SEEING RED: Billy Joel is Still Angry,
But Now He's Broke

BILLY JOEL once epitomized the Angry Young Man he sang about in the mid-1970s.

Now, at age 41, he's still angry. He's also broke.

Joel is almost a year into a 15-month world tour to promote his triple-platinum "Storm Front" LP and get himself out of a sea of red ink.

Although he's one of the biggest selling solo artists in the history of Columbia Records - with 14 albums and 25 Top 40 singles in his catalog, Joel has little financially to show for it.

Still in litigation is a $90 million lawsuit that he filed in September 1989 against his former manager and brother-in-law Frank Weber for fraud and breach-of-contract. The suit asks for $60 million in punitive damages and alleges that Weber duped Joel out of $30 million, losing $10 million of it in unsafe investments.

"I haven't gotten a penny back yet," Joel said in an interview before a recent sold-out concert in Phoenix. "The bulk of the lawsuit is still with the lawyers.

"The reason for the length of this tour is financial. Look, at this age, you don't want to go out on the road for fun and games. When I started the tour, I was in deep financial straits. The accounting firm I'm with now said I was looking at a deep, deep, deep, deep financial hole that would take two years to get out of. So I said, 'OK,' and put my head down and went to work and I'm getting back in the black.

"Am I angry about it? Bitter is a good word. The worst thing is having to spend so much time away from my kid," added Joel, who is married to supermodel Christie Brinkley. They have a 4-year-old daughter, Alexa Ray.

"When I was a kid, my dad was gone a lot and I swore to myself that when I became a father, I'm going to be home. So here I am - on the road, away from my kid.

"That's the thing that gets me the most. I'll make up the money somehow. I'll make good on that. But the time spent away from my kid isn't something you can make back. That's what I'm really bitter about."

Joel is well aware that his cash-flow problems would be history if he agreed to tour sponsorship, but the subject makes him bristle.

"I'm not comfortable with it. Whatever celebrity I have was given to me by people. To trade in on it would be a betrayal to that," he said. "Coke asked me. It was a lot of money. Millions and millions of dollars. George Michael got that deal. Pepsi made me an offer, I turned that down, and Madonna got that deal.

"Part of me was saying to myself, 'What are you, nuts? Take the money!' The funny thing is, I actually drink the stuff. But I can't really recommend it to other people."

If he did accept sponsorship, Joel is wary of another round of bashing from some segments of the media. The five-time Grammy winner said certain music critics have been on his back ever since "The Stranger" album produced four Top-20 singles in 1978.

"As soon as I started selling records, I was perceived in some circles to be this commercial wunderkind, a tunesmith-balladeer, a Tin Pan Alley man. You know, 'Need a hit? Let me grind it out' That's not how I write. Any hit I've had is an accident," he said.

Born William Martin Joel, he grew up in Hicksville, N.Y., and discovered Mozart at age 4 before taking 10 years of piano lessons.

As a second-grader, Joel remembers watching Elvis Presley perform on television one night and then trying to duplicate his moves at school the next day.

"I got up on stage during lunch hour in the gym and did my Elvis impersonation and the girls in the third grade started screaming because I was shaking my hips and doing 'Hound Dog.' The teacher dragged me off the stage, thinking I had done something really nasty. Hey, you don't even have hips in the second grade. But I was thinking, 'This is great.' I knew there was something to this and it stayed with me," he said.

"When I saw the Beatles on the Ed Sullivan Show, I looked at them and said, 'That's it. That's what I want to do.' Those guys didn't look like Frankie Avalon or Fabian. They wrote their own songs, played their own instruments and they had the coolest hair in the world.

"The first gig I did was when I was 15, in 1964. I played in a band at Holy Family Church in Hicksville. Girls who wouldn't look twice at me now liked me. At the end of the night, the priest came over and gave us $5 each. You got PAID for this stuff. That locked the backdoor. There was no way out for me. I was hooked.

"I didn't graduate from Hicksville High. Too many absences. I was working until 3 o'clock in the morning in clubs. Who could wake up at 7 o'clock?"

In 1971, Joel was homeless, sleeping on laundromat floors and surviving on peanut butter sandwiches when he signed a solo recording contract with Family Productions.

But his debut LP in 1972, "Cold Spring Harbor," was mastered at the wrong speed. So he played piano bars under the name Bill Martin and gathered material for his hit debut album for Columbia - "Piano Man" - in 1973.

His problems, however, were far from over.

"I signed away a lot of things in those early days," he said. "I signed away publishing rights, copyrights, a lot of record royalties. I tell you, I'm not a businessman. But I assumed in this just land of ours that there's some law against indentured servitude. You can't pay for a mistake for 20 years."

The on-going legal hassles are the main reason why Joel can't help out other aspiring acts.

"People send me tapes all the time. They either want me to do their material or they want to know what I think. I used to like that. Now, I send them right back," he said. "A lawyer can say, 'Billy Joel used the word 'the' in a song. Didn't you use the word 'the' in the song that you sent him? Hey, sue him!'

"It's a total defeat for the little guy because no one will listen to their tapes now because of all these lawsuits," added Joel, who once was unsuccessfully sued by someone who claimed he wrote "My Life," Joel's No. 1 single in 1978.

"Guys who do what I do, we don't need to steal. We write our own stuff. All the music I write, I've dreamt. I dream music all the time. I don't dream scenes and scenerios like most people do. I dream abstractions - shapes, colors, sounds, symphonies. I wake up and I don't remember what I dreamt, but it's in my subconscious like a filing cabinet.

"When I sit down to write, I try to get into that filing cabinet and once in a while, a little window or drawer will pop open with the music in it and I'll be able to write it very quickly."

The method has produced a string of hits, including "We Didn't Start the Fire," which topped the charts earlier this year.

Joel's "Storm Front" tour began Dec. 6, 1989, in Worcester, Mass., and is scheduled to end in March in New Zealand. By the time it's over, he and his seven-piece band will have played 165 shows to more than 3.5 million fans on five continents.

On Dec. 5, he will take a one-day break from the tour and return to New York City to receive a humanitarian award from the Cathedral of St. John the Divine and a "Grammy Legends" award in a television ceremony.

Past humanitarian winners include Leonard Bernstein and Duke Ellington. Joel will be honored as a "Grammy Legend" along with three of his idols: Quincy Jones, Aretha Franklin and Johnny Cash. "How does a little pup like me get in there? It's wild.

"I'd like to be remembered as a writer. I believe in the stuff I've written. Those are the things that really end up being your legacy. I'm not a showman and I don't really feel like I'm an entertainer.

"I'm as old as a '49 Studebaker. Ever look at a car from 1949? The steel is all rusted out, the body is all dented and falling apart, the upholstery is all ripped and the engine doesn't work.

"I look in the mirror and say, 'Well, you ain't Cary Grant, but you ain't in the junkyard, either.' But I'm happy with my life. Very happy. It's nothing at all like I pictured it would be."