Billy Joel

from Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
Billy Joel (2009)

William Martin "Billy" Joel (born May 9, 1949 in New York City ) is an American singer , pianist and songwriter . With 82.5 million albums sold, he is one of the most successful solo artists in the United States.

Life

Billy Joel was born in 1949, the second child of Howard and Rosalind Joel, in the Bronx , New York . He grew up in Hicksville Town of Oyster Bay on Long Island .

His mother was born Rosalind Nyman in the UK . His father was born as Helmut Joel in Nuremberg and was the son of Karl Amson Joel , who emigrated with his family to the USA in 1938 because of the increasingly aggressive persecution of the Jews . In 1947, Billy Joel's parents married and his older sister was born that same year. In 1960, when Billy Joel was 11 years old, his parents divorced. He stayed with his mother while his father returned to Europe and settled in Vienna . Joel's half-brother, born in 1971, the conductor Alexander Joel, comes from his second marriage with an Englishwoman .

In 1973 Billy Joel married his manager Elizabeth Weber; the marriage was divorced in 1982. From 1985 to 1994 he was married to Christie Brinkley , from this marriage the daughter Alexa Ray Joel, born in 1985, comes . In October 2004, Joel, then 55, married 23-year-old restaurant critic Katie Lee. In June 2009, the couple announced their separation. In July 2015, Joel married his fourth girlfriend, 33-year-old Alexis Roderick. In August 2015, the couple's first daughter was born. The second daughter was born in October 2017.

In 1997 Billy Joel donated the prize money for the second presentation of the Nuremberg International Human Rights Prize .

Musical career

Billy Joel (2007)
Joel receiving an honorary doctorate from Syracuse University (2006)

As a child, Joel was a lover of classical music and received piano lessons . At the age of 15 he began to play in rock bands , including with the Long Island known group The Hassles, with whom he recorded the two LPs The Hassles and Hour of the Wolf between 1967 and 1968 . A year later Joel played a rock record with Jon Small under the name Attila. He also worked in the late 1960s as a studio musician for various well-known artists such as Chubby Checker and The Shangri-Las and performed in piano bars under the stage name Billy Martin.

In 1970 Joel met the music producer Artie Ripp. This helped him to his late 1971 released debut album Cold Spring Harbor , but its commercial success failed to materialize. The master tapes were not transferred at the correct speed after the last mix. In addition, after the release of the debut album, Joel was in a dispute with his previous record label Family Productions , which the artist wanted to part with due to the bad contract situation. While Joel said he was "hiding" in various bars under the pseudonym Bill Martin, his new agency Columbia Records tried to break the contract with Family Productions, which in 1972 finally succeeded.

Together with Columbia, Joel released the album Piano Man in the fall of 1973 , in the title track of which he deals with his own past as a bar musician and which was so successful that the musician was nicknamed "Piano Man" based on the title. With his second record, Joel also achieved first significant placements in the American charts , but the two follow-up albums Streetlife Serenade and Turnstiles were initially unable to build on the great success of the album and in particular the single Piano Man .

With the studio album The Stranger released in the summer of 1977 , Joel made his big breakthrough. The track Just the Way You Are included was named "Song of the Year" at the 1979 Grammy Awards , and the record itself achieved platinum status . This success is also attributed to his collaboration with producer Phil Ramone , which lasted almost ten years.

In the fall of 1978 was followed by 52 nd Street , the first album of the musician, the number one on the Billboard album charts occupied; Joel received two Grammy Awards again for this. In 1982 the record also made music history because it was the first pop album in the Sony catalog to be released on the new CD format .

In 1987, Joel went on tour as the first American rock star in the Soviet Union . The six-part concert series that produced the live album Концерт ( Russian : concert ) also inspired the title Leningrad . For the accompanying album Storm Front from the fall of 1989, Foreigner guitarist Mick Jones took the place of producer Ramone for the first time . The record's biggest hit was We Didn't Start the Fire , the text of which contains important events, people and objects in history between 1949 and 1989, especially the United States. This song was number one on the US charts and was nominated for a Grammy.

The album River of Dreams, which was released in the summer of 1993, brought Joel great success, including four Grammy nominations again. In 1994 he started a tour together with Elton John called Face to Face . In the years that followed, Joel appeared primarily through community projects and benefit concerts. In March 1999 he was inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame . On December 31, 1999, he performed in New York's Madison Square Garden . The concert was released on the double album 2000 Millennium Concert . In addition, the face-to-face tour with Elton John was continued in 1998 and 2001 .

In 2006 Joel was again on a tour that took him to Germany for two concerts for the first time in twelve years in June ( Hamburg ) and July 2006 ( Frankfurt ). As part of the tour, he performed twelve times in a row at sold-out Madison Square Garden, which no one had achieved before. The performances were published as a cross section in June 2006 on the live album 12 Gardens . At the end of the European part of the tour, he and Bryan Adams played in July 2006 at a free concert in front of the Colosseum in Rome .

In February 2007, Joel released a new single, All My Life, after more than ten years. In December of the same year, another new song was released by him, Christmas in Fallujah , which he does not sing himself. The song, which deals with the situation of American soldiers in Iraq and is based on their correspondence with their families at home, should, according to Joels, be sung by a younger singer. He chose the American songwriter Cass Dillon as the interpreter . In 2008 Joel continued his American tour. The highlight was two concerts in July 2008 in New York's Shea Stadium . He welcomed Paul McCartney and Steven Tyler as guests .

