When Artie was informed that Billy and his inner circle had already agreed to the deal with Clive, he moaned, “You can’t go with Columbia Records. You said you wanted to be with Atlantic. Ahmet and I, we shook hands. It’s done.”
But Billy’s meeting with Clive had only confirmed his resolve, and Irwin was still the manager of record. “Now,” says Artie, “there’s a whole new game there. So, without being involved with Billy—’cause Billy and I are not talking to one another, okay?—I said, at the end of the day, ‘I don’t really care. What I care about is his talent, his genius, doesn’t get flushed down the toilet.’ Clive and his team of people go and look at my contract every which way to go see whether in fact there’s a hole in my contract. And they find out there ain’t no hole in it, other than the loose-leaf binder hole. That’s the only hole in it.”
So the deal was made, with Lang, who still held the contractual rights to a cut of Billy’s output, tugging Artie into the deal, as a kind of finder’s fee, for an even bigger share than Lang would get. In a fairly typical arrangement, each had a percentage of the retail price of albums Billy would sell—Artie’s was said to be four percent, or about twenty-eight cents per album sold, and Lang, benefiting at two percent, would make half that. A “sunset” clause limited their participation to Billy’s first ten albums. It wasn’t the most advantageous deal for the artist, but in any event, Billy’s long-ago boast to his mom that he’d be headed not to Columbia University but to Columbia Records was finally fulfilled.
Billy didn’t know that Clive was in jeopardy from an internal investigation for alleged misuse of company funds (Davis has an alternative version of events) to renovate his apartment and stage his son’s bar mitzvah. Clive would later write in his memoir that while he and Billy were having their meeting at the Beverly Hills Hotel, he had had to push the company investigation out of his mind.
“I’ll never forget hearing,” says Billy, “on the Monday after the Memorial Day weekend in 1973, that Clive had gotten the ax from Columbia. He was very important to me at the time, as a storied talent scout and a believer in what I might become. He was very much a song guy; that was his reputation. Bruce [Springsteen] and I had signed with Columbia at about the same time, and there were a lot of parallels early on; this was very important to us. So when Clive was ousted, we were a little bit hesitant to go ahead.”
But Kip Cohen, who’d survived the shakeup, assured Billy and the band that Columbia would support his efforts, that they were committed to making him a major artist, and that Clive’s replacement, a veteran TV exec named Irwin Segelstein, would work in concert with Billy and Goddard Lieberson, a cultivated and artist-friendly head man who oversaw all the record labels.
Now that Billy had got his wish, Columbia needed an album. In terms of material, he was off to a good start based on the reception “Captain Jack” had already received. He also had “Piano Man,” which had come to him in a rush of creativity and had already been rated as a must-listen by those who’d heard it. “Travelin’ Prayer” had been written almost two years before, as had “The Ballad of Billy the Kid.” Clearly that bunch of songs, the core of the album, was inspired by his move to Los Angeles with Elizabeth (and what followed).
The theme of escape can be heard in snippets all through the album. You don’t have to probe too far to see some of Elizabeth in “Stop in Nevada”:
She tried for years to be a good wife
It never quite got off the ground
And all those stories of the good life
Convinced her not to hang around.
And of course “Worse Comes to Worst” contained a nod to the cross-country road trip and its legendary stopgap job:
I’ll do my writing on my road guitar
And make a living at a piano bar.
Given Billy’s desire to be part of the California scene that then featured singer-songwriters incorporating country and western and folk-rock, Columbia assigned Michael Stewart, who was fresh from producing an album by his brother (and sometime Kingston Trio stalwart) John, called Lonesome Picker Rides Again. Recruiting a band similar to that album’s countrified L.A. session pros, led by guitar virtuoso Larry Carlton, with his sweet Gibson ES 355 stylings, Stewart would even embrace bluegrass influences.
Kicking off the album with “Travelin’ Prayer”—with its skipping locomotive rhythm, its hurrying mouth harp, and a fleet banjo solo from Eric Weissberg, of “Dueling Banjos” fame—definitely set the tone. “In retrospect, leading off with ‘Travelin’ Prayer’ might have confounded some people’s expectations,” says Billy. “Wasn’t I supposed to be some sort of ivory-tickling city boy?”
