The story of Billy Joel

A Long Island kid with a family history

William Martin Joel was born in the Bronx on the ninth of May 1949, and when he was one the family moved out to Hicksville on Long Island, into the new suburb of Levittown. His mother Rosalind was born in Brooklyn to Jewish parents from England. His father Howard had been born Helmut in Nuremberg, the only child of Karl Amson Joel, who had built one of the largest mail order textile firms in Germany. Under the Nazis the family fled to Switzerland, and in 1938 Karl was forced to sell the business to Josef Neckermann for a fraction of its worth. With American quotas closed to them, they reached the United States by way of Cuba, where they waited nearly two years.[1]

Billy's parents met in 1942 while performing in a student production of The Pirates of Penzance at the City College of New York. Howard was an engineer by trade and a gifted amateur classical pianist. The marriage did not last. They divorced in 1957, and Howard, who never liked America, went back to Europe, settled in Vienna and started a new family. Billy's half brother Alexander grew up to be a classical conductor. Billy stayed on Long Island with his mother and his sister Judy, a cousin the family had adopted. He later said that his whole life had been shaped by women, and that his mother was the one who encouraged him to become a musician.[1] [2]

The piano came first, and not by choice. At four he started banging on the family piano, so his mother sent him for lessons, and he kept at them until about sixteen. When a new classical piece bored him, he would improvise in the style of the composer rather than read the notes. As a teenager he also boxed on the amateur Golden Gloves circuit as a welterweight, winning twenty two of his twenty six fights before a broken nose ended that career. Then, in 1964, he watched the Beatles on The Ed Sullivan Show. Four ordinary looking guys playing their own songs on their own instruments. He said that night he knew he would play in a rock band.[1] [2]

At sixteen he joined a Long Island band called the Echoes, who played British Invasion songs, and they started recording in 1965. He also picked up session work as a teenage pianist on records produced by Shadow Morton. Money was tight at home, so he played a piano bar at night to help support his mother and sister. One late gig made him miss a crucial English exam, and in 1967 he left Hicksville High School without enough credits to graduate. He joked that if he was not going to Columbia University, he would go to Columbia Records instead. Twenty five years later the school board accepted essays in place of the missing work and handed him his diploma.[1] [2]

The Hassles, Attila and the lowest point

In 1967 Billy joined the Hassles, a Long Island band signed to United Artists. He came in on keyboards after their organist Harry Weber was fired for heavy drug use. Weber was found dead on a railroad track a few years later. The Hassles released two albums, The Hassles in 1967 and Hour of the Wolf in 1969, plus a handful of singles, and none of it sold. Their only brush with the charts was a soul cover that stalled at number one hundred and twelve on the bubbling under list. When singer John Dizek left in late 1968, Billy took over the vocals. The band's drummer, Jon Small, became his best friend.[1]

When the Hassles folded in 1969, Billy and Jon Small formed a duo called Attila, and it was as loud as the name suggests. There was no guitar. Billy plugged a Hammond organ straight into Marshall amplifiers, played the bass lines on the keyboard and sang, while Small pounded the drums. Epic Records released their only album in July 1970, with a cover showing the two of them dressed as barbarians in what looks like a meat locker. It sank. Billy later said they played about a dozen gigs and drove people out of every club with the volume. One AllMusic critic went further and called it the worst album in the history of recorded music.[1] [2]

Attila fell apart for a reason that had nothing to do with music. Billy had moved in with Jon Small, his wife Elizabeth Weber and their young son. Over time Billy and Elizabeth fell in love, and one day he told his best friend the truth. Small punched him in the nose, which Billy later said he deserved. He said he felt like a homewrecker. The duo broke up in 1970, the friendship went with it, and at first Elizabeth walked away from both men. Billy was thrown out of the house. He had nowhere to live and slept in laundromats, and he later said his depression brought him close to psychosis.[1] [2] [3]

In 1970 Billy tried to take his own life twice. First he swallowed sleeping pills that his sister Judy had given him, and he lay in a coma for days. Judy later said she thought she had killed him. When he woke, he was disappointed and swore he would get it right next time. He wrote a note and drank furniture polish. It was Jon Small, the friend he had hurt, who rushed him to hospital. Billy checked himself into Meadowbrook Hospital and spent weeks under observation and treatment for depression. He came out resolved to pour those feelings into music. The song Tomorrow Is Today, from his first album, is one he has described as a suicide note.[1] [2] [3]

