When Christie was living in Paris studying art, she used to stay up at night sketching, and a particular late-night radio show would come on with that song’s whistled intro. As a pair, they were night owls, but even bedtime didn’t shutter his creativity sometimes.
“His songwriting process was fascinating. Sometimes he would literally dream it, and he’d just like wake up and say, ‘Oh!’ and he’d have an idea.
“On tour, that whole energy, the audiences were totally into it; they just exuded happiness. That all came off the Innocent Man album so strongly, and you’d see the people in the audience with their boyfriend or girlfriend; it was their music together, and you could feel that. It was just wonderful.”
At the same time, Christie recalls, there were people in Billy’s PR firm who didn’t like the idea of him hooking up with her. “They felt that it sort of took this authentic rock-and-roller mystique away and thrust him a little too much in that white-hot spotlight.
“Being Billy and Christie, Christie and Billy, the couple, the item … suddenly twice as many people really do recognize you, and it starts becoming a kind of an excitement bubbling around when you enter a room or go anywhere.
“All of that stuff meant cameras, and Billy didn’t like cameras. He had this relationship with music critics—he didn’t like being critiqued—and photographers were, in his mind, an extension of newspapers—so he was highly suspicious: ‘What do they want?’ And I’d say, ‘Billy, just give them a smile, give them the shot, and then they’ll go away.’ ”
Given Billy’s almost giddy absorption in his new romance, smiling for the paparazzi was no great chore, and recording his next album felt almost as natural.
Making An Innocent Man fulfilled what had always been Billy’s deep-seated desire: to make records as people did in the early, more innocent days of rock. “It was easy to forget,” he says, “in these later days, of having to be so relevant and sociopolitically conscious in the face of pressure from the audience and the critics, that once upon a time it was just, Hey, listen to that record—that’s cool, huh? And you either liked it or you didn’t. None of that message stuff.”
Pulling An Innocent Man together happened so quickly and naturally that the process was a joy for Billy—exactly the opposite of making The Nylon Curtain, “which was all turmoil and excruciating, emotional trauma. I wanted to have fun this time, and I did,” he remembers. “Artists do get these urges; I related it to John Lennon’s oldies album, Rock ’n’ Roll. But some people think I jumped the shark.”
When “Tell Her About It” went to number one, Billy had some misgivings. He wrote it thinking about Diana Ross and the Supremes, but felt it was dangerous to take that song out of the context of the album. “It sounds a little too bubblegum, like Tony Orlando and Dawn,” says Billy. The song got a boost from the video, where they simulated an Ed Sullivan Show appearance by “B.J. and the Affordables”—a Motown, Jackie Wilson–style throwback.
“Uptown Girl” actually started out as “Uptown Girls”—“Uptown girls, they’ve been living in their uptown world”—and grew out of Billy’s social life before he met Christie. The temporarily plural title paid tribute to the various models Billy was dating, Elle among them, who were living in group apartments—“warrens” as Billy saw them—on the Upper East Side.
When Billy started dating Christie exclusively, he decided to drop the plural; thus “Uptown Girls” became “Uptown Girl.” Musically, Billy had created the song as an homage to Frankie Valli and the Four Seasons, but there were those who thought he was trying to sound like them without any irony. “I loved Frankie Valli. But to me, ‘Uptown Girl’ was the inverse of ‘Rag Doll,’ in which the singer was the rich guy, she the poor girl.”
When Billy put Christie in the video, it was obvious the song was about her. It got incessant rotation on MTV, because it was actually mirroring Billy’s life story at the time. “There was gorgeous Christie, and then there was me, the quintessential backstreet guy. People were interested in that stuff; it was almost like replaying the tabloids in a video,” says Billy.
The video was shot in New York at a gas station down on the Bowery. It was excruciating for Billy because the producers wanted him to dance: “They wanted me to do these steps with Christie, singing into a wrench, ‘Whoa-oh-oh. Cross the legs left, right, left over right.’ I was thinking, Are you kidding me?”
