Billy Joel

by Fred Schruers

  It’s a time-honored showbiz staple to pick out someone in the audience to sing to, and that night, spotting Patti Lee made it easy for him: “Patti Lee was the girl, for some years—really, until she went off to college and I started up with Elizabeth.” For years to come, Billy would admit she had a kind of ownership of him: “If not the one that got away, she was the first one that got away—and always in the background of my thoughts romantically, even when I was married. I don’t know if I’m ashamed to say it, but I’m surprised to hear myself say it.” While years later, in “Keeping the Faith,” Billy would claim, “My past is something that never got in my way,” he wasn’t always as ebullient as that 1983 song’s narrator:

  I thought I was the Duke of Earl

  When I made it with a red-haired girl

  In a Chevrolet.

  When asked, Patti Lee Berridge says, “I think that is about me, yes—I was probably a senior in high school when we got romantically involved.” She remembers the first time their eyes locked as well as Billy does: “It was a total flirtation. He took a liking to me right away, and he would like, talk to me when he was onstage. It wasn’t verbal—he’d make gestures at me, and he would like, carry on a conversation with me. I knew he was talking to me, but nobody else did.”

  Patti Lee would be in Billy’s life for the next decade, but the early days of snuggling on the Joel family couch trading hickeys in the company of Whitey, a shepherd/lab mix, and Cupcake, Roz’s cat—once Patti Lee hid under the couch when Roz came home unexpectedly—gave way to the breakup as she prepared to go to college upstate.

  Billy remembers, “When we broke up, I was pointing out, ‘Our relationship really means a lot to me. After all, Patti Lee, we’ve had sex together.’ This was like 1967 or so. And she answered me back with, ‘So?’ She was like the guy, and I was being the girl. She’s like, ‘Yeah? And so what?’ And it was a real splash of cold water in the face that a woman would say that to a man. She was completely at ease with her sexuality, her intellect, and her femininity before that was even a political hot potato.”

  “I went to college,” Patti Lee recalls, “and Billy was very—he asked me to marry him. And I said, ‘Are you kidding me? I’m way too young for that.’ ”

  Patti Lee would go off to college in Buffalo, return for chiropractic school on Long Island, and later study chiropractic in California, hanging out with Billy and his first wife, Elizabeth Weber (whom she befriended and later grew estranged from). She was steadily—and platonically—in Billy’s life, but also a bittersweet reminder that romantically, “Billy and I were always one beat off. Always friends, but always one beat off.”

  To Billy, the breakup back in the Hicksville days was a lesson in humility and a kind of life lesson. In Eric Rohmer’s film Claire’s Knee, the befuddled protagonist Jerome thinks he’s owed something due to his obsession with the enchanting young woman of the title: “The turmoil she arouses in me gives me a sort of right over her.” Much as Jerome would settle for a brief touch of Claire’s besotting knee, Billy would remember that infatuation, however deep, has to be reciprocated. She turned him down, the first but most important beat they would miss, “and I learned a lot from that. Oh, she was my muse for years. There are probably songs that I can say, yeah, that’s probably about Elizabeth—but quite possibly more about Patti Lee.”

  Perhaps the conversation that undid another potential marriage is the one that sums up the thwarted quest. “Billy and I were having dinner one time,” Patti Lee says, “and he was talking about a girlfriend at the time—I think it was Carolyn [Beegan, a romance going strong in 2000–2], and he said, ‘I’m pretty much in love with her.’ I said, ‘Let me tell you something, Billy. She has your heart but I have your soul.’ He was like, ‘Whoa, I should write that down.’

  “I told him, she’s not the one for you. I think I’m one of the reasons why he broke up with her. I asked him, ‘Are you going to marry her?’ And he said no. I said, ‘You’re stringing her on through some really good years of hers. You shouldn’t do that. If you’re going to marry her, fine. If you’re not, let her go.’ ”

  “It wasn’t really territorial,” says Billy. “There was a sweetness to how she said it.” Patti Lee was the challenging introductory course in his education about women: “Do they feel the same things we feel? She taught me that they not only did, they surpassed us in some ways, and could take us or leave us. Wow. ‘But we had sex, Patti.’ ‘So? So what? Get over it, you sissy.’ I’m supposed to be known for these love songs, these ballads, or these crooner type of tunes. And I suppose I should explore where does that shit come from—‘An Innocent Man,’ ‘She’s Got a Way,’ ‘Just the Way You Are,’ ‘You’re My Home,’ some of them frigging wimpoid. Well, where they come from is, I’ve been madly in love with women all my life.”

