His Music Can Be Lyrical Without Words
So what’s Billy Joel up to these days now that he’s not writing pop songs?
Penning instrumental piano pieces like “Soliloquy,” based on his experience as a divorced father (of Alexa, from his former marriage to Christie Brinkley).
“I had this terrible feeling every time my daughter would leave, and I started to write a four-note motif based on the words, ‘We say good-bye,”’ Joel told The New York Times. “The music was so evocative and expressive that I decided I didn’t need words.”
Joel, who recently released his “Greatest Hits, Volume III,” hasn’t finished a pop tune in four years - and doesn’t plan to start again anytime soon.
“I’m not saying I won’t write songs anymore ever,” he said. “It’s just for the foreseeable future.”
Loose talk
Aerosmith’s Steven Tyler, on the band’s lurid past (in USA Today): “We were drug addicts and alcoholics. I snorted my house, my plane, my Porsche … stuffing coke up your nose till it bleeds is an acquired taste.”
Suppose they’re starting to get a little gray?
Gunnar and Matthew Nelson turn 30 today.
So, Mick’s first roach came from a Beatle
In a new authorized biography, “Many Years From Now,” Paul McCartney reveals that Bob Dylan turned him on to marijuana in a New York hotel room in 1964, and the ex-Beatle introduced Mick Jagger to the weed two years later. “Funny, because everyone would have thought it would have been the other way around,” McCartney says.
Rosebud? So what was he, Citizen Cocaine?
San Francisco officials are having second thoughts about accepting a 7-foot metal replica of Jerry Garcia’s guitar, “Rosebud,” for the city’s public sculpture garden. Several citizens have written and called to protest honoring a man who symbolized the ‘60s drug culture.
Guess they’ll be plowing the Marshall Field’s
Stung by lagging ticket sales and a lack of corporate support, the organizers of Farm Aid ‘97 announced that the Oct. 4 fund-raising concert - featuring John Mellencamp, Neil Young, John Fogerty, the Dave Matthews Band and Willie Nelson - has been moved from the Dallas Cowboys’ Texas Stadium to a Chicago suburb.
What really got to him was the eardrum solo
A French court has ruled that the organizer of a U2 concert in Marseille four years ago must pay $34,000 to a man who doctors say lost his hearing at the show. The court said the promoter was responsible for the man’s hearing loss even though he sneaked around a security fence to get nearer to the Irish band’s giant speakers.
Didn’t Milkbone tour with Snoop Doggy Dogg?
And elsewhere in the legal world, rapper-producer Dr. Dre has been slapped with a breach-of-contract suit for allegedly stealing a portion of a song from the group Milkbone and using it on an album he produced for another artist, Scarface.
, DataTimes ILLUSTRATION: 2 photos
The following fields overflowed: CREDIT = Compiled by staff writer Rick Bonino