Mayer remembers, “Billy said, ‘I have a song I think you’d be really great on.’ And I go up there, and I play on the song, and it’s magical, because he picked the right song for me to play. He’s not thinking about Well, this is really gonna be great for the profile with the kids. It’s one musician calling up another.”
“Sometimes it’s almost an out-of-body experience, hearing these songs you sweated through as a kid spilling out to so many people at once,” says Billy. “A line like, ‘They just found your father in the swimming pool …’ in ‘Captain Jack’—that’s entertainment? But when we stuck a bit of ‘A Hard Day’s Night’ into ‘River of Dreams,’ it was both a tribute to the Beatles and I guess a sort of tease. Would Paul make it? Everyone’s having a good time, but the truth is, we were just vamping, stalling for time.”
After “You May Be Right,” Billy and the band stopped for a first encore. Then they played “Scenes from an Italian Restaurant” and “Only the Good Die Young.”
Finally, Wayne put a scribbled note on Billy’s piano: “Paul’s here.”
“Bringing Paul McCartney onstage—at Shea Stadium itself—was truly one of the great moments of my career,” says Billy. The band started the intro to “I Saw Her Standing There,” and Billy announced, “Ladies and gentlemen, please welcome Paul McCartney,” and the crowd went apoplectic. “We had barely rehearsed the song, but Paul gave it his all, hitting the high notes and giving them a good, subtle version of that famous head shake. I couldn’t get the grin off my face.” Then they played “Piano Man,” which they always close their shows with. “As we walked off the stage, I knew we’d do one last encore; I just had no idea what song to perform. What song was worthy of the Last Play at Shea?”
But Paul knew. Backstage he said to Billy, “We should do ‘Let It Be.’ ”
“I said, ‘Hey, can I do this? ’Cause I know I’m stealing the top spot—it’s your show. I’m just a guest,’ ” says Paul. “And really, I should’ve done my thing and then Billy should’ve finished. But he was very gracious. He said, ‘No, you’re right—you should finish it.’ ”
As Billy reflects on the night, “There’s really no way to describe what a high point that was—playing ‘Let It Be’ with Paul McCartney at Shea Stadium. And of course, with all the emotion and the sense of a circle being closed, with this great feeling of my career and my whole life’s path coming together at that time, I had a deeper realization on that stage.”
It had come to him, almost piercingly, in an off-the-cuff joke he made midway through the show, during “She’s Always a Woman.” There was a guy near the stage with his date, and Billy’s crew had gotten word that he planned to propose to his girlfriend right there.
Seated not far away from the man was Katie Lee Joel, seen fleetingly in the live footage of the concert and also briefly interviewed for the Last Play documentary film chronicling the event. The announcement that the couple was splitting up came not quite a year after that evening at Shea.
Billy’s piano tech cued him when the big moment came, and Steve Cohen hit the guy with the spotlight as he was quite obviously proposing to her. Billy then tossed out the comment, “Are you gonna marry her?” He raised his arms high with a big grin.
“Yes?” Billy asked. The audience cheered. “Congratulations! Get a prenup!” Billy told him.
There was a big laugh, a roar, from the stands. “That’s when it hit me,” says Billy. “In this stadium filled with fifty-five thousand exuberant people, I was the only one not enjoying the joke.”