If so, “Piano Man” had its say as the second cut. It was perhaps already guaranteed its primacy in his body of work—the indispensable, inescapable, signature song. “After all these years,” says Billy, “after all the bills it’s paid and the concerts it’s closed, and with the realization that the song and I are forever and inextricably linked, it’s hard to know what to say about it. To me, it’s really just a waltz. Back in Vienna, the waltz was at first viewed as somewhat scandalous—the European courts, who supported classical musicians, were too prudish to accept a dance made for couples virtually embracing, face to face.”
But, of course, in Billy’s waltz, the lyrics are about anything but romantic happiness:
And the waitress is practicing politics
As the businessmen slowly get stoned
Yes they’re sharing a drink they call loneliness
But it’s better than drinkin’ alone.
Not many twenty-one-year-olds are capable of writing and singing words as world-weary as Billy’s opening stanza:
It’s nine o’clock on a Saturday
The regular crowd shuffles in
There’s an old man sitting next to me
Making love to his tonic and gin
If the scene seems almost out of one of Charles Bukowski’s tattered memoirs (or imaginably about him, as he lived just three miles up Normandie Avenue from the Wilshire Boulevard location of the Executive Room), there’s an empathy and a universality to the observations made. In the song’s eight verses (interspersed three times by the refrain), there’s no wasted motion and, despite some sharply observed character portraits that seem recognizable as types, no clichés.
Just as “John at the bar” was at some level inveterate bartender Jon Troy, the barkeep’s pathos is acute:
He says, “Bill, I believe this is killing me”
As a smile ran away from his face.
Our narrator has a name, but whether that makes the song more or less personal is open to question. The use of “Bill” without the diminutive is the songwriter’s prerogative—the song never promised straight autobiography, and after all, the Executive Room’s actual signage proffered entertainment by “Bill Martin.” But it’s worth noting that the shorter version is the name many of his intimates use more regularly than “Billy.”
Eventually, the song’s point of view slides all the way around, and we focus on the singer. The manager gives him a smile, “ ’Cause he knows it’s me they’ve been coming to see / To forget about life for a while.”
On a website that purported to provide song lyrics, an interpretation of the penultimate verse reads, “And the piano smells like a carnivore,” which greatly amused Billy, who has called the instrument “the beast with eighty-eight teeth.” The singer has been getting his drinks for free, and the following line—“And the microphone smells like a beer”—is a reminder that those who have just been described to us are indeed not “drinking alone.” We are arriving at the memorable place where both the rhyme and the revelation have been heading:
And they sit at the bar and put bread in my jar
And say, “Man, what are you doing here?”
The beauty part, as one might say around the Parkway Green, is that Bill of the song and Billy the record-biz-entrapped singer-songwriter come together in that line. What indeed is Billy Joel, su
perstar-to-be, doing in this embarrassing scenario?
And finally, the refrain that’s been played to—and sung by—so many crowds on so many nights:
Sing us a song, you’re the piano man
Sing us a song tonight
Well we’re all in the mood for a melody
And you’ve got us feeling all right.
The waitress, according to Billy, was Elizabeth, who, when she was younger, “somewhat resembled the actress from Gigi, Leslie Caron.” The couple were relying on the kindness of strangers, to some extent, but they were making the rent. “These were the days of, if not wine and roses, then rye and high hopes for us,” says Billy.
Their relationship back then, before Elizabeth moved into managing Billy, was already subject to plenty of strain. Billy had been, and would continue to be, on the road a lot. But Elizabeth made it clear she wanted to make the romantic partnership official, as soon as possible—something Billy perhaps resisted a bit too diplomatically.
One day in September 1973, she entered the room where Billy was sitting and simply said, “We’re getting married today.”
Billy answered, “We are?”
She told him that she had the marriage all set up, and that if he didn’t marry her, she was leaving. She was from a Catholic family, and it was important to her that she and Billy weren’t “living in sin.”
