Billy Joel: And So It Goes

A definitive and superlative look at a schlub from Long Island who somehow became a rock star, showing how personal pain and musical genius were always intertwined.

I’m afraid journalist objectivity doesn’t stand a chance here. I’ve been a devoted Billy Joel fan for 40+ years, my personal musician GOAT, bar none. I own every piece of music he’s ever published, on multiple formats.

I literally grew up with Billy’s music, and I don’t mind saying his voice helped me get through some tough times. I’m not saying I named my son Joel after him, but let’s say a seed was planted. So a 5-hour documentary about his life and music was destined to command my attention.

“Billy Joel: And So It Goes,” directed by Susan Lacy and Jessica Levin, is the definitive chronicle of Billy’s life and music. Even if you’re not as devoted a fan as I am, it’s a compelling look at a regular guy from Long Island who became the unlikeliest of rock stars.

Everything is here — the troubled family history, self-destructive youth, years of struggling as a musician to almost overnight worldwide fame, a series of rocky marriages and tabloid headlines. “And So It Goes” traces its map through each album with an archaeological devotion to detail, tying together what was happening in Billy’s life to how that translated to songs.

“Billy Joel: And So It Goes” will stream on HBO Max in two parts, each about 2½ hours long, the first debuting July 18 and the other July 25.

Aside from a deeper appreciation for Joel and his legacy, I’ll take two big things away from this documentary. The first is that, for a guy who was often dismissed as derivative bubble gum pop music, the personal pain and musical genius were inextricably intertwined.

The second is the powerful figure of Elizabeth Weber, the first wife who was lost to legend as “Billy Joel’s first wife.” She emerges here, through contemporaneous interviews, archival footage and testimonies of her peers — chiefly Joel himself — as the person most responsible for his start in music and emergence as a star.

Now old, portly and bald — and the recently revealed diagnosis of a brain condition — today’s Joel more resembles a schmaltzy neighborhood guy from the New York City metro area, maybe somebody who did well in a trade and eventually moved up to management. And he’s got stories to tell.

Thing is, even in his heyday he was a very ordinary-looking man who came up in an era of music that seemed to reward sex appeal more than musical chops. His hands don’t really look like a piano player’s, with short, thick fingers that would seem more suited to working on an oyster boat or amateur boxing —both actual Joel vocations in his youth — than tickling the ivories.

The added dichotomy when this schlubby exterior was juxtaposed during his marriage to Christie Brinkley — the supermodel and “Bill from the bar” — spurred a lot of jokes, and envy.

Directors Lacy and Levin do masterful work not only in gathering a treasure trove of information — photos, news footage, interviews with something like a hundred figures — but in meticulously ordering it in a way that makes both narrative and emotional sense.

For example, Part One doesn’t really delve into his upbringing and family until more than an hour in. We learn about a loving but bipolar mother, and musically inclined but distant father, who decamped for good when the boy was 8. More, troubling secrets are eventually revealed situating the family’s trials during Nazi Germany.

Even for someone who thought he knew Billy lore as well as anybody, I was surprised by how much the film reveals. He was active in bands during high school, and was recruited to jump ship from on to the other by the promise of getting the use of an old Hammon B3 organ from band leader Jon Small.

Their group, The Hassles, actually scored a minor record deal and grew a decent following for the New York bridge-and-tunnel crowd. Later they both left together to create a Led Zepplin-inspired band, Attilla, which Joel acknowledges was atrocious.

“We're going to destroy the world with amplification,” he says of their credo.

Weber was actually married to Small at this point, and they shared a small house with Joel. A love triangle emerged, which ended the friendship (for a long time, at least) and the band. Morose at losing both, Joel attempted suicide, twice.

Against all odds, Joel poured out his hurt into poetry and songs, which eventually became his first album, “Cold Spring Harbor.” Despite problems with an amateurish sped-up master tape, it got some notice. “Choir boy vocals with New York guts,” one reviewer dubbed it.

Joel’s first nasty taste of the music biz led his first (of many) confrontations with record executives and shifty managers. Contractually unable to work, he took up a pseudonym gig as “Bill Martin” at an L.A. club called “The Executive Room,” from which sprung his first minor hit and eventual anthem, “Piano Man.”

That eponymous second album scored a little better, but a terrible contract with producer Artie Ripp meant Joel only made about $7,000 from it. Though Weber had come back into his life, and eventually took over his personal management. A third album, “Streetlife Serenade,” did little better, though West Coast music executives were not thrilled by their snide reflection in “The Entertainer.”

Billy decided he wasn’t destined to be another Jackson Browne, so he moved back to the Big Apple to rediscover his roots, quite literally writing his iconic “New York State of Mind” while riding a Hudson River Line bus.

After years of struggling and opening for other acts, Joel hit it big with “The Stranger,” yielding several Top 40 singles and his first Grammy Awards.

But personal tragedy was never far away, including an inclination toward boozing that eventually led to a serious motorcycle accident and estrangement from Weber.

Both Part One and Part Two are well worth the watch, though I found the first go the more illuminating. Part Two is, of course, hampered by the fact that Joel essentially stopped recording new songs after 1993’s “River of Dreams” album, so there’s not as much material on the artistic journey to mine.

Billy fans, including this one, have long lamented the choice of a major music star to step away making new music at the height of his powers — while continuing to play big concert draws. I think this contributed to an image of Joel that grew of a guy who was just coasting on past success, which led to people denigrating the music, too.

“I was tired of the tyranny of the rhyme,” is the best Joel offers for his step away from writing new songs, with occasional exceptions demonstrating he hasn’t lost a lick off his fastball.

His divorce from Brinkley — and seemingly she’s-here-she’s-gone marriage and split from third wife Katie Lee — and some unfortunate history behind the wheel of a car led to him becoming something of a punch line.

But then something strange happened. Younger people started finding his music, Joel became a regular on talk shows, his concert scheduled picked up again and he enjoyed a second renaissance as a beloved musical icon that continues today.

The array of famous artists giving their props is staggering: Nas, Pink, John Mellencamp, Paul McCartney, Don Henley, Sting, Garth Brooks and Bruce Springsteen included. The latter offers this gobsmacking take: “He had that Broadway, that Tin Pan Alley, which is why his melodies are better than mine.”

Joel was continually vexed by the poor critical reception he received throughout his career, despite constantly trying new types of music and grounding it all in a hefty classic music background. You can tell it still bugs him.

One area I do think the movie tiptoes around too carefully is the subject of Joel’s alcoholism. It seems clear it was a major factor in the dissolution of his first three marriages. (A fourth, to Alexis Joel, continues.) Billy talks about going to rehab, but says you have to go for yourself, not for others, and they he didn’t really want to go. So it never stuck. We’re left with the open question of if he’s still a heavy drinker.

“I don't like being told what to do,” Joel says, as close to a mantra as can pinpoint the essence of the man — especially if paired with his habitual admonission to the audience at the end of every concert: “Don’t take any sh*t from anybody.”

Billy Joel is a guy who forged his own path through the glittering swamp of pop music stardom. Sometimes he undercut himself, sometimes he went left just for the sake of going left, and he’ll be the first to tell you he screwed up innumerable times. And he made some of the most enduring music of the past half-century along the way.

“And So it Goes” is a superlative chronicle of a life and career that, despite all the pain and setback, really matters.