Even if you think you know everything about the Piano Man, the new documentary Billy Joel: And So It Goes, is sure to shine a light on one of pop/rock's most enduring singer/songwriters--and not just through the revelations therein. Tucked in every corner of the two-part feature (the second part premieres Friday, July 25 alongside the already-available first on HBO Max) is a trove of rare, unseen or brilliantly restored material from Joel's formidable career: session outtakes, candid behind-the-scenes video, hard-to-track-down interviews, promotional films and concerts aplenty. If you've followed Joel's career through the work of his longtime catalogue label Legacy Recordings' endeavors with his discography--career-spanning box sets on CD as well as vinyl, rare live sets, even compilations he allowed to release while openly rolling his eyes at the prospect--it's a real culmination of that work. And, it's no surprise, the work for And So It Goes, and much of Billy's archival endeavors for the last few years, has been spearheaded by one of their former employees.

John Jackson, current director of the Joel archive and the owner/CEO of consulting service Jacksonic Sound and Vision, was part of the Legacy team for nearly a quarter century, parlaying the first-ever music degree in rock and roll history (from Indiana University) into a formidable career, coalescing as Legacy's vice president of A&R. If you're familiar with Jackson's career highlights--a deep familiarity with Elvis Presley's catalogue, an organizer of an annual New York-based tribute show for AC/DC's Bon Scott, even a stint as a member of The Jayhawks--you might ask yourself how Jackson got mixed up with Oyster Bay's favorite son. Unsurprisingly, it's a matter of trust...not to mention a deep and abiding love for what Joel has to offer as a performer and composer. John was recently took time with The Second Disc to discuss his current career arc, the hidden treasures of And So It Goes, and what he hopes Billy Joel fans will hear from the vaults someday.

He's Right on Time

Jackson's investment in Billy Joel's work didn't just start when he reported to Sony Music. Hailing from what he jokingly refers to as "the north North Shore" in Connecticut towns along the Long Island Sound, he came of age musically during Joel's peak as a pop music hitmaker. "You couldn't turn on the radio or MTV without seeing 'Allentown' or 'Tell Her About It' or 'Uptown Girl,'" he remembers. "It didn't get any bigger than him at that point. Going to see those guys at Giants Stadium or Madison Square Garden was peak music fandom at that point." Likewise, his interest in other genres coincided with Joel's decision to slow his pace of writing and recording new music--but he'd put together his skills of catalogue music know-how and memories of Joel's imperial phase at least once for Legacy, interviewing Joel for a mini-documentary included with a 30th anniversary box set of The Stranger released in 2008.

He formally took over directing Joel's archive in 2021--a responsibility left vacant by the 2017 passing of Joel's previous archivist and former touring manager Jeff Schock. "I [wasn't] particularly pitching," he explains, "even though I was the guy at the label for 20 years for them, which helped. It was more that they needed someone to...be the liaison between the Sony vault, Billy's personal vault and the film company." Indeed, And So It Goes directors Susan Lacy and Jessica Levin of Pentimento Productions--veterans of PBS' American Masters documentary series--had already engaged Joel's camp with their pitch and soon worked with Jackson to find the perfect archival augmentations to their new interviews with Billy, his former band, famous musicians who admire him, and even his ex-wives Elizabeth Weber (who also managed him) and Christie Brinkley. "It's a juicy story of a human being to tell people," he offers.

Of course, that story went through some narrative transformations as Joel's story kept being written: And So It Goes, at various points, climaxed with the release of Joel's surprise 2024 single "Turn the Lights Back On" (one of only two original pop songs he's penned and released since 1993) and his 10-year, 100-concert residency at Madison Square Garden, which he decided to draw to a close last year, offering a final denouement to the narrative. "And the fact that they're releasing it so soon after he's gone on this performing hiatus," Jackson adds. "You couldn't have planned it, but I think it's probably the best time to release a retrospective on him."

Lost in "Let's Remember"

Happily, some major archiving of Billy's archive had been done while Jackson served at Legacy: A Matter of Trust: The Bridge to Russia offered upgraded, re-edited footage and a documentarian perspective on Joel's tour of the USSR in 1987, and a similar process was done for Joel's 1990 concert run at Yankee Stadium. The challenge, then, was to make the rest of the footage captured at concert halls and recording studios (plus rare television interviews and other promotional pieces) pop as brilliantly as those shows. "In 2025, [when you have] HD interviews and 4K footage you're filming now, when you put archival [material] up against that stuff, it can't be from a music video source that you would find on YouTube," he said. "So in a lot of cases we were looking for original videotapes and film reels, that sort of thing. We did a ton of transfers and a ton of upgrades and up-res." And the results from part one alone are breathtaking: things not seen since the first remaster of Joel's discography in 1998, preserved on QuickTime video files embedded on the CDs(!), have been given a second look for And So It Goes.

