What caused Billy Joel’s Moscow meltdown?
If there’s one thing we know from listening to rock stars, touring is hard. We’ve all been brought up on the illusion of the glamorous, glorious ‘life on the road’. A life where stretch limos powered by liquid cocaine ferry the hottest rock stars in the world to sold-out enormodomes packed with adoring fans from Manchester to Moscow. However, even for musicians at that stadium slaying level, touring is no walk in the park. It’s still an itinerant life of buses, hotels and, for Billy Joel, the occasional hostile communist country opening its doors to American pop culture for the very first time.
Cast your mind back to the far-flung days of the 1980s. A time when America, for all its myriad of flaws, moral deficiencies and barefaced attempts to let a pandemic murder its own people, was at least not actively opening itself up for the Russian government to enter. In fact, the US and Russian governments were trying to destabilise each other, rather than the entire rest of the world, if you can Adam and Eve it. By 1987, though, the Cold War was beginning to thaw at the hands of Mikhail Gorbachev.
Gorbachev was only four years older than Elvis Presley, and had been a fan of the King of Rock ‘n’ Roll’s work from his 1950s heyday. This exposure to American pop culture influenced him greatly, as did his knowledge of its appeal to the Russian public at large. This was, after all, a country so desperate for contraband Beatles records that illegal imports were smuggled into the country, imprinted on stolen X-ray emulsion sheets and sold to a thriving black market.
When Gorbachev took over as leader of the Communist Party in 1985, he began a process since reffered to as glasnost (openness) and perestroika (restructuring). The idea was to move the relationship between Russia and the US towards a more prosperous future. One wonders what he would think of what’s happening today.
Part of his vision was a series of concerts in the then-USSR by American pop and rock acts of the day. In 1987, the likes of James Taylor, Santana and the Doobie Brothers had played smaller sets behind the ‘Iron Curtain’, but the time had come for a full-on stadium rock show.
So, why was Billy Joel chosen by the USSR?
After Stevie Wonder and Bruce Springsteen both turned down the opportunity, the ‘Piano Man’ accepted the offer to tour the then-USSR, starting with two nights in Moscow. He took the opportunity for cultural exchange very seriously, which is just as well, because he sure wasn’t doing it for the money. Despite being a political operation, it soon became clear that Joel would have to fund the trip out of his own pocket to the tune of two and a half million dollars. The fee he’d be getting for the gig wouldn’t even cover half the costs. He was, after all, being paid in roubles.
Billy Joel was sold on the project though. He could afford it and thought it was the right thing to do so. Little did he know that this was only the beginning of his woes. During the first couple of days in Russia everything was hunky-dory. For a country with a reputation of being emotionless, Russian hospitality is among the best in the world, so Joel was welcomed with open arms and even more open vodka bottles.
Joel threw himself into it, drinking in the atmosphere (and the booze), and even playing an impromptu warm-up gig at a Georgian opera house. Unfortunately, by the night before his first gig at the Olympijskiy Stadium in Moscow, Joel’s voice was thoroughly shot, and it hurt to talk, let alone sing. Thanks to some last-minute medical assistance (including, possibly, the only incident of medically prescribed TicTacs in existence), he was well enough to play the show.
And so he played a high-octane set to a bunch of Communist Party functionaries, given tickets as perks, who took to it with all the energy and enthusiasm of an open casket funeral. They barely lasted a few songs and when they left, their seats were taken by people who, y’know, wanted to be there.
This still left the shaken Joel having to essentially teach an audience of 20,000 people how to enjoy a rock show. Which led to the surreal sight of him taking a wireless microphone into the crowd, leading individual members out of their seats and down to the front of the stage. By the end of the show, it felt like an actual rock concert, with Joel telling The Today Show via satellite the following morning, “the crowd looked like it could have been Detroit, it could have been Philadelphia, it was the same thing.”
If the story ended there, this would be a heartwarming story of cultural exchange, of victory snatched from the jaws of defeat. Unfortunately, that show was night one. Of six. The second night saw Joel, stretched to breaking point by his precarious vocals and the mounting pressure of the gigs, finally snap. It was all going so well too. Joel had decided to build the selist around up-tempo rockers, and the crowd who, thanks to Joel, now knew they could dance around and cut loose, were doing just that with aplomb.
So much so that the lighting crew kept training spotlights on the crowd, so the documentary crew following the shows could get footage of them. Unfortunately, the crowd were not used to this, and every time the light panned on them, like a deer in headlights, they would freeze. In between lyrics, Joel started bellowing at his crew to stop doing that.
When they wouldn’t, he gripped his Yamaha piano and, in a feat of strength befitting his days as a Golden Gloves boxer, flipped it straight over and brought it crashing to the ground. His crew were perplexed. His band terrified. The mild-mannered Joel had seemingly gone completely spare, and the audience was eating it up, assuming it was all part of the show and not a grown man in thrall to a dangerously violent temper tantrum.
They kept playing as he took out his frustrations further on a microphone stand, all the while singing the song they were playing, ever the pro. After a moment offstage to cool down, Joel managed to finish the concert sans piano, but the damage had been done, and it was not just to the poor Joanna.
The headlines were merciless
‘Billy Joel Has A Tantrum’ read an Associated Press story picked up by The New York Times. Joel himself had to apologise for his “real prima donna act” in Moscow, and one can only imagine the scrutiny he was under for the rest of his run from his hosts. Fortunately, its was only upwards after that little stunt, and the remaining shows were such joyous fun that by the final night in Leningrad, Joel was crowdsurfing while draped in the American and Russian flags.
Despite his best efforts on that second night in Moscow, Billy Joel wasn’t the last American rock concert played on Soviet Soil. In 1989, the Moscow Music Peace Festival hosted the likes of Bon Jovi and Mötley Crüe. In 1991, one of the most famous concerts in the history of heavy metal was played when Metallica headlined a Moscow airfield in front of a reported 1.6 million people.
To be clear, pop music wasn’t changing the world. The state of it at the moment is living proof of that. Though, for a brief moment, it sure as hell felt like it, and we have Billy Joel going mental on a piano to thank for it.