  IF ONE OF the takeaways from the 1960s, as enunciated by Billy in “Keeping the Faith,” was “You can linger too long / In your dreams,” young romance was inextricable from simple rock-and-roll exuberance:

  Oh, I’m going to listen to my 45s

  Ain’t it wonderful to be alive

  When the rock ’n’ roll plays, yeah.

  And that excitement was incrementally being moved onstage in Billy’s early garage-rocking days: “Despite our mostly marginal musical virtues, being in any sort of rock band at the dawn of that era was heady. Our original band name, when we were formed by my high school friend Jim Bosse, was the Echoes.”

  Jim—along with Billy’s childhood friend Bill Zampino—was to become “James” of the 1976 song from Turnstiles that had a life on FM radio (and was a hit in the Netherlands). It was about how their paths had diverged, from one friend to another but unsparing in its candor:

  I went on the road

  You pursued an education …

  Do you like your life

  Can you find release

  And will you ever change

  When will you write your masterpiece?

  Do what’s good for you

  Or you’re not good for anybody …

  Billy was recruited as a bit of an unknown quantity, recalls Bosse: “My impression of him right off the bat was that he was somewhat of a loner, not just with us but in general. But he had an inner self-confidence that was unusual. We were fourteen, fifteen years old at the time. And his skills on piano were head and shoulders above where we were at that moment. He could play classical music, but rock and roll had just been invented, so we were learning it on our own.”

  The Parkway Green gang that both were part of, a gaggle of young men living in the vicinity of one of Levittown’s designed public spaces, was not likely about to be mistaken for the local scout troop, Bosse recalls. They indulged in a fair amount of booze, glue-huffing, vandalism, and casual juvenile delinquency: “A lot of the members of that original crowd are deceased; a lot of them got pruned off rather early because of drugs, alcohol, and just hard living.”

  Billy recalls, “We were playing small local gigs at first, mostly at the Holy Family Church, with Billy Zampino as the drummer for a while. Then someone pointed out that a 1950s-era band who had a hit with ‘Baby Blue’ was called the Echoes, so [after a brief incarnation as Billy Joe and the Hydros] we became the Lost Souls, which of course wasn’t exactly a great fit for the Holy Family Church.”

  The band entered a statewide band competition, easily cakewalked through the local rounds, and emerged as Long Island’s champs. In October ’65, they played a final round up against three other bands at the New York State Pavilion of the World’s Fair, coming in second to the Rockin’ Angels of North Woodmere. In order to play clubs where alcohol was served, the band needed IDs, a problem soon solved by one of incoming drummer Dave Boglioli’s acquaintances, who plunked down a trunk of stolen wallets that had been emptied of cash but still had licenses that might do the trick.

  The Lost Souls found a manager named Dick Ryan who had a connection with Mercury Records, and after an audition, the group signed with them. B
ut soon they had to change the name once more, as there was already an English band called the Lost Souls. “This time we were really bummed,” says Billy, “because we loved the name. Then the head of the record company, Frank Mooney, came to us and said, ‘Here’s a name for you guys: the Commandos.’ We looked at him, thinking, That sucks. Even if Vietnam was not yet quite as unpopular a war as it would soon become, being tagged with that name was hardly an asset. But who were we to object? Just this bunch of stupid rock-and-roll guys, young kids, and they, the music executives, had the power to do what they wanted. So we became the Commandos—truly hating the name. That lasted less than a year, because the record company dropped us, thank God, after a couple of failed singles.

  “We stumbled ahead as the Lost Souls again, though we briefly became U.S. Male, I suppose as some misguided tribute to the cornpone Elvis song of that same name. Another lousy moniker for a band.