One archival find Jackson noted with pride was filmed on a crucial day in his career. "The day he was signed to Columbia Records, June 26, 1973, they had him go into one of their writing studios in the building and record two or three songs," he explains. "We ended up with an amazing solo piano version of 'Piano Man'; you go, 'Hold on, is this one of the earliest performances of this song?' All the film was in little reels with rubber bands around them, about the size of a quarter. There were two or three of them in a little box with some yellow tape on it." Things like that, he notes, were part of Columbia's dedication to recording as much as they could with their artists. "Because of how old the label was and how seriously they took music--which sounds ridiculous, but it's true--they were capturing more things than other labels would have at the time, especially in the '70s and '80s," he said.

Another asset to And So It Goes: the late producer Phil Ramone, who had a policy of running ¼" tape on every session and would capture unexpected things during the making of seven studio albums with Joel. One such example is heard briefly in the first part of the documentary, as Ramone coaches Joel's drummer Liberty DeVitto through the samba rhythm of "Just the Way You Are." Jackson reveals the moment actually came amid an equipment malfunction:

[At] take one, [Billy's] having a problem with the Fender Rhodes that Phil had in the studio. Billy goes, "Let me just play this on the piano," and Phil's like, "We can if you want to, but I think the Rhodes is better." You can literally hear a guy fixing the piano, and the guitar players are practicing their parts, and Liberty is playing the drum part, Phil's coaching him through that sort of reverse samba thing that we all know now. This goes on for 30 minutes! Billy moves back from the piano to the Rhodes, then they start playing the song--there it is. That's it right there.

Tomorrow is Today

Ramone's material isn't the only audio revelation. The documentary gives good time to every one of Joel's albums, and Jackson was particularly excited to revisit where that solo discography began.

"We actually were able to go back to the original Cold Spring Harbor tapes," he beams, "and Bradshaw Leigh, who was one of Phil's engineers, came on as a music mixer. We were able to make versions of songs like 'You Can Make Me Free' or 'Tomorrow is Today' or even 'She's Got a Way' that are stripped back of the stuff that Artie Ripp put on them as the producer of the record. It's amazing when you hear these songs actually in the right key for the first time, because they suddenly seem human in a way that the neither the United Artists pressing nor the subsequent Columbia Records pressing do."

Jackson hopes to revisit the Cold Spring Harbor era in a further audio project, but when we spoke, he was putting the finishing touches on a planned soundtrack album to the documentary, to be released through Legacy. While details were not confirmable at the time, he was honest about outtakes that, while heard briefly in the film, are something "I can promise you will never come out": the mythic sessions for Joel's planned third Columbia album, cut with producer James William Guercio at Caribou Ranch with backing from Elton John's band. (Joel recorded several of these songs in a self-produced session that became 1976's Turnstiles.) "You have no question of why this didn't move forward," he says of the early excerpt of "Miami 2017" included in the doc. "It is not Liberty and Richie and Russell. This works for one person; that doesn't mean it's gonna work for somebody else.

"And you could tell that he didn't think this was a good idea," he continues. "The guy that everyone's comparing you to in a negative way--you're gonna use his band to make your next record?"

Sleeping with the Television On

Jackson had nothing but positive things to say about Lacey and Levin's work on And So It Goes--but he did note the challenges of filling the gaps in their five-hour narrative. "The way that the documentary was made was very open ended and nonspecific at the beginning," he explains. "They wanted to experience as much of it as possible. I go, 'You realize this guy was on TV all over the world for about 30 years, right? So where do you wanna start?' And then, of course any vault, as people who work in the catalog business know, is basically a series of Excel spreadsheets you have to have the sort of knowledge and focus to be able to translate those. Saying 'I just want everything digitized'? OK, see you in about 20 years, and also give me $1 million!"

Ultimately, he says his biggest obstacle was actually the near-limitless accessibility of fan-uploaded clips on YouTube."For fans, it's amazing," he concedes, "but for somebody that's going, 'I love this interview or this performance...Can you get me the master for this?' I've never seen this before! He's just sitting in a chair talking, and I'm supposed to figure out where it's from, who shot it, who owns it, you know? For people who are doing music archives, it's a blessing and a curse."

