Billy Joel

by Fred Schruers

  Year in and year out, Billy Joel doesn’t do “pathetic,” doesn’t do “needy,” doesn’t do “poor me.” What some might see as a shortfall in his capacity for intimacy is recognized by longtime friends as an unwillingness to show vulnerability. The more he’s the center of attention—say, in a backstage production office a couple hours before a show—the more he seems to have one foot out the door. But what verges on introversion is more than compensated for by an often-wicked sense of humor that’s sharpest when he’s being self-deprecating. There was enough solitude and self-determination in his upbringing to set him up to, as the expression goes, row his own little boat.

  Those stalwart companions who might lay claim to being inside his psyche are the first to warn you of the complexities within. His is anything but an unexamined life, but much of what he’s discovered remains private. Still, when he talks about his boyhood years, he isn’t averse to using his considerable self-awareness that developed early: “As a teen, I had absolutely no fear of authority types. Even though I was looking for a father figure—which I found in my mother’s father, Philip, or in men such as our chorus teacher, Chuck Arnold—I probably came off as a little insular, a bit remote.

  “I was developing a sense of how I might make my way in the world. Recently, someone wrote me a letter about one of their kids, who’d been diagnosed with autism, but then it turned out the kid was just extremely shy. I wrote back and said, ‘Listen, believe it or not, I was excruciatingly shy when I was a kid, up until my midteens. That’s when I realized that I could make my piano talk for me. The piano spoke what I was feeling.’

  “Part of why I looked for answers in boxing was practical: I used to get brutally picked on when I went to piano lessons. And I got tired of it.” If he was to be an aesthete, like his grandfather Philip Nyman, he could also emulate Philip’s more masculine pursuits as a boxer. “Also, not only was I a smaller kid, but my piano teacher happened to teach ballet as well, so when I walked down the street with my piano books, I’d get these kids shouting, ‘Billy, where’s your tutu?’ They’d knock the books out of my hand and smack me around. So I took up boxing, and I got pretty good at it.” Of his twenty-six bouts, Billy lost two by judges’ decisions, two more by knockouts, and had twenty-two wins. “And one day, when the usual pack of teenagers up the block taunted me on the street again, I picked the biggest guy in the bunch, and I decked him.

  “It felt great. I remember looking around, just eyeballing each of them as if to say, All right, does anybody else want some of that? After that, everybody left me alone. Being able to defend myself gave me a certain level of self-confidence, but I was never really a violent guy.

  “After all, there’s always somebody tougher and stronger, no matter how good a boxer you are. The last fight I had, one that was actually in a ring, was with a guy who was a terrible boxer. He had no defense, no footwork. There was no science at all to what he was doing. He just had a head made out of rubber. I hit him and I hit him and I hit him, but he wouldn’t go down. I was outscoring him on points like crazy. Finally, when I got close enough, he tagged me. He broke my nose, and I went down. That’s when I realized that no matter how ‘bad’ I think I am, there’s always somebody badder.”

  Part of the distinctiveness of Billy’s features is the slightly askew and bulbous nose, the outcome of an amateur resetting of smashed cartilage by a fellow pugilist. Add in his slightly snaggle-toothed incisors (he’d get them realigned decades later), he might have fit in with ’40s cinema’s Dead End Kids.

  “Boxing got me in the best shape of my life, and it required much the same discipline as piano playing—you have to put in the work. But I also think you have to have a killer instinct to excel at it, and I didn’t have that. I just wanted to take care of myself.

  “I can’t even watch the sport anymore. I used to be a boxing fan, and now I can’t stand the violence of it. Because I know what it feels like to get hit.

  “But I also know what it takes to get back up.”

