Billy Joel

by Fred Schruers

  “I have to give her points for that,” says Billy. “She flew all the way from New York to visit with me. It could be for only two or three hours, to have a meal with me, then she would have to leave. There was no physical contact allowed except maybe hand-holding, and they even discouraged that. But it helped me a great deal to see her and realize that she was supporting me in this, and I loved her for that. Just to be able to see her was a great comfort, and it kind of reinforced why I was doing this. She’s why I’m doing this.”

  * * *

  ALCOHOLICS ANONYMOUS IS supposed to be just what the title implies—a place for first names only. But in rehab, Billy quickly realized that he could hardly go unrecognized—and he wanted and needed some degree of privacy when he was airing his problems: “When any other guy gets up and says, ‘Hi. My name’s Bob and I’m an alcoholic,’ that’s all he is to the other people in the room. But when I get up and say, ‘My name’s Bill and I’m an alcoholic,’ they go, ‘Oh, it is him.’

  “I felt as if the other people in the room were looking at me like, Well, of course he’s an alcoholic—he’s a rock star. And I didn’t blame them. I was just another one of those people I always used to make fun of. I always used to think, when I heard their stories, Oh my God, what a jerk. How can you blow a life like that?”

  Billy even had a groupie, a would-be bro, in rehab: “He would want to hang out with me. And the counselors saw that right away and separated us, because everybody in rehab has profound issues, and you’re supposed to focus on yourself. They explained to him that I had to work out my deal, so why didn’t he concentrate on his thing?”

  Despite these challenges, Billy went ahead with the treatment. He admitted to the group that he’d probably done a lot of “stupid stuff” and was self-destructive. “I just bought right into the whole spiel; I didn’t hold back,” he says. “I didn’t embrace the entire twelve-step experience, though, especially the ‘higher power’ thing. Still, I kind of took what I needed out of it to get fixed.”

  Katie noticed changes in Billy when he returned from Betty Ford. “He was very timid, quiet, even scared,” she remembers. “There was this real childlike feeling, where he was on sensory overload just being out in the world. He had been in this safe cocoon, and it was the first time he’d been without alcohol in a long time.

  “I’ve never met anybody more forgiving and soulful. When I say forgiving, I look at how he had a manager who stole tens of millions of dollars from him. And instead of carrying around his dark hate for this person, when he saw him once seven or eight years ago, he said hello. Most people would want to spit on him.

  “He doesn’t talk bad about people. It’s not that he’s into yoga and, like, all enlightened. That’s just his outlook on life. He has a certain naïveté with that, and trust—it can be his downfall when bad things like that happen. But on the other hand, it’s what makes him have this beautiful light around him, that he can still be like that when he’s had so many people take advantage of him.”

  The changes Katie saw in Billy when he left rehab were indeed real. “I felt like a deer caught in the headlights,” he says. “Everything felt like an ordeal. I didn’t want to see anybody. I didn’t want to do anything. I was a different person. I’d gone through something like shock therapy. Even just going out for a meal somewhere took enormous effort; there were so many people around. I was very timid and raw. My nerve endings were exposed, and I felt like I’d been beaten up. It took quite a while for me to come out of that. I would say there was about a three-month period of just recovering from recovery.”

  Billy never tried to self-diagnose. “I just assumed, this is part of my personality, and I have to deal with it, without the booze,” he explains. “I remember reading a book on Lincoln. It was interesting because he was very prone to melancholy, but he also kind of embraced it. It made him much more of an empathetic person, because he was aware of the dark parts and able to integrate them effectively into his political and personal life. If it’s there, it’s there. I don’t know whether I would be considered bipolar or manic-depressive. I just have a tendency to get sad from time to time. And I know that’s helped me a great deal as an artist. So sometimes melancholy can be beneficial. As long as you’re conscious of it—and not making it worse by drinking—it can be dealt with.”

  “I remember that for a while after rehab, Billy didn’t want to work,” shares Katie. “And then I said to him, ‘Bill, idle hands are the devil’s playground.’ That’s what I’ve always said. And I said, ‘I think you really need to reconsider.’ It was really difficult for him. But I think going back on the road really helped him.”

