Billy Joel

by Fred Schruers

  That said, Yetnikoff’s denial is clear. “Nothing ever happened,” he says. “I didn’t think she was that attractive, number one. Number two, I’m really gutsy and ballsy, but you think I’m going to start with a major artist’s wife? I’m not that gutsy. I’m not that crazy. And I always stayed away from trying to entangle personal and business. We’d get friendly and everything, but at one time Elizabeth’s brother Frank, when he took over from her, asked me to invest with him. He said, ‘We’re going to make a ton of money; we’ll buy real estate.’ And I said, ‘I’m not going to do it.’ He said, ‘Why? You afraid to lose money? We’ll guarantee it.’ I said, ‘That’s not the reason. If it’s a successful investment, now what do I do? I owe the artist a favor. Do I give him an extra royalty point? If it’s an unsuccessful investment, what do I do? Throw him off the label? I lose no matter what I do. So I’m not going to invest with him.’ I’m also not going to fuck his wife. As crazy as I may be.”

  Yetnikoff remembers one night saying to Billy, just so he knew where they stood, “She’s your wife and your manager. This is not my personal friend. I’ll tell you what, fire her, and I’ll never go out [to business meetings] with her again.”

  As the label head recalls, Elizabeth was not averse to stoking jealousy on Billy’s part. “She would tell people, ‘Walter has a very nice apartment.’ She was talking about leaving him at that time. Billy said, ‘So why is she telling me this?’ I said, ‘She’s looking to piss you off for whatever reason. She wants to get even for something, real or imagined. And I’m the one guy you really can’t have a fight with—nor me with you. So therefore she’s telling you it’s me, and setting up this whole thing. So she’s pulling your chain, I have no idea why.’ ” Yetnikoff remembers, “She had a little bit of a sadistic thing.… Emotionally, Elizabeth took advantage of him … a little cold. I remember once he said, ‘My feet are hurting … Elizabeth made me wear these shoes.’ ”

  However complex the triad of manager, artist, and executive, and however discouraging the results from Billy’s first two Columbia albums, Yetnikoff believed that his initial feelings about Billy, as refreshed by the energetic live date he saw, would bring talent and good fortune together. The turning point would come in 1977, when he first heard what would become the title cut of Billy’s album—“The Stranger”: “That sort of just went click! It hit me right away, you know—this guy’s got it—it’s a done deal.”

  London, about a century ago. Billy Joel’s great-uncle Harry Nyman (standing) was an amateur boxer like Billy. Seated next to him is Billy’s grandfather Phillip Nyman. (Photo credit i1.1)

  Billy Joel’s paternal grandfather, Karl Joel. (Photo credit i1.2)

  Billy’s dad, Helmut (later Howard) Julius Joel, born in June 1923, was sent by his parents to a private school in northeastern Switzerland, as Hitler was coming to power in their native Germany. (Photo credit i1.3)

  Billy’s mom, Roz Nyman, and dad, sometime around their marriage in 1942. (Photo credit i1.4)

  Billy and his sister, Judy, at the family upright piano on Meeting Lane, Hicksville. (Photo credit i1.5)

  Billy with Roz and Judy behind their house at 20 Meeting Lane, Hicksville, circa 1952. (Photo credit i1.6)

  Billy in his band uniform, holding the French horn, circa 1958. (Photo credit i1.7)

  The Lost Souls in 1965 (they played the New York World’s Fair in September): clockwise, Billy, Ken Recher, Jim Bosse, Howie Blauvelt, and Billy Zampino. Jim and Bill were the inspiration for Billy’s song “James.” (Photo credit i1.8)

  Hicksville High School yearbook photo, 1967. (Photo credit i1.9)

  The Hassles at a local Long Island club, 1968. John Dizek, with the tambourine, had Jagger’s moves—but Billy’s superior singing and deft playing, here on the Hammond B3 organ, soon made him the band’s focus. (Photo credit i1.10)

  With Patti Lee Berridge, 1968. Billy was nineteen and, as the peacoat and (nonprescription) spectacles attest, a major John Lennon fan. (Photo credit i1.11)

