Billy Joel The Biography


Mark Bego








This biography should be titled “Billy Joel The Biography according to Liberty DeVitto. I get that Mr. Bego had no access to the famed Mr. Joel but the reliance on the words of Mr. DeVitto was just kind of silly, after a while.  


This might have been a better book if Bego had simply written about Liberty DeVitto’s life with Billy Joel. Sure he has a ton of Joel stories but it was overkill. I’m not certain why so much of the book was based on the tales of Liberty DeVitto but there we have it. Seems every second page there is DeVitto’s name. You can’t escape it.


Not related to anything Liberty DeVitto was the Lemon Pledge suicide attempt. There are so many jokes but suicide is a serious thing so I’ll refrain. This event was one of the more important things to happen in Billy Joel’s life. Fortunately for the world, furniture polish is not a deadly poison. 21-year-old Billy Joel checked himself into a hospital and changed his life.


I know a woman who, while she likes Billy Joel, has a problem with one of his songs. Joel has seen the issue and is confused by it. The song in question is “She’s Always A Woman''. Joel doesn’t understand the confusion because as he sees it the song is a positive look at his ex-wife. I never much cared for the song so I don’t have an opinion but Joel has given up trying to explain it all. I don’t blame him.


I learned of the horrible record deal Billy Joel had managed to get himself into and it took a decade to shake that leach. Joel had signed a deal that would pay the company something on the order of  25 cents per album sold. This lasted for 10 Billy Joel albums making this fellow Artie Ripp rich in the process. Yet another story of a pop artist who got screwed by a record company. They are a dime a dozen, aren’t they? Ripp was attached to Joel for what must have seemed like a lifetime to Joel.


We take a brief foray into the world of Karen Carpenter. Why? I’m not entirely certain other than to fill up space. That’s what I see this book as: just taking up space.

 

I didn’t enjoy this biography. It could have been so very different had Mr. Bego looked for more quotes and stories from folks other than Liberty DeVito. Sure other members of the band were quoted as was Mr. Joel himself; it's just that there was no escape from DeVitto. But I didn’t like the book.


I’m not a fan of Mark Bego’s writing. It's not my habit to follow folks writing biographies not in the way you might follow and look out for the works of the likes of V. C. Andrews, not that I have followed or even read V.C. Andrews. But I have read another book by Mark Bego and it turns out that I didn’t care for that book either. So there is that. 


Well, on the plus side Mark Bego did force me to pull out a dictionary and a thesaurus. To be honest, this is something that has just never happened with past pop music biographies. Most don’t demand a dictionary so congratulations to Mr. Mark Bego for shoehorning “gimcracks” into a Billy Joel biography, even if it was indirectly.  


You’ll notice I didn’t try to cram gimcracks into this review. I could have written something like: Mark Bego has written a gimcrack book.


I’m sorry to say I’m not sure even Billy Joel fans will truly enjoy the book. I really wish I could say otherwise but it boils down to Mr. Bego’s style of writing. I also didn’t think there was much that I couldn’t have learned about Billy Joel through a Google search and it wouldn’t have the tiresome prose.


If you should read it and you are a Billy Joel fan you might have some fun learning new and nifty things about Billy Joel, according to Liberty DeVitto and it’s a quick read. So that’s a good thing.


I do hope Mr. Bego got paid well for the book though.

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