  * * *

  WHEN IT’S TIME to go on the road, you don’t have to tell Dennis Arfa twice. When Billy told him he was ready to tour again, Dennis’s notion was to play a row of dates in early 2006, beginning with a couple of shows at Madison Square Garden.

  Dennis had been Billy’s longtime booking agent and had always been a master at spotting—and even creating—pent-up demand. That’s why he used the time-honored tactic of having promoters throw a giant curtain across half an arena and sell just the front part, rather than scatter fans throughout the drafty old hockey rinks. People got used to jumping on tickets while they were available, as Billy and the band built their audiences by degrees in various cities.

  Every major rock act has its own primary, secondary, and tertiary towns, and of course no two acts have the same preferences. A welcome complication in Billy’s scheduling, since they first went out with Elton John in the summer of 1994, was figuring the difference between a solo tour and one featuring the two-headed beast.

  As a duo, Elton and Billy exceeded any previous co-billing as a drawing card, and even with reasonable ticket prices, the 2003 tour grossed $46 million. Says Billy, “That’s the industry’s way of keeping score. To Dennis Arfa, it’s about, Can we keep getting the fannies in the seats? To me—and the real key to whether and how long I should keep doing this—it’s, Can we get those fannies up and out of the seats during the show?”

  Touring with Elton was a mixed blessing for Billy. Elton had so many hits that the audience wanted to hear that he almost had to do them all. If Billy was to be part of the team, he felt that he needed to do hits as well. Album tracks just wouldn’t cut it.

  As they had on previous tours, Billy and his band didn’t hang out much with their counterparts down the hallway for shared dates, and also per long habit, the principals didn’t see each other backstage much. “I stay in my production office, which looks like the back room of a deli, and Elton’s in this setup with racks of clothes, shoes, and sunglasses, like the grandeur that was Rome, everything except—I think except—you know, togas,” says Billy. “But he’s a very witty, generous guy to be around. And I owe him very personal thanks, especially for the concern he showed some twenty years ago when I was having problems with booze, not taking care of myself, and he said, ‘I’m worried about you.’ ” That would not be the last of that theme in their history.

  From time to time, Billy would hear from Dennis how great it would be, with or without Elton, to get back to Madison Square Garden. Billy had performed six closely spaced shows at the Garden in 1993 in support of River of Dreams. But he had been absent from the Garden as a solo act during the intervening time, and additionally, he hadn’t been on the road on a significant solo tour since a 1998–99 run of sixty-four shows. About a million people had seen those shows. “But history means nothing,” said Billy, quoting football coach Bill Parcells.

  Perhaps that distance between solo Garden concerts would work in Billy’s favor, his team conjectured, because the last time he was onstage in the Garden, with the Face to Face tour in April 2002, was the night of his infamous meltdown.

  When the tickets for the first couple of Garden dates went on sale, they were quickly snapped up; and as more concerts were added, the response didn’t let up. At first Billy and the band were reluctant to announce ten performances—the reco
rd Springsteen had set for consecutive Garden shows—but they plowed past him to twelve. “That seemed like the right place to stop,” says Billy, “because even though I’m not superstitious, why land on thirteen if you don’t have to?”

  Billy had found a real rapport with his new road band, and these Garden gigs would showcase their synergy. Drummer Chuck Burgi, who had been recruited by Tommy Byrnes from the Movin’ Out pit band, came into his own. According to Billy, “He kept great time and, as they say in the trade, ‘moved a lot of air.’ ” In addition to his forcefulness on the powerful numbers, he had the knack of knowing just how and when to hit a rim shot for a sardonic underpinning to Billy’s onstage shtick.

  During the twelfth and final concert, radio veteran Bob Buchman—Billy’s colleague in the charity he helped start in 1978, Charity Begins at Home—went onstage and announced that the consecutive Garden concert record had been attained. A banner bearing the name “Joel” and the number twelve then rolled down from the rafters—the first tribute of that kind to go to someone other than an athlete.