With Christie and Alexa—whose middle name, Ray, is a tribute to Ray Charles—shortly after Alexa’s birth on December 29, 1985. (Photo credit i2.1)
When Billy recorded “Baby Grand” with Ray in 1987, producer Phil Ramone instructed, “challenge him.” (Photo credit i2.2)
As a road-weary pair of pop culture ambassadors to the Soviet Union in 1987, Billy and Christie Brinkley (seldom without a video or still camera on the journey, she doubles here as Lady Liberty), found respite from sometimes over-adoring crowds when and where they could. (Photo credit i2.3)
Billy, minus a sneaker, cavorts onstage in the Soviet Union. (Photo credit i2.4)
With the Sony brass, from left to right, Walter Yetnikoff, Billy, Tommy Mottola, and then-manager Frank Weber, in June 1988. (Photo credit i2.5)
“We all end in the ocean / We all start in the streams …” For the “The River of Dreams” video in 1993, Billy and the production shot on and around the Connecticut River (from the Mohegan word for “long, tidal river”), which empties into Long Island Sound. (Photo credit i2.6)
Billy and Elton John began their series of sporadic, record-setting Face to Face concert tours in 1994. (Photo credit i2.7)
Billy and Carolyn Beegan, as they toured Italy in the late nineties. (Photo credit i2.8)
Billy and Trish Bergin met when the Long Island TV newswoman was assigned to interview him in 1995; she came back on a second assignment as Y2K approached, and the romance took in spring 2000. (Photo credit i2.9)
Billy married Katie Lee on the grounds of his Centre Island estate in October 2004, with his daughter, Alexa, as maid of honor and his half-brother, Alex, as best man. (Photo credit i2.10)
When Billy set a new record for Madison Square Garden by selling out twelve consecutive shows in early 2006, he earned a number in the rafters alongside the arena’s various sports heroes. (Photo credit i2.11)
For the May 2006 Rock for the Rainforest benefit, Billy, seen here with James Taylor, Will Ferrell, and Sting, did his Joe Cocker impression with “A Little Help from My Friends.” (Photo credit i2.12)
Billy helped design a series of boats built for utilitarian purposes; to travel to his Last Play at Shea gigs in July of 2008, he rode on a 57-foot Shelter Island commuter called the Vendetta. Here he’s seen aboard Argos, a 36-foot lobster boat he commissioned from Maine’s Ellis Boat company. (Photo credit i2.13)
Two sold-out Shea Stadium evenings before 55,000 fans each night sealed the legend of a storied ballpark that had seen some of rock’s greatest acts, several of whom took the stage with Billy over the two evenings. (Photo credit i2.14)
Paul McCartney’s transatlantic race to arrive at Shea Stadium in time to cap off the concerts’ second night was a career highlight for Billy, and they rocked hard on “I Saw Her Standing There.” (Photo credit i2.15)
On a balmy winter’s day in Miami in 2011, Billy and Bruce Springsteen shared lunch and a ride across Biscayne Bay in Billy’s 28-foot landing craft/utility boat. (Photo credit i2.16)
Father and daughter at the keyboard, in September of 2013: Alexa Ray did one of her rare performances of dad Billy’s work singing “Just the Way You Are” for a Gap ad. (Photo credit i2.17)
Billy met Alexis Roderick, then a risk analyst for a stock market firm, at a Long Island restaurant not far from his home in 2010, and soon after they were living, and traveling, in tandem. (Photo credit i2.18)
Billy’s motorcycle collection is quartered in downtown Oyster Bay in his Twentieth Century Cycles shop, where Bruce Springsteen once made a pilgrimage to order a custom bike. Here Billy stands on his Centre Island property with a lovingly updated variation (he codesigned) on a 1939 Harley-Davidson “Knucklehead.” (Photo credit i2.19)
The series of Madison Square Garden dates that kicked off in January of 2014 was unprecedented in time span of the residency and the ticket sales generated. A bonus was the intensity of crowd enthusiasm that fed Billy’s own enjoyment of the shows. (Photo credit i2.20)
CHAPTER 17
ANOTHER DAY COMES TO AN END
Coming off the Last Play at Shea, Billy felt the buzz he needed to commit himself to an extended world tour that would spill right across the rest of 2008 and much of 2009. He would need that energy for the classic twenty-two hours of boredom that give way for a mere couple hours of fun onstage. Touring was also an overwhelmingly male enterprise—often, backstage, the sole female with an ongoing role in mounting the shows was the ever-cap
able and congenial production assistant Liz Mahon (whose husband tours in John Mellencamp’s band)—and Billy hoped Katie would join him along the way.
As the late-autumn start of their swing through Asia and Australia loomed, however, it was becoming clear to Billy that Katie, caught up in her burgeoning career and the new opportunities that came with it, wasn’t going to be the kind of wife who enjoyed life on the road. “Let’s face it, if you’re not getting the onstage buzz, it’s a dubious way of life,” says Billy. “Even the charter jets and the five-star hotels and the fancy meals and the avalanche of swag and adulation don’t really take the grind out of it.”
