Townsman Al passed along a New York Post story of former Billy Joel drummer Liberty DeVitto bringing suit against Joel for unpaid royalties. This is a cautionary tale for hard-working drummers who fuel the massive hits of their bandleaders.
“Everybody always assumes that you make a lot of money because you worked with Billy Joel,” DeVitto told The Post. “It didn’t happen that way.”
Although I can’t help but agree with the sentiment that kicked off Al’s message to our basement dwellers (ie, “I’m on the side of Liberty…”), for the following contribution to Joel’s recordings alone I am tempted to root against DeVitto in his suit against his former employer.
DeVitto doesn’t have a songwriter’s credit but insists he was a major part of a collaborative creative process between Joel and his musicians.
“If Billy sang ‘Only the Good Die Young’ like he wanted to, it would have been a reggae song,” DeVitto said.
See, I hate “Only the Good Die Young” as a song as much as I hate Joel as an artist. Without DeVitto’s musical guidance perhaps that song would have been buried as a deep cut that Joel haters would never have had to hear, and perhaps Joel’s career as a hitmaker would have petered out shortly after The Stranger.
In short, perhaps no one wins, but that DeVitto was a fine drummer on all those hideous hits!
