Billy Joel

by Fred Schruers

  The out-of-town performances would continue, as gigs in Dublin, London, and Manchester were booked for October and November, and in an April interview with Rolling Stone’s Andy Greene, he described plans for a return to the road. “I’m putting my toe back into the water to see how performing feels,” he said, predicting “more songs that weren’t hits” played in some large cities beginning with Philadelphia. Even as he revealed his boredom with the hits, he cited a Led Zeppelin concert of deep tracks that disappointed him, and he recalled a 2006 Florida gig when songs like “All for Leyna” didn’t play well.

  Then in May came an interview in the New York Times Magazine that located him at his Sag Harbor house: “He is seemingly never alone, spending his time in the company of his two pugs or his live-in girlfriend of three years, Alexis Roderick, a former Morgan Stanley risk officer (who he probably wishes had been alongside him in the 1970s to assess his first record deal).”

  Billy and his interviewer agreed that Elton, otherwise at least partly forgiven, looked like a mom. Reminded that he once would rip up bad reviews onstage, he admitted, “Maybe it was a Long Island thing. We had a chip on our shoulder.” He also depicted the cancellation of his autobiography for fear it was being steered to “more of the sex and wives and girlfriends and drinking and divorce and the depression”—topics the interview then pursued. He told of his agonies at the hands of Oprah—“I did the show because Katie had a book coming out.” He relived his history of being duped by the music business. Then he described just how far he would go into being an oldies act: “If I don’t think I’m any good … I’m going to stop doing it. It has to be fun. You have to feel good about it.”

  Finally, under steady pressure from Dennis Arfa and not a few asides from the circle of friends and road dogs whose livelihoods—and in many cases, sense of identity—depended on Billy being on the road, the optimistic noises began. Both for himself and for his band and crew, Billy was finding that the money had its say: “I’m from Levittown. They come at you with these huge offers. First I say no, and they think I’m negotiating. And they come back with twice as much. There’s only so much of that kind of money you can turn down. But I have to want to do it—I’m wondering, will I want to go out at sixty-five, okay, here’s my swan song? I don’t think I’ve ever done my farewell tour. I don’t know if I believe in those things.”

  Even as Billy and company began preparations for something much more elaborate, they suddenly announced on October 15 that the next day, Billy would play a one-off concert at a classic old venue, the Paramount Theater in Huntington. It would be his first show on Long Island in twelve years. The proceeds would go to a favored charity, Long Island Cares—The Harry Chapin Food Bank. The rush for tickets was over almost before it started. Some side deals that Billy’s people could do nothing to forestall had seats in the 1,555-capacity hall going for $800 or more.

  “It’s been a long time since he’s played a room anywhere near as tiny as the Paramount,” wrote Rolling Stone, “and Billy soaked in every bit of love from the screaming fans, who had absolutely no idea they’d be seeing Billy Joel in concert when they woke up the previous morning.”

  “Long Island, long time no see,” said Billy as he began. “This is harder than it used to be.” In accordance with the new ethos that had spread among the reviewers, the raves came in. “He was clearly in good spirits,” wrote Newsday, “breaking out in a wide grin at the ovation he got for ‘River of Dreams,’ as well as being in fine voice. His recent hip surgeries seem to have done the trick as he swiveled his hips during the encore ‘It’s Still Rock and Roll to Me.’ ”

  He had introduced “Blonde Over Blue” by noting, “I don’t think we’ve ever played this one before—it could be a car wreck,” but after a “huge ovation,” he said, “I like that one. We’re going to keep it.” He closed with, “Maybe we’ll see you again soon,” setting off Internet rumors of shows to come.

  Within days the dominoes started to fall. A gig at an arena in Sunrise, Florida, was announced for January, and on October 31 came the announcement that Billy would play New Year’s Eve at the eighteen-thousand-seat Barclays Center in Brooklyn. “When we opened Barclays Center thirteen months ago,” said Barclays CEO Brett Yomark, “Billy was one of the must-have artists for our building.”

