I read something (I don’t remember what) somewhere (I don’t remember where), that you basically learn things as a teenager (like the French for library), and that stuff stays in your head, and everything else you learn after that just sort of ebbs away (like any piece of information in any language). Or maybe I just made that up. However, I do truly believe that the cultural touchstones you surround yourself with as a youngster have an indelible influence on the person you become.
Take me, for instance. I don’t know what drew me to the double-play cassette of the Talking Heads albums 77/More Songs About Buildings and Food one Saturday in Wolverhampton Library, but something did and I checked it out, listened to it and had my brain changed.
Around the same time, I happened to be watching an edition of TV music programme The Old Grey Whistle Test (around 1985, I think) and caught a performance by Jonathan Richman. He sang a song called Chewing Gum Wrapper, a cappella, while dancing feverishly, and again had my brain changed. I soon became a devotee of Jonathan and, through him, ventured into the dark, beating heart of the Velvet Underground and beyond.
And, basically, that’s me. The Talking Heads/Richman axis drove me into a devotion to quirk and freaks, and soon I travelled towards such oddness as Daniel Johnston, Suicide, the Residents, Captain Beefheart and anything else that didn’t quite add up.
But there was another outlier that pre-dated all of this mild esoterica. Someone not cool or strange or original or perverse. Someone who, up until quite recently, it was fairly embarrassing to exalt.
I can’t remember when or how I got involved with Billy Joel. But I must have been young, in my pre-enlightened days, before the ubiquity of Uptown Girl. I was smitten enough that I joined the Billy Joel fan club and I can recall my excitement at getting some sort of newsletter through the mail, featuring a mangled version of my name and address on the envelope and all the way from America!
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I watched the VHS tape Billy Joel: Live at Long Island a lot and started picking up his albums. But soon I realised that Billy Joel was considered, by the cool kids at my school, not very cool at all. Shamed, I put away such childish things and soon moved on to New Wave weirdness. But I still felt a twinge if I heard Allentown or similar through an open window.
Perhaps it was for all these reasons that I found the recent epic HBO documentary Billy Joel: And So It Goes quite triggering. I was curious to catch up with my pre-pubescent obsession, whom I must have abandoned around the time of his An Innocent Man mega-fame in 1983. I discovered I was not alone.
Everyone abandons Billy. Wives, bandmates, parents, managers (with all his money). He appears to be eminently abandonable. He seems to have brought a lot of this on himself. As the film shows, he was a gloomy youngster, then a brooding singer-songwriter, who perked up considerably as he got more famous, reached peak perk when he married supermodel Christie Brinkley and became massively successful, and then became incredibly miserable and self-sabotaged pretty much the rest of his life. I feel, if I had experienced any sort of success in my life, I would have inevitably done the same thing.
It appears to be the lack of a dad that is one of the main issues in his life. His musician father, a Jewish refugee from Nazi Germany, left the family when Bill was a kid, washed up in Vienna (hence the song) and didn’t seem particularly interested in his son’s career, despite Billy’s efforts.
Billy filled this daddy-sized hole in his life with booze (you know you’re in trouble when Elton John’s telling you to take it down a notch), stopped writing pop songs in the 1990s and pretty much stewed. A recent marriage, a couple of kids and eventual sobriety have made him slightly more chipper.
But it must be an odd life. He seems a man determined not to think about the past (he returned the advance for a planned autobiography, as he couldn’t face mulling over his life), but spends all his time playing the old hits around the world and, famously, 150 times at Madison Square Garden.
The documentary really made me feel for him. I feel personally responsible. It feels as if at the very moment I got off the Billy bus, his life went to shit. If it makes him feel a little happier, I have now invested in a cassette of Greatest Hits Volume 1 & 2 and I hope that the five hours (!) I spent in his company during Billy Joel: And So It Goes is some sort of penance for my neglect of the Piano Man over the years. Years that have been so very hard on him. Because of me.
Billy Joel: And So It Goes is out now via NOW TV.
Dale Shaw is a TV and radio writer, journalist, screenwriter and musician