A bad contract and a piano bar

Billy's first manager, Irwin Mazur, had spotted him back in 1966 and steered him toward a solo deal. The Woodstock organizer Michael Lang gave Billy an advance, then passed him to the producer Artie Ripp, whose company Family Productions signed the twenty two year old in 1971. It was a long contract covering records and publishing, and Billy later said he signed away everything, his copyrights, his royalties, even his first child. The debut album, Cold Spring Harbor, was named after a harbor village near his Long Island home and came out on the first of November 1971. It included She's Got a Way and Tomorrow Is Today, but almost nobody heard them.[1] [2] [3]

Something went badly wrong in the mastering. The record was cut slightly too fast, so every song played sharp and Billy's voice came out high and thin. He threw a listening party for his friends, heard them ask why he sounded like a girl, and flung the record across the room like a frisbee. Distribution was weak and the album barely charted. He went on the road anyway with a small band, touring in a camper, living on peanut butter sandwiches and opening for acts like the Beach Boys and the J. Geils Band. At the Mar y Sol festival in Puerto Rico in April 1972 his set went over so well that Columbia's boss Clive Davis took note.[1] [2] [3] [4]

The real break came through a radio station. On the fifteenth of April 1972, WMMR in Philadelphia broadcast Billy live from Sigma Sound Studios in front of a small audience of contest winners. One of the new songs he played was Captain Jack, written after he watched suburban kids buying heroin from a dealer across the street from his Oyster Bay apartment. The station kept the live recording in rotation for a year and a half, and it became the most requested track in WMMR's history. New York stations got hold of tapes too. Columbia chased him hard, and he turned down Atlantic Records. The trouble was getting him out of his contract with Artie Ripp.[1] [2] [3]

While the lawyers argued, Billy lay low in Los Angeles. For six months he played the Executive Room, a piano bar on Wilshire Boulevard, under the name Bill Martin, taken from his first and middle names. He played standards for the regulars, and he later said the characters in Piano Man were all based on real people there. Columbia finally signed him, and the Piano Man album came out on the fourteenth of November 1973. The title song reached number twenty five in April 1974, his first top forty hit. The album went gold, yet he said he earned only about eight thousand dollars in royalties. Part of every sale still went to Ripp and Lang.[1] [2] [3] [4]

Back to New York

Billy and Elizabeth Weber reconciled and married in 1973, and before long she took over as his manager. Columbia wanted a quick follow up, so Streetlife Serenade was rushed out on the eleventh of October 1974, padded with instrumentals like Root Beer Rag. Its best known song, The Entertainer, was a bitter joke about the music business. Billy had been annoyed that Piano Man was cut down for radio, so he wrote about it, and The Entertainer reached number thirty four. He later judged the album harshly, saying it had interesting musical ideas but nothing to say. On the back cover he looks miserable, and he explained that his wisdom teeth had been pulled two days earlier.[1] [2]

Late in 1974 a bassist named Doug Stegmeyer joined his touring band. Stegmeyer played in a Long Island group called Topper, and he soon recommended his friends, the hard hitting drummer Liberty DeVitto and the guitarists Russell Javors and Howie Emerson. Saxophonist Richie Cannata joined in 1975. The next album began badly at Caribou Ranch in Colorado, with producer James William Guercio and two members of Elton John's band. Billy hated being compared to Elton and hated the polished sound. He fired Guercio, moved back to New York in 1975, and produced the record himself with the Long Island guys. It was the first time his own band played on his album.[1] [2] [3] [4]

Turnstiles came out on the nineteenth of May 1976, and it was a homecoming record. Say Goodbye to Hollywood borrowed the famous drumbeat of the Ronettes' Be My Baby. New York State of Mind came to him on a Greyhound bus up the Hudson, and he wrote it as soon as he reached his new home in Highland Falls, hoping to write a standard of his own. Miami 2017 imagined New York in ruins. The album cover was shot on the Astor Place subway platform, with each figure standing for a song. It stalled at number one hundred and twenty two. The consolation came when Barbra Streisand recorded New York State of Mind, and his relatives were thrilled.[1] [2] [3]

The Stranger and the big time

By 1977 Billy believed Columbia was about to drop him. Four albums had failed to produce a major hit, and he pictured executives with a red pencil ready to cross him off. He needed a producer who understood his band. By Billy's account, the Beatles' producer George Martin was interested but wanted session players, so Billy turned him down. Then came Phil Ramone, the engineer and producer behind Paul Simon's Still Crazy After All These Years. Ramone saw Billy's Carnegie Hall shows in early June 1977 and loved the rough energy of the Long Island band. Over long Italian meals at Fontana di Trevi, across the street from Carnegie Hall, they planned the album.[1] [2] [3] [4]

