himself as a sensitive singer/songwriter for his debut album, Cold Spring Harbor, which was released in November of 1971. Due to an error in the mastering of the album, Cold Spring Harbor was released a couple of tape speeds too fast; the album remained in that bastardized form until 1984. Following the release of the album, Joel went on a small live tour, during which he would frequently delve into standup comedy. The tour received good reviews but Joel remained unhappy with the quality of his performance and, especially, the quality of the album. Furthermore, he lost a manager during this time and Family Productions was experiencing legal and financial difficulties, which prevented him from recording an immediate follow-up.
Early in 1972, he moved out to Los Angeles with his girlfriend Elizabeth. Joel adopted the name Bill Martin and spent half a year playing lounge piano at the Executive Room. Toward the end of the year, he began touring, playing various nightclubs across the country. At the beginning of 1973, Joel married Elizabeth Weber and she enrolled at UCLA's Graduate School of Management. Around the same time, a radio station began playing a live version of "Captain Jack" that was recorded at a Philadelphia radio broadcast. Soon, record companies were eagerly seeking to sign the pianist, and he eventually signed with Columbia Records. In order for Joel to sign with Columbia, the major label had to agree to pay Family Productions 25 cents for each album sold, plus display the Family and Remus logos on each record Joel released.

By the end of 1973, Billy Joel's first album for Columbia Records, Piano Man, had been released. The record slowly worked its way up the charts, peaking at number 27 in the spring of 1974. The title track – culled from experiences he had while singing at the Executive Room – became a Top 40 hit single. At the end of the summer, Joel assembled a touring band and undertook a national tour, opening for acts like the J. Geils Band and the Doobie Brothers. By the end of 1974, he had released his second album, Streetlife Serenade, which reached number 35 early in 1975. After its success, Joel signed a contract with James William Guercio and Larry Fitzgerald's management company, Caribou, and moved from California to New York. Through songs like "Say Goodbye to Hollywood" and "New York State of Mind," Joel celebrated the move on his 1976 album, Turnstiles. The sessions for Turnstiles were long and filled with tension, culminating with Joel firing the album's original producer, Guercio, and producing the album himself. Once he fired Guercio, Joel also left Caribou, and hired his wife as his new manager.

×

Billy Joel Discography. Part 3 (2000-2005)

Close

Turnstiles stalled on the charts, only reaching number 122. Joel's next album would prove to be the make-or-break point for his career, and the resulting album, The Stranger, catapulted him into superstardom. The Stranger was released in the fall of 1977. By the end of the year, it peaked at number two and had gone platinum, and within the course of a year, it would spawn the Top 40 singles "Just the Way You Are" (which would win the 1978 Grammy for Record of the Year and Song of the Year), "Movin' Out (Anthony's Song)," "She's Always a Woman," and "Only the Good Die Young." Over the next two decades, the album would sell over seven million copies. Joel followed The Stranger with 52nd Street, which was released in the fall of 1978. 52nd Street spent eight weeks at number one in the U.S., selling over two millions copies within the first month of its release. The album spawned the hit singles "My Life," "Big Shot," and "Honesty," and won the 1979 Grammy award for Album of the Year. Although he had become a genuine star, critics had not looked kindly upon Joel's music, and the pianist became a vocal opponent of rock criticism in the late '70s. In one incident, he denounced Los Angeles Herald Examiner critic Ken Tucker on-stage and then, as a form of protest, tore up the critic's reviews.

In the spring of 1980, Joel released Glass Houses, theoretically a harder-edged album that was a response to the punk and new wave movement. Glass Houses reached number one in America, where it stayed for six weeks; the album spawned the Top 40 singles "You May Be Right" (number seven), "It's Still Rock'n'Roll to Me" (number one), "Don't Ask Me Why" (number 19), and "Sometimes a Fantasy" (number 36) and won the 1980 Grammy for Best Rock Vocal Performance, Male. In the fall of 1981, Joel released Songs in the Attic, a live album that concentrated on material written and recorded before he became a star in 1977. The album's "Say Goodbye to Hollywood" and "She's Got a Way" became Top 40 hits.

Songs in the Attic bought Joel some time as he was completing an album he had designed as his bid to be taken seriously as a composer. Before the album was finished, he suffered a serious motorcycle accident in the spring of 1982. He broke his wrist in the accident – it would take major surgery to repair the wound. In July of 1982, Joel divorced his wife, Elizabeth. His new album, The Nylon Curtain, was finally released in the fall. A concept album about baby boomers and their experiences, the album was a commercial disappointment, only selling a million copies, but it did earn him some of his better reviews, as well as spawning the Top 20 hits "Pressure" and "Allentown." Joel quickly followed the album in 1983 with the oldies pastiche An Innocent Man.