  CHAPTER 2

  PIANO KID

  Whatever his shortcomings as a father, Howard Joel passed on his love of music to Billy at an early age: “We had a piano in the house. It wasn’t a grand piano, or even a good one—it was an old, beat-up Lester upright, and it was terrible. Every fifth key didn’t work. But I would go over and ‘play’ it every day when I was a little boy. I’d go, bang, bang, bang, here’s the thunder, bing, bing, bing, here’s the lightning. And after a few years of that, my mother finally said, ‘Enough of the storm song. You’re gonna have to learn how to play right,’ and she dragged me down the street to the piano teacher, Frances Neiman.” Twelve years of childhood piano lessons followed, sometimes more at his mother’s urgings than due to Billy’s eagerness. “Sometimes felt like drudgery, but I’ve continued to rely on that training every day of my musical life.

  “After a few lessons with Miss Frances, I was able to pick out pieces by ear, and that’s when I truly fell in love with music. It wasn’t so much from reading the flyspecks in the Mozart sheet music; it was when I discovered that I could figure that stuff out in my head. I love this, I thought. There was wizardry to it, a kind of sorcery to the manipulation of sound. I was just a little guy, and I wasn’t a real social butterfly, but wherever I went, if there was a piano, I’d wander over and play it. And it enchanted people. As I got older and started liking girls, I realized that the piano was better than a sports car. I’d be playing and I’d look up, and, Wow, there’s a girl! And I’d play a little more, and, Man, there’s another girl! I thought, This is great.”

  Like many kids in the late 1950s, Billy was fascinated by Elvis, and his first experience trying to channel him would prove a revelation. “I was in third grade and I did my best Elvis impersonation—I performed ‘Hound Dog’ as the scheduled entertainment at lunch break—and the girls in the fourth grade started screaming. That’s when I recognized that there’s a lot of power in this music stuff. I’m in third grade, and the fourth-grade girls are screaming? And I wasn’t even into girls at that point. That routine ended when I got pulled off the stage for wiggling my hips. You don’t even have hips in the third grade, but the teachers were all in an uproar. I thought it was the coolest thing in the world. Man, did I make trouble or what? That must be a cool thing to do. Rock star, hmmm.”

  IF MODERN PARENTS are obsessed with keeping their children off various screens, Billy says his parents had little need to worry. “Our television broke when I was about two years old”—many Levitt houses had an Admiral twelve-inch set built into the staircase—“and after that I didn’t have a TV again until I was in my twenties. I read a lot and listened to the radio, and my mom would play albums on our little Magnavox record player. We didn’t have that large a musical library, but we had all sorts of genres—Broadway, classical, jazz, country, folk, opera, rock, and whatever records my father brought home. There was also the pop music on the radio from New York City—all kinds of music, and I liked all of it.”

  Billy would not be the first classically trained kid to embrace rock and roll as his music of first resort: “By the time of the British Invasion, I’d be defining my musical personality against rather than within classical music. You know, ‘Roll over Beethoven, and tell Tchaikovsky the news.’ ”

  In 1966 John Lennon set off a controversy by mildly observing that the Beatles were more popular than Jesus. But what many people don’t remember is that, years before, he had said that “Elvis was bigger than religion in [John’s] mind.” At the time, he was apologizing for ceding some of his loyalty from Elvis to Little Richard because of the latter’s new single, “Tutti Frutti.” Again, in a typical aspiring rocker’s experience, Billy was in part guided into black music by young Brits who, underneath their pop radio hits, made albums that were suffused with their love of American rhythm and blues, including Chuck Berry songs (especially Johnnie Johnson’s revved-up piano) and Isley Brothers tunes like “Twist and Shout.”

  In October 1963, at age
fourteen, Billy got a taste of what soul music was really about, up close, when he ventured into Harlem with a friend and saw James Brown play the Apollo. A famous live recording—financed by “The Godfather of Soul” himself when his label showed reluctance to do so—came out of one of these Apollo shows. “His footwork alone was amazing,” Billy recalls, “but that great soulful rasp, all his the ferocity mixed with the precision of the band, and the unabashed showmanship of the man made an indelible impression on me.”