  An outtake from the photo shoot for the self-titled 1970 Attila album. (Photo credit i1.12)

  Jon Small, Sean Weber-Small, and Billy, circa 1970. (Photo credit i1.13)

  Irwin Mazur’s duties as manager on the tour to promote the Cold Spring Harbor album included such expertise as tire changing (left to right: Billy making a snowball, guitarist Al Hertzberg, bassist Larry Russell, and Elizabeth Weber). (Photo credit i1.14)

  First post-signing performance for the label, 1973, at a ritual known as the singles meeting, in a CBS conference room. (Photo credit i1.15)

  The attention from Cashbox was encouraging—Billy hadn’t had a hit album or single yet, just a too-long-for-mainstream-radio waltz called “Piano Man.” (Photo credit i1.16)

  Another Holiday Inn on the Piano Man tour. (Photo credit i1.17)

  Backstage at Academy of Music in Philadelphia, 1974, with Bruce Springsteen, noted local deejay Ed Sciaky, and Janis Ian. (Photo credit i1.18)

  On the road, or at least on the shoulder—left to right, Russell Javors, Richie Cannata, Billy Joel, Doug Stegmeyer, Brian Ruggles, and Liberty DeVitto. Guitarist Howie Emerson would have taken this shot. (Photo credit i1.19)

  The 1977 Home Run office party at the Copacabana—Billy with Dennis Arfa, Elizabeth, and of course, Santa. (Photo credit i1.20)

  Soundman Brian Ruggles, left, and lighting designer Steve Cohen, right, had already been with Billy on several tours when this photo was taken at a Columbia Records party in 1978. As part of the road cadre once known as the Mean Brothers, they’re now in their fifth decade as leaders in the Joel brain trust. (Photo credit i1.21)

  Cuba, March of 1979, as Billy and the band visited for the Havana Jam ’79 show that guitarist Russell Javors called “The Bay of Gigs.” (Photo credit i1.22)

  Billy and Elizabeth, on the shoreline at Cold Spring Harbor in 1979, awaiting a seaplane lift. (Photo credit i1.23)

  Billy, thirty-five, and Christie, thirty-one, on board the yacht that served as the setting for their wedding and part of the subsequent celebration as it toured New York Harbor, March 1985. INSET: Christie’s handcrafted invitation to the wedding. (Photo credit i1.24)

  CHAPTER 7

  JUST THE WAY I AM

  Songwriting has always been an obsessive—sometimes joyous, sometimes torturous—part of Billy Joel’s life. It probably hasn’t helped that his method is the inverse of that of most writers: “I start with a melody, a chord pattern, and a rhythm, and then I try to decode what’s in the music. What is it saying? What was my motivation for writing it? What’s the emotion?

  “It’s really the backward way to write songs; most songwriters begin with words, lyrics, poetry, and then set it to music. Over the years, I’ve marveled watching Elton John write songs. Here’s how Elton typically works: [longtime collaborator] Bernie Taupin will send him a bunch of lyrics, and then Elton will sit down at the piano and bang out a melody. I always say to him, ‘How the hell do you do that?’ Because I do it the other way around. The music is there and then I jam the words on top of it. It may be more difficult, but that’s the way I’ve always worked.”

  Similarly, Billy has always listened to songs with the music as the essential tableau and has tended to discover the words more gradually. “I actually discussed this once with Keith Richards when we found ourselves sitting together at some music industry function. He talked about the discovery he’d made that he called ‘Vowel Movements.’ You need to find a good vowel to help you round out some of your lines. An example of that is ‘Honky Tonk Women’: ‘I tried to take her upstairs / For a riiiiiiidee …’

  “I never ignore how much luck and chance can help a song. When I write, I’m not really speculating that a song will resonate with millions of people. I wouldn’t even begin to know if a song is going to be a hit—and I certainly don’t try to sit down and write one.” He also never thought about the record company or the radio when he wrote, or the critics: “And not even the audience. For one thing, I’ve never v
iewed the audience as monolithic. They’re just individual people who, thankfully, still come to see me in large numbers.