They recorded The Stranger in about three weeks in the summer of 1977. When Billy whistled a melody for the title song as a placeholder, Ramone told him the whistle itself was perfect. Just the Way You Are, written for Elizabeth after the tune came to him in a dream, nearly stayed off the record because Billy thought it was a soppy wedding ballad. Scenes from an Italian Restaurant was stitched together from three unfinished songs, inspired by side two of Abbey Road. Vienna grew from a visit to his father in Austria. And Only the Good Die Young started out as a reggae tune until Liberty DeVitto threw his sticks and refused to play it that way.[1] [2] [3] [4]

The Stranger came out in September 1977. The first single, Movin' Out, went nowhere at first, but radio latched on to Just the Way You Are. On the eighteenth of February 1978 Billy played it on Saturday Night Live, and that week it hit number three. The album spent six weeks at number two. When some Catholic groups pushed stations to ban Only the Good Die Young, the controversy only helped. The Stranger passed Simon and Garfunkel's Bridge over Troubled Water to become Columbia's best selling album, eventually topping ten million copies. Just the Way You Are won Record and Song of the Year, and Billy heard the news late at night in a Paris hotel room.[1] [2] [3] [4]

The follow up, 52nd Street, arrived on the eleventh of October 1978. It was named after the old jazz street in Manhattan, where both Columbia's headquarters and the studio stood, and it leaned into jazz with guest players. It became his first number one album, holding the top spot for eight weeks, with My Life, Big Shot, which he said was sparked by a dinner with Bianca Jagger, and Honesty, which spent eight weeks at number one in France. It won the Grammy for Album of the Year. That same year he played Madison Square Garden for the first time, the start of a relationship with the arena that would run to more than one hundred and fifty shows.[1] [2] [3]

Rock and roll, a crash and a divorce

Critics kept calling Billy a soft balladeer, and it stung. His answer was Glass Houses, released on the twelfth of March 1980. It opens with the sound of breaking glass, and on the cover he is about to throw a rock through the window of his own waterfront glass house on Long Island. The album spent six weeks at number one. It's Still Rock and Roll to Me, a wry dig at the new wave fashion of the moment, gave him his first number one single in July 1980. Five sold out nights at Madison Square Garden that year earned him the venue's Gold Ticket Award, and the album won him a Grammy for best male rock vocal.[1] [2] [3]

In 1981 he released Songs in the Attic, live recordings of early songs that most of his new fans had never heard, and She's Got a Way and Say Goodbye to Hollywood finally became hits. Around then saxophonist Richie Cannata left the band to open a studio, and Mark Rivera took his place in 1982. At home, things were coming apart. Elizabeth had managed his career brilliantly and put his finances in order, but the marriage was strained. Both she and Billy's second wife would later talk about too much drinking. Billy has admitted that Stiletto, from 52nd Street, was a pretty nasty song about that relationship.[1] [2] [3] [4] [5]

On the fifteenth of April 1982 Billy was riding his Harley Davidson through Huntington, Long Island, when a car ran a red light in front of him. He slammed on the brakes, hit the side of the car and flew over it, landing on his back. His left thumb was crushed and his right wrist was pulled out of its socket. He was wearing a helmet, and he was flown by helicopter to a Manhattan hospital, where surgeons repaired his hands. He spent about a month in hospital relearning the piano. To this day there is no bone in the tip of his left thumb. That summer, on the twentieth of July 1982, he and Elizabeth divorced.[1] [2] [3]

The Nylon Curtain came out on the twenty third of September 1982, and Billy has called it the recording he is most proud of. It was one of the first albums recorded, mixed and mastered digitally, and critics heard a tribute to the Beatles and to John Lennon, killed less than two years before. Allentown began life as a song called Levittown, then Bethlehem, before he settled on the steel town next door. Goodnight Saigon told the Vietnam War from the Marines' side, drawing on friends who served, while Billy described himself as a draft dodger. When he played the Bethlehem area that December, Allentown's mayor gave him the key to the city.[1] [2] [3]

Uptown girls and the Soviet Union

Newly single and suddenly dating supermodels like Elle Macpherson and Christie Brinkley, Billy said he felt like a teenager again. So he wrote like one. In about six weeks he had most of An Innocent Man, released on the eighth of August 1983, a loving tribute to doo wop, Motown, soul and the Four Seasons. Tell Her About It went to number one in September 1983, with a video staged like The Ed Sullivan Show and a cameo from Rodney Dangerfield. Uptown Girl reached number three in America and topped the British chart for five weeks, knocking off Karma Chameleon. On The Longest Time, Billy sang every vocal part himself.[1] [2] [3] [4]