  A more universal cultural moment came with the assassination of John F. Kennedy the following month. Like anyone from his generation, Billy has his own personal recollection of the event. “What I strongly recall is walking down to the corner drugstore, which rented TVs, and bringing one home on the cart that was included in the deal, tugging it down Meeting Lane on four wobbly wheels. Not long after we turned it on in our living room, we saw Jack Ruby shoot Lee Harvey Oswald.”

  Many years later the moment was still reverberating for Billy, as listeners would hear in his bellowing summation halfway through 1989’s “We Didn’t Start the Fire”: “J.F.K. blown away, what else do I have to say?”

  Contemporaneous with the tragic intrusion of the president’s assassination was the ongoing influence of pop music on the radio—Ray Charles doing “Busted,” the Kingsmen grinding through “Louie Louie,” the Beach Boys displaying California’s earnest naïveté with “Be True to Your School,” Dion DiMucci epitomizing the hitter-with-heart with “Donna the Prima Donna” and “Drip Drop,” and the Ronettes doing “Be My Baby” as Phil Spector’s seemingly unstoppable rise neared its peak.

  By the time the British Invasion fully kicked in the following year, says Billy, “thanks to that magical era in radio, even beyond Elvis, what was really striking to a fledgling rock piano player like me was how Little Richard had completely upset the convention that the piano was a secondary, static element in rock music. And you turn and look at Jerry Lee Lewis and Fats Domino, it was plain to see that the insurgent energy of rock was well represented by guys pounding on keyboards. After all, it’s a percussion instrument—you strike the keys, literally pounding the instrument. It was meant to be played hard, like the drums.”

  In addition to those piano gods, Ray Charles, with his statelier style that mingled soul with country, piled up hits like “Georgia on My Mind” and “Hit the Road Jack” (1960), “I Can’t Stop Loving You” (1962), and “Crying Time” (1965), and served as another touchstone for Billy: “From the moment I first heard him, I wanted to sing like him. There’s something going on inside the larynx with Ray that creates almost the sound you’d get out of a speaker if you hooked up a Leslie Tone cabinet to a Hammond B3 organ: he’s got a slow swirl that sounds growly but always so musical.” As Billy would write in Rolling Stone’s coverage of the 100 Greatest Singers (where Ray was second only to Aretha Franklin), Ray’s was a unique voice in popular music: “It was clear he was getting such a kick out of what he was doing, and his joy was infectious.… He took the yelp, the whoop, the grunt, the groan and made them music.” Billy adds, “Ray also produced all these different sounds—huh-hey!—as if he were tickled by the noise he’d just made. He would sing a phrase and respond to himself with an oh, all right!

  “The soulfulness that shone through him was harder to place. I’d sit there just marveling, How the hell does he do that? Is it because he beat himself up so much? Was it the black experience, coming up in the Jim Crow South? Was it the church thing? Was it the drugs? Hard living? I just thought, Man, I want to sound like that.”

  Ray Charles was the antithesis of life in Levittown, and listening to his 1962 LP Modern Sounds in Country and Western Music, Billy heard “a black man giving you the whitest possible music in the blackest possible way, while all hell is breaking loose in the civil rights movement. When he sang, ‘You Don’t Know Me,’ I thought, He isn’t just singing the lyrics. He’s saying, ‘You don’t know me, get to know me.’… He shows you his humanity. The spontaneity is evident.” The eventual experience of working with Ray (in 1986) was “an evangelical event. He was the minister and I was the congregation,” he wrote.

  “To think that he and I would one day perform a duet together,” says Billy, “a song I’d written for him, ‘Baby Grand’—that would have been beyond imagining for me back in the sixties. For starters, I’ve never thought I had a good voice. I can be objective about it. I like it better now that it’s thickened out more at the bottom end than when I was younger, but I don’t compare it to those naturally compelling voices I came up listening to. I can sing in key; I can sing in pitch. I can growl it up or rock it up or soul it up, but my natural voice, to me, is sort of like a kid singing in church.

  “I wasn’t the only one chirping onstage to have that complaint about his own voice. We were all studying at the feet of titans. Then along came these guys who seemed to make it all more accessible—the Beatles were mining classic American rock and R&B, making that music their own.

