Billy Joel

by Fred Schruers

  When Billy spoke with Tim White for a November 1978 Crawdaddy cover story and described how he “just disappeared,” the ever-meticulous White interviewed Angelique Norton, who owned the bar with her husband, Russell. “There’d been so many piano players coming and going,” she said, “but he stood out … and he had a following. On slow nights I’d ask him to play some of the classics, like a polonaise by Chopin, and he’d do them. But he used to tell me he didn’t like playing requests for people. Sometimes customers would start singing along, and he definitely didn’t like that, either.”

  Billy would pick up the story in the transcript: “It was all right.… I took on this whole alternate identity, totally make-believe. I was like Buddy Greco, wearing my shirt with the collar turned up, unbuttoned halfway down. The characters that Steve Martin or Bill Murray do as a goof, I was doing, too, but people didn’t know I was kidding. They thought, Wow, this guy is really hip. They would say [in a drunken slur], ‘Play thish shthong.’… I never knew the song, so I played a lot of major-seventh chords [which were strewn through all genres of pop and would be shared by later rock songs, from Lennon’s “Imagine” to the Red Hot Chili Peppers’ “Under the Bridge”], and they’d go, ‘Yeah—that’s it!’ ”

  Making his exile from the music business a lot more palatable was Elizabeth’s impending return. “I had a sense of mission, but at first there was a real loneliness to the entire enterprise,” says Billy. Finally, Elizabeth, who had been studying business at Long Island’s Adelphi University, rejoined Billy in L.A., where, with Sean in tow, she picked up her business studies at UCLA.

  Soon she, too, began working nights at the Executive Room, waitressing. They each brought home about two hundred dollars a night. Their closest friends during that period were John and Sandy Gibson, whom they’d met at Family Productions. Sandy edited a newsletter and handled press there, and soon thereafter she was working at the industry trade paper Cashbox. John was a Hollywood Reporter staffer. Later they’d both move to Atlantic Records in New York. (Eventually John left the music business to became a personality on Fox News.)

  When their Atlantic staff jobs took them east, John and Sandy were happy to have Elizabeth and Billy move in as house-sitters for their place on remote Scheuren Road, up Las Flores Canyon in the hills of Malibu, where the rent was just $219 a month. They bunkered in, essentially waiting for Artie to lose interest. “My hope was that by going underground, he’d lose track of me and be persuaded, sometime in the near future, to let me out of the onerous deal I’d made,” says Billy. (A few years later Bruce Springsteen would similarly go silent while disentangling himself from a bad management deal with Mike Appel.) “Meanwhile, Artie had no idea where I was. I was calling myself Bill Martin professionally. How were they going to find me in this big sprawling city, hiding in plain sight at a piano bar? I had dropped off the face of the earth.”

  During the Malibu encampment, Billy laid eyes on his father for the first time in many years. The international label Phonogram, European distributor of Artie Ripp’s label, sought out Howard Joel (mistakenly, at first, in Germany rather than Austria) as part of their PR strategy. Although Billy was in Milan when he got the news, the easiest course was to fly Howard to Los Angeles soon afterward.

  At LAX, Billy met Howard upon arrival outside customs. Despite the nearly two decades that had passed, he spotted him at once, based on shared genes: “the same bug eyes.” Over several days of catching up, Billy would learn of Howard’s remarriage to an Austrian woman, Audrey, and also that he had a half-brother, Alex. Although there was no glad-handing, given Howard’s saturnine personality, and the older man seemed more bemused than impressed by Billy’s career, the reconnection solved at least part of the puzzle that had been Billy’s childhood.

  AS BILLY KILLED time playing the Executive Room, he considered what his next step would be, if he could indeed break free from Ripp’s control. Fortunately, the market for even a damaged talent—as he was after Cold Spring Harbor’s underwhelming performance—was quite robust as the decade turned. The two important music labels in the early 1970s were Warner Elektra Atlantic Records (known as WEA) and Columbia. The Atlantic fiefdom had the hippest cachet, thanks to bellwether groups like Cream and Led Zeppelin dominating rock alongside such great holdovers from the soul era as Sam and Dave, Ray Charles, and a wide territory in between that included the Rascals and Crosby, Stills and Nash.

