Billy Joel

by Fred Schruers

  “You can’t always reason or know why things are. Some people grasp for religious faith.… I just see it as a river where we’re caught up in the flow. I say we start in the streams and fall into the ocean. But no matter what, we’re just carried along by this thing. So to think we have control is a joke in a way. We’re in this thing, and we have to kind of make the best of it.”

  Billy noted in comments at the time that if he sounds fatalistic, “what really counts is who’s standing in the long run, and that’s one of the essential elements of that song—who’s standing, and why is that? Why do people continue to survive? If someone believes in me, then I guess that I should believe in myself.”

  “All About Soul” was a fiercely sung studio performance in which Billy’s anguished vocal was leavened by harmonies from the vocal group Color Me Badd, as it clearly rummaged through the shards of the relationship:

  This life isn’t fair

  It’s gonna get dark it’s gonna get cold …

  It’s all about soul

  Who’s standing now and who’s standing tomorrow.

  “Lullabye (Goodnight, My Angel)” had its genesis around this time as a classical piano piece. The words would come to Billy with their own logic, when Alexa asked her father one night what happens when people die.

  “Maybe it was my own sensitivity to the difficulties her mother and I were having”—the relationship had been increasingly pockmarked by unpleasant quarrels—“but I read in that question her fears about what was happening within our family,” says Billy. “Would we be split apart, with the threesome she’d always known never to be made whole again?”

  For all his wish for family solidarity, Billy had also been touring a lot. In 1993 Alexa would turn eight. “That’s a terrible time for a father to be away from a child,” says Billy. “You have so much to learn about each other. I was just so crazy about her. I just loved having a kid, and of course I didn’t want to be away. Christie had put her career on hold and was spending lots of time with her. But during those absences, Christie and I drifted apart. Combined with the toll the lawsuits had taken on us, well, it was a full-time job trying to hold the relationship together.

  “You hear in the music of ‘Lullabye’ a father talking to his daughter,” he says, “with alternating major and minor chords. It’s almost like a dying man singing to his child. And he’s trying to reassure his daughter, which is what the major key is, but he’s also hinting at the fact that there will be separation. And that’s where the minor key changes come in. Where there’s not a minor, there are suspensions—chords that take longer to resolve—so you have the anxiety of the unresolved chord, then the release of tension when it does resolve”:

  Goodnight my angel

  Now it’s time to dream

  And dream how wonderful your life will be

  Someday your child may cry

  And if you sing this lullabye

  Then in your heart

  There will always be a part of me.

  “On the surface it’s the father saying it to a child, but beyond that it was me comforting myself. My mother sang a lullaby to me. She would sing, ‘The cutest little fella, everybody knows’ from the old lullaby ‘Mighty Like a Rose.’ But she didn’t know all the words so she would sing ‘lu, lu, lu, lu lu …’ ”

  What Billy came to discover during playback of the recording in the studio was, although “I didn’t even perceive at the time I was doing this, there’s an instrumental segment in the middle and I’m going ‘lu, lu, lu …’ I got all choked up when I realized that I was doing this—I’m passing along that comforting lullaby sound.”

  Billy didn’t really think he and Christie were in imminent danger of breaking up at that point, but their disputes had increased in intensity over the years, to the point of drawing attention around 1990–91 in dubious reports from the National Enquirer. Finally one day Christie reportedly did something that shocked him. The two were having an argument, and at some point in the fight, Christie threatened to take Alexa away from Billy. He remembers her saying, in paraphrase, “I can make it so you can’t see her.”

  Billy’s overwhelming feeling at that moment was Don’t say that. Call me every name in the book, but don’t threaten to take away my daughter. “It felt like a knife went into my heart,” he says. My first thought was Wait a minute, I didn’t have my father. Now you’re going to not let me be a father? Are you out of your fuckin’ mind? Remember that scene in The Godfather where [Al Pacino’s] Michael is fighting with [Diane Keaton’s] Kay, and he says, ‘You won’t take my children!’ I could never let that happen. It just kind of popped into my head. You will never do that. I will never not be her father.”

  Whether Christie was being serious or not, then and there something snapped inside Billy. Although it would be years before the two even started talking about splitting up, things would never be the same.

