Billy Joel

by Fred Schruers

  “Over the years,” says Billy, “my opinion of that album has persisted. Streetlife, to quote one of its lyrics, should be ‘put in the back in the discount rack like another can of beans.’ ”

  CHAPTER 6

  GOODBYE TO HOLLYWOOD

  In mid-1975 Billy sensed a restlessness in Elizabeth, seemingly the result of varied pressures she was feeling. She and Jon Small looked after Sean on a rotating basis, and the boy flew, often solo, west to east and back again. During Sean’s L.A. stays, since Billy was often on the road or simply too busy to stand in as the boy’s father figure, she took on most of the caretaking responsibility herself.

  At the same time, Billy had his own set of pressures, the key one being an urgent need to build a body of songs that could serve him better in the studio than the last bunch had. Meanwhile, his unsettled management situation only added to the career instability he felt. He was sensing that he probably had kept Jon Troy on as manager longer than he should have. Billy had gleaned from those around him that they all liked Jon—he understood record promotion and was road smart; he also knew plenty of people in the music business, knew about radio, knew about retail. But Troy had filled the role more as a road-dog comrade-in-arms than as a plugged-in pro. He had no credentials as a manager.

  Troy believes that Elizabeth had targeted him early on as an impediment to her own aims: “She was a very ambitious woman, and it was obvious she was hitching her wagon to a star and positioning herself to learn as much from me as she could. It didn’t take me long to realize, She’s in training for my job. The frustration was, it didn’t matter. I could talk to Billy all day, but she had him every night in bed. Only Billy saw the beauty and the love. Nobody else could.”

  Billy’s original drummer in his solo launch, Rhys Clark, felt concern over the pair: “He was very obsessed with her and wrote songs accordingly.… They had some difficulty with Jon when they first came out here; they had Sean with them. And Elizabeth would kinda cry on [Rhys’s wife] Marilyn’s shoulder about Billy and the road and so forth. He did tell us one time about when he came home to the house on Mulholland, the occasion was Valentine’s or something, and she put on the gear in terms of the garter belt and everything—made a night of it. He loved it.”

  Whatever happened later, Billy would never discount the role Elizabeth played in that period, “how much hard work she did on my behalf, and the real love that existed between us.” As he said in “You’re My Home,” she saw “the crazy gypsy in my soul” as no one else could.

  When the time came to let Jon Troy go, Billy did so with remorse. Ultimately, all he could offer had already been written down in “Say Goodbye to Hollywood” with (especially in the live version on Songs in the Attic) its mocking castanets; terse, declamatory sax breaks (each following the baleful reminder, “Forever”); punchingly relentless drums; and, most of all, the impassioned vocal—derived from the throb of the Ronettes’ Ronnie Spector and done by her to good effect with the E Street Band in 1977, as well as by Bette Midler the same year. (As the song fades, Billy can be heard hollering to his band as they depart the studio.)

  As an apology for what came to pass, the song has a bit of rhino skin on it, a refusal to give all the way in to sentiment:

  So many faces in and out of my life

  Some will last

  Some will be just now and then

  Life is a series of hellos and goodbyes

  I’m afraid it’s time for goodbye again.

  The two men would see each other over the years, and Troy remembers a dinner in New Orleans, where he was bartending at the time, as a kind of warm summing-up moment. Billy’s ultimate take on the split was delivered as a benediction, not a taunt, says Troy. “Yeah, that was it. He told me a few years later, ‘Your problem was you were in it for the music.’ And he said, ‘Well, you got a song.’ ”

  After Jon’s death in 2009, a music business friend would note that no one had expected a long life for him: “Jon’s idea of a good breakfast was vodka and amphetamines.” But he lives on as Johnny in “Say Goodbye to Hollywood,” in Billy’s guilt-tinged depiction of how their arrangement would end under pressure from later handlers:

  Johnny’s takin’ care of things for a while

  And his style is so right for troubadours

  They got him sitting with his back to the door

  Now he won’t be my fast gun anymore.