  Columbia was the bigger label, with a more corporate image. It made Blood, Sweat, and Tears very radio-friendly, and even Janis Joplin came out a little less raunchy (and authentic) than she actually was. But above all, Columbia was the label of Bob Dylan.

  For that reason alone Columbia appealed to Billy: “Here was this raspy singer who got no radio play, had no hit singles, had nothing going for him except that he was Bob Dylan—and they had the sense to see what that meant. They stayed with him and put out those records, and he’s ended up being the most important solo artist of our time. To this day, Dylan is still at Columbia Records. What that said to me was, This is a career-oriented label.”

  Over time Columbia would end up being the right choice for Billy. They stuck with him through five albums that weren’t hits. Even Piano Man, which was perceived to be successful, barely dented the charts at first. The Stranger, in 1977, would be his first commercially impressive album.

  Not that he could have walked into any label’s office ready to sign on. Beyond the strictures of his deal with Ripp, he was stigmatized by the very fact that a bottom-feeder such as Artie had discovered him.

  Artie was the classic jack-of-all-trades, master only of working the seams in between. Billy needed a different setup altogether, far from the Runyonesque world of Artie’s Broadway connections. He wanted to be independent, but needed help from a West Coast lawyer, a West Coast accountant, and a record company that had a strong presence there, where the real heat in the industry was at the time. Thus in that familiar and more often than not futile way of Tinseltown wannabes, Billy and Elizabeth would live by their wits for a while to see what they could make happen in their parallel careers.

  At the time, Billy had an aide-de-camp named Jon Troy, a gruff but mostly likable character who’d been a bartender, worked alongside powerful Top 40 radio programmer Bill Drake, and finally came into Billy’s orbit by contacting Artie while between jobs as indie record promo man. He’d heard Cold Spring Harbor as a demo that Drake had forwarded—“By the third track I said, ‘Whoa, this guy’s great.’ ” Troy made a pilgrimage from New York to Philly to see Billy open for Taj Mahal, “and he just blew me away, ten times better than even the record. I went backstage and visited. Next thing I know we’re on the road together.’ ”

  With an organizational vacuum already forming due to Billy’s alienation from Mazur and Ripp, Troy stepped into a role as a sort of ad hoc manager, part gofer. One task he recalls, from the early days on Billy’s Cold Spring Harbor tour, was hounding Artie Ripp to wire money to their hotel. Artie had neglected to pay for the band’s stay, and the hotel had locked them out—they were waiting to get into the rooms.

  Jon Troy was also handy when club owners tried to stiff the band: “I’m an Irish New Yorker—I’d get in there and make sure they got paid, one way or the other.” He and Billy had a rapport, partly, Jon felt, because each had lost consciousness from a suicide attempt earlier in life. They had discussed the odd moment of coming back to awareness. “I woke up,” Troy remembers. “I had been in a coma for three days, and my mother was standing over me. I said, ‘Oh, shit, I’m still here.’ ”

  As Jon recalls, “I remember at one point Billy was saying how fed up he was with it all and how long he had been at it and nothing was happening. Artie was definitely jerking him around. And Billy just felt like chucking it all and going back to clamming or whatever it was he did out there on Long Island. And I said to him, ‘I’ll kill you if you do that. You’ve got a God-given talent.’ His quick remark back to me, which I’ve never forgotten, was ‘Fuck
you, Troy—the only time I am playing with God is at a piano. But you can go out and write marketing plans, you can run a restaurant, you can talk to people, deal with executives or radio people. I can’t do any of that shit.’

  “He humbled me, he really did, with that statement,”

  Perhaps because Billy sensed that he possessed just one financially rewarding skill in life, he renewed his commitment to the course he’d set out on: “I was not going to take another job. I was going to be a musician—that’s my work. I recognized how corrupt and decadent, how larcenous, this business was, but I just had to try to find the most straight-up people I could.”