  As the marriage crumbled irreversibly, one priority remained. “I give Christie and myself credit,” Billy says, “for eventually uniting, through whatever tempests and accusations, around the ultimate priority of trying to ensure Alexa’s happiness. The irony is you love your kid so much that she becomes the very thing that causes your worst conflicts.

  “Christie likes to joke that the end of the marriage, which was an emotional fact by late 1993 [and ironically hit the tabloids on their anniversary, March 23, 1994, precisely nine years after their wedding date], spelled the end of my songwriting career. At least I think it’s a joke.”

  On paper, she’s not wrong. The song “Famous Last Words” closed Billy’s 1993 album River of Dreams. “I can still hear the bitterness and disappointment I was feeling at that time, and then a grasping for a renewal of faith that happened on the second side of the album,” says Billy. “It’s about a guy who goes through a whole period of disenchantment and disillusionment and anger, but who finds his faith being renewed in things like family and children, the things that are important in life. And with that transition, the album feels to me like a cohesive journey.”

  After all the years of groping for words and chain-smoking and engaging in the unhealthy behavior that can go with songwriting, Billy wrote “The River of Dreams” pretty much in one straight shot. “I almost felt like I was sleepwalking as I wrote it, scribbling lyrics down one morning, and they didn’t change much at all from that first draft,” he says.

  In fact, he actually dreamed the song. “And when I woke up the next morning, my first thought was that it seemed like it was a three-chord song, a one-four-five progression, which has been done a billion times. And I thought, I can’t write that—it’s too simple.

  “But then I got in the shower, and I was going, ‘Hatch-u-ati-ati, in the middle of the night …’ over and over, and figuring that if I couldn’t shake it, it meant I should write it. So I sat down at the piano and tweaked it just a bit—and pretty soon I was singing, ‘In the middle of the night / I go walking in my sleep,’ and it just flowed from there”:

  … from the mountains of faith to a river so deep

  I must be looking for something

  Something sacred I lost

  But the river is wide

  And it’s too hard to cross.

  Even as Billy was writing the song, he was thinking to himself, Why the hell am I doing this? I’m not a preacher; this sounds like a sermon: “And even though I know the river is wide / I walk down every evening and I stand on the shore … So I can finally find out what I’ve been looking for.”

  “It’s a searching song, because I really was looking for a way to renew my faith in man,” says Billy. “I was just so shattered by the betrayal I’d experienced. I’d lost faith in humanity and I was looking for a way to find it again—without getting ‘born again.’ ”

  When it was released, River of Dreams immediately charted at number one in Billboard, and ticket sales for the upcoming tour, which would include six nights at Madison Square Garden, were strong.

  Not just the dissolut
ion of his second marriage but the bitter end of Frank Management would reverberate in Billy’s seemingly final pop album. It was a rough stretch with agonies both public and private. As a lyric from River of Dreams paraphrased the old spiritual, “Nobody knows about the trouble I’ve seen.”

  Some fifteen years later Billy pulled up on his motorcycle to a Japanese restaurant in Southampton for some take-out food. There in the parking lot stood Frank, who’d been lunching there. Billy remembers that Frank looked to be in shock—“Maybe wondering if I was going to punch him. I said, ‘Hey, Frank.’ ”

  Frank answered “hi” very tentatively, and Billy asked him how he was doing. Then the two shook hands. “To me it was water under the bridge,” says Billy. “It’s just like the lyric from ‘The Great Wall of China’ ”:

  You take a piece of whatever you touch

  Too many pieces means you’re touching too much

  You never win if you can’t play it straight

  You only beat me if you get me to hate.

  “I just wanted to let Frank know, I’m not walking around hating you, and I hope that part of our lives is over.”

  CHAPTER 13

  THE NIGHT IS STILL YOUNG

  It’s pretty obvious to anyone who knows Billy’s music that it’s often about him trying to figure out—“haplessly trying to figure out,” as he says—his relationships. That’s the skeleton key. And perhaps none has been more deeply explored—and fought for—than his relationship with Christie Brinkley. By 1993 the storybook romance had descended into something bitter and all too public.

