An ailing Billy Joel was not in attendance tonight at the world premiere HBO documentary about his life and music but sent word to a packed Beacon Theater in NYC via its director.
“Billy wishes he were here tonight, and he asked us to convey his greetings to you all. He said ‘getting old sucks, but it’s still preferable to getting cremated’,” relayed Susan Lacy, who helmed and produced the doc Billy Joel: And So It Goes with Jessica Levin. Part 1 of 2 opened the Tribeca Festival Wednesday.
“Billy may be considered the poet laureate of New York. You feel the essence of our city in his lyrics,” said Tribeca Enterprises’ Robert De Niro introducing the festival and the film with co-founder Jane Rosenthal.
Joel’s scrappiness and immense talent are both vivid in the film about the Long Island bard who formed his first cover band, The Lonely Souls, at age 14. That led to a group called The Hassles, then Attila with drummer Jon Small, until he fell in love with Small’s wife Elizabeth Weber. That turned messy, she left. Joel attempted suicide. He eventually rallied. Elizabeth returned, they moved to California and married. She became his manager and his career slowly took off.
He kept his chip. A cold, abusive father, also a pianist, left the family, and his possibly bipolar and alcoholic single mother was left to raise him and his sister. He described them as a rare Jewish and at times dirt poor family in his middle-class town. But he had music and his mother made sure he always had lessons.
He felt alienated in California, went through a few producers, was down his first label and a music business that exploited talent and wrote songs about it all, making him somewhat unpopular. We see him expending significant effort in the doc trying to debunk frequent comparisons between himself and the other rising piano playing pop rock star Elon John.
Back in New York he formed his band, went on tour opening for most every big act of the era, sold out Carnegie Hall connected with producer Phil Ramone and put out The Stranger in 1977, launching an era of hits, Grammy awards and full on stardom to drinking, drugs a motorcycle accident and split with Weber, ending Part 1.
Music royalty dots the film. Paul McCartney said Joel’s I Want You Just The Way You Are is the one song he wished he had written. Bruce Springsteen praised Joel’s melodies. Nas described the wonders of Piano Man, about Joel’s stint working at The Executive Room Bar in LA to make ends meet, and New York State of Mind, expressing relief as her returned to his home coast.
“Although we always wanted the music to speak for itself, we are immensely grateful that he was convinced that there was more to it than that,” Lacy said. “It wasn’t always easy, but he peeled back the layers of his music and his life with courage and humor and vulnerability. No matter where you’re from, Billy’s music reaches across geography and generations and in this increasingly fractured world it’s a privilege to celebrate an artist whose music has connected for so long.”
“He will be back,” she said.
The HBO Original has unprecedented access to never-before-seen performances, home movies, and personal photographs, along with extensive, in-depth one-on-one interviews of the rather private artist.
An HBO Documentary Films presentation of a Pentimento Production in association with Hazy Mills Productions and Playtone Productions. Directed and produced by Susan Lacy and Jessica Levin; executive producers, Tom Hanks, Gary Goetzman, Todd Milliner, Sean Hayes, Steve Cohen; producer, Emma Pildes; edited by Kris Liem, James Pilott, Steven Ross. For HBO: executive producers, Nancy Abraham, Lisa Heller, Sara Rodriguez.
The doc will debut on HBO and be available to stream on Max in July.
Joel last month postponed all tour dates disclosing a diagnosis of normal pressure hydrocephalus (NPH), stemming from an onstage fall during a concert last February in Connecticut. The Rock and Roll Hall Of famer posted on social media that his condition led to “problems with hearing, vision, and balance” and that was undergoing physical therapy.
In an update late last month, his wife Alexis Roderick said the family “is hopeful for his recovery” and thanked fans for an outpouring of support.