  “So, basically, I write for myself—for my own amusement, and with the thought, What do I want to hear?” Billy began in the 1970s, largely trying to re-create Beatles music. “When the Beatles broke up, I thought, Oh, we’re not gonna get any of that anymore. Maybe I can try to do something like that. It might sound selfish, but it was always for me. I’m the only person I know how to please, really. Will that produce hit records? I never know. I certainly didn’t see it coming with The Stranger.”

  During the Stranger stage of Billy’s life, Elizabeth was Billy’s muse. And for better or worse, he adds, “I got a lot of good material.

  “When a relationship goes south,” says Billy, “and you just sit back and let it happen—hoping maybe it’ll get better, maybe things will change, and they aren’t going to—you have to ask yourself sometimes, Do I really like this? Or am I a masochist? Or am I just letting this happen because I don’t want to ruffle any feathers?” He long ago rejected the masochism thesis but adds, “I think sometimes you let things slide because you hope they will get better. I was married, and I didn’t want it to fail.” As he started writing The Stranger, the album that would become his breakthrough, he admits, “I was clearly working out a lot of relationship issues in my music.”

  Among the most famous songs to emerge during this period was “Just the Way You Are.” “I think it’s a well-written song. It’s got a good chord progression, a clever melody, and a great sentiment in the lyric,” says Billy. “To this day I still empathize with the song’s main feeling: I love you just the way you are. Everybody wants to be told that—I always have. You want to be accepted for who you are—not for who you appear to be, or what you present as perhaps a mask to the world, but for exactly who you are. We all want someone to say, ‘Don’t change for me.’ ‘Clever conversation’ is just a lyric device for saying, ‘I don’t really want shallow cocktail chatter, superficial chitchat. I want someone I can really talk to, I want a real dialogue, I want real communication.’ It’s always struck me as odd that some people tend to interpret it as ‘He just wants to keep her in her place.’

  “I also don’t think a love song is effective unless there’s an element of anxiety in it, and an undercurrent of darkness. Love is not all glitter and wonderfulness and clouds and happiness forever—there are ups and downs in relationships. There’s an element of that anxiety in the bridge of the song: ‘What will it take till you believe in me / The way that I believe in you?’

  “I think there’s always a bit of insecurity in love, if you truly love somebody. If you open yourself up, if you allow yourself to be hurt, there’s potential vulnerability. That’s real love. Somebody can stomp all over you if you really love them, and you give them your heart anyway.”

  The first time Billy played “Just the Way You Are” for Elizabeth, they were at a restaurant in Northport on Long Island. He wanted her to know he’d done something special, thinking of her. “I wrote this for your birthday,” he told her after he finished playing the song.

  “ ‘Do I get the publishing too?’ ” Billy remembers her replying. (“She might have been half-joking,” he says, though his longtime lighting designer and friend Steve Cohen remembers joining her in her white Alfa Romeo in the lot for a smoke as she spat out between inhalations, “Didn’t even give me the fucking publishing.”) “In retrospect, I probably should have known right then and there that the relationship was doomed. I had written ‘Just the Way You Are’ for someone who had changed.”

  When it came time to record the song, Billy and the band didn’t like it all that much. “We all thought it was too much of a ‘chick song,’ ” he says, “and that I was going to get tagged as a lounge singer or a wedding singer for doing it.”

  Billy’s new producer, Phil Ramone, suggested a backward samba beat that, in everybody’s opinion, sounded much better. Phil had been working with Phoebe Snow, who was spending time in a nearby studio with Linda Ronstadt, and they’d both heard the song. (Phoebe, known for her 1975 hit “Poetry Man,” was soon to battle her label and move to Columbia to record a second album with Phil Ramone.)

  Phil played the song again for Phoebe in the control room. “Oh, it’s a great song,” she raved. When Billy and the band told her they didn’t like the song, she told them they were crazy. “You have to put that on the record,” she said. But Billy still didn’t want it on the album, citing it as “too gushy.”

  Then Linda Ronstadt chimed in: “That’s one of the greatest songs I’ve ever heard. You don’t want to put it on the album? Are you nuts? That’s a hit record.”

