“At the time of the Vietnam War draft, my favorite line you’d hear was ‘Vietnam is sending the black man to kill the yellow man for the white man who stole the land from the red man.’ For a young and rebellious kid like me, it was pretty simple: Why do I want to go shoot somebody over in Vietnam? I don’t feel any threat.
“But a lot of my friends went, and of course I respected them and what they endured. And over the years, they would say to me, ‘Why don’t you do a song about it?’ And I repeatedly told them that I just didn’t feel knowledgeable enough. This led to a series of late-night sessions, some of them very boozy and frank and moving, and I finally felt I could take a stab at inhabiting that world they’d been in, which was how I came to write ‘Goodnight Saigon.’ ”
In Billy’s mind, all the soldiers had had was one another: “They fought for our country, and then they didn’t get welcomed home. And they did this in the prime of their lives, and to this day, a lot of them are still screwed up over that. You know, no flags, no parades, no brass bands. They were basically told to throw that uniform away and make believe they were never there. ‘Grow your hair long and, here, take this pill, you’ll be fine.’ ”
What was being marginalized, in Billy’s mind, was the hopeful world of the 1960s—it would be shattered for the people who had fought the war and once staffed the factories. A thread was being broken: “And this was all supposed to be during the time of Reaganomics and God Bless America, the shining city on a hill, aren’t we the mighty power!”
Ultimately, Billy and the band went back to Allentown and played a couple of shows. But the city was still having a tough time, not having recovered from the steel recession. “I empathize with people who have difficulty finding work or staying in a job,” says Billy. “I know people sometimes think that I don’t know what that’s like—He’s always been a rich rock star, he doesn’t know what people are going through. The hell I don’t. I wasn’t born a rock star. I didn’t inherit anything. I had to work my whole life, and I consider what I do a job. And there’s a lot of actual work involved in it. No, being a musician is not as tough as working in a factory, but I’ve worked in a factory. Maybe not in a steel mill, but I put in time inking typewriter ribbons in a factory, and my God, it’s mind-numbing, a Dickensian existence. To this day I still remember what it feels like to do a meaningless hard day’s work for a low wage.”
While writing The Nylon Curtain in the early 1980s, Billy was still feeling that post-Vietnam seismic shift in the country. The image of a nylon curtain wasn’t chosen without some thought. “It had to do with the suburbs, with a certain degradation of our lives as everything went synthetic,” explains Billy. “By contrast to the Iron Curtain, a dominant image in Americans’ heads from the forties on through the fall of its key physical feature, the Berlin Wall, the nylon curtain is not a clear image. It wavers, it’s hazy. Again, I wasn’t aiming to send a message as an overt sociopolitical statement, but I wanted to write about people in a different way, and I wanted it to be very richly textured.”
In keeping with that, Billy and his team weren’t even sure what the record was until the very end of the mixing process. “Rather than writing the songs from the inside out—you start with a basic idea and you build out—I wrote it from the outside in. You take a germ of an idea and you flesh it out. This was done from an aural landscape, working my way into Well, what’s the heart of the song? And not knowing the answer until the final mix—Oh, this is what it is. It’s a great way to play the studio as an instrument.”
Billy came to the realization that the Beatles had begun using the studio as an instrument around the time of the Revolver album. “When they started an album, they weren’t always sure what they were going to end up with,” he says. “I think of how John Lennon would pick up a French horn, or Paul would play the drums, just messing around with all kinds of stuff. And they ended up in a really cool place.
“I had an idea of the sound I was after, and a certain mood for the album. And with ‘Allentown’ and ‘Goodnight Saigon’ in particular, I finished writing the songs using external elements.” In the studio, they actually edited in the sounds of a pile driver and, the first noise as the album opens, a factory whistle. Real-life sound effects appear all through that album, such as the jet sounds and the boarding announcement in “Scandinavian Skies,” which was an actual airport announcement in Dutch for a flight leaving from Amsterdam to Stockholm. “We had a blast doing all that. It’s not just about playing instruments and the right notes; it’s also about creating an atmosphere.”