Billy met Christie Brinkley on the Caribbean island of St. Barts in 1983, and she starred as the rich girl in the Uptown Girl video. When she arrived to rehearse, the first thing he told her was that he did not dance, so she walked him through the steps. They married on the twenty third of March 1985 on a yacht on the Hudson River, with Paul Simon among the guests. Their daughter Alexa Ray was born on the twenty ninth of December 1985, her middle name a tribute to Ray Charles. That same year Billy sang on We Are the World, and his double Greatest Hits set became one of the best selling albums in American history.[1] [2] [3] [4]

The Bridge followed in July 1986, featuring a duet with Ray Charles on Baby Grand, Steve Winwood on organ and a co-write with Cyndi Lauper. A Matter of Trust and Modern Woman both reached the top ten, but Billy was unhappy. He felt rushed by management, out of step with his band, and would rather have been home with his new baby. He later called it not a good album. It was his last record with Phil Ramone, and the last to carry the wolf logo of Artie Ripp's Family Productions. The closing song, Getting Closer, took aim at that old contract. That year Billy also cast the tie breaking vote that put the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame in Cleveland.[1] [2]

In July 1987 Billy took his band, his wife and his baby daughter to the Soviet Union. After an improvised show in Tbilisi he played six concerts in Moscow and Leningrad, and the shows were broadcast by radio around the world. The trip cost around two million dollars, so a film crew came along to help pay for it. At the second Moscow show, angered that the crew's lights kept freezing the audience, he flipped over his electric piano and smashed a microphone stand, then kept singing. He later apologized. He dedicated Honesty to the Soviet singer Vladimir Vysotsky, and he befriended a clown named Viktor who inspired his song Leningrad.[1] [2] [3] [4]

Betrayal, storms and the last album

In 1988 Billy took a rare acting job, voicing Dodger, a streetwise dog in Disney's Oliver and Company, drawn with his trademark Wayfarer sunglasses. Behind the scenes his finances were in trouble. After Elizabeth, his career had been managed by her brother, Frank Weber. In August 1989 an audit turned up major discrepancies, and Billy fired him. He then sued Weber for ninety million dollars, accusing him of fraud and breach of trust. In January 1990 a court awarded Billy two million dollars in a partial judgment, and in April it threw out Weber's thirty million dollar countersuit. Billy later wrote The Great Wall of China about his former manager.[1] [2]

Storm Front, released in October 1989, was his first album since Turnstiles without Phil Ramone. The producer was Mick Jones of Foreigner, recommended by Eddie Van Halen. Billy also overhauled the band. He kept Liberty DeVitto, guitarist David Brown and Mark Rivera, but Doug Stegmeyer and Russell Javors were out, and DeVitto later said Stegmeyer was forced out. Crystal Taliefero joined on vocals and percussion. The lead single was We Didn't Start the Fire, written after a twenty one year old friend of Sean Lennon told him nothing ever happened in the fifties. It rattled off world events from 1949 to 1989 and became his third and final number one. Billy later compared the tune to a dentist's drill.[1] [2] [3] [4] [5] [6]

Storm Front went to number one, his first chart topping album since Glass Houses, with I Go to Extremes, And So It Goes and The Downeaster Alexa, a song about struggling Long Island fishermen, titled after his boat, which he had named for his daughter. He meant it. In 1992 he joined a protest by East Hampton baymen against fishing rules, and he and twenty nine others were charged with fishing out of season using a banned net method. The charges were dismissed in 1993 because the state had cited the wrong law. Also in 1992 he sued his former lawyer Allen Grubman for ninety million dollars. The case settled in 1993 for three million, paid by Sony.[1] [2] [3]

River of Dreams came out on the tenth of August 1993. Billy had scrapped most of his first sessions, and on Don Henley's advice brought in producer Danny Kortchmar. The gospel flavored title song reached number three, and the album went to number one for three weeks, his fourth and last chart topping album. Christie painted the cover. Lullabye was written for Alexa. At the 1994 Grammys, while performing River of Dreams, he stopped mid song to protest that Frank Sinatra's speech had been cut off earlier in the night. The album closed with Famous Last Words, and it proved to be exactly that. It remains his last album of pop songs.[1] [2] [3]

His second marriage was ending too. On the first of April 1994 Christie survived a helicopter crash in Colorado alongside the developer Richard Taubman. Less than two weeks later she and Billy announced their separation, and they divorced that August. She married Taubman that December. Billy and Christie stayed friends, and he became godfather to her two younger children. As for the songs, he later explained that after River of Dreams he felt done. The Beatles had made about twelve albums, he said, and so had he. He did not want to dilute his legacy, and he felt the business had left him behind when the album's deeper songs got no airplay.[1] [2] [3] [4]

