He admitted that his father “didn’t teach me much” about how to play piano.
Billy Joel is digging deep into his complicated relationship with his late father, Howard Joel.
The “Just The Way You Are” singer, 76, recalled an instance in which he was knocked unconscious by his father after putting his own spin on Beethoven’s “Moonlight Sonata” during piano practice as a child. Howard, an accomplished classical pianist in his own right, required that all songs be performed as they were originally written.
“My father, Howard, he never really showed Bill kindness and compassion and understanding towards his talent,” Billy’s sister, Judy Molinari, explained in the first installment of the singer’s two-part HBO documentary Billy Joel: And So It Goes. “He didn’t really see it. And with Howard, classical music, it had to be strict by the book. Exactly how, say, Beethoven wrote it.”
And there were serious consequences for messing with the source material.
“One thing I remember, I was supposed to be playing the ‘Moonlight Sonata,'” Billy said. “Must have been about eight years old. And rock & roll was around at that point.”
So, taking a page from the great rockers at the time, Billy played a more upbeat, raucous rendition of the classical tune instead of its traditional somber tone. The move caught the attention of his father, who was less than impressed with his take on the track.
“He came down the stairs. Bam! I got whacked,” Billy recalled. “And I got whacked so hard, he knocked me out. I was unconscious for like a minute. And I remember waking up going, ‘Well, that got his attention.’ And that was my memory of his piano lessons. So, he didn’t teach me much.”
The five-time Grammy winner confessed that he never saw his parents ever having fun together during his childhood.
“I saw stuff with them when I was a little kid that was not, not good,” he said. “Things were very tense between them.”
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He added that he and Judi were actually a little “relieved” when their parents eventually got divorced in the ’50s “because then there wasn’t gonna be any more arguments or fighting or any of that scary stuff” moving forward.
As a result, Billy noted that he never really got to know his dad — who moved back to Europe following the divorce — and instead looked up to his maternal grandfather, Philip Nyman. “He was the dominant male figure in my life,” he said. “Brilliant man. He was a big influence on me.”
Billy wouldn’t reconnect with his father until he was in his early 20s, when he found Howard living in Vienna. The pair would later share the stage together during Billy’s 1995 concert in Nuremberg.
The first installment of Billy Joel: And So It Goes is streaming now on HBO Max, with the second episode set to drop on July 25.
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