Jon Small, who produced the video, hired Michael Peters, who designed the dance moves for Michael Jackson’s “Beat It” video, as the choreographer. Jon said to Billy, “Here’s the deal. We’re not going to teach you how to dance. We’re going to teach the guys behind you to do what you do. You just need to get from A to B. You do this every day; you are Elvis onstage.”
“Meanwhile, poor Christie is trying to gavotte across the set in hot tar with five hundred people looking on from across the street, with a few mooks shouting stuff like ‘Show us your tits!’ ” remembers Billy.
“I actually worked with a choreographer for those little steps—that’s how bad of a dancer I am,” says Christie. “Also, it was the hottest night of the summer, a thousand degrees, and the tarmac was so hot my heels would sink right into it. Every time I go to kick my feet, my shoes would just sink in and stay.”
Billy had, in fact, despised (and would continue to despise) every video he ever made: “I hated the process, and I was never comfortable in front of the camera. I thought the whole idea was stupid. But I recognized that they were useful promotional tools back when MTV actually showed videos.
“I know I’m not a matinee idol: I don’t photograph well, I don’t film well,” he says. “I’ve always been aware of that. It’s one of the reasons I was comfortable being a musician: I liked the anonymity of being in a studio with a microphone. That’s all done behind closed doors, but then when I’d see it on-screen, I would watch the video and say, ‘No, no, no, no. That’s not what I had in mind at all. That’s not what the guy who’s singing looks like.’ ”
When Billy was shooting videos, he would make believe he was Elvis. “But that guy on-screen, he don’t look like Elvis,” says Billy. “It was just wrong. But that was the era.
“The only fun part was roping the band in with me, like in ‘The Longest Time.’ We start out all looking like old guys with gray hair walking through the halls of our high school the night of our reunion. I could relate in a way to that video because when I was a kid, my friends and I used to sing in the boys’ room, sneaking cigarettes and doing a cappella stuff. The acoustics weren’t quite as great as in the tunnel at Parking Field Four at Jones Beach, where we’d cut school and sing doo-wop all day, but they were pretty good.”
The memory of those oceanside vocal workouts came in handy when Phil Ramone and Billy were recording the vocals for “The Longest Time.” They had hired the Persuasions, the top harmony group around. Says Billy, “They came in. They’re passing around the cognac, and we had a bass guitar on the track, which meant they had to stay exactly in pitch—and they kept going flat, flat, flat. More cognac, going flatter.”
Phil finally told Billy, “You’re going to have do all these parts yourself.” So Billy found a technique that worked for him: for the bass singer’s part, he imagined he was a very fat black guy, and for the falsetto, he pictured a skinny Italian kid from Newark wearing a wife beater T-shirt. “I did this for the five different harmony parts. Part of making An Innocent Man was accepting that, at thirty-four years old, it was time for me to bid farewell to some of those high notes,” he says.
If you said goodbye to me tonight
There would still be music left to write
What else could I do
I’m so inspired by you
That hasn’t happened for the longest time.
Once I thought my innocence was gone
Now I know that happiness goes on
That’s where you found me
When you put your arms around me
I haven’t been there for the longest ti
me.
“An Innocent Man is a very special album to me,” says Christie. “It was a really special time, because we were falling in love, and the album really reflected that new love and that innocence that sometimes you don’t get at that stage in your life—that abandon.
“It’s like, you’ve been hurt before, but you’re just going to go for it. I know that reviewers described that album as a valentine, and it really was. I think everybody could kind of feel that love in their own life and relate it to the emotions that he was expressing so openly and so beautifully in that album. And if it’s been described as a valentine to me, I think it was also a valentine to some of the musicians that he grew up on and loved and admired.”
CHAPTER 10
CHRISTIE LEE
Christie Lee Hudson was born in Michigan and grew up in southern California, the all-American girl. After moving to Los Angeles, her parents eventually divorced, and when Christie’s mother remarried Don Brinkley, they left the city smog for the ocean breezes of Malibu. She was educated at Our Lady of Malibu and the Lycée Français, and after graduating, she moved to Paris to study art and began modeling there. Her first husband was a French illustrator named Jean-François Allaux. Her subsequent relationship with Olivier Chandon had its own storybook elements, despite the tragic ending that left her in search of some stability.
