Why do critics hate billy joel

God, that made me truly happy. And I helped make it happen! We wore matching jackets with velvet collars. I tried being a hippie for a year — it was a total loss, I was a lousy hippie.

I became the keyboard player for this band called the Hassles. It was real psych-e-whatever. This was about the time Hendrix was out. His music really got to me, and the Hassles drummer and I decided we were gonna do a power duo. It was the loudest thing you ever heard. We made one album for Epic, called Attila. It had this weird cover. The art director had us in a meat locker, with carcasses hanging around us, and we were dressed up as Huns. I got talked into it. I started writing songs on my own, taking odd jobs in New York in the meantime.

That was a weird deal. This was right before Piano Man. I went to the West Coast. I just disappeared. So I used the name Bill Martin, and I got a gig working in a piano bar for about six months. It was all right. I took on this whole alter identity, totally make-believe; I was like Buddy Greco, collar turned up and shirt unbuttoned halfway down.

It was I was about twenty-three. I still had no idea what a mess this whole business is. I get a dollar from each album I sell. I deserve that money a lot more than Ripp does, but I signed the papers, so what can I do? And he seems willing to continue to take the money. Do you own your publishing? People send me tapes through Columbia all the time, and I do not and will not listen to them. Lawyers [ whistles whimsically ]…… It was a settlement. The guy is wrong.

I never heard his song. I want to kill him. Maybe he did have a melody that was copyrighted. When they question my intentions, that bugs me. Enough about that. I should clear up the Dakota thing. You know it? During the Madison Square Garden gig [in July], it came out in the New York Post and the New York Times that I had applied for an apartment in the Dakota [an exclusive Manhattan apartment building] and had been turned down because I admitted to being a drug user and because I had groupies!

Number one: I did not want an apartment at the Dakota; my wife did. Elizabeth no longer manages me. She is involved with me: fundraising, movie production, film editing. There was a rumor that all these things put a strain on your personal relationship.

Give me a break. Now tell me more about the Dakota incident. A wife is considered chattel to the husband. They were worried about me. I showed up in my suit, I went to the interview, I did the Dakota. The man, the heavy guy who was the deciding guy, had the nerve to have me sign albums for his daughter. There had been an interview in Us magazine right before we went to this Dakota interview. I got a mother. I got a sister. I got a father.

And the press is calling me a known drug user because I happened to say that once I went onstage stoned. People think I have much more money than I have. I pay high salaries. I am in no way set for the rest of my life. I make a nice living, okay? But I go into the red on the road. The salaries and the costs and the production. I go on the road because I like to play.

So where do you make your money? Well, for the last three years the revenues have mainly come from record sales. There are several charities you contribute to on a steady basis. Which are they? The Rehabilitation Institute in Mineola, New York, which handles a lot of causes, and the Little Flower school in Suffolk, for orphans and kids who are emotionally troubled.

There are several others. Incidentally, have you heard the new rumor? They even had a tribute to me! It features stories celebrating ridiculous ideas, trends, and products; pieces arguing that unabashed stupidity can be a great part of life; and articles calling out the bad side of stupidity. Click HERE to subscribe to the print edition. Around my 26th birthday, I discovered a face that I had hidden away. After everyone had gone, I took it out, tried it on, and understood myself for who I really am, something strange and unfamiliar: a Billy Joel fan.

There is no logical reason I should be so enamored with Billy Joel: I was born in , the year he released his final pop album. Billy Joel stopped making pop music when his career was still thriving, because Billy Joel knows when to call it quits, which is one of the many things I love about Billy Joel.

Incidentally, my parents were such big hipsters that even the commercially and critically beloved Bruce Springsteen was too mainstream for them. Springsteen and Joel, of course, are yin and yang: New Jersey and New York, the guitar guy and the piano man, etc. Billy Joel is quintessential Long Island—he still lives there—while my dad wanted to get out of there as fast as he could. He literally lives in Sweden now. Between when I graduated college and now , i.

But make no mistake, Billy Joel is good! His songs are imbued with an underlying, familiar pathos, and he focuses on the most mundane tragedies of existence. So how is Billy Joel pulling this off? In , in the era before big data, a brand researcher describing the effect of nostalgia on the palate brought up the orange juice test in an interview with The New York Times.

If you do it in California, Minute Maid wins every time. And in spite of his years-long abstinence from making pop music, Billy Joel has never truly gone away. He was inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame in , honored by the Kennedy Center in , awarded the Gershwin Prize for Popular Song in , and is one of only two singers to perform the national anthem twice at the Super Bowl, 18 years apart.

Before Shea Stadium met with the wrecking ball in , its final events were a pair of Billy Joel concerts; both sold out in less than an hour. There may be no one who better understands the strange staying power of Billy Joel better than Mike DelGuidice. The singer, pianist, and guitarist was living in a trailer on Long Island when he came up with the idea to create Big Shot , a Billy Joel cover band.

Nearly 18 years later, Big Shot not only gigs, but tours nationally. DelGuidice, from his themed cover band and his Nassau County-inflected patter to his vocal seizing of the Joel mantle, seems to embody a remarkable continuity of Billy Joel as a concept, one that improbably survives through the generations.