  Artie had proven to be anything but that, so Billy set up a meeting with an attorney named Lee Colton, who Jon Troy had heard was a robust negotiator with real record-business savvy. He also hired veteran accountant Ralph Goldman’s firm. Now the troika was in place to rejigger the deal with Artie and take the accompanying step of finding a new contract with a real record company.

  Lee Colton carried himself casually, but Billy would come to find out that he could take on the industry sharks. He was an Angeleno who reliably wore a dark suit and conservative tie. (He would strongly hint that Billy go onstage with his own version of that outfit, which became his practice.) Lee was also a strapping figure, a former football player at the inner city’s Los Angeles High School and a boxer of sorts, like Billy. He’d attended UCLA law school and gone into the then slightly disreputable trade of lawyering in the record business. “I guess it’s not exactly a ticket to respectability even now,” remarks Billy, “which may be why he always behaved impeccably.”

  Over time Lee would represent such acts as Blood, Sweat, and Tears and Sly Stone, who found success as Billy’s eventual label mates. This was when Walter Yetnikoff ran things at Columbia after taking over in 1974, in the wake of Clive Davis’s departure.

  Lee’s gutsy lawyering is best summed up in an anecdote from a couple years later. Lee was still fairly new to the music business game when, a couple of albums into Billy’s Columbia contract, he went to visit Yetnikoff at the Beverly Hills Hotel. His unannounced agenda was to win a boost in Billy’s royalty rate from Columbia.

  Yetnikoff saw it coming. Opening the door to what he presumably thought would be just another elegantly attired Beverly Hills suit, Yetnikoff greeted Colton with a volley of epithets to the effect that if he was there to seek a bump-up in royalties, there was no fucking way he was going to get it. He then fixed a gimlet eye on the lawyer to see the result.

  “You cocksucker,” Lee replied. “Who do you think you’re talking to?”

  Then he sat down, and they talked.

  Lee’s self-assurance had already begun to show itself in 1972, when he set out to free Billy from his burdensome deal with Artie Ripp in order to clear a path for the Columbia signing. One point of leverage in Billy’s favor was that Artie and his Family Productions label were handcuffed to the disadvantageous deal at Paramount and its umbrella corporation, Gulf + Western (or Engulf + Devour, as the Hollywood business wags dubbed it). Artie would see little profit in holding Billy to the label deal already in place—he has frequently referred to it as “a platinum coffin with diamond studs”—because, despite various perks the label offered in terms of payouts, it was too dysfunctional to do the kind of marketing and promotion that would trigger really profitable album sales. Fed up with his “coffin,” Artie needed to cut his losses and walk away from Paramount; even if he could control Billy, it would do him little good to do so at a label so ill equipped to bring profits to artist or manager.

  Lee Colton intended to make very certain that Artie no longer considered Billy one of his ongoing assets. Together he and Billy resolved to continue waiting Artie out. It was a cruel set of handcuffs for an eager young artist, but in cases like Billy’s, where a manager has little else going for him, it can be effective.

  Meanwhile, “Captain Jack” was gaining a growing buzz, as the premier FM radio station in Philadelphia, WMMR, had a live version of the song in heavy rotation. The track was destined for the next, unnamed album (it would be Piano Man) and was a popular part of the band’s live show.

  The live track was part of a wide-ranging studio show that took place on April 15, 1972, two weeks after Billy’s performance in the downpour at Mar y Sol and about a year before he would be signed to Columbia. The concert was spurred by the enthusiasm of local FM deejay and music writer Jonathan Takiff, who had been playing a couple of Cold Spring Harbor tracks even before he saw Billy open for Taj Mahal—the same show that so excited Jon Troy at Philly’s Main Point club. Takiff’s favorite song was “Captain Jack,” which he’d describe as “yer classic youth wasted on (not enough) sex, drugs, and rock-and-roll narrative. And it was told with a searing, pitiless tone, unique suburban twist, and a chorus so dynamic it could ‘get you high tonight’ on its lonesome.”