Elizabeth had been very supportive, but as much as he loved her, Billy didn’t think he should marry her. With road trips and myriad career business going on, he just didn’t feel it was the right time. Plus, they were still very young. He was only twenty-four years old—too young, he felt, to get married. And yet rather than risk a deep rift in the relationship and face her well-known obduracy, he agreed.
“Elizabeth had it all planned out,” says Billy. The two lived in Malibu at the time, and they went to the local courthouse. “I remember our getting married by the justice of the peace, and the witness was a sheriff’s deputy with a Smokey the Bear hat. I thought to myself, What’s wrong with this picture? This looks like I’m getting booked.”
Right after the wedding ceremony, the newlyweds drove up to Point Dume, in Malibu, and visited a little bar called the Dume Room (described in a local blog years later as “borderline dangerous in the best dive tradition … Steve McQueen and John Wayne drank here”). “I didn’t miss the linguistic irony of that spot,” says Billy. “I ordered a Zombie. I was kind of in a daze about it all, and while I didn’t think it was the right thing for me to do, I thought it was the right thing to do by her.”
As Piano Man found its way into the marketplace, it headed for number twenty-five on the Billboard Hot 100 chart, and ultimately it ranked fourth on the Adult Contemporary chart. The band’s inevitable tour started in late February 1974 in a New York hot spot, Max’s Kansas City, home to the Warhol crowd. The New York Times pop music critic John Rockwell showed gratifying enthusiasm, saying, “Mr. Joel is fast developing into an important artist.” He found Billy’s piano playing virtuosic (although some of his arrangements he deemed “bombastic”). Three months later, when Billy played Carnegie Hall (opening for Jesse Colin Young), Rockwell wrote of Billy, “One knew this artist was fulfilling all of his promise as a musician and a star.” (Billy was still working the college circuit as well, and a live pairing that occurred at Rutgers University in mid-1974—and would have later echoes—came when Billy invited local boy Bruce Springsteen onstage to do “Twist and Shout.”)
Amid all these positive reactions to Piano Man, Elizabeth and Billy were still sitting at the kitchen table wondering how to make ends meet. Not only did Billy’s earnings barely trickle in—he had made less than $8,000 on the album by a 1978 accounting—they also struggled to shake money loose from Columbia for promotion and touring. Billy and Elizabeth were coming to realize that Jon Troy just didn’t have enough power within the music industry to make things happen fast enough.
In Billy’s mind, his best selling point wasn’t the recordings; it was the live shows. “I kept insisting on this—I was beating my head against the wall. But Jon really didn’t have a lot of leverage with Columbia and couldn’t convince them,” recalls Billy. “Although Jon empathized with me and liked the band, and we all got along with him, he tended to defer to the company’s wishes. What you really want in a manager is somebody who’s willing to take the recording company head on and say, ‘This is not the best thing for my artist.’ ”
The ultimate realization of how little clout Jon had with Columbia came with Billy’s next album, Streetlife Serenade. For the label, this was its chance to put out a Piano Man II, a fully realized set of songs, but in fact Columbia rushed the album out less than a year after the first album was released, in October 1974.
Then as now, if you had a successful debut album—and Piano Man was regarded as a debut, even though it had been preceded by Cold Spring Harbor and the earlier releases with the Hassles and Attila—you would be under great pressure to get the second one out quickly. “This is why people talk about the sophomore slump,” says Billy. “You spend your youth building up material, crafting that bildungsroman that tells your story, and then, in the middle of abruptly finding success and crashing in Holiday Inns, of being a bandleader and wondering when the checks will arrive, you have a couple months to write ten or twelve heartfelt new songs. By the way, remember, the songs about how much the road sucks have already been done, and nobody wants to hear them.”
Nonetheless, Billy had one song in that vein, and it’s probably the only song on Streetlife Serenade that he would always regard somewhat fondly: “The Entertainer.” That song was ready to add in when, shortly after they concluded the Piano Man tour in Cincinnati in early May 1974, Billy found himself back at Devonshire Studios in North Hollywood cutting tracks.