An Innocent Man restored Joel to his multi-platinum status, eventually selling over seven million copies and spawning the hit singles "Uptown Girl" (number three), "Tell Her About It" (number one), "An Innocent Man" (number ten), and "Keeping the Faith" (number 18). Several of the songs on the album were about model Christie Brinkley, who was engaged to Joel by the time the album was released. During 1983 and 1984, Joel became one of the first '70s stars to embrace MTV and music videos, shooting a number of clips for the album that were aired frequently on the network. Brinkley and Joel were married in the spring of 1985.

Joel released a double-album compilation, Greatest Hits, Vols. 1-2 in the summer of 1985. Two new songs – the Top Ten "You're Only Human (Second Wind)" and the Top 40 "The Night Is Still Young" – were added to the hits collection; the album itself peaked at number six and would eventually sell over ten million copies. In the summer of 1986, Joel returned with the Top Ten single "Modern Woman," which was taken from the soundtrack of Ruthless People. "Modern Woman" was also a teaser from his new album, The Bridge, which was released in August. The Bridge was another success for Joel, peaking at number seven, selling over two million copies, and spawning the Top 40 hits "A Matter of Trust" (number ten) and "This Is the Time" (number 18), as well as "Big Man on Mulberry Street," which was used as the basis for an episode of the popular Bruce Willis/Cybill Shepherd television series Moonlighting.

n the spring of 1987, Joel embarked on a major tour of the U.S.S.R., during which he had an on-stage temper tantrum and shoved a piano off the stage. His Leningrad concert was recorded and released in the fall of 1987 as the live double album Kohuept, which means concert in Russian. Joel was quiet for much of 1988, only appearing as the voice of Dodger in the Walt Disney animated feature Oliver and Company.

×

Billy Joel Discography. Part 3 (2000-2005)

Close

Joel fired his longtime manager and former brother-in-law Frank Weber in August of 1989, after an audit revealed that there were major discrepancies in Weber's accounting. Following Weber's dismissal, Joel sued Weber for 90 million dollars, claiming fraud and breach of fiduciary duty. Immediately after filing suit, Joel was hospitalized with kidney stones. All of this turmoil didn't prevent the release of his 12th studio album, Storm Front, in the fall of 1989. It was preceded by the single "We Didn't Start the Fire," whose lyrics were just a string of historical facts. The single became a huge hit, reaching number one and inspiring history students across America. Storm Front marked a significant change for Joel – he fired his band, keeping only Liberty DeVito, and ceased his relationship with producer Phil Ramone, hiring Mick Jones of Foreigner to produce the album. Storm Front was another hit for Joel, reaching number one in the U.S. and selling over three million albums.
During 1990, Joel undertook a major U.S. tour, which ran well into 1991. In January, the court awarded Joel two million dollars in a partial judgment against Frank Weber, and in April, the court dismissed a 30 million dollar countersuit. At the end of the year, the National Academy of Recording Arts and Sciences honored Joel with a Grammy Living Legend award; that same year, Quincy Jones, Johnny Cash, and Aretha Franklin were also given the honor.

Following the Storm Front world tour, Joel spent the next few years quietly. In 1991, he was awarded an honorary doctorate by Fairfield University in Connecticut. In the summer of 1992, Joel filed a 90 million dollar lawsuit charging his former lawyer Allen Grubman of fraud, breach of contract, and malpractice; in October of 1993, the two parties settled their differences out of court. Joel returned in the summer of 1993 with River of Dreams, which entered the charts at number one and spawned the Top Ten title track. Following the River of Dreams tour, Joel divorced Christie Brinkley. In 1996, he gave a series of lectures at a variety of American colleges. He performed at the 1999 New Year's Eve Party in Times Square, and 2000 Years: The Millennium Concert, a live album of this concert, was released early the following year.

His next studio record, Fantasies & Delusions, arrived in 2001 and was his first album of his own classical compositions. A year later, Twyla Tharp choreographed and directed Movin' Out, a Broadway musical based on Joel's music. A new venture as a children's author began in 2004 with the release of his first book, Goodnight, My Angel: A Lullaby. The 54-year-old Joel married the 23-year-old Katie Lee that same year and was making tabloid headlines again in March of 2005 when he checked into the Betty Ford Clinic for treatment of alcohol abuse. He checked out in April, and in November his four-CD/one-DVD career retrospective My Lives was released. Live in Madison Square Garden NYC and the accompanying 12 Gardens Live arrived in 2006.
In 2007, Joel released his first original composition since River of Dreams – a ballad called "All My Life." He quickly followed it with "Christmas in Fallujah," a tune he wrote but did not sing; it was performed by Cass Dillon. After this brief burst of activity Joel returned to touring regularly, his most notable performance being the closing shows at the legendary Shea Stadium in July 2008. These two concerts were recorded and released as DVDs and CDs in the spring of 2011. On the heels of this live album came word that Joel was penning a memoir, but the book was quickly scrapped after the announcement.