  One of the daggers in the heart of the relationship would be tied to Liberty DeVitto. Billy had gradually been building a casual, chatty friendship with Carolyn Beegan, who worked for a company that catered all of Billy’s shows in the New York area. While the two wouldn’t, in fact, be linked until after the split with Christie, those backstage at the time relate that Liberty assumed that Billy was having an affair with Carolyn when he discovered that Billy hadn’t returned home after his concert on New Year’s Eve 1993.

  However, Carolyn wasn’t actually the reason he was detained. The truth is that Billy had played the Nassau Coliseum that night and fallen off the piano, bashing his face. Since he had a cold to boot, he decided that he wasn’t in good enough shape to handle the drive back to East Hampton. Instead, he stayed at the Garden City Hotel nearby, where the band camped out, and Billy had reserved a room just in case. Carolyn was working Janet Jackson’s show that night at Madison Square Garden, and the two had no contact. However, the rumor that the two had had a tryst found its way back to Christie.

  Months later the truth would be established, but it seemed the unfounded story not only pushed Christie over the edge, causing her to decide Screw this, we’re done, but also led Alexa to mistrust Billy’s loyalty to the family. (As Billy’s inner circle observed, Liberty had ready access to Christie’s ear since his wife, Mary, was very close with her. “It was all very Peyton Place,” says Billy.)

  Christie had been very supportive when Billy was operated on for kidney stones, but by late 1993, as they were effectively separated, she was spending time with the man who would become her next husband, real estate developer Rick Taubman.

  Then, on Friday, April 1, 1994, Christie and Rick were heli-skiing 12,800 feet up a mountain outside Telluride, Colorado, when their helicopter crashed in fifty-mile-per-hour winds. Billy was scheduled to play a gig in Dallas, but when he got word of what had happened, he flew to Colorado and found his way to Christie at the hospital near Telluride, where she’d been transported. She had painful but not life-threatening injuries, as did Taubman. Billy took her and Alexa, who had been staying in Colorado as well, back to Long Island. To Billy’s aggravation, Christie and her assistant spent a good deal of time in whispered communication. Although Billy and Christie been separated for a while and the two hadn’t talked much about what was going on in her life leading up to the heli-skiing crash, technically he was still her husband, and he wanted to lend support. But Billy didn’t feel that he could stay home with her—he still had about a month and a half of tour dates that he felt he couldn’t cancel. When he returned from the tour, Christie was gone, back to Colorado, and eight-year-old Alexa was with her. He was greeted by a basically empty house, save for some unwanted Sri Lankan lounge chairs and funky-looking tables.

  Christie would marry Taubman in December 1994, having divorced Billy in August, and she would divorce Taubman the following year, having given birth in June to their son Jack. At the height of his marriage’s unraveling, on April 8, Billy announced plans to take to the road with Elton John on a “Face to Face” tour that would crisscross America in midsummer, playing major outdoor venues. Anticipating that undertaking hardly improved his mood. About a week after the tour announcement (as Billy’s longtime friend Billy Zampino would tell Tim White), Billy put an ad lib in his set for a Florida gig. A local writer had assumed that “Movin’ Out (Anthony’s Song)” was in the set as a reference to Christie; in reaction, Billy cut it and subbed in “Shades of Grey.” As an intro, though, he played an excerpt from Samuel Barber’s mournful “Adagio for Strings.”

  Billy was very depressed, all but dysfunctional, during this time, and relations between he and Christie varied between cold and stormy. The lawsuit with Frank had wiped him out financially, and now the road owned him. But at least on tour he could go on autopilot, shuffle through his days, and draw what energy he needed from the crowds each show night.

  Despite the stress he was under—not to mention all the temptations that went with being a musician in the 1970s and 1980s—Billy never succumbed to the chronic use of hard drugs that many rockers practiced. Unlike John Lennon, who dropped acid with George Harrison and famously called Rubber Soul “the pot album” when he and the Beatles were making it, Billy never experienced drugs as being helpful creatively.