  Still, in metropolitan New York and perhaps the entire world, there is only one arena that is agreed to rule them all, and that’s Madison Square Garden. In early November came the news that Billy would establish an unprecedented (except by sports teams) “franchise” at the Garden. Health permitting, he would do a monthly gig, as he said himself in his usual straightforward way at a press conference, as long as, he boldly promised, “there is demand.”

  “We welcome Billy home,” said the Garden’s executive chairman James Dolan, “and look forward to many unforgettable nights of music at the Garden.” Governor Andrew Cuomo, Billy’s fellow motorcycle enthusiast and increasingly a friend and dinner companion, added, “It is particularly fitting that these two great icons are coming together to make entertainment history right here in New York City.” He offered congratulations to both Billy and “the millions of fans worldwide who will benefit from this collaboration for years to come.” Cuomo and Billy had ridden motorcycles side by side in September for a 9/11 memorial trip from a midtown firehouse to the World Trade Center Ground Zero site, and days after the Garden press conference, Billy would be the star guest at a Cuomo fund-raiser where tickets went for as much as $50,000. As the crowd at the Roseland Ballroom roared with laughter, Billy put new words to the tune of “Honesty”: “Find a bunch of millionaires with lots of cash to burn / And be sure all your sex tapes hide your face.”

  The initial Garden shows had sold out as quickly as the technology would permit, with tickets at a relatively restrained range from $64.50 to $124.50. Of course, these tickets were in many cases resold for as much as three times their face value, and a Forbes.com article predicted that the “demand” could continue for perhaps forty shows or so before beginning to lose steam.

  If the Garden residency was a coup that very few other artists—perhaps only Springsteen—could even contemplate attempting, the news that came in mid-September 2013 was more significant yet to Billy. In early December of that year, he would stand alongside Carlos Santana, Herbie Hancock, and opera singer Martina Arroyo to accept what for any American popular artist was the nation’s most coveted recognition: a Kennedy Center Honor.

  At the ceremony, President Obama called him “an artist whose songs are sung around the world but are thoroughly, wonderfully American.”

  “Billy Joel is so much more than a piano man,” said his friend Tony Bennett, noting that Billy had added much to the American songbook. “He’s our poet and our pal.”

  Then Don Henley’s sandpapery voice proved to be the right vehicle for a stripped-down “She’s Got a Way,” and Garth Brooks brought out the country in “Only the Good Die Young” and added sturdy renditions of “Allentown” and “Goodnight Saigon,” backed by a gospel choir and, later in the song, U.S. Armed Forces veterans. The latter moment brought forth a standing ovation and, for many present, tears. Rufus Wainwright brought a disciplined theatricality to “New York State of Mind,” then led the crowd in a sing-along of “Piano Man.” And Brendon Urie of emo band Panic! at the Disco delivered a dramatic version of “Big Shot.”

  As Billy would sum up the day for Billboard, “That was a really moving experience. You just sat there and one thing after another is happening. The State Department gives you the award, you meet with the President and First Lady, and they’re saying all these nice, effusive words about you. People come up shaking your hand, I didn’t have to do nothin’. I didn’t have to do a speech, I just sat there. There’s Tony Bennett talking about me. It’s funny, I go to places and people say, ‘You were great at the Kennedy Center Honors,’ and I say, ‘But I didn’t do anything. I just sat there.’ So it was an easy job.”

  In mid-2014 came word
that Billy had won the prestigious Gershwin Prize.

  The inaugural show of the Garden residency had its share of sardonic Billy moments. At one point he looked at the huge video screen and noted, “I didn’t think I was going to look like this. I look just like my dad. I thought I was going to look like Cary Grant.”

  The performance was dogged by equipment glitches that caused some patchy sound and, most conspicuously, robbed the audience of part of Carl Fischer’s hot solo on “Zanzibar,” but it was greeted rapturously, and the press had admiring things to say. “From the ovations here, Joel seems well on his way toward morphing from musician to New York institution,” said the Daily News, while Billboard found him to be “playing at championship level,” and Rolling Stone pointed out, “No other rock star has ever attempted anything like this: a gig a month as long as he wants, on his home turf, in the white-hot spotlight of the world’s most famous rock arena … and every minute of last night’s show was a reminder why Billy Joel can keep these monthly blowouts going as long as he’s willing to show up.”

