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06-01-2013, 05:32 PM,
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Miguel
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Posts: 11,925
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Billy Joel NYT interview
Quote: A.G.: ...you’ve written almost no pop songs since your last album, 1993’s “River of Dreams.” Why did you stop?
B.J.: I never stopped writing music. I’m still writing music — piano pieces, orchestral music, dramatic pieces — but they could become songs. Some of them are like hymns that I just don’t have words for, but I might.
A.G.: Do you miss writing popular music?
B.J.: No.
A.G.: Why not? Is it too much effort?
B.J.: No, no, no, it’s not because of the effort. I got tired of it. I got bored with it. I wanted something more abstract, I wanted to write something other than the three-minute pop tune even though that’s an art form unto itself. Gershwin was incredible, Cole Porter was incredible, Richard Rodgers, great stuff, Hoagy Carmichael and John Lennon, the three-minute symphony. For me, it was a box. I want to get out of the box. I never liked being put in a box.
A.G.: Nice box to be in.
B.J.: Very nice box to be in for a while, but then it becomes like a coffin.
A.G.: You’ve always thought of yourself as a rocker, so if I went back to 1968 and told you that songs like “Just the Way You Are” would be standards now, would you be excited?
B.J.: Yeah, sure, I’d be excited, absolutely. When the Beatles did “Yesterday,” I remember the first time I heard it. I said, “That’s a classic, that is going to be around forever.” O.K., it’s a ballad. So what? The Beatles wrote ballads; they also did rock ’n’ roll. That’s the kind of mold I put myself into. I’m not going to just stick to one kind of music, I’m going to do all kinds of music. I like it all.
A.G.: A critic once wrote that you’re “naturally inclined to write big melodies like McCartney” but that you idolize John Lennon. Do you agree?
B.J.: I idolized both of them equally. I didn’t really delineate who was writing the lyrics and who was writing the melody. I assumed it was a collaboration. When Paul would get too sweet, John would kind of sour it down, and when Paul was at a loss for a lyric, John would throw something in offhand that was sardonic. I loved the combination of the both of them.
A.G.: Do you think there’s a finite number of great songs in any one person?
B.J.: Everybody is different. Some writers can write reams of great books and then J. D. Salinger wrote just a few. Beethoven wrote nine symphonies. They were all phenomenal. Mozart wrote some 40 symphonies, and they were all phenomenal. That doesn’t mean Beethoven was a lesser writer, it’s just some guys are capable of more productivity, some guys take more time. Mozart pisses me off because he’s like a naturally gifted athlete, you listen to Mozart and you go: “Of course. It all came easy to him.” Beethoven you hear the struggle in it. Look at his manuscripts, and there’s reams of scratched-out music that he hated. He stops and he starts. I love that about Beethoven, his humanity shows in his music. Mozart was almost inhuman, unhuman.
A.G.: Is songwriting hard for you?
B.J.: Yeah, I relate to Beethoven. I write backward — I write the music first and then I write the words. Most people write the words first and then they write the music. Keith Richards was explaining his method of songwriting. He calls it “vowel movement.” They come up with a riff, and it’s like sounds, and whatever sound . . . like “start me up” — “up” works because it has a consonant at the end of it, but if you go “take me home,” it wouldn’t have worked. I kind of subscribe to that. It has to sound right sometimes even more than being a poetic lyric. It’s a struggle to fit words onto music, and I want it to be really, really good, so I take a long time. I love having written, but I hate writing. So then I go through postpartum depression, and it’s: “Ugh, I gotta start all over again? Where am I going to get the” — what do you call it? Sitzfleisch?
Quote: A.G.: Your first record deal as a solo performer, in 1970, was with the producer Artie Ripp and was notoriously bad.
B.J.: Yeah, I pretty much gave up my publishing, my copyrights, my royalties. He had to get his pound of flesh.
A.G.: Your first wife, Elizabeth, once claimed that when all was said and done, you made less than $8,000 off the initial release of the album “Piano Man.”
B.J.: Yeah, that sounds about right. It was a terrible deal.