  “At that point, I was resolved to leave the group anyway, even before it became evident that the Hassles were looking for a keyboardist. The other guys in the Lost Souls, except for Jim Bosse, who’d become an accomplished guitar player, didn’t seem really serious about pursuing a career in music.”

  Recognizing the futility of trying for music stardom—especially with Billy leaving the band—Jim Bosse indeed headed forth to pursue an education, as depicted in “James.” He enrolled in a two-year college, then Hofstra University, before heading to Philadelphia for a postgrad optometry degree. Though his wife-to-be was renting an apartment that Roz had set up in the Meeting Lane house to bring in some revenue, he saw Billy only rarely. Billy, meanwhile, was on a very different course, pursuing his rock-and-roll future with the Hassles: “You have to remember, by this time I had already cut off most of my other options, because I was on my way to not being allowed to graduate from Hicksville High School.”

  Jim was in his final year of undergrad school as a bio major when Billy came by and sat at a piano in Jim’s apartment to play the songs that would become cuts on the Cold Spring Harbor album. As Bosse recollects, “I was saying, ‘Wow, this is great stuff.’ ‘Jim,’ he said, ‘I want you to come to the studio and play the guitar parts on it.’ ”

  Bosse hadn’t played guitar in a year and was a week from his final exams. “I said, ‘Billy, I can’t. Number one, I’m real rusty. Secondly, if I go into the studio and miss my final, I waste a semester.’ So I passed. One of the major regrets of my life.”

  After relocating to Denver, Jim would sporadically see Billy on tour dates there, and then on a visit back east, Jim played Billy an arrangement of “James” transposed to classical guitar: “I think that’s when he first started to formulate his own classical pieces.”

  Did Bosse ever feel that the song was a bit too tough on him? “It’s a complex song—I took it as advice from an old friend, because Billy truly believed I was going down the wrong path, based on that meeting where he came to my apartment and played his pieces, and I turned down being the guitarist on the album. For Billy it’s always been music and that’s it. If he couldn’t do music, he’d just as soon die. He was not going to do anything else with his life, so he couldn’t imagine how I could change streams and give up music.

  “That fire in his belly was burning too strong, and so he was giving me his really heartfelt opinion. And of course once you start writing a song, at some point what inspired the song becomes secondary to making the song really good. So the lyrics can become a little more biting and a little more critical, but that’s not necessarily how I interpreted the song.”

  Regardless, the result is probably not being used in career counseling in high schools. “Yeah,” says Bosse, “you’re going to criticize a guy for becoming a doctor? Come on. But that’s Billy’s take on the world. Billy is the American dream—rags to riches. But under his own terms.”

  IN 1966, DURING his junior year at Hicksville High, Billy joined the rest of his class in filling out a questionnaire called “Idea Associations.” It listed about forty items for which the students were supposed to state what response the phrases evoked. A few of Billy’s responses, in retrospect, are intriguing:

  I LIKE: good music, New York City, pretty girls, Chinese food

  I HATE: loud-voiced people, phony people, prejudiced people

  THE BEST: singer of popular music was Nat King Cole

  I SUFFER: from a lack of taking things seriously

  I WANT TO KNOW: why Negroes are persecuted

  A MOTHER: is indispensable

  I NEED: a good shot of confidence

  A BROTHER: never had one

  MY FATHER: left when I was younger

  “I probably sound like sixteen going on clinically depressed,” says Billy now, “but my childhood hadn’t exactly been all noodle salad and laughs. And I was already beginning to feel a certain determination to find what David Copperfield called ‘the hero of my own life.’ Because I didn’t see anyone else likely to fill that role.”

  For kids like Billy, who weren’t sons of privilege, the examples weren’t the All-American golden boys but rather the tough guys of the working class. A couple of notable boxers were among them. One was Barney Ross, the game welterweight who was raised in Chicago’s Maxwell Street Jewish ghetto and became a symbol of his tribe’s toughness. Known for his indomitability in winning seventy-four of his eighty-one bouts and earning a Silver Star in a Guadalcanal firefight, he ended up wounded and addicted to opiates. (He would also fight Hollywood when he felt they’d stolen his life story with the film Monkey on My Back.)