  “ ‘Johnny’s taking care of things for a while / and his style is so right for troubadours’ is of course about Jon Troy,” says Billy. “Jon was a good man, he loved music, and he really loved what I was doing. The ‘they’ in ‘they got him sitting with his back to the door’ refers to my attorney, my accountant, and me. We all agreed we couldn’t move forward effectively with Jon in. It all had a kind of Wild West theme. The legend was, Wild Bill Hickok never liked sitting with his back to the door, and indeed doing so one day is what killed him. And like Wild Bill, Jon just didn’t see the bullets coming.”

  THE DENOUEMENT OF the Jon Troy chapter would happen by degrees, as whatever Elizabeth’s aspirations, she was busy with her academic studies (later curtailed by her move back East) at the UCLA Anderson School of Management. She was perhaps wary, then, that combining the roles of wife and manager would put undue strain on a less-than-perfect relationship. Meanwhile she began looking about for a seasoned manager who could bring experience, contacts, and aggressive energy to the party.

  Lee Colton, having capably renegotiated the terms of the Artie Ripp deal, suggested a new full-service team, Caribou Management, to take over. It initially made sense to both Elizabeth and Billy. From his legal work with Blood, Sweat, and Tears, Lee knew Caribou’s Jimmy Guercio, who had produced their Grammy-winning second album. Jimmy’s partner was Larry Fitzgerald, the manager of Chicago and the Beach Boys. They added up to a powerhouse in the music industry, and in 1971, after Guercio grew weary of paying union scale at studios on either coast, they had built a deluxe recording retreat called Caribou Ranch in the remote mountains outside Boulder, Colorado. In fact, Elton John, with his 1974 Caribou album coming out of sessions there, was beginning a string of three albums on the site. Billy and the band prepared to put their career in Caribou’s hands. It seemed like an appealing package deal—a well-connected management team who also had their own creative outpost to shelter the artist during the process of making a crucial album.

  The managers were already making noises about using Elton’s band, who were familiar with the facility, to play on Billy’s record. But pushing in from an opposite angle was Billy’s road band, including mainstays Rhys Clark on drums and Doug Stegmeyer on bass, who were avid to play on his recording sessions. It would be a good row of paydays for the band. They also knew that Billy believed in the powerful machine that the group could be onstage, and that he wanted that same feel in the studio. On Streetlife Serenade, Michael Stewart had brought in highly able session guys, but for Billy, the vibe just wasn’t there. Still, Michael hadn’t wanted to work with Billy’s musicians. “This was frustrating the guys,” says Billy. “Little by little, the band’s camaraderie and joy in playing on the road were starting to fall apart.”

  Rhys had been on the road with Billy since Cold Spring Harbor, and he and the others wondered, When are we going to get to make a record? It was getting hard for Billy to pull the guys together. Nobody, including Billy, was getting paid a whole lot of money, and his well-honed road band was starting to fray.

  The record company finally relented, and the band attempted some live recordings at the Great American Music Hall in San Francisco. Those sessions were scrapped, though, which only increased the frustration.

  By the time the several weeks allocated to record Turnstiles rolled around in January 1976, Billy was feeling chastened from watching Streetlife tank. So knowing the label was in favor of a change, he started out with Guercio as producer. It looked good on paper; he had made big records with various best-selling artists. Wearing the twin hats of manager and produ
cer, he indeed insisted—in spite of Billy’s concerns—on using Elton John’s band, saying, “Well, you’re a piano player. Let’s get Elton’s guys.” Billy thought, What’s the point of that, exactly? That’s already Elton’s band—I want my own band.

  It was immediately clear to Billy that this creative arrangement wouldn’t work. “I played a little bit with Elton’s guys, Dee Murray and Nigel Olsson,” says Billy, “and they were really nice guys, but it sounded like Elton’s band. There was a real myopia to that move by Caribou—I was already sick of being called ‘the American Elton John.’ It was such a misstep that I already was sure I wouldn’t go much further with Caribou.