  “John Lennon had full awareness of the musical history. He had studied it all, and said early on that you can do a whole lot in a two- or three-minute rock song, that it was an art form in its own right. I agree—I think you have to have a good amount of innocence, ambition, and also confidence in your craft to be able to say, ‘We can tie all this up in three minutes.’ ”

  It’s instructive, for anyone wondering why Billy all but ceased writing pop songs after 1993’s River of Dreams, to hear his thoughts on the ineluctable diminishing of the bravado that energized his work back then: “It’s the innocence that goes first—at least it did for me—and then the confidence.” Few musicians, or artists in any field, have made so much out of the slaphappy enthusiasms of youth. While Billy was embarking on what would become a three-decade run when he began composing in the 1960s, today, he says, “to write the same kind of songs now, at this age, I don’t think I’d even be able to try it. I didn’t know any better then.”

  THE STUDY IN Billy Joel’s Centre Island home is a kind of inviting gentleman’s den of mahogany and nautical charts and sweeping views of the water surrounding his property, with bookshelves stacked to the ceiling with history, fiction, biography—books that have received much attention in his many years as an autodidact. Anyone who’s not at the PhD level of study in domestic and world history, especially military history, is unlikely to match his chapter-and-verse knowledge of those disciplines. He has no trace of defensiveness about being a high school dropout who never seriously contemplated higher education: “By junior high, I remember everybody talking about what college they wanted to attend. I had no desire to go to college. From the age of fourteen on, I had focused on being a musician. That’s what I’m going to do. I’m not going to go to college. It’s pointless. I had no ambitions in that direction at all, though I did want to get the high school diploma—for my mom.”

  At Hicksville High School, there were more than a thousand kids in the class of ’67, but by Billy’s senior year, his likeliest affinity group—the hood-punk-greaser kids—was starting to fade in prominence. In their place emerged the folky, prepsychedelic, earnestly bohemian crowd who preferred turtlenecks and black-framed glasses to varsity jackets. “Pot had started coming in,” Billy recalls, “but I didn’t want to do it. I guess I was scared. But I wasn’t scared when I was with the jocks drinking beer, and I wasn’t scared hanging out with the hoods who were sniffing glue and drinking Tango or Ripple. Still, by the time I hit high school, I had crossed over from the junior high die-hard greaser type to being a bit of a hippie—because I was in a band. I grew my hair long and started wearing jeans. I also made a point of knowing the collegiate crowd, because a lot of the cute girls were the rah-rah college types—blond, athletic surfer-style girls with nicely developed chests. I managed to get along with everybody.”

  Still, there were the usual teen romantic pitfalls. Despite being named in the paean to young love that is “Only the Good Die Young,” the real life Virginia “was all in my imagination,
never consummated; she was the fantasy love girl.” Thus Billy widened the playing field. He “madly crushed” for Carol Mulally in eighth grade, “such a beautiful creature,” until she wrote a note about him to her girlfriend Dina—“The creep has been staring at me all day.” He cultivated dating “wallflower girls,” names he can still tick off like Cathy, Lorraine, and Glenna, nicknamed Glenna Glide “because she walked like she was on skates.” Most of these passing fancies amounted to what he terms “shiksa madness,” as he sought the less obvious targets. “I kind of prided myself on picking out these blossoming beauties that no one else recognized. The other guys would go, ‘Where’d you find that one?’ I’m not a breast man—I fall in love with the face.”

  One face, though, seemed to eclipse the others: “The one girl who made the strongest impression on me was Patti Lee Berridge, who lived a couple of miles away, in Bethpage. We spotted each other one night in 1968, when she was in the audience at a bar in Plainview called My House and I was onstage with my band, the Hassles. She was my age, eighteen, and she looked like Ann-Margret.” Billy couldn’t have missed her: a cascade of red hair, features that were somewhere between model-chiseled and girl next door, and in her eyes, a clear zest for living.