  “Clearly,” Steve Cohen would say, as another couple of highly praised shows were turned in, “what we’re dealing with now is no mystery. There’s no record coming out. There’s no new product coming out. He’s been touring with no new product for twenty years. So how do you make that unique and interesting? Well, it comes from his perspective sitting at that piano wanting to do what he does.

  “We were just catching up backstage at a gig one day—he was in his dressing room by himself, and I was just hanging out. He was talking about next year, about what he might want to do. And then, he does that thing where he looks at me and shrugs and he goes, ‘What else am I going to do?’

  “So, I think that that’s a little disingenuous, but really, at the end of the day, that’s what it is. And I think this is just another cycle.… It will reach its conclusion when he has gotten what he wanted out of this particular run emotionally and creatively. When it stops being fun, he stops wanting to do it. So our role in all of this, meaning all of the guys in the family, is to try and make it so that the set and the show all feels good—so he walks offstage and he’s stoked. I’ve had conversations with him after every one of these shows where we just kind of giggle and think, Wow, we’re still good. Remember, he had said, ‘I’m not going to do this if I can’t be as good as we used to be.’ And I think we’re better. I think we’re better than we’ve ever been.”

  CODA

  The concert dates that Billy scheduled monthly through 2014 for Madison Square Garden quickly became destination events—a reason, if you could find a ticket, for a trip to New York City from anywhere on the globe. The scattered additional shows around North America looked almost random, though largely they were nods to various arenas that were overdue for a visit.

  But the trio of shows booked for the Los Angeles area on May 17, 22, and 27 were special on several levels. While Billy had played at a variety of local venues over the years, from the Executive Room to the Staples Center—and, most recently, the Honda Center in Anaheim five years before—he had never played the true, globally revered classic, the Hollywood Bowl. Built in 1921 to showcase the Los Angeles Philharmonic Orchestra, it had hosted Aaron Copland, Arthur Rubenstein, Sergei Rachmaninoff, Van Cliburn, the Beatles, the Doors, and countless others—but not Billy.

  True to his way of shrinking a sprawling arena down to the intimacy of a club, Billy drew the crowd into his own reflections after opening the middle show of his L.A. stand with a bravura (if geographically non-topical) “Miami 2017 (Seen the Lights Go Out on Broadway).” “I didn’t know I was gonna do this when I started out at the Troubadour,” he said as he gazed about appreciatively from his piano stool, motioning toward a scrubby hilltop that loomed in the background. “I used to live right over the hill, at 6800 Mulholland,” he noted, and indeed, the house where he lived briefly in 1974 was but half a mile from the Hollywood Bowl Overlook that commands a view of the entire city sprawling to the west.

  He would invoke memories of his Angeleno days each evening at the Bowl, mocking the idea that he and Elizabeth thought they were big shots staying at the down-market Tropicana. (But at the adjoining Duke’s coffee shop, he added with a gesture, “You could get a sandwich like this for a dollar fifty!”) Backstage after his sound check on the first night, he indulged in a smoke and some casual touristic memories. But the easeful reflections tapered off as the sprawling tarmac of the load-in area became a logjam of local industry types and, more imposingly, actual family—Elizabeth Weber herself was seated restively on a folding chair near the loading dock alongside her son Sean Weber Small, as well as Sean’s wife and young daughters.

  There was a reunion of sorts, as Billy and Elizabeth shared an awkward embrace and some talk of Sean’s kids. Sean, now based in L.A. and running a small production company, would attend two shows and also make the ninety-minute drive north to the rented Santa Barbara house where Billy was lodged, to visit the man he refers to as his stepfather. The chats they had there were not superficial: “I think Sean is trying to put together the jigsaw puzzle of what his life was,” says Billy pensively, “and I can understand that.”