The last song on the album, “Where’s the Orchestra?” was a summation of all the feelings Billy was having at the time, “that life isn’t a Broadway musical, it’s a Greek tragedy. Okay, I’m here, my big night at the performance, and this is it? It’s a drama.”
Where’s the orchestra
After all
This is my big night on the town
My introduction to the theatre crowd
I assumed that the show would have a song
So I was wrong.
Twenty years almost to the day after that song was released as the closing cut on The Nylon Curtain, Billy would be quoted in Chuck Klosterman’s September 2002 New York Times Magazine story speaking of it: “ ‘That song still applies to me,’ [Joel] says in a weirdly stoic tone. ‘I heard it the other day, and it still moved me, because I feel like that today. I’ve only felt content a few times in my life, and it never lasted. I’m very discontented right now. There are situations in my life that didn’t pan out.’ ”
The New York Times Magazine piece had been set up as a kind of curtain opener for the “Movin’ Out” Broadway debut about a month later but became a cri de coeur—a bit of a PR backfire. Klosterman had done his homework and knew that the proximate cause of Billy’s dour, almost clinically depressed mood was his recent breakup with Long Island television news anchor Trish Bergin.
Billy continued: “I’m like most other human beings. I try and I fail. The whole message of that song is that even though you can enjoy the comedic, ironic elements of what you’re experiencing, life will always come up and whap you on the head.”
Subsequently, in his 2003 book of essays, Sex, Drugs and Cocoa Puffs: A Low Culture Manifesto, Klosterman did something unexpected for a Spin magazine emeritus: he wrote a hipster’s laudatory critique, “Every Dog Must Have His Day, Every Drunk Must Have His Drink,” as an ode to Billy’s work, centering on the Glass Houses album but also extolling “Where’s the Orchestra?” and Klosterman’s own personal, even spiritual, relationship to the song. The heart of his thesis can be distilled to “Nobody would ever claim that Billy Joel is cool in the conventional sense … yet Billy Joel is great.”
He saw Billy as being “unfairly ghettoized” by listeners who couldn’t fit him into a Springsteen-style archetype, but added that by contrast, “it’s almost as if Joel’s role in the experience is just to create a framework that I can place myself into; some of Raymond Carver’s stories do the same thing.”
In “Where’s the Orchestra?” he writes, “Anyone can figure out Joel is actually discussing the inexplicable emptiness of his own life.… It’s about having a dark secret, but—once again—not a cool secret.” In sum, for Klosterman, the album is really about what he calls the “New Depression,” which started around the same time the album came out in mid-1982.
In a later, pamphlet-sized book called The Billy Joel Essays, Klosterman notes that his Times editor “found it slightly bizarre that I liked Billy Joel, since he was living under the impression that I sat in a bomb shelter listening to Warrant and snorting cocaine off a Ouija board.” Being assigned to write the piece because he liked Billy “proved ironic,” he notes in introducing the reprinted piece, “because now Billy Joel hates me.”
The Times piece indeed kicked up some pushback from Billy’s near circle of advisers. While Billy thought, based on the disconsolate interview, that the writer saw him as one of the last romantics, he
felt the printed result was maudlin. Billy was quoted in the New York Post as complaining that most of the piece was plucked from just a few minutes of their interview. But over time, as Klosterman ascended in the public eye partly on the post-Billy hullabaloo, and as Billy benefited by getting a second look from the kind of rock dweebs who once ignored him, the Klosterman insights have been seen as positive. And he still offers real insight in some of his pronouncements: “[Billy] musically amplifies mainstream depression. He never tried to invent a new way to be sad. Joel’s sardonic gloom has been at the vortex of almost all his most visceral work.”
The album and the song close together, on a moody note, as Billy finishes singing the final verse (and then, briefly, reprises the theme to “Allentown”):
At least I understand
All the innuendo and the irony
And I appreciate
The roles the actors played
The point the author made
And after the closing lines
And after the curtain calls
The curtain falls
On empty chairs
Where’s the orchestra?
