Billy and the Joels--The American rock star and his German family story

by Steffen Radlmaier

  After watching Billy perform in Carnegie Hall, Phil Ramone was convinced (a live recording of this sensational concert on June 3, 1977 was released in 2008). He was fascinated by the musical energy unleashed by the band on stage, and wanted to capture this energy and joy of playing on record. He recognized the secret for success immediately. The musicians were not to change their live attitude in the studio, but play as they did on stage – raw and rousing. His credo: “Don’t play one bit differently from how you do on tour. Play just like the rock and roll animals that you are.” Phil Ramone got on well with them all and behaved almost as if he were a member of the band. This also contributed to the relaxed working atmosphere in his New York recording studio. “We did the songs in five takes instead of 15 or 20”, Billy explains, “He was one of the guys. We’d throw around ideas, kick the songs around, try them different ways and get them right. We’d throw pizza at each other. That’s how it was with Phil.”71 It was like being in the playground again. Or on the streets where Billy used to play with his school-pals.

  In early summer 1977, just as New York was celebrating the completion of the World Trade Center with its characteristic twin towers, they found themselves recording the new album in Phil Ramone’s Manhattan studio. This time things were going to be different. The album’s subsequent title “The Stranger” hadn’t yet been decided upon, and only three songs were actually ready to be recorded. The ultimate concept developed gradually during recording, with improvisation and spontaneity playing a major part in proceedings. Billy Joel and Phil Ramone agreed on one thing in particular: the right feeling was to be more important than technical perfection.

  It was the beginning of a long friendship that endured right up until Phil Ramone’s death in 2013. Billy described just how much his friend and producer meant to him in an obituary that appeared in the April edition of Rolling Stone: “I sometimes think about how different my life would have been if I hadn’t met Phil. I wouldn’t have had the success I had. I would have had a completely different life. I don’t know that I even would have been able to be a recording artist if “The Stranger” hadn’t done what it did…I hadn’t had a record like that until I worked with Phil Ramone, and then suddenly everything took off like a skyrocket…He was beloved by every artist he ever worked with, because he was so musical and technically a genius, and funny and warm and unpretentious. We stayed close over the years.”73

  The Breakthrough

  The relaxed atmosphere in the studio paid dividends. Taking advantage of the tight tour band, Phil Ramone was able to give Billy’s songs the sound and shape that had been lacking on his previous recordings. Billy’s piano, Liberty DeVitto’s drums and Doug Stegmeyer’s bass formed the foundation for the tracks.

  At that time, Billy used to carry a school notebook around with him, in which he’d jot down any sudden ideas he might have. He’s often explained the creative process of his song writing: To start with there’s a sudden inspiration, a musical brainwave, a snippet of a melody. He always had the music first, the lyrics following later.

  “That’s how I hear popular music. I remember my first exposure to popular music was probably at a beach listening to a portable radio or at a party listening to somebody’s little dinky record player where they played the 45s where the speakers were about two or three inches big and you really couldn’t hear the lyrics. What you heard was a melody, some chords, a rhythm. The drums were always prevalent in rock and roll and pop music. You heard the sound of the singer’s voice and you heard the production of the recording. One of the last things you ever heard was what the hell they were saying. […] Does anybody know the lyrics to “Louie, Louie”? I don’t think even The Kingsmen know the lyrics. So my exposure to popular rock and roll was that lyrics were one of the last things you ever got to. So I write music first. Actually I wrote music when I was a little kid. I made up my own operas, made up my own compositions. I didn’t need words. Then I got into a band and we started to write songs and they looked at me to be the lyricist. And I said, ‘What are you looking at me for?’ ‘Well, you read a lot, you read a lot of books’, ‘So what, that doesn’t make me Robert Browning. It doesn’t make me Bob Dylan.’ ‘Well’, they said, ‘give it a shot.’ So I ended up with the task of writing words for these songs. But I did it backwards.”74 Even today, Billy Joel still sees himself as more of a composer than a lyricist. If he thinks of a new melody, he just sings any old lyric to it at first.

