The bandmate Billy Joel doesn’t want to talk about anymore: “Absolutely nothing”
Is there ever anyone that’s expecting anyone else when they buy tickets to a Billy Joel concert?
Better question: how would you like it if Billy Joel was putting on a show, and yet for the first few songs, all you would hear was the goddamn bass player working his way through all of the tunes before Joel even came on? You would feel a little bit cheated, right? Everyone wants to see ‘The Piano Man’ play his hits, but Joel felt that there were more than a few times when things broke off pretty badly between him and his partners.
And no, we don’t need to dig up all of the tabloid-heavy stories that people all like to hear about. The kind of stuff is water under the bridge for the most part, and even if Joel did have a few breakups that ended badly, the fact that he has come off as a pretty level-headed guy throughout everything made him look like one of the cooler rock stars to have ever been in the spotlight.
Because that’s how he presented himself. Other people might buy into the whole mystique of being a rock and roll star, but Joel was just a kid from Long Island who happened to be one of the biggest stars in the world. His job was a lot more high-profile than what everyone else was doing, and even when working with the biggest names in music, he was going to stick by his band no matter what he did.
Turning down George Martin probably wasn’t all that fun, but the idea of continuing on without the band that helped him get to the top just felt wrong. After all, there’s no one else who could have delivered those classic horn lines on tunes like ‘Only the Good Die Young’, but when looking through his past bandmates, Joel remembered that the schism between him and drummer Liberty DeVitto ended pretty badly when things turned a corner.
There wasn’t anything wrong with DeVitto by any stretch, but things were already moving in a different direction when the band reached the late 1980s. Joel needed to stretch himself a little bit more, and when he began work with people like Mick Jones on Storm Front, there was no reason to get the rest of the band involved. He wanted to make something that felt a lot more authentic to him, but DeVitto was convinced that all Joel saw were dollar signs whenever he played.
The last thing that Joel wanted to do was hurt his bandmates, but even years after DeVitto left in a huff, Joel felt that he was better off not talking about him ever again, saying, “Liberty [DeVitto] is a bitter guy. And Liberty’s reasons [for why he no longer plays in Joel’s band] are wrong. He said it was financial. It had nothing to do with money. Absolutely nothing. I’m not going to tell my side of the story.”
But if there’s one thing that DeVitto could be counted on for, it was seeing through Joel’s bullshit during his time with the band. He could always be there with a fun aside when coming up with joke titles like ‘Sodomy’ instead of ‘Honesty’, but he also knew when Joel was slipping when he came in with the first draft of ‘Movin’ Out’ that sounded note-for-note like Neil Sedaka’s ‘Laughter in the Rain’.
Leaving him behind wasn’t something that Joel ever wanted to do, but sometimes it’s the closest bandmates that have fights like brothers. And while DeVitto could hold a grudge for a while, his appearance on the documentary And So It Goes made it seem like some of that water had started flowing under the bridge again.