Face to Face, classical music and hard years

Without new songs, Billy became one of the great touring acts. Starting in 1994 he shared stadium stages with Elton John on the Face to Face tours, billed as the Rocket Man meeting the Piano Man. They played their own hits, swapped each other's songs and sang duets, and the 2003 run grossed more than forty six million dollars in just twenty four dates. There was grief along the way. On the twenty fifth of August 1995, Doug Stegmeyer, the bassist who had helped build the Billy Joel Band and anchored every album from Turnstiles to The Bridge, died by suicide at his home in Smithtown, Long Island. He was forty three.[1] [2] [3] [4]

In 1997 Billy announced he would not write more pop songs for the foreseeable future and would focus on classical composition. His piano pieces were first played in public that October, and in 2001 Fantasies and Delusions, performed by his friend Richard Hyung-ki Joo, topped the classical chart. In March 1999 Ray Charles inducted him into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame. On the last night of 1999 he played nearly four hours at Madison Square Garden. Then in October 2002 the choreographer Twyla Tharp opened Movin' Out on Broadway, a dance show built entirely on his songs. It ran for more than thirteen hundred performances and won Tony Awards.[1] [2] [3] [4] [5]

Those years also brought trouble. In June 2002 he spent ten days at Silver Hill Hospital, a substance abuse and psychiatric center in Connecticut, which he called a Father's Day gift to his daughter. There were car accidents too. He crashed in East Hampton in 2002, and in January 2003 he was airlifted to hospital after his Mercedes hit a tree in Sag Harbor. In April 2004 his car left a wet road and hit a house, although police found no sign of alcohol. In October 2004 he married the food writer Katie Lee at his Long Island home. She was twenty three and he was fifty five, and in March 2005 he checked into the Betty Ford Center for thirty days.[1] [2] [3] [4] [5] [6]

In 2006 Billy went back on the road and sold out twelve shows at Madison Square Garden in one tour, breaking Bruce Springsteen's record of ten. The Garden raised a banner with the number twelve, the first number it had ever retired for someone who was not an athlete. That summer he played a free concert in front of the Colosseum in Rome. The tour also marked a painful break. Liberty DeVitto, his drummer for thirty years, was left off it and never played with him again. In February 2007 Billy sang The Star Spangled Banner at Super Bowl XLI, his second time singing it at a Super Bowl, and in July 2008 he closed Shea Stadium with Paul McCartney.[1] [2] [3]

In June 2009 Billy and Katie Lee announced their separation. That May, DeVitto had sued Billy and Sony, saying he was owed more than ten years of royalties and had helped arrange songs like Only the Good Die Young. They settled amicably in 2010, and later rebuilt their friendship. There was friction with Elton John too. In a 2011 interview Elton said Billy needed real rehab, and Billy later called that moment his rock bottom, when he wrote to his band saying he wanted to stop. That same year he cancelled a planned memoir, saying his music already told his story. In 2013 he received the Kennedy Center Honors, where Garth Brooks sang Goodnight Saigon with a choir of veterans.[1] [2] [3] [4] [5]

The Garden, a last song and a quiet stage

In December 2013 Madison Square Garden named Billy its first ever music franchise, alongside the Knicks and the Rangers, and on the twenty seventh of January 2014 he began a residency of one show a month for as long as people kept buying tickets. They did, for more than ten years. In 2014 the Library of Congress gave him the Gershwin Prize for Popular Song. On the fourth of July 2015 he married Alexis Roderick, a former finance executive and equestrian, at his Oyster Bay estate. Their daughters Della Rose and Remy Anne were born in 2015 and 2017, and Billy joked that other parents at school assumed he was their grandfather.[1] [2] [3] [4]

On the first of February 2024 Billy released Turn the Lights Back On, his first new pop song in about seventeen years, written with the producer Freddy Wexler, Arthur Bacon and Wayne Hector. He performed it at the Grammys that month with Laufey, and it entered the Hot 100 nearly fifty years after Piano Man first appeared there. The video used artificial intelligence to show younger versions of him. In April 2024, when CBS aired his one hundredth residency show, some stations cut away in the middle of Piano Man, and the network had to broadcast it again. The residency ended in July 2024 after one hundred and four shows, his one hundred and fiftieth at the Garden.[1] [2] [3] [4]

On the twenty second of February 2025, at Mohegan Sun in Connecticut, Billy fell flat on his back near the end of the show, then got up and finished. In May 2025 he cancelled all seventeen remaining concerts, stadium dates across North America and England, and revealed he had normal pressure hydrocephalus, a condition where fluid builds up around the brain and affects balance, hearing, vision and memory. Less than two weeks later the HBO documentary Billy Joel: And So It Goes premiered without him at the Tribeca Festival. It aired in July 2025, featured Elizabeth Weber's first interview in forty years, and revealed his suicide attempts from 1970 to a wide audience.[1] [2] [3] [4] [5]