Billy’s career had thrown a number of obstacles in front of their marriage, and the signs of strain were multiplying. Insiders say that one emblematic moment presented itself in mid-October, when Billy found himself in a drafty, venerable Manhattan concert hall called the Hammerstein Ballroom, rehearsing with Bruce Springsteen for a fund-raising benefit for presidential candidate Barack Obama.
Billy had spent a long afternoon in the hall’s confines while the Secret Service was at work getting ready to lock the place down for the senator’s appearance later that evening. “Bruce and his band were there, and without wanting to sound corny, so was a sense of hope and change,” says Billy. “Our bands fell into that easy musicians’ camaraderie that’s not without an edge of competitiveness to it—but of course that went unspoken.”
Midway through the rehearsal, Katie Lee, per Billy’s invitation, stopped by with some girlfriends. They were all dressed to the nines—young, pretty, vivacious—and yet there was a feeling in the room that they acted like upper-class debutantes visiting the hired entertainment. “There was something patronizing about it,” says one insider. “She had been this girl we thought of almost as a hillbilly. Fresh out of college but still unspoiled, we thought.”
The evening itself—billed as “Change Rocks”—was a landmark moment for Billy, given his long-held liberal political side. He felt it was a privilege to play. The bill would include India.Arie and John Legend and even a cameo from Alexa on “Baby Grand.” Bruce and Billy had figured out which songs they might trade verses on, and they’d gotten their various band members aligned, but Billy pushed to keep the rehearsals brief. “That was somewhat to Bruce’s discomfort,” he remembers. “But I just don’t like to squeeze the inspiration too thin by overpreparing.
“Bruce is a savvy emcee on a rock stage, and I’m fairly confident in my ability to vamp with whatever’s going on, so that evening, as the hall filled up with swells who were willing to pay, in some cases, several thousand bucks per ticket—I’m against inflated prices, but this was an exception—we mingled with the crowd backstage.” These attendees included a mix of musicians, politicos, and heavy security under the supervision of the Secret Service operatives who were there in number.
At the show’s start, Bruce walked into the spotlight and said, “Welcome to the summit meeting!” He’d take up the same theme in the spring of 2010, when he and Billy appeared together at the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame’s twenty-fifth-anniversary concert: New Jersey and Long Island, he theorized, would still be part of a continuous land mass, had it not been for continental drift. But tonight, for Obama, the two blended music as well as territory. Thus Bruce ad-libbed on “Tenth Avenue Freeze-Out,” “When the change was made uptown and the Piano Man joined the band …” and also “when Jersey and Long Island bust this city in half!”
“When I didn’t know all the changes to his ‘Spirit in the Night,’ ” recalls Billy, “Bruce called out the chords, and he really invested his verses in ‘New York State of Mind,’ ‘Allentown,’ ‘A Matter of Trust,’ and ‘River of Dreams’ with that Bruce fire and commitment. We had a heartfelt hug at the end and had raised what turned out to be $8 million for Obama’s campaign—and perhaps set the stage for some future collaborations.”
For Billy, meeting Obama and his wife, Michelle, more than met his expectations, and the two men had the chance to discuss the psychology of growing up with a single mom, and “how that may set you on a particular, perhaps hard-striving, path in life,” says Billy. “He casually talked about inviting me and Katie to the White House if all went well, and naturally I said we’d be honored”—though he was still mulling over the uncomfortable moment with Katie earlier that day and perhaps realizing the future was going to be hard to predict.
“You register these feelings, and then you try to move on,” says Billy.
A month later they were all outbound for the concert tour that would begin in Hong Kong, hopscotch briefly to Tokyo, then cover all the major Australian cities. Katie brought her mom, an amiable and pretty southern lady, and they arrived in Japan and were installed on the penthouse floor of the lofty Park Hyatt, the hotel that had supplied the setting for the 2003 film Lost in Translation.