by Stephen Thomas Erlewine, AMG

×

Billy Joel Discography. Part 3 (2000-2005)

Close

Forget for a moment that this double-disc, 36-track collection isn't presented in strict chronological order – it does roughly divide into two parts, with the pre- Innocent Man material largely taking up disc one and the post-Innocent Man selections on disc two (yes, there are some exceptions to the rule, but it generally follows this rule). Forget that there are some singles, radio hits, and fan favorites that should have been included, such as "Pressure," "Scenes From an Italian Restaurant," and "Angry Young Man." Even with these flaws, this Australian-only collection provides the best summary of Billy Joel's best material to date, trumping the original Greatest Hits, Vols. 1 & 2 and edging out the similar 2001 U.S. release, The Essential Billy Joel. The reason for this is that it does include such early highpoints as "You're My Home," "Everybody Loves You Now," and "Streetlife Serenader," while de-emphasizing his last two subpar pop albums, Storm Front and River of Dreams, and just concentrating him at his best as a pop craftsman and recordmaker. Yes, some absent songs should be here, but only a handful shouldn't be here (maybe just "All About Soul (remix)," actually), and it's a highly entertaining listen that certainly spotlights Billy Joel at his best. Maybe not an Ultimate Collection, but pretty damn terrific all the same.

by Stephen Thomas Erlewine

×

Billy Joel Discography. Part 3 (2000-2005)

Close

This international collection of highlights from the East Coast native's prolific career takes its choicest bits from Columbia's three hugely successful Greatest Hits compilations. Piano Man: The Very Best of Billy Joel may just skim the surface of Joel's large reservoir of material, but it's hard to argue with the end results. All of the radio hits, minus some of the more obscure ones like "Allentown," "Pressure," and "Matter of Trust" are dutifully represented. From "River of Dreams" and "We Didn't Start the Fire" to "Piano Man" and "Scenes from an Italian Restaurant," this skillfully paced compilation, which also includes a ten-track DVD, is about as good a single-disc Billy Joel primer as one is likely to find.

by James Christopher Monger

×

Billy Joel Discography. Part 3 (2000-2005)

Close

"People who just know Billy Joel from Top 40 singles may not like Billy Joel, and I can't say I necessarily blame them. I don't think that really represents the sum and substance of my work."

So says Joel in the liner notes to My Lives, a comprehensive four-CD/one-DVD box set that uses rarities, B-sides, soundtrack contributions, demos, album tracks, and the occasional hit to draw a musical biography of one of the more successful recording artists of the rock & roll era. In essence, the box is an argument for Joel's statement that his hits do not represent his work accurately (thereby, it also acts as an antidote to his previous box set, which just stuck the three volumes of his greatest hits together). The fact that this is a clearing-house for non-LP cuts, something that has been long awaited by hardcore fans, is almost beside the point – this is intended as defense of Joel's work as a whole, an argument for his strengths as a writer and a musician, with the rarities being offered as Exhibit A. While it cannot be argued that Joel's unreleased material is on the level of either Bob Dylan or Bruce Springsteen – quite frankly, he's not nearly as prolific a songwriter as either – My Lives does act as a counterpart to Tracks or The Bootleg Series in how it fills in the cracks within the catalog. But since this doesn't add much to the official record, the way that those two landmark sets did – for the abundance of rarities here, there are only five brand-new, unfamiliar songs hauled out of the vaults; the rest are alternate takes and early versions of familiar songs – a better comparison is the Band's A Musical History, which traced the group's career using a wealth of rare material to illustrate the band's growth and depth.

Here, the unreleased material, oddities, and overlooked tracks are used to illustrate the truth within the set's title – that Joel did indeed have several musical lives during his long career. To that end, My Lives is indeed a success, since it's the first Billy Joel release to acknowledge that he was in bands prior to launching a solo career in 1971, offering two songs apiece from the Lost Souls and the Hassles and just one monstrosity from his legendary heavy metal organ-n-drums duo, Attila. It also goes out of its way to emphasize Joel's latter-day classical work; not only does it contain three selections from his Fantasies & Delusions album, but Anthony DeCurtis' liner notes linger so long on Joel's classical pieces, it seems like a justification of sorts. But that's fine – having the lesser-known psychedelic and garage R&B bands bookend classical compositions performed by Richard Joos not only offers a nice contrast, it tells the story and in a way no other Joel compilation has, even if 2001's Essential did end with a few classical cuts. And if the intention was to help build the case for Billy Joel, songwriter and musician, opposed to rock star, this box is successful, at least partially.