In 2026 Billy has mostly stayed off the stage. His only performance came on the second of January, when he jumped up with a tribute band called Turnstiles in Wellington, Florida, for two songs. In March he sat in the audience at Carnegie Hall, next to Pink, as other artists and his own band played his music. On the fourth of September 2026 his oldest friend Jon Small died of cancer at seventy nine, and Billy wrote that Jon had been like a brother and had saved his life. Days later he revealed on SiriusXM that he had a shunt implanted in his brain, which improved his memory and balance, and he told fans not to worry because he was still here.[1] [2] [3] [4] [5] [6] [7]

Doctors told Billy that loud concerts had been giving him something like a concussion every night, so as of 2026 he has no shows booked. His legacy is secure anyway. He has sold more than one hundred and sixty million records, scored thirty three top forty hits and three number ones, and won five competitive Grammys plus a Grammy Legend Award. Piano Man is preserved in the Library of Congress's National Recording Registry. Younger fans have discovered Vienna through films and social media, tribute bands like Turnstiles keep the songs alive in clubs, and his old band plays on as the Lords of 52nd Street. He counts his legacy as twelve studio albums, and says everything else is packaging.[1] [2] [3] [4] [5] [6] [7]

The people around Billy Joel

Billy Joel and Elizabeth Weber. Elizabeth was married to Billy's bandmate Jon Small when she and Billy fell in love around 1970. They married in 1973 and she became his manager, sorting out his finances and pushing to recruit Phil Ramone. Billy wrote Just the Way You Are and She's Always a Woman for her. They divorced in 1982. In 2025 she gave her first interview in forty years for the HBO documentary about him.[1] [2] [3] [4]

Billy Joel and Jon Small. Jon Small drummed beside Billy in the Hassles and Attila and was his best friend, until Billy fell in love with Small's wife. Small punched him and the friendship broke, yet it was Small who rushed Billy to hospital after his second suicide attempt. They reconciled, and Small directed his concert films and the Baby Grand video. When Small died in September 2026, Billy called him a brother.[1] [2] [3] [4]

Billy Joel and Christie Brinkley. Billy met the model Christie Brinkley on St. Barts in 1983, cast her in the Uptown Girl video, and married her on a yacht on the Hudson in March 1985. Their daughter Alexa Ray was born that December. Christie painted the River of Dreams cover. They divorced in 1994, soon after she survived a helicopter crash, but remained close friends, and she attended his 2004 wedding.[1] [2] [3]

Billy Joel and Katie Lee. Billy met the food writer and future television host Katie Lee at a rooftop bar in New York, and they married at his Oyster Bay home on the second of October 2004. She was twenty three and he was fifty five. She reportedly gave him the ultimatum that led to his 2005 rehab stay, and he wrote the single All My Life for her. They separated in June 2009.[1] [2] [3] [4]

Billy Joel and Alexis Roderick. Billy and Alexis Roderick, a former Morgan Stanley executive and equestrian, got together in 2009 and married on the fourth of July 2015 at his Long Island estate, with New York governor Andrew Cuomo officiating. They have two daughters, Della Rose and Remy Anne, and the family later settled in Florida.[1] [2]

Billy Joel and Elton John. For years Billy resented being compared to Elton John, and he fired a producer who put him with Elton's band. From 1994 they became the most successful touring pair in pop on the Face to Face tours. The friendship cracked after Elton said publicly in 2011 that Billy needed real rehab, which Billy called his rock bottom. Billy said the bad blood lasted a little while.[1] [2] [3]

Billy Joel and Phil Ramone. Phil Ramone produced every Billy Joel studio album from The Stranger in 1977 to The Bridge in 1986. He won Billy over by loving his rough Long Island band, pushed him to put more of himself into his vocals, and acted as the team captain in a chaotic studio. When Ramone died in 2013, the Album of the Year Grammy for 52nd Street passed to Billy.[1] [2] [3] [4]

Billy Joel and Artie Ripp. Artie Ripp signed Billy to Family Productions in 1971 on terms Billy called horrible, produced the flawed Cold Spring Harbor, and kept earning a cut of Billy's Columbia records through The Bridge. Billy aimed the song Getting Closer at that contract. Still, he has credited Ripp as the first person who believed in him.[1] [2] [3]