The plan was for Billy and Katie to take the several free days between tour legs in Japan and Australia to relax at the Four Seasons in Bali. Known for its discreet service and for a romantic aura exemplified by its private bungalows with luxuriously warm plunge pools, the Bali break would be a nice setting for some quality time before the Aussie tour began.
Perhaps she was wary of the line of thunderstorms that was moving across their planned flight path to Indonesia, or perhaps she was thinking about career opportunities that had come up back home, but Katie Lee passed on that experience. After the Japan leg, she and her mom got on a plane to the States, and Billy found himself facing a trip to Bali, amid the impeccable comfort of the luxurious villa of a five-star hotel at Jimbaran Bay—and no one to share it with. The morning of their separate departures, Billy sat alone in a glassed-in anteroom for smokers at the periphery of the Park Hyatt’s dining room, working on a cigarette and staring out a wall of glass, across Tokyo to Mount Fuji, wondering what was going to become of his marriage.
A LITTLE TANNER than he had been a few days before, and in some regards more relaxed, Billy arrived in Perth for a November 23 show to kick off his Aussie tour. About as far from the major Australian population centers as you can get, Perth has a slightly rustic air—almost like a frontier town, planted at the edge of a million square miles of western Australia. Billy was somewhat oblivious to his surroundings as he hunkered down with Steve Cohen and Brian Ruggles to concentrate on how best to reintroduce themselves to the audiences in Australia, a country that had always been so welcoming. They would cover the major venues moving from west to east, ending in Sydney before a hop to Auckland, New Zealand, and then head home.
A crucial addition to the set list for most of the Australian shows would be one of only two songs that Billy had written as “pop” compositions, words and all, in many years: “Christmas in Fallujah.” The experience of fund-raising for Barack Obama had made Billy’s feelings about America’s dual wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, as engineered by the outgoing Bush-Cheney administration, all the more bleak. America (and, in a much lesser way, its ally Australia) was now bogged down in a struggle that seemed to offer little chance of successful resolution. The Iraq chapter was fizzling to a close, though with constant violence still cooking, an equally unpromising mission in Afghanistan loomed. “Any thinking person has to sympathize with the soldiers who had to prosecute these conflicts,” says Billy.
Not unlike “Goodnight Saigon,” “Christmas in Fallujah” was told from the point of view of those troops who, Billy said at the time, “fight in our name, for little thanks.” And in this case, for apparently indifferent results:
It’s evening in the desert
I’m tired and I’m cold
But I am just a soldier
I do what I am told
We came with the crusaders
To save the holy land
It’s Christmas in Fallujah
And no one gives a damn …
They say Osama’s in the mountains
Deep in a cave near Pakistan
But there’s a sea of blood in Baghdad
A sea of oil
in the sand
Between the Tigris and Euphrates
Another day comes to an end
It’s Christmas in Fallujah
Peace on earth, goodwill to men.
Billy would perform the song with a fervent rasp onstage, but he hadn’t wanted to sing on the recording himself, unwilling to reengage with the music industry and its commercial expectations for anything he might release. Guitarist Tommy Byrnes, who does a good deal of producing between tours, knew a talented young singer named Cass Dillon, and Billy felt that a younger voice—as young as most of the guys on the ground in the war zone—would be appropriate. Dillon’s version would debut as an iTunes single in December and be included there on his EP, with the proceeds earmarked for the Iraq and Afghanistan veterans’ charity, Homes for Our Troops, a nonprofit that builds homes for disabled vets.
“Fallujah” was slotted into the Aussie sets as the fourteenth number, between “River of Dreams” and their version of AC/DC’s “Highway to Hell.” The latter song, number 258 on Rolling Stone’s list of the 500 Greatest Songs of All Time, was performed by guitar roadie Ricky LaPointe—better known as Chainsaw (one reviewer said that he was presumably named for the sound of his voice)—a man of impressive rotundity who stalked the stage in baggy shorts, hollering the words that recount the singer’s history of paying his dues in a “rockin’ band,” en route to the promised land. “ ‘Highway to Hell’ is a kind of novelty number,” says Billy, “though I introduced it in down there [in AC/DC’s Aussie homeland] as a spiritual. I suppose if Attila had made the grade, I’d be writing lyrics like that.”
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