“The Nylon Curtain was a concept album,” says Billy. “Even in the love songs, there are troubles, pressure, surprises, and disappointments. Everybody fails, everybody falls, everybody has something bad happen. It’s about how you recover, how you cope with it, how you deal with loss and regret and move on. That’s a major, recurring theme in a lot of my lyrics.”
Making the album was, at times, in terms of both the work and the mood, an excruciatingly difficult process for him and his band. There’s so much going on in the album—so many textures, so many colors, so many instruments, so many vocal parts, and so much production technique. “I was, I guess, trying to create my own Sgt. Pepper,” says Billy. “I wanted it to be a real statement. I was picturing kids sitting and listening to this album the same way I used to listen to Sgt. Pepper under those big padded Koss headphones.”
The album, which was released in September 1982, was also made for FM radio, but progressive FM radio had faded in the late 1970s. By 1982 it was all gone. The stations would play “Allentown” only occasionally. “Pressure” and “Goodnight Saigon” got some airplay at college stations, but the album was a commercial failure. For Billy, it was an artistic success, but when he got to the end of it, he reported feeling as if he’d died making the album: “It was so much work and so rich and deep—but not a lot of fun. It was much darker than I had foreseen when I set out to make it.”
One revealing track on that album is “Surprises.” Even as he recorded it, Billy realized his marriage to Elizabeth was headed for its finale. Says Billy, “There’s a line, ‘It shouldn’t surprise you at all / You know / … You were so young and naïve / I know it’s hard to believe / But now it shouldn’t surprise you at all.’
“Because I kind of knew this all along.”
BY EARLY 1980, Elizabeth and Billy lived in different places and had very different lives. The two officially separated that year; Frank Weber had already been guiding Home Run on a day-to-day basis, with Elizabeth as the titular head.
Frank actually took Billy’s side in the divorce, causing Billy to feel beholden to him. “People wonder why I hired my brother-in-law to manage my finances after splitting with Elizabeth. But he had put himself in opposition to his sister, his own blood, to take care of my needs at the time,” explains Billy. “In hindsight it seems foolish, but at the time, it made perfect sense because Elizabeth really wasn’t overseeing business when we parted ways. She was off being more of a rock star than I was. She was living a life of limo rides and hanging with the swells.”
While Frank Weber was managing, Elizabeth went to work on other projects. Meanwhile, Frank was pointing out all the places where he felt his sister had made wrong business decisions.
In 1982, however, before the divorce and separation of assets, Elizabeth and Billy made a last attempt to reconcile. During that time, she asked him to buy them a townhouse in Manhattan, and he complied, purchasing a $4 million (very expensive) four-story house in the East Sixties. “I thought, Well, maybe this will do it. Maybe this will bring us back together,” he remembers.
Elizabeth hired Mario Buatta, the most famous interior designer in Manhattan, to furnish and decorate the townhouse, and wound up spending untold amounts on the home for both figurative and actual chintz. She loved her Alfa Romeo and had assembled an enviable wardrobe. The money was flying out of the kitty. “Finally I figured out the score, and the divorce went ahead full speed,” says Billy. “I really felt like I’d been burned this last time, because I didn’t feel that she actually had any intention of working on a reconciliation. I think she wanted to get whatever she could get out of me before the shit hit the fan.”
Elizabeth, correctly assessing that Billy wouldn’t want to stage a fight over the details, persuaded him that the best way to handle the divorce settlement would be to use her own counsel, Texas attorney Ron Williams. Frank signed off on her idea. Along with other assets and shares of the proceeds going forward, Elizabeth ended up with the Upper East Side townhouse as part of the division of marital assets.
Elizabeth’s reaction to Billy’s serious motorcycle accident on April 15, 1982, would be the lasting proof of the divorce’s inevitability.