  When it came time to pick the performances for what became the thirty-two-song double-disk set 12 Gardens Live, the choices were obvious. Among them, the band tucked in what’s called a “deep album track,” “The Night Is Still Young,” with Crystal Taliefero filling in the higher-pitched part Billy had originally sung on this somewhat obscure number. (Although it had gone to number thirty-five as a single in 1985, the song was basically a throw-in on that year’s collection, Greatest Hits, volumes one and two.) Says Billy, “Even as I sang it onstage, I realized that the same problems a career can bring to one marriage are likely to crop up in another”:

  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 this life is all about.

  Those lyrics now sounded autobiographical twice or even three times over.

  CHAPTER 16

  GOODNIGHT, SHEA STADIUM

  At a 1969 press conference, four years after “Satisfaction” became a hit, Mick Jagger was famously asked if he was any more satisfied with his life. “Financially dissatisfied,” he answered, “sexually satisfied, philosophically—trying.”

  Prior to meeting Katie, Billy’s situation was somewhat the obverse, whether he recognized it or not. At that point in his life, he hadn’t had to think about money in many years, but somehow the two other categories were bound up together. “In terms of a life partner, I didn’t know if I’d run out of time and it would be too late for me,” he says. “And then Katie came along. Miracle of miracles, she made everything okay. Despite having folded up the pop songwriting tent some years before, I wanted to do something special for her. So I started composing ‘All My Life.’ I wasn’t thinking about having a hit song or anything like that—I wanted a song specifically from me to her and only her. I just wanted a standard, something that Tony Bennett could have sung, or maybe a saloon song that Sinatra might have done. I think I succeeded in that, and performed a bit of emotional exorcism as well”:

  All my life

  I’ve hurt the ones who cared

  One by one

  No loving heart was spared

  I’ve been a wild and restless man

  But still a man who needs a wife

  That was my dream and now it seems

  You’ve taken all my life.

  “I think I always wanted to write a song like that, but never had. It’s long and very slow. It’s also very emotional and kind of self-deprecating in some ways, as if I’m saying, ‘Hey, I did some bad stuff in my life, and I paid for my mistakes.’ I probably had to have gotten to this age to be able to write it and sing it with any kind of confidence.”

  “He wrote ‘All My Life’ for our [second, in 2006] anniversary,” says Katie. “I’d been working in San Francisco for two weeks at that time. He came to visit me, and there was a piano bar in the hotel lobby. He goes, ‘I wrote something for you. I want to play this for you.’ So we go in, and he starts to sit down—it was very dark—and the woman working there said, ‘Excuse me, you can’t play the piano in here.’ And I thought, I’m not going to let you ruin this for me. So I said, ‘Um, that’s Billy Joel. I don’t think anybody’s going to care.’ She said, ‘Oh,’ and kind of ran away.

  “Then Bill sat down at the piano and started singing this song for me. It was so touching, but the best part was that this couple got up and started dancing. They had no idea that it was him sitting there playing it, and watching them enjoy the romantic song that he wrote for us made it so much better for me, to see how the music can touch other people.”

  Billy recorded “All My Life” on December 29, 2006, not quite three months after the couple’s second anniversary, as a response to Katie’s regular requests for him to play the song: “Finally I thought, Maybe I should just make a recording, and then she can play it whenever she wants instead of my having to sing it all the time,” Billy says.

  It was an expensive session. Billy hired a full orchestra and a rhythm section in a big studio and got Phil Ramone to produce the song. “I knew it was an extravagance,” he admits, “but it was for my wife.

  “I had never expected the sort of thing that happened between Katie and me to happen. I’d thought I was done. It was fantastic: a love song come to life. But sometimes you know that other, much darker verse is waiting, not far away.”

  HOPING FOR A little R&R in the new year, Billy kicked back for the holidays in late 2006. The label sent out a notice in January 2007 announcing the impending release of “All My Life” (initially on Valentine’s Day 2007, on the People magazine home page). Midwinter loomed as a fairly relaxing stretch for Billy, with just one duty: a second appearance at a Super Bowl to sing the national anthem. He figured it would be an easy enough gig, as Super Bowl XLI would be in Dolphin Stadium, not far from his Miami home. With a thirty-second commercial going for $2.6 million as the Colts battled the Bears before millions of viewers, it amounted to substantial exposure.

