The amiable connection with her ex continues, although since new girlfriend Alexis Roderick came into Billy’s life in October 2009, on a less frequent basis. Billy says, “Everything’s cool that way. She’s had to take more of a backseat in my life because I have another woman in it. So we speak once in a while, and I e-mail once in a while. She’s living her life.”
In fact, after befriending young piano-based songwriter Cassandra Kubinski in the aftermath of the Katie Lee breakup, he described his feelings of forgiveness in sufficient detail that Kubinski composed a song, “No Hard Feelings,” depicting his take on it all:
You got the house, you got the cash
The furniture and all that trash
The dog’s even going with you …
But you know, the hardest part
Is when I search deep in my heart
I got no hard feelings, no hard feelings
Because I know you really loved me.
“We still think of ourselves as friends,” says Billy. “The great thing about my ex-wives is they all still like me. I’ve been able to retain friendships with my exes—Christie, Elizabeth I see from time to time, and I enjoy being a good friend to them.”
ALMOST AS TRYING as his breakup with Katie was Billy’s dispute with former drummer Liberty DeVitto, which kicked off in late May 2009, precisely when relations with Katie were at their marriage-ending worst. At age fifty-eight, Liberty said that since being discharged from the band in 2005, after thirty years with Billy, he’d been working studio gigs and teaching drum students to support himself and his family. He asked for royalties for songs he felt he had contributed to, and his lawyer proposed that they should audit Billy’s books as part of their suit.
“Everybody always assumes that you make a lot of money because you worked with Billy Joel,” DeVitto told a wire service reporter. “It didn’t happen that way.” (Billy’s longtime associates know that Liberty had made $3 million in Billy’s employ.)
DeVitto told the New York Post he was bitter over the way he lost his job: “People get fired, they get severance or insurance for a certain period of time. I didn’t even get a phone call. It was cold.”
Per rock legend, drummers are the volatile ones in most bands (and the most often replaced or, as Spinal Tap would have it, lost to bizarre circumstances best left unsolved). And for many years, Liberty DeVitto filled that role in Billy’s band—mostly operating as what might be called “good crazy,” a vibrant mix of undeniably pummeling chops, flamboyant onstage gesticulations, and such habits as slinging drumsticks into the audience. Beyond keeping a beat, he was Billy’s comic foil onstage—a windmilling center of energy while the boss man was usually confined to his piano stool.
He’d been recruited from the very clubs Billy had played, and his band had even shared bills with Billy’s Hassles. As Liberty would recall in 2013, when interviewed by the filmmakers on the occasion of the twenty-fifth anniversary of the Russia trip, “I was in a group called New Rock Workshop, and we used to walk past each other and just be like, ‘Hey, how ya doin’?’ ”
When Liberty moved on to form Topper with Russell Javors, Doug Stegmeyer, and Howie Emerson, soon adding Richie Cannata, they drew enough attention to be recruited by Billy for the Streetlife Serenader tour. Believing that an artist should stick with one unified band in the studio and on the road, Billy told Doug, “I’m moving back to New York. I want the same guys to play on the record that go on tour with me, and I want a New York–style drummer.” And Doug said, “Well, you know the guy.”
Before hostilities erupted in 2009, Liberty told his story at some length for a fan site called the Electric Beard: “So Billy came to New York and I played for him, and he loved the new stuff that I played. He was going to do what eventually became Turnstiles, and it wasn’t until many years later that he found out that Doug had slipped me a tape of the new stuff before I actually went into the audition. So I had that going for me.”
With some further encouragement from Doug and Liberty, Billy brought on the Topper guitarists, and the band was set for nearly a quarter-century to come. There was still, however, the glitch in the Turnstiles sessions that occurred when Billy’s temporary management wanted Elton’s band to play. In an interview for Drummer magazine, Liberty recalled being plunged into that turnabout: “The funny thing is, when I got the phone call for the Billy audition, I asked, ‘What is Billy into?’ They said, ‘Go buy [Elton’s] “Captain Fantastic.” ’ So I learned all of Nigel’s licks …‘Don’t Let the Sun Go Down on Me,’ where he rides that cymbal for the longest time. On [Billy’s] ‘Honesty,’ ‘Leningrad,’ I do the same thing in there.”