As robust as Sony's and Billy's archives could be, sourcing even known works could be challenging. "I think I think the biggest misconception on the filmmakers' part--and this is no fault of theirs--was that everything just exists," he says. "In many cases, the answer was 'we don't have that' or "Sony does not have that.' Something that was made into a music video and copied to death and serviced to everybody over 40 years; the original film at some point was thrown away, or misplaced, or the director never gave it back to whomever. The idea that anything you can dream up you're gonna be able to find was a bit of a learning curve for everybody."

One such example was the promotional footage shot at Sparks Saloon at Huntington, NY in 1981. The shows were filmed during a particularly relentless period in Joel's schedule: promoting 1980's Glass Houses, prepping the live album Songs in the Attic for release that year, with studio time already booked for next year's The Nylon Curtain. As such, no one who was there--chiefly Joel, his longtime live engineer Brian Ruggles, nor lighting director Steve Cohen--could recall anything about the provenance of the recording beyond the "standard def and mushy" safety copies in Sony's vaults.

"We started putting the puzzle back together, and there's a lot more [from those shows] than people thought--except that the pieces, the exact shots that they specifically wanted in the documentary, were missing," Jackson says. "Maybe the person who made the music videos was literally cutting film with a razor blade and making a video and then laid it off to a video master, gave it to the label and that was the end of their job.

"Things like that become really frustrating to everybody involved, but you can only deal with what you do have and not constantly gnash your teeth about what you don't," he continued. "For me, as a realist, I go, 'We don't have this shot, but we have this shot'...but I'm only there to provide ideas, and if they ultimately wanted to use a specific shot and then sort of try to up-res it or do something with the picture, that was their prerogative." (Ultimately, the restoration did wonders for all the material, which often presents songs in live montages to incredible effect. Jackson concurred after watching the film at the Tribeca Film Festival in June. "It literally blew me away how good the art the archival stuff looks, after all of the hardworking folks on the film got through with it," he marveled.)

The Night is Still Young

Jackson also appreciated some of the lesser-discussed personal revelations in And So It Goes, like Billy's late-in-life reconciliation with his estranged father and his family's escape to America from the Nazis during World War II. (He astutely connected the family's passage through Cuba during that time to Joel's appearance at the close of the three-day Havana Jam in 1979.) With the documentary done, however, he's excitedly looking forward to the potential of whatever Joel's archive might be needed for next.

"YouTube is the most obvious next step for all of this stuff" that 's been restored, he said, from music videos to promotional footage. "There's a multi-prong YouTube strategy, starting with upgrading everything that has existed already, replacing audio or picture where we can. Then going through all the longforms: Live At Shea Stadium or Billy Joel Tonight...making sure all of that stuff is all there as good as it can be. And then the final leg is 'What's the new stuff?'"

Jackson promises that fans will not have to wait long to hear Live from Long Island, the 1982 concert video released as a triple album in Joel's last vinyl reissue box set, on its own. He also expressed hope for a revisiting of the concerts that made up Songs in the Attic, an LP comprised of lesser known singles and deep cuts but made of sets that featured all the hits. "Some of us will be lobbying for certain things to actually happen, but you are dealing with the reality of expenses and where is it gonna go and all that good stuff," he says. "There's certainly no immediate end to what's there."

When the Truth is Told

Through it all, though, Jackson is proud to keep the faith for Billy Joel, and thinks And So It Goes will remind viewers new and old of what makes the singer/songwriter "our George Gershwin of the second half of the 20th century" with a deep catalogue that "is, I think, head and shoulders above almost all of his peers."

"I went to see him and Stevie Nicks in Philly a couple years ago," he remembers--part of a continuum of shows that's included the night Paul McCartney dropped in to his closing performance at Shea Stadium in 2008 and even some post-COVID rehearsals at Madison Square Garden. "A good third of the audience was middle-aged and older women wearing shawls and draped lace outfits. These aren't Billy Joel fans! [But] they were having the best time in the room...That's where his heart is, in performance of all of the material."

And while Joel's battle with normal pressure hydrocephalus is keeping him off the road at present, And So It Goes offers no finality for the man who's had us feeling alright for decades. "You don't come away thinking this is [his] whole life," Jackson summarizes. "This is one version of a story that is still continuing."