  “All of this shows how much I know about hit records,” says Billy. Phoebe and Linda browbeat both Billy and Phil into putting “Just the Way You Are” on the album. “Maybe Phil’s way of putting me in a corner was by saying, ‘I can’t argue with those two. Women know a lot of things better than men do.’ ”

  PHIL RAMONE WAS known to practice the “no bullshit” law: “It’s the only way to make music,” he says. “If something doesn’t quite smell right, or smells slick, those are things that I think the band and Bill and myself always kind of teased each other about—if it crossed that dangerous edge. I think the worry was that ‘Just the Way You Are’ was going to be categorized as somewhat too ‘sweetie pie.’ And our standing rule, which I think cemented our relationship, was that you don’t want to make a record that you have to apologize for five or ten years later. You don’t want to have a song that you’re stuck with.

  “Jokingly we said, ‘Well, you’ve written a song that may be played many times at weddings.’ You make a dumb remark like that and—voilà!—it comes true. But I think the reason Billy seldom plays that song is that it doesn’t really do in public what it does on the record. The notes are the same; the playing is done with a certain feel. But it doesn’t knock them down like some of the rock-and-roll tunes. So even though it was highly successful, you still can’t say we knew from the beginning it was going to put down such a footprint.”

  “Just the Way You Are” would be one of four tracks from The Stranger that charted in 1978. Billy accepted the invitation from Saturday Night Live to perform on February 28 of that year—even though, as guest host Chevy Chase pointed out: “The class of ’sixty-seven from Hicksville High out on Long Island is having their reunion tonight, but one alumnus will not be there because he’s here.… Ladies and gentlemen, Billy Joel.”

  Despite requests from the producers for Billy not to, Billy chose to launch into his recently released and highly controversial song “Only the Good Die Young,” which some decried as anti-Catholic and he described as “pro-lust.”

  “I suppose sneaking that in is what caused me to bite my thumb a couple times as I exchanged looks with the band afterward,” says Billy. “What sticks with me from that night is the squabble [former show mainstay] Chevy Chase got into with Bill Murray, who was essentially his replacement—and at that stage, just making his bones as the SNL legend he would become. I was standing in the wings with the band, ready to go on, when they got into it. As I recall, Chase spat out to Murray, ‘What’s this Second City shit?’ and Murray, giving no ground, and mindful that Chase’s marital difficulties had recently been made public, suggested Chase go home and do something unprintable to his wife. I think it was John Belushi who stepped in before punches were thrown. When we turned to Lorne Michaels and asked what it was all about, he snapped, ‘None of your business.’

  “And seconds later we were banging out ‘Only the Good Die Young.’ ”

  Billy did make his twentieth high school reunion at a local country club. “I noticed two things—the geeky guys from high school were the more successful and well-turned-out ones in the crowd, and even the girls I hadn’t made much impression on in the Hicksville High corridors were now quite flirtatious,” he remembers.

  ANOTHER SONG FROM The Stranger that people correctly assume to be abo
ut Elizabeth is “She’s Always a Woman.” “It reflects how she took a lot of heat—because there weren’t a lot of women in positions of power in the business at the time,” explains Billy. The scuttlebutt on Elizabeth was often—Oh, she’s a bitch, she’s a ball buster. But Billy’s attitude was “You can say she’s a tough businesswoman, but that isn’t my problem, that’s your problem. She’s always a woman to me.”

  It would remain surprising to Billy that “She’s Always a Woman” was, like “Just the Way You Are,” misinterpreted as being misogynistic. “I wrote it as a commentary on women in business being persecuted and insulted, talked about as if they were somehow not feminine because of their business acumen,” he says. “And my take was ‘She can ruin your faith with her casual lies / And she only reveals what she wants you to see’—all second person—but then it comes back to me: ‘She’s always a woman to me.’ Yes, she can be difficult, she can be confounding, she can be impossible, but she’s obviously a better businessperson than you are. So give credit where it’s due. It was a tribute to Elizabeth.

  “I saw it happen with my mom, who got beaten down by the system, unable to get steady, rewarding work. And I saw it happening all over again with Elizabeth. They were giving her a tough time because she was a woman.”