Billy Joel

PUBLISHERS WEEKLY 3 NOV 2014

Journalist Schruers draws from many hours of interviews with Joel and his family and friends to create a generous portrait of the determined, talented musician. Joel was born in the Bronx in 1949, and his family moved to Hicksville, N.Y., the following year, where they were one of the few Jewish families. With his father largely absent, Joel took up boxing to deal with the bullies who beat him up on his way to his piano lessons. Enamored by pop music on the radio (Elvis Presley, Ray Charles, the Kingsmen, the Ronettes, the Beatles), though not graced with "matinee idol" looks, Joel found that belting out crowd-pleasers at the piano attracted notice, especially from girls. Instead of finishing high school, Schruers explains, Joel put together a series of bands and soon attracted the attention of record producers first, Paramount's Artie Ripp, who "discovered" Joel, yet whose contract would prove onerous for some years; then Clive Davis at Columbia, which Joel wanted to be signed to because it was also Bob Dylan's label. Schruers writes that with his platinum album The Stranger, in 1977, Joel had "moved to a different place in the music business." Joel's first wife, Elizabeth, became his manager, liberating him from the "larcenous" record business for a time. Soon, Joel began writing his most memorable love songs for the women in his. His three-decade run of hit songwriting came to an end after 1993's River of Dreams. This book was originally to have been published as a memoir in 2011, with Schruers as cowriter; and here, Schruers uses interviews to great effect, allowing to emerge the everyman persona that resonates with Joel's fans. A writer and fan evidently sympathetic to and admiring of his subject, Schruers offers a fair, thorough assessment of Joel's celebrity.