  “So I fired Jimmy Guercio as the producer. Now at this point, this was my third album with Columbia. You have to imagine the executives up there going, ‘He fired Jimmy Guercio? He’s not big enough to fire Jimmy Guercio.’ And then I was about to officially install Elizabeth to be the manager at that point. It just wasn’t working out with Caribou; it was just not the right company for me at all. It was too big, too West Coast oriented.”

  At the same time, in addition to their romantic partnership, Elizabeth and Billy formally entered into a professional partnership, and she began to show the kind of business prowess that would stand her in good stead as Billy’s manager. Michael Lang had seen the change coming all the way back in the Irwin Mazur days. “I liked Irwin,” Lang recalls, “but I thought he was inept and wasn’t furthering Billy’s career. Artie had him body and soul, as they say. So I didn’t think Billy had a champion in a situation where he needed one at the time.… I think Elizabeth was just sort of formulating the idea, I could do this. I think I could see that building in her.”

  According to Billy, “Elizabeth had good instincts, and she was also protective—she was my wife. She saw me kind of getting screwed around by people like Artie Ripp, and then she thought Jon Troy wasn’t doing a very good job. Then with Caribou, it was the arrogance of those guys and just their whole way of doing things was just so corporate and not me at all. And I turned to her when I was going to leave Caribou. I said, ‘Why don’t you do it? You’ve been watching this stuff. You’re pretty smart. You always have something very insightful to say about what’s going on. Why don’t you handle it?’ She thought, Great. I think she was just waiting for me to give her the go-ahead.”

  The change was immediate. Billy still had one foot on the West Coast, but Elizabeth moved their home and operation to New York, to a townhouse on East Ninety-second Street, near Central Park. The day after they agreed on it, she turned one floor into Home Run Systems Corp., filling it with desks, telephones, assistants, and stationery, and “boom—it was on.”

  Their energetic friend Dennis Arfa—they had met when he managed a band that opened for the Hassles—set up shop as the in-house booking agent. The move spelled the end of savvy booker Chip Rachlin’s tenure. In another move that ran counter to the conventional wisdom, they agreed with Dennis that they wanted to play headlining gigs only, rather than some of the illogical—and in some cases absurd—pairings they’d been subjected to. “Nothing against Olivia Newton-John, but we were hardly a natural fit as a co-billed concert attraction,” says Billy. Also coming on board as road manager was Jeff Schock, who would grow into a role guiding marketing and promotion for Billy.

  Howard Kaufman, for decades an influential music business operative who was part of the Caribou team back then, insists that Elizabeth’s role in Billy’s ascent has been consistently undersold: “Because she had the drive and Billy trusted her, and she took over his management—that’s why he’s successful today. That’s my opinion. No one else could have managed him, because he wasn’t going to listen to anyone else. She got him out from behind the piano; she got him to make the kind of records he could make, to do the things he needed to do to be a star. We were never going to get him to do them.”

  At that moment, however, Billy’s split from Caribou left an unsettled, unpromising career crossroads in its wake. As he remembers: “I was already headed back to New York and I said, ‘Okay, my wife’s going to manage me.’ So I imagine little red check marks went by my name up at Columbia Records: his wife’s managing him, he hasn’t had a hit, his album stiffed, he fired Jimmy Guercio. And the other thing was, I had passed on hiring George Martin to produce, which was another strike.”

  The George Martin episode still hurts: “That was ’seventy-three, and George Martin was looked on by the music industry as the state-of-the-art producer, the Beatles’ guy. If you could get George Martin, then you must be pretty damn good. He was interested, but when we had a conversation, he said, ‘I’ve seen you play, I like your stuff. I don’t like your band. I want you to work with the studio musicians.’ It was a crucial moment because here I had the opportunity to work with George Martin, a producer of the band I admired most in the world, the Beatles, and he didn’t want to work with my band. I said, ‘What do I do?’ It was a real dilemma. And I kept trying to convince him to try the guys out, just let them try. We’d been on the road, and that was what I wanted. I didn’t want smooth.”