A.G.: Then, in the late ’80s, you discovered that your former brother-in-law and manager, Frank Weber, had seriously mismanaged your money. Didn’t you literally open up a safe-deposit box and find a bunch of I.O.U.’s?
B.J.: That and bad investments and tax shelters, just bad everything. It was much more of an emotional betrayal for me than financial, because this was somebody I trusted so much.
A.G.: It’s probably a really ugly exercise, but did you ever compute what you lost?
B.J.: At one time there was an audit, and I was given a figure of $30 million. I didn’t even know I had anything like that. I thought maybe 3, maybe close to 10 million. But I’m not bitter about any of that stuff.
A.G.: Oh, I would be so bitter.
B.J.: People don’t understand, I’ve met these people again, and I shake hands with them. I saw Artie at some kind of music event in L.A. like 10 years ago. “Hi, how ya doing?” I don’t have any hard feelings, I don’t.
A.G.: You don’t have hard feelings about a guy who made a ton of money off a bunch of albums he didn’t even work on?”
B.J.: I came out fine. I didn’t like getting ripped off, and I didn’t like the fact that my daughter might not have what she deserved to get. It wasn’t so much about me. The same thing with Frank Weber. I saw him a couple years ago out here in the Hamptons. He was going into a restaurant, and I said, “Hey, how ya doin’ man?” We sat and talked. I have absolutely no hard feelings. I let all that go. I can’t carry that stuff around. You’d be pissed off your whole life. Bad things happen to good people and bad things happen to bad people.
A.G.: So was there a point when you actually started paying attention to the business side?
B.J.: Yeah, after I got screwed the second time. Fool me once, shame on you, fool me twice, shame on me. It was time to grow up. I always had this sense that O.K., I’m an artist and I shouldn’t have to be concerned about something as banal as money, which is baloney. It’s my job. It’s what I do. I didn’t pay any attention to it, and I trusted other people, and I got screwed.
A.G.: Did you experience any actual deprivation?
B.J.: No. I never went without a meal. I just didn’t have the money I was supposed to have. I know what poor is. When I was a kid, we didn’t have anything. There was a rumor that I filed for bankruptcy — that never happened, either. I owed Uncle Sam a couple of million bucks in income tax, and the money that I thought was there, wasn’t there. I had to sell a place in the city. I was building a house out here in the Hamptons, and I owned a place on Central Park West. I sold it to Sting. I was praying for a rock star. They don’t care what their accountant says. If they want something, they buy it. Then I sold the house that I was building to Seinfeld. I keep exchanging star homes. I bought Roy Scheider’s house. Mickey Drexler bought my old place in Martha’s Vineyard. I’m the Realtor to the stars.
A.G.: Were there tours you went on just because you needed the dough?
B.J.: I became a road warrior. I said, “That’s how I earn a living.” I went out on the road and stayed out on the road for years. Made it all back, and I enjoyed it.
A.G.: You recently said you aren’t touring now because you don’t want to feel like you’ve got to play all your hits. Are there songs you would just as soon never sing again?
B.J.: I wouldn’t say never, but there are some I’d like not to have to do. I can’t do a show without doing “Piano Man.” I’ve done shows without doing “Just the Way You Are.” I hardly ever do “Uptown Girl.” We had a lot of hits, so I have the luxury of being able to pick what hits I’m going to do and what hits I’m not going to do.
A.G.: You also said you have no interest in being what you called “an oldies act.”
B.J.: I haven’t put out an album in 20 years. Let’s face it. I am an oldies act. I just don’t want it to be like when you watch Channel 13 and there’s the Delltones or some English band from the ’60s, and they’re real crotchety and they look terrible, and I go, “Oh, God, I don’t want to be on that show.” I haven’t worked for three years. I’m going to play in Australia. I want to see how it feels to work again, I want to see if I think I’m still any good, because if I’m not any good, I’d consider retiring. If I don’t think I’m any good, I don’t care how much I can make, I don’t care how many people want me to, I’m going to stop doing it. It has to be fun. You have to feel good about it.
More: http://www.nytimes.com/2013/05/26/magazi...d=all&_r=0
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