  “I’d like to be able to say I tuned in and waxed creative along with my heroes, but in fact, my adventures with acid totaled all of three,” says Billy. The first acid trip, in the early 1970s, was a wonderful experience for him. He was living at Sandy and John Gibson’s house in Malibu. They were tripping and listening to music when they all realized they were terrifically hungry. So they ordered food from the local deli, the Bagela, which was also their pot connection. The delivery kid arrived with their order and started laughing at them because they were so high. “I was trying to pay for the food, but it was a struggle to write ‘William Joel’ on a check with rockets screaming through my brain. If that’s the acid test, I’m pretty sure I flunked. Then we proceeded to consume massive quantities of pastrami, ham, and coleslaw, Coneheads style, with our hands.”

  The second trip was also in Malibu, and it was terrible. “I saw Elizabeth’s head turn into a skull and a snake and a phantom as I was floating above the room,” he remembers. “It took hours of listening to James Taylor and Gordon Lightfoot to mellow out. I just kept saying, ‘Oh, God, please, James, help me.’ ”

  Trip number three, with Brian Ruggles, was a short one. It was 1974, and Billy was living in the Hollywood Hills on Mulholland Drive, in a house overlooking the Hollywood Bowl. He had just gotten his first Moog synthesizer and had big Altec Lansing speakers in his garage. He and Brian plugged the synthesizer into the gigantic speakers and tried out different noises. “It sounded like rocket ships taking off—weird, noisy, cosmic space sounds—so Brian and I decided we were going to form a group,” says Billy. “We’d call ourselves the Vree-Oo and Bleep-Bleeps Space Band. My job was to write lyrics and sing; his was just to press the buttons. Brian is a funny guy to hang out with no matter what you’re doing; he has this great laugh. So we had a nutty trip that lasted three or four hours. We made so much noise, the neighbors must have thought we were blowing the place up. For acid, that was it—I never tripped again.”

  The most prevalent recreational drug of the era was cocaine. In the 1970s it still carried a certain jazz-era cachet, and its popularity among musician
s, though not yet the general public, was growing. By the mid-1970s it was the drug of choice in every corner of the music business. “Everybody was holding and everybody was sharing,” says Billy, so if someone ran out of the “Aztec marching powder” (to use P. J. O’Rourke’s phrase) or the funds to buy more—cocaine seemed expensive even to Billy, who could easily afford it—there was plenty to go around.

  Like those in his circle, Billy might take a toot now and then, but he understood it was a dubious aid for writing or performing. On those few occasions when he did, he regretted it, because his throat would tighten and he would talk too much onstage. One night, after a concert during which he was high, he stood up from his piano and vowed to himself, That’s the end of that.

  In Billy’s opinion, problems come when you mix coke into what is supposed to be a serious conversation: “The chatter becomes very righteous—what we used to call ‘valid.’ You’re so valid, and everything you have to say is so important and rational and meaningful. But that’s a delusion: you’re just yapping your head off because your jaw needs to move, as in ‘I love you, man.’ It’s an ego drug. You think everything you have to say is so necessary that no one can miss hearing it, when in fact you’re incoherent—also sexually useless. Basically it’s one of the dumbest drugs in the world.”

  Billy experimented with heroin only once, in Holland, on a plane from Amsterdam to Stockholm with his road gang. The song on The Nylon Curtain called “Scandinavian Skies”—a kind of latter-day stab at a “Strawberry Fields Forever”—refers to this experience. It was intended as a lark, a random taste of the forbidden for the latter-day Mean Brothers. “We’d been drinking, and there was some Dutch guy who somebody knew, and somebody said, ‘It’s safe, it’s okay,’ and I remember it was a new syringe.” On the commercial flight, succumbing to nausea, as most first-timers will, he used the airsickness bag, and for a moment the psychological plunge was vertiginous. And then, “even though I was as wrecked as I’ve ever been in my life, I was also able to understand why people got hung up on the stuff. It was one of the most euphoric highs I’ve ever had,” he says. “You just feel so good that you can’t bear not feeling that way all the time, and that’s what scared the living hell out of me. I recognized just how dangerous that feeling was, and I guess I had enough self-discipline to avoid it after that—although just looking around at all the junked-out rock stars who littered the scene by then might have been motivation enough.”