Billy Joel and Frank Weber. Frank Weber, Elizabeth's brother, managed Billy's career after she stepped back. In 1989 an audit found major discrepancies, and Billy fired him and sued for ninety million dollars, alleging fraud. A court awarded Billy two million dollars in 1990 and dismissed Weber's countersuit. Billy wrote The Great Wall of China about him.[1] [2]

Billy Joel and Liberty DeVitto. Liberty DeVitto was Billy's drummer for three decades, from Turnstiles on, and shaped songs like Only the Good Die Young. He was dropped before the 2006 tour without explanation, sued over unpaid royalties in 2009 and settled in 2010. By 2020 they had reconciled, and Billy wrote the foreword to DeVitto's memoir.[1] [2] [3]

Billy Joel and Howard Joel. Billy's father Howard, a refugee from Nazi Germany and a fine classical pianist, left the family after the 1957 divorce and settled in Vienna. Billy barely saw him as a boy. A visit to Vienna years later, and a lesson from his father about an old woman sweeping the street, inspired the song Vienna, which Billy says may be partly about him.[1] [2] [3]

Billy Joel and Ray Charles. Ray Charles was one of Billy's great musical idols. Billy wrote Baby Grand as a duet for the two of them on The Bridge in 1986, named his daughter Alexa Ray after him, and wanted Charles to record New York State of Mind. In 1999 Ray Charles inducted Billy into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame.[1] [2] [3] [4]

