Last night I watched the second half of Billy Joel: And So It Goes, and honestly? I didn’t like it as much as Part One, which is like the first half of Lawrence of Arabia — troubled beginnings, difficult development, Joel’s relationship with wife #1 (Elizabeth Weber), the gradual finding of success in the ’70s and then up, up, up into the early ’80s…pow!
The second part is about basically about the pressures and difficulties of life at the top — 1982’s Nylon Curtain album, trying to connect with his emotionally remote father, the initially very happy Christie Brinkley years and the arrival of his first daughter Alexa, getting financially ripped off by his manager Frank Weber, “We Didn’t Start The Fire“, the Katie Lee Biegel marriage, serious alcohol abuse (Joel dried out at Silver Hill in ’02 or thereabouts), the marriage to Alexis Roderick and their two daughters, but gradually running out of gas and losing the drive to write new songs, etc.
Hell, the documentary runs out of gas. The general narrative drift is “things are harder, more complicated, boozier as the creative fire gradually dims,” etc.
Being married to a driven creative type with a turbulent emotional past is never a day at the beach…guaranteed.
It’s a bummer to think that the most recently composed Joel song that I’ve really liked is The River of Dreams (“In the middle of the niiiight”), which came out in July ’93. There hasn’t been an album of original songs since. 32 fucking years ago, man. Joel explains that songwriting-wise he’d become a burnt-out case, “tired of the tyranny of the rhyme,” etc.