  Billy had performed the anthem without a hitch at Super Bowl XXIII in 1989, but in Miami, when he sat down at the piano, it began to drizzle, and thoughts raced through his mind: “Now, one thing you know, going into a Super Bowl national anthem performance, is that a group of military fighter jets is already screaming toward the stadium when you start the song. After that you have about ninety seconds, and then you’d better be done with the last verse.”

  There were more than ninety-three million people watching, and Billy had refused to do what many singers do and pretape the performance for lip-synching. “All I needed to get it right was a working set of sound monitors, so I could hear myself,” he explains. “I was also playing the piano, which means you have to be able to hear your vocal so you know that you’re in key with the piano.” The band did three rehearsals, during which Billy rested a stopwatch on the piano to time the performance because of that flyover. The time came in at 1:29 all three times—right on the money.

  Then, just before the show was about to start, the drizzle turned into a downpour and soaked the piano. But the show had to go on. Says Billy, “They were giving me the hand sign—showing me the fingers, five, four—and I was frantically testing the mike, but there were no monitors. They didn’t turn on the goddamn monitors. I couldn’t hear a thing.”

  And then, more fingers. Three … two … one! “I had to go on, I’m a professional. What am I going to do, say on live TV that I can’t sing because I can’t hear myself?”

  Thinking fast, Billy did a piano intro, hoping to detect the pitch—but he still couldn’t hear a thing: “So I started singing, and I had to wait a good several seconds to hear the bounce-back of my vocal from the public address system. Anyone who’s ever been to a ballgame knows you can hear the sound echo off the walls
of the stadium, but as a performer, you’re still not really certain you’re on pitch. I was pretty sure I wasn’t.”

  On top of it all, at the press conference before the game, some people thought Billy was being a smartass when he said, in all honesty, that “ ‘The Star-Spangled Banner’ is a slog and ‘America the Beautiful’ is a better song.” And in response to a question about what it’s like to sing the anthem before the Super Bowl twice, he answered, “I don’t know, I haven’t done it yet.”

  Many journalists thought Billy was making fun of them and the whole process. They went after him and his performance with hatchets. They even accused him of using a pitch-correction device called an Auto-Tune. “I have never used one and don’t need to—as long as I can hear myself,” countered Billy. Following that Super Bowl fiasco, Billy vowed to himself to avoid the traps of ill-managed TV audio set-ups.

  If the grand spectacle of the Super Bowl had backfired, an attempt at capturing the public imagination with something more intimate also lacked traction with the broader audience. When “All My Life” was released in early 2007, it received no airplay. That said, Billy was philosophical: “There was nowhere for it to live, which is what I kind of liked about it. That made it even more personal for me, as though the only person who was ever going to hear it was my wife.”

  Though the song came and went without finding listeners, Dennis Arfa had a herd of more than willing promoters and lined up a sequence of concerts that would take Billy and the band through the whole year. They worked scattered dates throughout the south in midwinter and moved north and into the Midwest in the spring. “Whether it’s Albany or St. Paul, the concrete backstage dungeons don’t change much, but the crowds all have their own vibe,” says Billy.

  When “My Life” almost disappeared into static after an equipment glitch in Cleveland, Billy told the audience, “We are not on tape up here! These are real rock-and-roll fuckups!” The crowd belted out part of the song for him, and at one point Billy went back to piano fundamentals and banged out “Heart and Soul,” to a disproportionately ecstatic response. In Atlanta, Billy tossed out tributes to Georgia greats by doing two songs by the state’s favorite sons—Little Richard’s “Good Golly Miss Molly” and Otis Redding’s “Sittin’ on the Dock of the Bay”—as well as “Georgia on My Mind,” which was written by Indianan Hoagy Carmichael but made famous by Georgia-born Ray Charles.