  Takiff must have sounded just as fevered when he talked the boss at WMMR into featuring Billy live on the air. The twelve-song set (subsequently released by Columbia/LEGACY as a bonus CD on a 2010 Piano Man reissue) became a turning point as Billy’s career gained traction that would never quit. After Takiff duped the live tape and aired it a few times on his late-night weekend show, “Captain Jack” created a groundswell, and soon it was the most requested song in the station’s history.

  Given the sudden serendipitous airplay in one of the nation’s most music-loving constituencies, the good reception Billy and his backing band were getting as the opening act for a string of college concerts they were playing, and insider chatter about the minor sensation Billy had caused at the at the Mar y Sol Festival, Irwin Mazur wasn’t surprised to get a call in early 1973 from Kip Cohen, head of Artists and Repertoire (A&R) at Columbia. Kip had worked in the shadow of Clive Davis, who became head of the label largely thanks to his own A&R prowess. Whether or not Cohen was aware of an imminent deal Ripp was discussing with Atlantic, Davis wanted to meet with Billy at the earliest opportunity. Irwin met with Davis and Kip Cohen on his own, but Elizabeth and Billy made a clandestine trip to the Beverly Hills Hotel, in early May 1973, to meet with him in his bungalow. That was when the crucial handshake took place.

  During the meeting, Davis, never one to stint on revealing his accomplishments, made a point of mentioning having signed such artists as Janis Joplin. In his memoir Clive would mention that Artie Ripp added a certain spice: “[He was] an extremely colorful record industry personality with whom Billy would dramatically fall out. At the time, however, Ripp was tireless in his promotion of Billy in ways that suggested the stereotypical music biz character.… Artie insisted I go to see Billy in a club, and needless to say, he tore the place apart.… He was clearly a triple threat—a gifted singer-songwriter, a torrid piano player, and a sensational live performer. I had to sign him.”

  Simultaneously, Artie, despite Columbia’s urgency, was following up on the competing interest from Atlantic Records. The connection dated back to a year before, when Billy and Elizabeth’s friend from her days in Artie’s employ, Sandy Gibson, made a zealous pitch for Billy to label head Ahmet Ertegun, her employer at Atlantic. Another legend in the business and a figure Billy respected, Ertegun had presided over some of Billy’s favorite R&B greats, from Ray Charles to Sam and Dave.

  In 1972 Ertegun brought his two key execs to Artie’s home in the Hollywood Hills. The visitors were Jerry Greenberg, whom they called in the business “a good records man,” and Jerry Wexler, a writer-turned-R&B-producer-turned-impresario and legend almost on the scale of Ertegun.

  Billy sat at the Steinway and launched into the strongest songs in his repertoire, several of which, like “Travelin’ Prayer,” “You’re My Home,” “Piano Man,” and “Captain Jack,” would end up on his second album. Aiming to replicate as closely as he could the arrangements the full band would perform, Billy played his fingers numb for the people in the room.

  Then Jerry Wexler piped up: “You play too much. Stop playing so much.” This wasn’t, in Billy�
�s mind, a good sign: “I’d been doing this job for pay for nearly a decade, and for better or worse, what they were hearing was my style.”

  Wexler also had an opinion on “Piano Man.” To him, it sounded too much like the 1968 Jerry Jeff Walker song “Mr. Bojangles,” which had become a top-ten hit for the Nitty Gritty Dirt Band in 1971. “Jerry, God rest his soul,” says Ripp, “was a person, like Ahmet, with a sense of humor. And Jerry makes a remark like, ‘If ‘Bojangles’ wasn’t written, maybe you would not have written that song.’ Okay, now Billy didn’t like what he heard.” Billy pointed out that despite a similar structure and chord progression, the song was his own and had come out of a personal experience.

  The meeting was cordial enough and, recalls Artie, “at the end of the day, Ahmet and I negotiated a deal for Billy to be an Atlantic artist.

  “And then all of a sudden, out of the blue, Clive Davis comes into the picture.”

  What was a surprise to Artie had of course been engineered by Irwin, Billy, and Elizabeth. Whether because Billy wanted a chance to be on Dylan’s label (which Davis would later say was the clincher) or perhaps because Billy felt sideswiped by Wexler’s comment, Columbia would win the day.