Rare facts about Billy Joel

• Billy's grandfather was forced under Nazi rule to sell his textile business to Josef Neckermann for a fraction of its value. Karl Amson Joel built one of Germany's largest mail order textile firms. In 1938 he had to sell it to Josef Neckermann, and the family escaped to America by way of Cuba.[1]
• Billy's parents met while performing in The Pirates of Penzance at the City College of New York in 1942. Rosalind Nyman and Howard Joel were both in a student production of the Gilbert and Sullivan opera. They married, had Billy in 1949, and divorced in 1957.[1]
• Billy's half brother Alexander Joel is a classical conductor in Europe. Howard Joel remarried after settling in Vienna, and his son Alexander became a conductor. He was chief musical director of the Staatstheater Braunschweig in Germany from 2001 to 2014.[1]
• As a teenager Billy boxed in the Golden Gloves and won twenty two of his twenty six fights. He fought as a welterweight on the amateur circuit. He gave it up after his nose was broken, which may have been lucky for his piano hands.[1]
• Billy was baptized at eleven, but the family left the church after the pastor made antisemitic remarks. Although both parents were Jewish, Billy was not raised in the religion and went to church with friends. He now describes himself as a Jewish atheist.[1]
• Billy got his high school diploma twenty five years late, in 1992. He missed an English exam after a late gig in 1967 and left without enough credits. The school board later accepted essays instead, and he received the diploma at Hicksville High's graduation.[1]
• Billy Joel has said he is a better organist than a pianist. Despite the Piano Man nickname, his first bands leaned on organ. In the duo Attila he ran a Hammond organ straight into Marshall amplifiers to replace a guitar.[1] [2]
• The album Attila features Billy and Jon Small dressed as barbarians in what looks like a meat locker. The 1970 album cover matched the name, Attila. The record flopped, and one AllMusic critic called it the worst album in the history of recorded music.[1] [2]
• Billy's debut album was mastered too fast, so he sounded unnaturally high on every song. He compared his voice on Cold Spring Harbor to the Chipmunks and threw the record like a frisbee. A corrected version only came out in 1983, without his involvement.[1] [2]
• Piano Man went gold, yet Billy said he made only about eight thousand dollars in royalties from it. His exit deal from Family Productions meant Artie Ripp and Michael Lang took a cut of every record sold, so the album's success barely reached Billy.[1] [2]
• Billy looks miserable on the back of Streetlife Serenade because his wisdom teeth had been pulled two days earlier. The barefoot photo of a cross looking Billy was not an artistic choice. The front cover is a painting of a hotel and cafe in San Pedro, California.[1]
• The Turnstiles cover was shot on the Astor Place subway platform, and every person on it stands for a song. Billy said each character represents a track, such as the girl in headphones for All You Wanna Do Is Dance. The man with the suitcase is Say Goodbye to Hollywood.[1] [2]
• The pounding piano opening of Angry Young Man was meant to imitate the drums on the surf hit Wipe Out. On Turnstiles, Billy hammers the keys at the start and end of Prelude and Angry Young Man to copy the Surfaris' famous drum part.[1]
• The car you hear driving off at the end of Movin' Out is bassist Doug Stegmeyer's Corvette. The sound effect closes the album version of the song and symbolizes Anthony leaving. It was removed from the single edit.[1]
• The famous whistle on The Stranger was only meant as a placeholder. Billy whistled the melody to show what an instrument should play. Phil Ramone told him he had just done it, and the whistle stayed.[1]
• Jazz great Phil Woods played the alto sax solo on Just the Way You Are. The band was reportedly unhappy when Phil Ramone brought in the jazzman. It was the only time Woods played on a Billy Joel record.[1] [2] [3]
• Honesty spent eight weeks at number one in France, far outdoing its American chart peak. In the United States it stopped at number twenty four. In France it became one of the ten biggest hits of the nineteen seventies.[1]
• 52nd Street is often called the first commercial CD because it had the first catalogue number. It went on sale in Japan on the first of October 1982, one of fifty CDs released that day, but it carried the first catalogue number in the series.[1]
• When Phil Ramone died, his Album of the Year Grammy for 52nd Street was passed on to Billy. The producer had accepted the award in 1980. After Ramone's death in 2013, the statue went to the artist.[1] [2]
• Billy once wrote to the Beatles asking how to break into music, and got back a merchandise pamphlet. He told the story at a master class. It later inspired his question and answer sessions for students about the music business.[1]
• After his 1982 motorcycle crash, Billy has no bone in the tip of his left thumb. The thumb was crushed when a car ran a red light in front of him on Long Island. He joked that if he crashed again he would play with his elbows.[1]
• Allentown started life as a song called Levittown, then briefly became Bethlehem. Billy dropped Bethlehem because it sounded too religious and liked the rhymes in Allentown. Allentown's mayor later gave him the key to the city.[1]
• Billy sang every vocal part on The Longest Time himself. He and Phil Ramone planned to use a vocal group on the doo wop song, but Billy recorded all the harmonies, finger snaps and hand claps alone.[1]
• Rodney Dangerfield's cameo in the Tell Her About It video was a trade. Billy had written the song Easy Money for Dangerfield's 1983 film of the same name. In return, the comedian appeared at the end of the video.[1] [2]
• Uptown Girl is Billy's only UK number one, and it knocked Karma Chameleon off the top. It spent five weeks at number one in Britain in late 1983 and became the second best selling single of that year there.[1]
• Billy cast the deciding vote that put the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame in Cleveland. In 1986 the site committee split seven to seven between San Francisco and Cleveland. Billy's vote broke the tie.[1]
• The clown who inspired Leningrad came to see Billy at Madison Square Garden in 2015. Viktor Razinov had followed all six of the 1987 Soviet shows. The song's backing vocals were sung by the Hicksville High School choir.[1]
• Billy voiced Dodger in Disney's Oliver and Company, and the dog was drawn to look like him. The 1988 character is a streetwise Jack Russell who wears Billy's trademark Wayfarer sunglasses. Billy also sang the character's song, Why Should I Worry.[1]
• Storm Front's producer, Mick Jones of Foreigner, was recommended to Billy by Eddie Van Halen. It was Billy's first album since Turnstiles without Phil Ramone. The cover shows a maritime storm warning flag.[1]
• Garth Brooks took Billy's song Shameless to number one on the country chart in 1991. The song first appeared on Storm Front. Brooks later called Goodnight Saigon his favorite Billy Joel song.[1] [2]
• In 2000 Hillary Clinton's Senate campaign launch accidentally played Captain Jack, a song about heroin. Staff meant to play New York State of Mind, track five on a greatest hits CD, but played track two instead.[1]
• Rolling Stone named Christie Brinkley's River of Dreams cover the best of 1993, and later one of the worst ever. Her painting showed scenes from every song. In 2024 the magazine placed it last on a list of the fifty worst album covers.[1]
• In 2002 Billy sold his Amagansett house to Jerry Seinfeld for thirty two and a half million dollars. It was reported at the time as the most expensive home sale in New York State history. Billy had bought it for about two point nine million.[1]
• Madison Square Garden retired the number twelve for Billy, its first retired number for a non athlete. It honored his twelve sold out Garden shows on one 2006 tour, which broke Bruce Springsteen's record of ten.[1]
• In 2011 Billy became the first non classical musician given a portrait in Steinway Hall. The honor came from the piano maker in New York. Years earlier, one of his classical pieces was named after Steinway Hall.[1]
• Billy's 1992 arrest charge for fishing out of season was thrown out because the state cited the wrong law. He had joined East Hampton baymen protesting fishing rules and was charged with twenty nine others. The judge dismissed every case in 1993.[1]
• Colorado College held the first academic conference devoted to Billy Joel in 2016. Around three hundred people attended the event, named after It's Still Rock and Roll to Me, and Billy joined by phone for an hour long interview.[1]

Disputed stories

These stories are told often but the accounts don't agree. Here are the versions and who says what.