DAVE DAVIES, HOST:
This is FRESH AIR. Singer-songwriter Billy Joel is the subject of a new two-part, five-hour documentary on HBO. It's called "Billy Joel: And So It Goes." And it looks at his life and career to date in a way our TV critic David Bianculli says is both insightful and unflinching. Here's this review.
(SOUNDBITE OF SONG, "INTRODUCTION")
BILLY JOEL: When I was young, I worked on an oyster boat. I used to look up at this mansion on the hill and wonder, what would it be like to live in a house like that? I used to think, they're rich [expletive]. They never had to work a day in their life. Well, I own that house now. It's not finished yet, but neither am I.
DAVID BIANCULLI, BYLINE: The full title of HBO's new Billy Joel documentary reveals a lot about the approach that codirectors Susan Lacy and Jessica Levin, who also collaborated on "Jane Fonda In Five Acts," are taking. The program is called "Billy Joel: And So It Goes." And the subtitle refers to one of the singer-songwriter's most introspective and intricate compositions. Structurally, "And So It Goes" taps into Joel's lifelong love of classical music. It's a challenging piece intentionally sprinkled with dissonant notes and unresolved chords. Joel sees his life that way. That's why I wrote it, he says of the song.
And Lacy and Levin present their artistic biography of Billy Joel the same way. A lot of attention is paid to process, what inspired certain songs and how they were written and recorded. But the dissonance of Joel's personal life is not shied away from. Multiple marriages and divorces, repeated visits to rehab centers for alcoholism, serious conflicts with managers and fellow musicians. It's all included. Not just from Joel's point of view, either. We hear from his sister and stepbrother, his now grown daughter, his ex-wives, his former bandmates and managers, and even from a series of rock critics whose career assessment of Joel's musical output often was less than kind.
And we also hear from such musical peers as Paul McCartney, Garth Brooks and Sting. All of those interviews are anything but perfunctory and certainly aren't presented just to make Joel look better in retrospect. How he met and eventually married his first wife, Elizabeth, is a story dramatic enough for a daytime soap opera. She provides her account of their relationship in honest, direct and ultimately fond terms, and so does he. His second wife, supermodel Christie Brinkley, is similarly candid, so much so that at several points she fights back tears.
Joel, though, tells his own story with a certain emotional distance, acknowledging his own mistakes but also noting and often forgiving the mistakes of others. His biggest unresolved issue has to do with his own father, a classical musician who abandoned the family early, leaving Billy and his sister to be raised by a single mom. But before he left, Billy's father did notice young Billy's creative approach to piano lessons.
(SOUNDBITE OF DOCUMENTARY, "BILLY JOEL: AND SO IT GOES")
JOEL: One thing I remember, I was supposed to be playing the "Moonlight Sonata." Must have been about 8 years old. And I - rock and roll was around at that point, and I started playing - instead of playing (playing piano), I started playing (playing piano). He came down the stairs. Bam. I got whacked. And I got whacked so hard he knocked me out. I was unconscious for, like, a minute. And I remember waking up going, well, that got his attention.
BIANCULLI: Susan Lacy, whose other credits include running the outstanding PBS arts biography series "American Masters" knows a good story when she sees one and, as producer, knows how to tell it. Some parts of the narrative are built around his biggest hits. For example, a dispute with his first manager led Billy Joel to book himself into a piano bar under an assumed name, Bill Martin, because Martin was Billy's middle name. That experience led directly to the early breakout hit "Piano Man," a song that became so familiar that in his later concert days, he could stop singing it at any point, and the audience would take over.
We learn the inspirations for "New York State Of Mind," "Just The Way You Are," "Vienna," "Baby Grand" and others. The billboard sales of songs and albums is charted, but so is the often lukewarm or dismissive critical response. We see him fighting back from near bankruptcy after being swindled by his manager and establishing long-running concert runs with Elton John and as a solo act at Madison Square Garden.
We're shown his creative bursts and his destructive behaviors and watch as he retires from writing lyrics, then performing before he's lured back to appear at a benefit concert after Hurricane Sandy, which devastated his beloved community of Long Island. The reception to that 2012 appearance led Billy Joel on a new path, and more than a decade of concert appearances followed. So did such awards as the Gershwin Prize for songwriting and the Kennedy Center Honors and the record-setting Madison Square Garden residency that ran off and on for 10 years.
The documentary ends with Joel performing "Piano Man" at one of those concerts, but that footage is interspersed with film from 1973 of Joel at the piano singing the same song the day he signed his recording contract at Columbia Records. As Joel says in this documentary of his life to date, it is not a finished story. But as told in "Billy Joel: And So It Goes," it is a very revealing one.
(SOUNDBITE OF ARCHIVED RECORDING)
UNIDENTIFIED CROWD: (Singing) Sing us a song, you're the piano man. Sing us a song tonight. Well, we're all in the mood for a melody, and you've got us feeling all right.
(CHEERING)
DAVIES: David Bianculli is professor of television studies at Rowan University. He reviewed the new HBO documentary "Billy Joel: And So It Goes."
On tomorrow's show, comic, actor and writer Sarah Silverman. Whether it's talking about sex, abortion, being Jewish, racism or just daily life, she's willing to take risks to make a point and make it funny. We'll talk about her comedy special "PostMortem," which is funny and emotional. It's about the death of her father and stepmother nine days apart. I hope you can join us.
To keep up with what's on the show and get highlights of our interviews, follow us on Instagram - @nprfreshair. FRESH AIR's executive producer is Danny Miller. Our technical director and engineer is Audrey Bentham. Our managing producer is Sam Briger. Our interviews and reviews are produced and edited by Phyllis Myers, Roberta Shorrock, Ann Marie Baldonado, Lauren Krenzel, Therese Madden, Monique Nazareth, Thea Chaloner, Anna Bauman and John Sheehan. Our digital media producer is Molly Seavy-Nesper. Our consulting visual producer is Hope Wilson. Susan Nyakundi directed today's show. For Terry Gross and Tonya Mosley, I'm Dave Davis. Transcript provided by NPR, Copyright NPR.
NPR transcripts are created on a rush deadline by an NPR contractor. This text may not be in its final form and may be updated or revised in the future. Accuracy and availability may vary. The authoritative record of NPR’s programming is the audio record.