The accident was horrific. Jim Boyer, longtime sound engineer for Phil Ramone and Billy as they made a string of hit albums, was right behind him on New York Avenue, in Huntington Station, and describes what happened. “I can’t tell you how many times people look right at you when you’re on a motorcycle and don’t see you,” he says. “He was on a racer,” referring to Billy’s favorite breed of bike, a café racer with low-slung handlebars. An elderly local Long Island resident, Cornelia Bynum (who, to add insult to injury, would later sue), “hit him right in the front of the motorcycle, which turned the wheel and jammed his hand between the handlebar and the gas tank. But it knocked him off the bike too.”
Billy flew some dozens of feet down the road, in fact. “I got him off the street and sat him down,” recalls Boyer. “He was mobile. I made a call, and as soon as they realized who it was, it was a mob scene. We just got him on a helicopter and took him into the city.”
“I was surprised,” recalls Billy, “that I was able to stand up and stagger over to my bike to see what the damage was. I guess I was in shock, because the pain hadn’t hit yet. I sat down on the curb and checked the damage to my hands.” The injuries, despite the heavy-duty gloves he’d been wearing, were extensive.
Billy looked up, dazed, at the first cop to arrive, who seemed to be angling for an autograph. “An ambulance ran me over to Huntington Hospital, then into a helicopter, and the next thing I knew, I was in Columbia Presbyterian in Manhattan with both hands in casts, a crushed [left] thumb, and a wrist that had been wrenched out of its socket—just all banged up.
“It’s the old joke, right? ‘You’ll never play the piano again.’ I’m sure these expert reconstructive surgeons—and I thank them for what they did for me—had a couple of dark laughs working on my left thumb. It was so crushed, they couldn’t save the top bone, the distal phalanx, under the nail.”
Billy’s hands eventually healed well enough to function, in his opinion, passably. “It still kind of wobbles at the end,” says Billy. “Because of the damage to my hand, there’s no subtlety in my playing, no real nuance at all. People say I’m a good pianist. I’m not. For rock and roll, I can hold my own, but in classical or jazz terms, I stink. I mostly use two fingers on my left hand; I play octaves. Most people are right-handed, like me, so to be able to manipulate the fingers in your left hand, to do the stuff that greats like Bill Evans could do, is a real gift. Bach teaches you that both hands are equally important, because they’re both playing melody. I never really studied enough to emulate that.”
One day shortly after the accident, Billy woke up from a “painkiller nap,” and Elizabeth was in his hospital room with an attorney. She h
ad a contract she wanted Billy to sign. The contract, as Billy recalls, basically said that he was turning over everything to her and her control. She made the case to Billy that “this is what we should do … this would clarify things and there wouldn’t be any more battling.” “When I finally understood what was in that deal, I said, ‘No fucking way—I’m in a hospital bed and you’re shedding crocodile tears and bringing me a contract that completely screws me? And I’m supposed to turn over this control to you because you’ve got an attorney here representing you?’
“I may have acted like an idiot a time or two, but I’m not a complete idiot. I guess she thought I was in a very vulnerable position and that I would have an epiphany—that she knew best and I should turn everything over to her. That really killed it right then and there. You don’t do that to somebody in a hospital bed. I was stunned by the whole thing.”
Eventually Billy flew to Haiti, accompanied by Frank Weber, and got what has often been termed the “quickie” divorce (with no residency requirement or wait) that local law allowed. “We went to Port-au-Prince, which was a pretty scary place—poor people in the streets, soldiers everywhere; it was nasty—and I remember thinking, What a poetically perfect place to end this situation. There must be a reason it’s not called Love-y.” After the visit to the Haitian Office du Divorce des Étrangers, he sat with Frank in the airport bar. “Once it was all agreed to, it was a pretty hefty divorce agreement,” says Billy.
There were record royalties, publishing rights, copyright royalties, live tour monies, real estate holdings, and more. By 1987, Elizabeth was coming after Billy in New York State court in Manhattan for what she claimed were nonpayments in pension plan funds ($300,000), music earnings ($180,000), and monies ($260,000) that had been held back by Billy’s advisers to pay what they saw as her fair share of the taxes due from that period.
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