It's still rock 'n' roll to him

For his first solo tour in nearly seven years, Billy Joel will finally unearth many of his less familiar tunes. 'We have a pretty rich catalog of stuff that wasn't hits Actually, those are the songs I like better.'

BY GLENN GAMBOA | STAFF CORRESPONDENT

January 22, 2006

SUNRISE, Fla. - It's (nearly) 9 o'clock on a Saturday. The regular crowd shuffles in.

Thousands of Billy Joel fans - many of whom have seen the Piano Man play numerous times - pack the BankAtlantic Center here in the suburbs of Fort Lauderdale for opening night of his latest tour, ready for him to play them a memory or two, ready to "La lala deedee da, lala deedee da, da dum."

Joel, however, has a different idea. This time out, he wants to make some new memories, for his fans and for himself.

"I don't know if people are going to remember some of these songs we're going to do tonight," Joel says, seated at the piano in the middle of his spare, circular stage. "Hell, I don't know if we're going to remember some of these."

But that's what excites Joel about his current tour, which stops at Madison Square Garden for a record-breaking 11 concerts starting Monday night. It is all about trying something new. It's his first tour as a solo headliner in nearly seven years, the first since becoming half of the biggest-grossing musical duo of all time with Elton John. It's his first tour since marrying Katie Lee, who will host Bravo's "Top Chef" in March. And it's his first since he completed a highly publicized stint in rehab last year.

"If we're going to keep ourselves interested, we can't play for the reviewer and we can't just play for the audience," Joel says, calling from his base in Miami Beach. "In the end, you have to just play for yourself."

Songs in the attic

And what interests him most are songs that he has rediscovered from his own catalog, songs he hasn't played live in years, if at all. "We rehearsed a lot of songs that were album tracks, rather than just rehearsing the songs that were the obvious hits," Joel says. "What we wanted to do was throw stuff out there and see how we feel playing it, how the audience responds to it and what works. We want it to be a show the audience likes as well. We don't want the audience to be walking out of there saying, 'I didn't know anything he did.'"

Most veteran artists rehearse between 30 and 40 songs for a headlining tour. Joel and his band have about 60 songs to choose from each night - including everything from monster hits such as "Movin' Out" to signature songs such as "Scenes From an Italian Restaurant" to obscurities such as "Where's the Orchestra?," a 24-year-old album track that makes its live debut on this tour.

"I've always wanted to do this song, but I never have," Joel tells the Sunrise crowd before unveiling "Where's the Orchestra?" "Tonight, I'm going to do it."

That's the approach the 56-year-old Joel brings to most things these days.

His "wasted effort"

It's been 13 years since he announced his retirement from what he called the rock music rat race - the worries about how radio would receive his records, about how many copies he would sell the first week, about how long he would have to be away from home because he was touring. "I thought that on 'River of Dreams' I had made a quantum leap in my lyric writing," he says. "But it had only one successful single and it kind of got written off after that. I thought, 'Where do you go from there?' Radio was not very receptive to it. I was tired of banging my head against a wall. It seemed like wasted effort."

After "River of Dreams," Joel has continued touring on a limited basis, but he turned most of his creative juices toward writing classical music, a lengthy process that turned into "Fantasies and Delusions" - a collection of arias, waltzes, suites and other instrumentals he released in 2001.

Since then, Joel continues to write music for himself. "I'm writing music that could become classical pieces or songs or a movie soundtrack or a Broadway show," he says. "I don't really know where it will all end up, and that's not really important to me right now because writing is its own gratification."

Tony Bennett duet

Joel did reveal that he has completed a pop song - which could be his first new nonclassical material since 1993. However, he doesn't plan to sing it.

"I wrote a song recently with Tony Bennett in mind," Joel says, adding that he intends to bring the song to Bennett when they work on a duet together for Bennett's upcoming "Duets" project. "It's like a standard that Tony Bennett would have done in the '50s or '60s. Now I don't know if he's going to want to record it, but to me it's so obviously a Tony Bennett type of song that I don't feel compelled to record [it] as a Billy Joel song. I think it should live in Tony Bennett's world."

Joel's decision to stop recording new material remains a brave one, but also one that hasn't seemed to hurt his popularity or his touring. While most acts, even veterans such as the Rolling Stones, rely on new albums to help boost interest in their tours, Joel hasn't needed them.

"I don't need to see him do any new stuff," says Matthew Licht, who says he has seen Joel eight times, minutes before Joel takes the stage in Sunrise. "He does classic music and he's a great performer."