When Billy met her, he was looking for steadiness, too, a sentiment he recalls writing around that time in “The Night Is Still Young,” although the song was only released on his two-volume Greatest Hits collection three years later. “Maybe,” he says, “it felt a little too close to home when I first wrote it.”
I’d like to settle down
Get married
And maybe have a child someday
I can see a time coming when I’m gonna throw my suitcase out
No more separations
Where you have to say goodnight to a telephone
Baby I’ve decided that ain’t what life is all about.
“There seems to be some wishful thinking in there,” says Billy, “about considering quitting the road and this Death of a Salesman existence—some admission that even though rock and roll was the only thing I ever gave a damn about, I began to think about what it might be like not to live that life anymore.”
As memorable as the courtship was, it would remain a bit of a blur for Billy. The wedding wasn’t a celebrity fest—Billy had his regular crew there, and Christie had lots of friends. The event was designed not to play into the hands of the tabloids and paparazzi. Afterward the two got on a cruise boat in New York and tooled around by the Statue of Liberty, then headed back up the East River at twilight to a restaurant called the Water’s Edge, in Queens, which looked out on the United Nations. The view from there was of a romantic cityscape, across the East River into Manhattan as the city’s lights winked on. Billy and Christie spent their wedding night at the Carlyle Hotel in Manhattan, and reckon that’s when their daughter, Alexa, was conceived.
With the start of married life, followed so quickly by the realization that a child was on the way, recording albums lost its priority for Billy: “Whatever your talent, whatever your career, your focus on everything shifts when you have a kid.”
Alexa Ray Joel—whose middle name is a tribute to Ray Charles—was born at New York Hospital, at NYU, right before New Year’s Eve, on December 29, 1985. Christie and Billy were then living in the Lloyd Neck house, and early that morning Christie started having labor pains and finally said, “Okay, this is it.”
“We had thought we’d be ready to go once the moment came,” says Billy, “but in reality it was like we were Lucy and Ricky, running into walls while trying to get the right stuff packed.” Eventually they made it to the hospital, and for the next fourteen hours Christie was in labor without any pain medication. “I kept begging her, ‘Take the epidural, will you?’ But she wanted natural childbirth. And it hurt. I could tell it hurt. I had to keep going in and out of the room; I couldn’t take it. I thought I was going to faint. I’m pretty sure no guy would be able to take that kind of pain. Seeing that gives you incredible respect for what women are capable of tolerating. If a guy had to go through labor, the second it started, he would say, ‘Inject me with painkiller in the eyeballs right now.’ The doctor took one look at me in the delivery room and told me to stay at the head of the bed.
“When Alexa finally arrived, it was the most joyful moment of my life. We asked a nurse to take a picture, but we didn’t know if you were allowed to lift her out of the little bin she was resting in, so the picture is of us holding her like a baby pizza that’s just come through the door.”
When they left the hospital, they were semidisguised in Groucho Marx glasses—two mustachioed parents with this tiny mustachioed baby, hoping to avoid recognition. The Daily News managed to ID their picture anyway.
When they got back home to Lloyd Neck, there were photographers all around the property, trying to get the money shot of Billy and Christie with Alexa. As her parents, they had concerns about ensuring that she would be safe, and now that concern deepened. Making matters worse, Billy received disturbing and deranged letters from different people saying things such as “You’d better watch your kid” or “You’d better watch your wife” or “We’re going to get you and we’re going to get her.” Billy turned the more threatening letters over to the police, but he didn’t always tell Christie about them. “I didn’t want her to get all freaked out,” says Billy. “But those nuts are out there.
“We all know what happened to John Lennon, or about the kidnapping of Frank Sinatra’s son, or the Lindbergh baby. There are human time bombs ticking out there. And performers seem to have this totemic weight that brings out the worst instincts in loony people.” Eventually the couple let the press take a picture of Alexa, realizing she wasn’t going to be recognizable for at least a couple of years.