  Another was Rocky Graziano, a New York slum kid who came out of poverty and prison to be a middleweight legend, and the tattered hero—as portrayed by Paul Newman—of the 1956 film Somebody Up There Likes Me. And of course there was the ultimate antihero Terry Malloy in On the Waterfront. As played by Marlon Brando, Terry discovers that it’s a short step from fixing fights to fixing the justice system. Put simply, he learns that you go astray when you don’t pursue what you know in your heart is right. By the time he told his brother, “You shoulda taken care of me, just a little bit, so I wouldn’t have to take them dives for the short-end money,” it was too late for redemption. He’d already entered the gallery of stubborn American heroes that the Greatest Generation passed on, by oral legend, to kids like Billy.

  The high school word-association exercise continued:

  I AM SORRY: that I got in with the wrong crowd

  THE ONLY TROUBLE IS: what’s done is done

  PEOPLE: make you or break you

  I AM MOST AFRAID OF: ruining someone’s life

  I WISH: I had a million dollars

  MY GREATEST WORRY IS: what my family thinks of me

  I SUFFER: when my family is angry with me

  I FAILED: to enter the Golden Gloves because of my wrist

  Despite constant fatigue from staying up nights to play in bands, Billy did some of his coursework and straggled all the way to the end of the school year with the class of ’67. But about a week before graduation, he was told he didn’t have enough credits to get a diploma and would have to go to summer school.

  That wasn’t going to happen. “I was eighteen years old, I had already been in a band for four years, and I knew what I wanted to do. It was very clear: I’m going to be a musician. And I don’t want to have any further schooling. I felt I knew enough. I was very well read. I’d taught myself a lot of what I knew, all from books. Besides, with no TV in the house, all I did was read: history, science, literature—in a pinch, even textbooks. Throughout my childhood, my mother was always going to the library and bringing home stacks of books. It was like candy for me. It sounds arrogant, but I knew more than some of the teachers. And the kids who were graduating—okay, they had their credits, but they weren’t all that smart as far as I was concerned; they knew enough to pass a test. So I’d effectively dropped out a long time before I actually wasn’t allowed to graduate.”

  Billy had mixed feelings about forsaking the diploma, because he knew his m
other’s heart would be broken. She knew he was a smart kid and wanted him to go to college. To fail to graduate was an aberration in middle-class Hicksville. She worried about his future.

  Billy says, “I knew that it would hurt her, and she’d had a tough enough time as it was, because she was a single mother. She couldn’t get good jobs. We were the poor family on the block. But I didn’t give a rat’s ass. I even said, ‘I’m not going to go to Columbia University. I’m going to Columbia Records. I don’t need any more of this. Summer school? I’m not going to put one more day into this penal institution, because I hate it.’ ”

  Once Billy was in a working band, an irrevocable life change occurred: “I knew I was going to be a musician. I didn’t exactly know how I was going to make a living at it, whether it was writing, playing, recording, being a session guy, or being part of the band, I didn’t know, but that’s what I was going to do.

  “I remember one night on a road trip in 1986, in some hotel room, I was moved to write my mom about what her loyalty and persistence and inspiration had meant to me. A few days later came the first of two letters in which she returned the sentiments. I was really touched by them.”

  “God,” Roz wrote, “I enjoyed being your mother. I was so lucky. I had a ray of sunshine living right in my own house.” The letter continued:

  And it didn’t take anything big to “turn you on.” You were so appreciative of the smallest things. A new map for your room—“Wow!” A new plaid shirt. “Gee—neato!” Books brought home from the library. “Hey, great!” A plate of spaghetti—“Hot dog.” We never had any money, but we communicated, we laughed, we cried, we celebrated holidays, birthdays, picnics, shows, concerts, friends, grandpas, grandmas, aunts. We were a family who were there for each other when times were good or bad. And your laughter and your music and your enthusiasm brought so much life to that little house in Hicksville. Between you and Judy and me and our pets, it was a home, and no money in the world could buy that pleasure I had from knowing the joy of living in that home with those fabulous kids. The quiet was deafening when you left.