Over the years, Billy would give Liberty credit for his court jester antics on- and offstage, and he even mentioned some input Liberty had in the studio on certain arrangements. But the slow accumulation of aggravations—what the band noticed as Liberty’s lack of enthusiasm, sabotage on songs that had predated him, his suspected role in bringing false rumors to Christie about Billy, and his listless approach to working with Danny Kortchmar on River of Dreams—had taken a toll.
The drummer continued on the tack he’d set. Although Liberty didn’t write any of the songs and didn’t have a recording contract (beyond a particular bonus royalty pledged for a specific set of recordings), and although he had been paid triple scale for the bulk of the sessions he played on, he reportedly sought royalties for claimed creative input. Individuals privy to the back-and-forth in the lawsuit said the parties traded accusations—Liberty claiming that if he hadn’t played the drums on The Stranger’s “Only the Good Die Young,” it would have emerged as a reggae song, while a contrasting anecdote claimed that if Liberty’s urgings had been obeyed, the most successful song on the same album, “Just the Way You Are,” would have been recorded as a cha-cha. Whatever those differences, Billy had twice taken a stand in favor of retaining DeVitto despite the opinion of prospective producers George Martin and later Jimmy Guercio, each of whom had suggested a change of musicians and then moved on when that request was denied.
Among the contentions Liberty had made in the media was that Doug Stegmeyer’s downward spiral to suicide had been worsened by his dismissal from Billy’s band. Insiders spoke of a lingering resentment dating to the 70’s when Liberty pulled away a chair Billy was about to sit in, possibly causing long-term damage.
When various bandmates felt Liberty was pushing the beat too avidly, leaving the lead singer panting out lines behind him, the change became inevitable. And yet Billy found himself missing the drummer’s showmanship: “He was very exciting to watch, a show in his own right onstage. People loved watching him. He was a good drummer for many, many years with me. ”
Liberty had also been indulged as Billy’s team fought off a lawsuit caused by the drummer chucking his drumsticks into the audience. At a time when a certain amount of wanton destruction on the road was any rock band’s birthright, DeVitto reportedly did his part. One tour had even been forced to leave the state of Ohio after Liberty crashed a car into a motel lobby, as he described for a podcast program called “Worst Gig Ever”: “Next morning the cops are there, they take me away … I got bailed out … that’s when we started to change our names on the room list …”
The alienation only increased around the time of Liberty’s divorce from his first wife, Mary, as he recounted in an interview for the Electric Beard: “I remember exactly what it was … I walked up to [Billy] and I said, ‘I’m getting divorced and she’s getting it all. So if any crumbs fall off the table, maybe you can sweep them my way.’ ”
By estranging himself from the Billy camp, DeVitto perhaps missed out on considerably more than crumbs when Billy decided, deep into his 2009 tour schedule, that he would distribute some $13 million in bonuses to his band and crew—an unprecedented outlay in the realm of rock, with the longest-serving members getting six and even seven figures along with advice on tax strategies. Prior to the filing of Liberty’s lawsuit, Billy had reportedly planned to
dole a goodly portion out to Liberty; the lawsuit, via its settlement, greatly diminished the payment to the ex-drummer.
Not unlike the long-lived resentment attorney Allen Grubman had nursed after not being invited to Billy’s wedding to Christie, Liberty had been upset about not getting an invitation to the Katie nuptials in October 2004. As the word had gone out to friends and band members, Liberty had gradually realized he was not included. He further alienated Billy by publicly sharing with the Electric Beard site a doleful, rambling letter he had composed years before, concluding with the thought that he was trying “to rebuild my career. It’s tough starting over with nothing at the age of fifty-four.”