For the first two discs, My Lives is flat-out terrific, even when the music is somewhat less than perfect. the Lost Souls were generic '60s garage pop, and while the Hassles were better, they were a bit too close to the Rascals, yet all this works in the greater context of the box – it provides context for what Joel did next. And after the aptly titled "Amplifier Fier" from Attila, the set goes into a great series of rarities, starting with the organ-driven precious pop of "Only a Man" and continuing through "Oyster Bay," the best previously unheard song here, and then a bunch of Western-themed Piano Man demos, including the title track with different lyrics and mind-bendingly distracting echo, "The Siegried Line," an early version of "Worse Comes to Worst" called "New Mexico," and the unreleased "Cross to Bear." Soon, album tracks start to be woven into the greater fabric of the set, but the rare material keeps flowing throughout the second disc. And there are a bunch of highlights here: an early "Only the Good Die Young" with a reggae beat, a demo of the B-side "Elvis Presley Blvd" called "The End of the World," plus the actual flip side, an early version of "For the Longest Time" called "The Prime of Your Life" that has none of the doo wop, a version of "Christie Lee" that's looser and better than the finished one, an early "And So It Goes" dating from 1983, the year it was written, and the rollicking "Nobody Knows But Me," a contribution to a children's album. Some of this material is a little rough, but taken together, it not only gives a good sense of the range of Joel's work – he did rock & roll, R&B, sensitive singer/songwriter, epic pop – but that he had an exceptional sense of craft, something that's particularly notable from the demos.

If My Lives consisted of just these two discs, or mined this time between 1971 and 1983 (even 1986) more thoroughly, it would not only be flat-out essential for die-hard fans, it would be worthwhile for doubters, since it offers an insight to Joel as a musician and craftsman that isn't quite heard on the final product. Unfortunately, the set has another two discs to go, covering the years from 1989 to 2005 – a decade and a half where he produced exactly two pop albums and one classical project. It's not just that Joel's productivity dropped sharply during this time; so did the quality of his work, as the third and fourth discs here make plain. Nearly all of this consists of non-LP rarities – or more specifically, contributions to soundtracks and various compilations, with a handful of live performances and B-sides for good measure. On the third disc, a whopping 11 of the 17 songs are covers, and all of them feel tossed off in the studio, as if Joel knocked them out because of contractual obligations. Arriving after the lively and interesting first two discs, this aggressively bland sequence of slick covers – highlighted by a version of "Highway 61 Revisted" set to a beat borrowed from Elton John's "Whenever You're Ready (We'll Go Steady Again)" – is dispiriting and illustrates Joel's decline in a more dynamic, depressing way than either Storm Front or River of Dreams. The fourth disc covers Y2K forward, although even that is a little misleading: his many tours with Elton John are covered with a duet from 1994, and there are two selections recorded in the early '80s taken from the Essential Billy Joel DVD, while the rest, including the three classical selections, are from 2001. This is Billy Joel the old pro, turning out serviceable selections of his classic hits – a version of which can be seen on the largely inconsequential DVD A Voyage on the River of Dreams, a live concert from Frankfurt that was originally broadcast on the Disney Channel – and while it's marginally more spirited than the third disc, it doesn't exactly make a case for Joel being a vital artist – which is pretty much the opposite of the first two discs, where it's possible to hear him grow and develop. Here, you can hear the stagnation set in.

That said, these two discs do help clear out the closet of all non-LP Billy Joel items, so they're useful in that regard, and they do help round out the portrait of Billy Joel the artist – that his glorious first decade and a half was followed by a decade and a half that failed to deliver on his promise. Accurate though it might be, it doesn't make for great listening, but fortunately, the dividing line is pretty clear on My Lives – with the exception of his contribution to the Oliver & Company soundtrack, "Why Should I Worry," on disc three, all the good stuff arrives on the first two discs. And there's more than enough good stuff there to make this set worth every penny for the hardcore fans who have been waiting a long, long time for a set like this.

by Stephen Thomas Erlewine

×

Billy Joel Discography. Part 3 (2000-2005)

Close

×

Billy Joel Discography. Part 3 (2000-2005)

Close

×

Billy Joel Discography. Part 3 (2000-2005)

Close

×

Billy Joel Discography. Part 3 (2000-2005)

Close