Says Billy, “ ‘The Entertainer’ came partly out of the experience of seeing ‘Piano Man’ downsized from the original six-minute album cut to a three-minute single.”
I am the entertainer, I’ve come to do my show
You’ve heard my latest record, it’s been on the radio
It took me years to write it, they were the best years of my life
It was a beautiful song but it ran too long
If you’re gonna have a hit you gotta make it fit
So they cut it down to 3:05.
“I don’t suppose that little aside did me that much good with the Columbia brass,” says Billy, but the rest of the song’s lyrics constituted a broadside against the entire apparatus of pop stardom—“Got to get those fees to the agencies”—and a summary of the education any performer receives:
I am the entertainer and I’ve had to pay my price
The things I did not know at first I learned by doing twice
But still they come to haunt me, still they want their say
So I’ve learned to dance with a hand in my pants, I let ’em rub my neck
And I write ’em a check, and they go their merry way.
When Billy performed this song before an audience, he would often point out that the narrator wasn’t, strictly speaking, him: “I wouldn’t want to be heard complaining about the ‘rough’ life of a singer-songwriter—‘I’ve played all kinds of palaces and laid all kinds of girls’—by, say, a group of all-night truckers or machine shop guys.”
Even the relationship that stars have with their fans wasn’t excluded from the song. “In retrospect,” says Billy, “the stanza concerning that was the product of inexperience, because, without wanting to sound corny, I’ve been rewarded over the years with a touchingly dedicated army of fans.” But back then the guy in the song was definitely hedging his bets:
Today I am your champion, I may have won your hearts,
But I know the game, you’ll forget my name,
And I won’t be here in another year
If I don’t stay on the charts.
The Streetlife of the album title is clearly Los Angeles, with the mention of “Shoppin’ center heroes” on “Streetlife Sere
nader” and Billy’s best attempt to sketch a portrait of the city amid the hip-swinging rhythms of “Los Angelenos”:
Hiding up in the mountains
Laying low in the canyons
Goin’ nowhere on the streets
With the Spanish names.
As a lifelong student of piano, if Billy was ever going to do a ragtime cut, 1974—right after the movie The Sting briefly propelled the music of Scott Joplin and the entire ragtime genre back into vogue—was the time. “I’ve shown the song ‘Root Beer Rag’ some loyalty over the years, tossing it into set lists as a kind of instrumental palate cleanser,” says Billy. “It requires my full attention as the notes spill out.”
To record the Streetlife album, Michael Stewart once again recruited an all-star lineup of session men, though Billy was still hungering to work with his road band and make use of the wordless communication they had acquired from gigging night after night. Tight as the ensemble was, Billy couldn’t resist what he later called “dribbling” another sonic layer on top: He was going through a period of enchantment with the stinging sounds of the Moog synthesizer; “And I felt the jagged stabs of sound it lent to a song like ‘The Entertainer’ helped make my point,” he adds.
“Overall, though, to be honest, I have a very low regard for that particular album. The rush to record it left me with less than my strongest material. In general, the album seemed directionless.”
It would turn out that Billy wasn’t alone in that assessment of the release. “Desiccated of ideas” was hardly the unkindest phrase from a pan in Rolling Stone. Other critical dismissals were soon followed by disappointing sales figures. “The Entertainer” barely clicked as a single, and when it stalled at number thirty-four, the album ground to a halt at thirty-five. It would have been a likely time for Billy to reassess where he stood in his career. But Jon Troy was getting pressure from Columbia to schedule recording dates for yet another album.
It wasn’t hard to read in the label’s attitude that they considered the album to be a complete bomb. Somehow Billy persuaded them to stop the bleeding and not release it in what had been a promising market in Australia. Says Billy, “I’m actually convinced that my success in Australia was due to the fact that Streetlife was held back there.” Instead, Piano Man was followed up two years later, down under, by the Turnstiles album, and that kept radio play and critical acceptance in Australia at a high level for him.
Billy Joel Page 11