The letter would have no impact on negotiations as the lawyers for the opposing sides conducted a brief backroom battle that reportedly included Billy taking Liberty to task for the incident with Christie. Then in late April, almost as abruptly as it had begun, the dispute was settled. Billy’s legal team released a statement saying, “The case has been amicably resolved.” The sums involved, and the punches and counter-punches that had been thrown in meetings, were not disclosed.
Today, Billy has moved on: “I do feel bad that it ended the way it did. I never wanted to get back at him in the press, ’cause I’d been asked about it—‘What happened with Liberty? How come you’re not working together?’ And, ‘He said this about you.’ I wanted to take the high road there and leave it as it is. I was a little bugged when stuff that he said came out in the press, but you just get over it. And now I don’t really have any hard feelings.”
IF BILLY’S HISTORY with Liberty was ultimately a tangled one, his history with Elton John, rock’s first famous piano man, has been even more complex. Ever since Billy and Elton first hit the road together in 1994, an arrangement brokered by Steve Cohen and Elton’s then-manager (and Cohen’s very good friend) John Reid, their story has been a saga of alternating camaraderie and competition—two iconic figures on a world stage, sometimes frolicking, sometimes fighting.
When their concerts clicked, fans and critics alike had responded to the juxtaposition of the two rock icons. At the 1994 opening show for about sixty thousand fans, the New York Times’s reviewer Neil Strauss had found that “Mr. Joel’s piano player [in other words, his onstage persona] comes on like a pint of beer and Mr. John’s like a cup of tea.” He summed up the approach as “two gifted, idiosyncratic artists [who] exist in the nether world between pop and rock, where Broadway show tunes, classical compositions, ragtime gospel and rock-and-roll mingle freely.” However, by 2009—when Billy’s marriage to Katie and his relationship with Liberty were at their worst—long-simmering tensions were hiding beneath their planned revival of the Face to Face tour later that year.
While the two had been a modern-day touring money machine—Billboard had declared their 2001–2 campaign to be the most successful tour package ever—both felt less sanguine about the gigs this time around. Elton, on the one hand, had never fully forgiven Billy for the Wembley cancellations in 1998. Billy, on the other, continued to feel as he did as late as 2007 in an interview with the Oakland Tribune, when he opined that the original Elton tours had been fun, but “after ten years, we were pretty much doing a stock greatest hits show. Elton was the opening act on the tour, he went on first. So we’d be sitting backstage and Elton would be playing hit after hit after hit. We’d be sitting there saying, ‘Oh, my God, we have to follow this?’ Well, if you try to go up there and do album tracks or obscurities, the crowd is going to go to the bathroom. So we were doing greatest hits for ten years, and that got a little old. As much as I liked working with Elton, we wanted to do other songs.”
And yet, after six years of individual tours, 2009–10’s ambitious three-leg, twenty-seven-show Face to Face began in Jacksonville in March. Making his Miami home the pivot point for the winter led to some enjoyable moments in the winter sun, but despite an efficient charge across the early part of the tour, Billy and Elton both would be dogged by health problems along the way, with eleven postponements and one cancellation, in Little Rock. Fans in Buffalo perhaps had the worst luck. Billy took ill just prior to the planned December 4 date—the announcement of “flu-like symptoms” came around three P.M., even as fans began descending on the HSBC Arena. That show, and also one scheduled just after in Albany, was rescheduled for March.
Then November saw a raft of rescheduled dates, as Elton contracted a withering E. coli virus that knocked him out of his solo Red Piano tour of the U.K. as well as the northwestern wing of the Face to Face tour. As Elton gradually recovered in an English hospital, Billy’s agonies with sciatica and hip dysplasia worsened. Betrayed by his very joints, sitting at home stewing over his broken marriage and the anomie of facing boisterous crowds in a state of emotional free fall, Billy had those closest to him worried.
The combined effect of Elton’s illness and the need for Billy to get some time off was to push an array of scheduled dates later into winter, as eventually the piano-playing odd couple made up the dates, and wholeheartedly. By the time they got to Salt Lake City, for example, the local reviewer applauded Billy’s “lovable crassness that only added authenticity to his story songs” and concluded that he “plays like a gunslinger and gets the job done.”
