Getting Burned
One of the hard lessons of rock and roll is that the music business is about both the music and the business, and if you don’t pay attention to each of them, you’re gonna get burned.
The Rolling Stones learned that lesson when their manager Allen Klein appropriated control of the publishing rights to their songs and made himself a fortune off their best selling album Hot Rocks.
Van Morrison learned it when one of his first recordings as a solo artist, “Brown Eyed Girl,” became a big hit, and he found himself having to call the record company and beg them for money to live on because he was broke.
Justin Hayward of The Moody Blues learned it after signing away the rights to all his songs for the next eight years, cutting himself off from earning anything for his music during the heyday of the band.
Tom Petty learned it while he was working on his third album with The Heartbreakers. He also had signed away the rights to his songs and only won them back after threatening not to finish his next record and quit the music business entirely.
And Billy Joel learned it when Frank Weber, a manager he had trusted and defended vehemently, turned out to have been fleecing him for years.
Plenty of people around Billy had been noticing that something wasn’t right. According to his biography, “Billy’s wife at the time, Christie Brinkley, said to him, ‘Billy, I don’t get it. Why is Frank going on a private jet? Isn’t it the rock star who’s supposed to be on the private jet? We always fly commercial, and he’s always on a private jet.’”
That biography by Fred Schruers provided this list of the things that came to light when the I. R. S. investigated Weber’s financial dealings.
“The eighty-three-page filing alleged that $2.5 million in loans had been given without Joel’s knowledge or authorization to various horse-breeding and real-estate partnerships and other businesses controlled by Weber; that Weber had lost more than $10 million of Joel’s money in investments of a highly speculative nature, many of which involved Weber’s own companies; that Weber had double-billed Joel for his music videos, cheated him on expenses including travel and accounting fees, and mortgaged Joel’s copyrights for $15 million without disclosing it on Joel’s financial statements; and that Weber caused phony financial statements to be issued to Joel, which painted an unrealistic picture of his finances.”
It was a tough time for Billy. But he’s fighter, and he fought back with his music.
His biographer wrote, “What made Billy the angriest about the legal wrangling was that he knew he would have to rebuild the fortune that Frank had squandered, which meant month upon month on the road, away from [his daughter] Alexa, who was nearing her fourth birthday.”
And as these events all took place as Billy was working on his 1989 album Storm Front, the fury that he felt found an outlet in his music.
“‘He got a lot of good songs out of it’ says Christie. ‘I think everything he did after that started with “I’ll prove [Frank] wrong, and I’ll earn it back, and I’ll make it happen,” and we’re all the beneficiaries, with all the great music he’s made since then.’”