(Credits: Far Out / YouTube Still)
Wed 21 January 2026 4:00, UK
In the late 1980s, 20 years into his career and approaching 40, Billy Joel was selling as many records as ever, while his personal life was the envy of millions, as he’d literally married the ‘Uptown Girl’ from his own music video, supermodel Christie Brinkley, with whom he now had a baby daughter.
Unfortunately for him, there were other circumstances from the past still raining on his parade, specifically, a long string of bad business deals that had cost him millions of dollars and the rights to many of his classic songs.
“After I signed everything away, my ex-wife [and former manager, Elizabeth Weber Small] got half of anything else,” Joel told the Baltimore Sun in 1990, “And nine years of mismanagement dug me deeper into the hole. I’m not a businessman, as you can tell. I’m a piano man. But fortunately, I can keep playing the piano long after these people have outlived their usefulness.”
Joel didn’t deny the bitterness he felt at the time, but he claimed it had less to do with the money itself and more to do with the fact that he’d have to spend far more time touring to make up for it, and would thus have to miss out on important time with his family; however, the silver lining to this predicament was that he was forced to think outside the box and consider more unusual touring opportunities.
The most famous example of this came in 1987, when Joel became one of the first prominent Western rock musicians to do a proper tour of the USSR, a daring move that actually did more financial harm than good, as the disastrous state of the Russian economy forced him to essentially fund every element of his own tour, yet he came away from the experience with anything but regrets.
“It was the highlight of my life as a musician,” Joel said. “I never really bought into [McCarthyism], but to see [the Soviet Union] with my own eyes was very gratifying. To me, the Cold War ended in 1987. I wasn’t going to bomb them, and they weren’t going to bomb me.”
The musician played to huge crowds in Moscow and Leningrad in the summer of ‘87, but the sound systems were lacklustre, and the audiences were often unsure how to act, as policing of the events was strict in those final days of the old Soviet regime. The concerts were broadcast live on Russian radio, and a live double album compiled from the shows, called Kohuept, was released a few months later, somewhat to Joel’s dismay.
It was the eye-opening cultural experience, and the fact that his wife and daughter joined him on the trip, that made the Russian tour rewarding for him, as the actual nuts and bolts of putting on the show were less inspiring.
“They asked me when I was leaving how they could get more artists to come there,” Joel recalled, “And I said, ‘You really have got to come up with some more quid, Johnny. It’s not like we want to rip you off or exploit you because we’re capitalists, it’s just that we don’t want to get punished for coming here’. The amount of money they offer a Western artist isn’t enough to cover half of the roadies’ wages for a day… Breaking even would be nice.”
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