  In fact, Billy himself was full of jagged energy, both musically and lyrically. As a songwriter, he would respond to news-making events in the world around him—often getting his updates via the New York tabloids he would seek out at the newsstands of whatever town he was in. The jolt that drove him back to New York, after three years out west, was the famous Daily News headline of October 29, 1975: “Ford to City: Drop Dead.” New York was going to default, and the city, as it begged for federal help, was going bankrupt.

  “I wrote a song, which ended up on Turnstiles, called ‘Miami 2017,’ based on the idea of what would happen if New York actually went down,” says Billy. “The answer I came up with was: the apocalypse would happen. That’s what everybody was predicting. The cops wouldn’t be there. The firemen wouldn’t be there. The city would burn. There’d be riots, all kinds of terrible things. So I pictured myself being an old Jewish guy living in Miami Beach in the year 2017, telling my grandchildren that I was there—‘Seen the lights go out on Broadway / I saw the Empire State laid low.’ ”

  The song was also Billy’s reaction to the casually voiced anti–New York sentiment from people in L.A., a steady gnawing at his hometown loyalty: “I didn’t move out to California assuming I was going to stay there forever. I was there temporarily, and when I left, it wasn’t so much because of a bad experience in Los Angeles; living there was actually quite pleasant at that time. The music business was centered there. I had a nice house up on Mulholland Drive. The California lifestyle was very easy, and I was still coasting a bit on the success of Piano Man, though Streetlife had come out and … dropped dead. But when I experienced any kind of anti–New York feeling, I actually felt angry. ‘Miami 2017’ came out of that. It was a kind of science fiction song. More personally, it was a challenging premise about going home, which is where ‘New York State of Mind’ came from as well.”

  Billy never assumed “New York State of Mind” would be a hit. He saw it as more of a standard, a 1940s- or 1950s-style blues song, in the manner of “Georgia on My Mind.” The song was never even released as a single. It got FM play and a certain amount of airplay on New York pop stations. But when Barbra Streisand recorded it on her hit Streisand Superman album, it got a lot of attention. (Says Billy, “Certainly my mom looked at me with fresh eyes—finally, a real singer had picked up on her errant son’s efforts.”) A number of other artists, including Mose Allison, covered “New York State of Mind” because it was known as a great singer’s song. But to Billy’s mind, it didn’t become truly iconic until after 9/11: “It took on a whole other meaning then, because it was a song about coming back to New York, and how much this place means to someone who’s had to leave it for a while.”

  The songs for Turnstiles—the title evoked not just the subway entrances in his beloved city but the access points to certain music venues—were emerging with Billy’s return to the East Coast in 1975 going into
1976. The move had its roots in a day about a year before, as he and Elizabeth drove from upstate New York across the Connecticut border on Route 84. “Driving that road, you cross the Newburgh-Beacon Bridge,” remembers Billy. “It was the fall and just beautiful, the Hudson Valley in full fall-foliage glory, and I said, ‘Good God, this is gorgeous. I never realized that we had this kind of stuff, and I miss New York.’ ”

  “I want to find a house up here,” he told Elizabeth. “I don’t want to move back to the city. I want to move just outside of town and kind of work my way back into the city.”

  Elizabeth found a house for rent in Highland Falls, a small community just south of West Point on the Hudson River. The house, once the carriage house for J. P. Morgan’s estate, was in a daffodil-strewn retreat overlooking the river. The compact Georgian structure wasn’t grand, but it was picturesque.

  Billy finished a tour, flew in from the final gig, got on a Greyhound bus headed to West Point, and took a seat by the window. “On that ride I started writing the song that became ‘New York State of Mind,’ thinking, This is where I’m going to end up. I’m back,” says Billy.

  “It really was intended to reflect a New York state of mind, not a New York city of mind, but I wanted to include the city in it,” he explains. “I was so glad to be back home again, feeling, This is where I belong. And that song was a celebration of that.”

  “Say Goodbye to Hollywood” overlapped the theme: “It was all about putting L.A. behind me—Okay, thank you, you’ve been great, it’s been fun, but I’m leaving, say goodbye. A lot of the Turnstiles album was really that dynamic of coming home.”