  Billy’s commute to the show each night was by helicopter, to the roof of an office tower on Wilshire Boulevard. No one recalls better than him, though, that playing L.A. wasn’t always helicopter lifts and people eating pricey catered dinners at twilight. Some decades ago, when he stood a good chance of being dropped by Columbia (until Walter Yetnikoff was lured to a show and opened the label money spout to help the band establish itself), none of the present-day success may have seemed likely. Now it’s for Billy himself to say when enough will be enough: “Yes, I can do it, I can tour, I can get an audience to come. I can make money. I can continue to generate income for everybody else. But is that the right thing to do? I tend to think not. Why did DiMaggio step away from the game? Why did Mantle leave? Why did these great athletes step away? ’Cause they loved the game too much to not play it well. And I know eventually I’m going to run out of the physical ability.”

  One song that seems to have a lifetime guarantee of being included in every full set list is “It’s Still Rock and Roll to Me,” with its demanding drum major routine of Billy twirling the microphone stand. The song was a significant hit, a number one in the summer of 1980, and despite a subsection of the audience who cordially loathe it, and his own admission that he can see why, Billy sticks by it.

  He likewise doesn’t repudiate what he and his forebears and peers once created: “It’s an admirable format, the pop format. It’s very hard to do, almost a miniature, and it’s very hard to cram all this meaning and feeling into three minutes. And people might go, Why don’t you just challenge yourself to expand the song genre into your music writing? But in a way it feels like kind of painting a moustache on my own original painting. I should be able to convey what I want with the music alone. That’s what the great composers all did.

  “I think there’s a song cycle in every songwriter that eventually kind of runs out. There is an arc to creativity, especially with songs, that eventually peaks and then diminishes. And I’m not afraid to admit to that. Maybe the ‘river of dreams’ dried up. Because there’s a line in the song—and I was always trying to figure out, why did I write that?—‘So I can finally find out what I’ve been looking for.’ That’s a metaphor, I think, for how I always wanted to be better, to write better songs. And I got to a point where I said, I can’t be any better than this. And I’ve tried. I tried and I tried, and I beat myself up and went through all kinds of emotional angst because of that. I’m not going to be any better than I am in that genre. I’ve done it.”

  RESOLVED AS BILLY may be on the topic, he would make time, during the mellow backstage hours prior to his L.A. shows, for a trio of meetings that may usher in another musical avenue. In meeting on back-to-back nights with two of the top five or so electronic dance music (EDM) deejays in the world, David Guetta and Avicii, he was on a path, sh
ould he decide to follow it, for sharing pop music’s ascendant territory. The meetings came at the behest of the younger artists. Of Guetta, a Paris-based deejay (“no one has done more to make EDM part of the pop universe,” says Rolling Stone) in his midforties, Billy remarks, “They say he’s the biggest deejay in the world, which is a weird kind of category, like, ‘most jumbo shrimp.’ ”

  Yet Billy saw a possible avenue to work with him: “What he had to suggest is that you both go in the studio and you just try putting things together the way we do when I do my [traditional] thing—which is you take sounds and rhythms, and they get a beat and a pulse, and then they kind of flesh it out.” After meeting with Avicii, a Stockholm-based deejay in his midtwenties whose “Wake Me Up” was a massive 2013 hit, Billy said, “He seems like a really bright guy too. And he’s at that age where he wants to create, create, create, create. He was very enthusiastic about me writing something with him. Maybe it’ll create some sparks. I said, ‘There’s nothing wrong with that. That’s good.’ So I’m going to give it a shot.”

  Yet another backstage meeting was with Universal Pictures executives who want to involve Billy in some forthcoming sound tracks, not just for the onscreen song uses called syncs, but as a composer. Though such assignments would interlock nicely with his new Universal Music publishing deal, he’s staying open to offers from other studios: “There’s talk about a remake of The Magnificent Seven, with some big-name guys. And the minute I saw that, I went, ‘Yeah, I always wanted to write that sound track.’ Because ‘The Ballad of Billy the Kid’ is kind of an homage to that Elmer Bernstein score.”