Billy also credits Alexa’s birth with giving him the understanding of unconditional love: “You think you know about love, and then this fierce attachment kicks in, and it’s like nothing you’ve ever experienced before—you feel like what you’ve been missing all your life is suddenly there. And of course, you never lose that feeling. Before you become a parent, you get bored when people gush on and on about their kids—‘Yeah, yeah, yeah, you and your little brats, who cares?’ Then you have one of your own, and you can’t shut up. You think, Oh, my God, I’m a father. I have a child. I’ve brought another human being into the world. It’s very emotional, very moving.
“The thing I remember most about becoming a dad is how my perception of time was completely blown to smithereens. There’s this sudden warp in your view of your own mortality. Instead of thinking only in terms of your own lifetime, you start thinking of your child’s. Almost immediately you become concerned about the future in a whole different way. You’re thinking, What kind of world is she going to have? And it really changes you—for the better, I think.”
“He was totally in love with Alexa,” says Christie. “I remember the two of us just gazing into her little cradle for hours.”
“The second you decide to have kids, you just sort of clean up your act, whatever it is that you think needs growing up—you grow up,” says Billy. “But as we all know, rock and roll really isn’t a business that likes grown-ups too much.”
Like all babies, Alexa was easy to pack up and move from place to place, so Billy continued touring. The family traveled around the world many times, as Billy performed in places such as Australia and the Soviet Union, Europe and Japan, and more. Alexa had what her parents termed “a great troupe of gypsies—one big family, all of us raising her and all of us in it together.”
Soon there was a group of kids backstage; Liberty DeVitto’s daughter and the other kids became Alexa’s best friends. “Mary, Lib’s wife at the time, and I would hang out, and there were kids and wives and all of that happening backstage,” says Christie. “But eventually all the kids needed to start staying home and going t
o school. And that’s when things started to change.
“When you’ve got a little child at home, it’s harder to leave home. Billy’s job got a whole lot tougher once he had something so precious and wonderful at home; he just wanted to be there.”
AS A STOPGAP while Billy nurtured domesticity, Columbia in June 1985 released Greatest Hits, volumes one and two. The twenty-five tracks were spiced by a pair of new songs, the determinedly jaunty antisuicide message “You’re Only Human (Second Wind)” and the lulling, soul-tinged “The Night Is Still Young.” Both broke out as hits, reaching number nine and thirty-four, respectively.
At that stage in his life, Billy had to continually remind himself that he had a job. And part of the reason was that he was now financially responsible for another life. (The years of what some would call spectacular album sales would never completely reassure the Hicksville boy within that he was over the financial hump.) Says Billy, “I thought, Maybe we’ll have more kids, and everything’s going to change, so I guess I should just keep doing what I’m doing. But I didn’t want to—and I think my next album, The Bridge, makes it pretty clear how I was feeling.”
Billy didn’t want to record The Bridge at all and would later express regret over making the album. He knew that whatever he put out, some people would buy it just because they were fans. But he judged the album to be subpar, which made its sales feel like a swindle to him. “At the time I was quietly asking myself, What are you doing? You’re just taking advantage of people liking your old stuff, and the record company’s going to market it and hype it—and you know it sucks. That whole attitude came through on the album.”
Noticeably, there are only nine songs on The Bridge, which was just enough to make an album. The truth is, Billy barely eked them out. His dynamic with the band during that period was terrible. In the past the musicians had always weighed in with suggestions, stayed around in the studio, and contributed plenty. None of that happened with The Bridge. Liberty DeVitto would play his drum part and leave; Doug Stegmeyer would play his bass part and do the same; and David Brown hung around more because there was some interesting guitar stuff going on. But there was no creative vibe flowing from the band to Billy. Making albums had become a big business for them, and there were rumblings that the musicians weren’t happy with their financial deals. Without the connection between them, the situation in the studio was sad.
Billy Joel Page 19