Since January 2014 Joel has been performing once a month at Madison Square Garden in New York. The first four concerts were sold out immediately. If the demand for the around 20,000 tickets continues, the guest performance should take place for years. Between the monthly concerts in New York, there are a few other concerts, mostly in American baseball stadiums, but also in European soccer stadiums. In September 2016 he performed for the first time in the Commerzbank-Arena in Frankfurt. In 2015, the Rolling Stone listed Joel 50th among the 100 best songwriters of all time .

Discography

Studio albums

year title Top ranking, total weeks, awardChart placementsChart placements
(Year, title, rankings, weeks, awards, notes)
Remarks
DE DE AT AT CH CH UK UK US US
1971 Cold Spring Harbor - - - - -
First published: November 1, 1971
1973 Piano Man - - - UK98 (1 week)
UK
US27
Quadruple platinum
× 4
Quadruple platinum

(40 weeks)US
First published: November 9, 1973
Sales: + 4,200,000
in UK only placed in 1984
1974 Streetlife Serenade - - - - US35
platinum
platinum

(18 weeks)US
First published: October 11, 1974
Sales: + 1,000,000
1976 Turnstiles - - - - US122
platinum
platinum

(12 weeks)US
First published: May 19, 1976
Sales: + 1,000,000
1977 The Stranger - - - UK24
gold
gold

(40 weeks)UK
US2
diamond
diamond

(137 weeks)US
First published: September 1977
Sales: + 10,720,000
# 67 of the Rolling Stone 500
1978 52nd Street DE19 (10 weeks)
DE
AT4 (12 weeks)
AT
- UK10
gold
gold

(43 weeks)UK
US1
Seven times platinum
× 7
Seven times platinum

(76 weeks)US
First published: October 13, 1978
Sales: + 7,800,000
Grammy (album of the year), number 352 on the Rolling Stone 500
1980 Glass Houses DE24 (12 weeks)
DE
AT4 (20 weeks)
AT
- UK9
gold
gold

(24 weeks)UK
US1
Seven times platinum
× 7
Seven times platinum

(73 weeks)US
First published: February 1980
Sales: + 7,975,000
Grammy (rock)
1982 The nylon curtain DE34 (7 weeks)
DE
AT20 (2 weeks)
AT
- UK27 (8 weeks)
UK
US7th
Double platinum
× 2
Double platinum

(35 weeks)US
First published: September 17, 1982
Sales: + 2,150,000
1983 To Innocent Man DE36 (23 weeks)
DE
- - UK2
Triple platinum
× 3
Triple platinum

(97 weeks)UK
US4th
Seven times platinum
× 7
Seven times platinum

(111 weeks)US
First published:
Aug 8, 1983 Sales: + 8,225,000
1986 The Bridge DE34 (9 weeks)
DE
AT18 (4 weeks)
AT
CH22 (4 weeks)
CH
UK38
silver
silver

(10 weeks)UK
US7th
Double platinum
× 2
Double platinum

(47 weeks)US
First published: July 29, 1986
Sales: + 2,260,000
1989 Storm front DE5
platinum
platinum

(60 weeks)DE
AT10
gold
gold

(18 weeks)AT
CH30 (1 week)
CH
UK5
platinum
platinum

(25 weeks)UK
US1
Quadruple platinum
× 4
Quadruple platinum

(69 weeks)US
First published: October 4, 1989
Sales: + 5,400,000
1993 River of Dreams DE2
platinum
platinum

(33 weeks)DE
AT2
platinum
platinum

(26 weeks)AT
CH2
platinum
platinum

(28 weeks)CH
UK3
platinum
platinum

(27 weeks)UK
US1
Quintuple platinum
× 5
Quintuple platinum

(56 weeks)US
First published: August 5, 1993
Sales: + 6,725,000

gray hatching : no chart data available for this year

Movies

  • Oliver & Co. , animated film. Voice of Dodger USA 1988
  • The Joel Files aka The Joel Files , documentary. Director: Beate Thalberg. Billy Joel's German-Jewish family history D / A 2001
  • Billy Joel: A Matter of Trust - The Bridge to Russia , documentary. Directed by Jim Brown. USA 1987/2013

literature

Web links

Commons : Billy Joel  - collection of pictures, videos and audio files

Individual evidence

  1. ^ "Gold and Platinum - Top Selling Artists" . Recording Industry Association of America
  2. a b Steffen Radlmaier: German Lesson. The Joel Family Chronicle. ( Memento from January 15, 2013 in the Internet Archive ) In: Rolling Stone , 3/1996 - reproduced on piano-man.de
  3. Billy Joel became a father for the second time
  4. He became a father again - at the age of 68 Gala.de , October 24, 2017.
  5. Hank Bordowitz: Billy Joel: The Life and Times of An Angry Young Man. Guild of Master Craftsmen, 2006, ISBN 0-8230-8248-2 .
  6. Solveig Grothe: “We didn't start the fire”, world history in 291 seconds . someday
  7. Billy Joel in the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame
  8. New business model for music stars: Rock until you drop . Spiegel Online , January 27, 2014
  9. Current status: Concerts planned until September 2017
  10. The 100 Greatest Songwriters of All Time. Rolling Stone , August 2015, accessed August 7, 2017 .
  11. Chart sources: DE AT CH UK US