Sometime between that date and the San Jose gig three days before, Elton’s agent broke unwelcome news to the Englishman, just before Elton did a press conference from Beverly Hills via satellite, promoting his production of Billy Eliot the Musical. No Face to Face dates would be added, the agent relayed—Billy was done for now. “Billy,” Elton said, “has decided to take a year off. It doesn’t gel with my plans, but he’s my friend. And as an artist you have to respect his decision.”
Privately, of course, Elton was fuming, and his disapproval found its way into the media. Billy replied in an interview with Rolling Stone’s Austin Scaggs that appeared online on February 26, bearing the headline “Billy Joel Dismisses Rumors He Yanked Tour with Elton John.” The key quote was the lead: “There was never a tour booked this summer!” Billy continued: “Obviously, this has the smell of a really juicy story: ‘Why did they cancel? Did Billy and Elton have a fight? What’s going on?’ The truth is, there’s nothing going on. I had made up my mind a long time ago that I wasn’t going to work this year.”
The feud then went quiet—for the moment.
Regardless of the seeming détente, the final two upstate New York Face to Face gigs were fraught. But both Albany and Buffalo went without a hitch in early March, earning a heap of warm reviews (“the pair have power, even majesty,” wrote one local reviewer) and drawing enthusiastic audiences. Still, the performances were hardly as buoyant as they had been when the 2009–10 Face to Face tour had begun. Now it was history.
Billy’s 2009 had been a tough year, as he remembers: “I promised myself more personal time. I said, I’m going to Italy, and I’ll probably go to Paris. I’ll probably take my boat to New England and hang out on the coast. I’ll ride my motorcycle.” For the first time in what seemed like ages, he thought, “I’ll just be a bum.”
Billy Joel’s present-day audiences are as fervent as any he’s ever played to, as seen here on New Year’s Eve 2013. He told this Barclays Center crowd how he had played nearby Bay Ridge at age seventeen with his first band, the Lost Souls. (Photo credit pt4.1)
CHAPTER 19
THE IDOL OF MY AGE
Facing the long span that began in the late spring of 2010 with no concerts scheduled, Billy felt genuine relief that each day’s biggest decision would be about lunch, and he found other pursuits. By early summer, he was much more interested in spending time in his burgeoning Oyster Bay motorcycle emporium, Twentieth Century Cycles, than in doing anything with music. For several years prior to the current motorcycle fixation, the lure of designing boats, like his beautifully custom-made Shelter Island runabouts, was in the forefront for Billy. To describe his pursuits as hobbies undersells the investment of time, capital, and passion involved.
In 2010–1
2, as he renovated an expansive storefront space just around the corner from the Oyster Bay town hall, the avocation was almost becoming a full-time job. Hiring veteran bike savant (and sometime racer) Alex Puls to come up from down south and settle in with his family marked a turning point.
“I design bikes, I think, similarly to the way I create music—the notes are mine, the composition is mine, but the execution is done by master craftsmen. The whole process of going from concept to design to finished product has often reminded me of the scene in Close Encounters of the Third Kind where Richard Dreyfuss is trying to re-create Devil’s Peak.
“At first he doesn’t know just what he’s doing. But he hangs in, and eventually he lets go and says, ‘Just close your eyes and hold your breath and everything will turn real pretty.’
“It’s a similar thing with me and motorcycles. I love taking a stock bike and customizing it. It’s almost as if there’s a reincarnation aspect to it. For some reason I always want to go back to the year of my birth, 1949. Everything I like stylistically comes from that era—the late forties and early fifties—and I feel like I’m always trying to re-create it.
“Some designs at that time were so beautiful and functional, I often wonder why they had to stop. Why did they have to change? Why all this emphasis on new, and cutting-edge, and experimental, and innovative? Why not explore the nuances of what was already there and improve on that?
Billy Joel Page 34