  The album’s title song “The Stranger” tells of the many masks behind which people hide in day to day life. But the album’s biggest hit was the love song “Just the Way You Are”. He’d written it for Elizabeth and hesitated for quite a while before finally selecting it for the album. Even the band thought it too soft; the drummer in particular made no secret of his dislike for the song. It was probably thanks to singer Phoebe Snow, who happened to be in the studio at the same time, that the song did finally get released. She recognized the song’s hit potential and advised her colleagues to include it on the album. It turned out to be very good advice indeed: “Just the Way You Are” went on to be a massive hit that stayed in the top ten for months and eventually became a standard, covered by numerous other artists over the years since.

  The album also came up with three more hits: “Movin’ Out”, “Only the Good Die Young” and “She’s Always a Woman” – the high expectations of the record label were finally being fulfilled. “Scenes from an Italian Restaurant” drifted away somewhat from the regular three-minute radio song format in that it has two quite different parts, reminiscent of the Beatles’ “A Day in the Life”.

  One of the album’s finest songs is “Vienna”. Billy wrote it for his father, Helmut, whom he’d been to visit at his home in Vienna, Austria. While in the Austrian capital, the singer got the feeling that old people enjoyed better treatment there than in the USA, where old age was a subject people seemed to suppress. “When do you realize, Vienna waits for you”. The refrain even sounds a bit like the way a father might admonish his hyperactive child: ‘Take it easy, come back down to earth, more haste less speed!’ Something we all experience at one time or another. Whatever the case, in this song Vienna doesn’t stand for a morbid or moribund old town, but a timeless city of the aged in which a person can learn to consciously deal with one’s time on this earth. It’s also a kind of protest song against the youthism rampant not only in the USA.

  Billy’s fifth solo album, “The Stranger” finally gave his career the decisive boost it had needed. It was released in 1977, just a few weeks after the tragic death of the King of Rock and Roll, Elvis Presley. Until 1984 it held the record of being Columbia’s biggest selling album, with over ten million copies sold (Bruce Springsteen’s “Born in the USA” eventually overtook it).

  So the Piano Man and balladeer was suddenly a rock star and had to learn how to deal with his new found popularity. While his concert venues were getting bigger, his relationship with his audience was getting more difficult. The 28-year-old still felt like the young guy from Long Island that he’d been for so long. He still lived with Elizabeth in a small apartment on the 35th floor on Manhattan’s East Side. The fame of which he had once so often dreamed turned out to be annoying celebrity hype, with intrusive journalists, money-grubbing business partners and brazen autograph hunters.

  This huge success changed a lot for Billy Joel. It allowed him a life of luxury, but bought with it renewed pressure to succeed. And vanity and jealousy started to spread among the band members. The musicians were earning well but were not getting royalties or bonus payments, a common practice in the music business. Success or failure was of course due mainly to the frontman, but there were some (for example long-serving drummer Liberty DeVitto) who would have liked to be getting a bigger slice of the cake. Other members of the band were offended because they had been replaced by guest musicians on some of the recordings. For example, jazz saxophonist Phil Woods was hired to play the solo on “Just the
Way You Are”.

  Still, for the time being, they were all generally pretty happy that the long-awaited breakthrough had finally come. “The Stranger” not only sold extremely well, it even satisfied some very influential critics. Time Magazine had this to say about the album: “Joel’s best songs have a brash humor, the sad, sometimes lavish sentiment that still stirs faint echoes of the boys down on the corner, harmonizing to the Top 40. […] Under the direction of gifted producer Phil Ramone, the new record has a harder, more astringent sound. Joel’s lyrics can be lilting, wistful or full of bite. He is at his best taking unsentimental trips back to home territory, exploring the dead ends and defeats of middle-class life in a song like “Scenes from an Italian Restaurant”.”75

  It was only rock and roll’s ‘official journal’ Rolling Stone that once again found something to moan about. Billy Joel couldn’t easily be put into any particular pigeonhole, and didn’t quite fit in with the fashionable taste of music’s opinion leader. In the early stages of punk and disco music, mainstream rock was just about the last thing that was going to win any medals. In the UK it was the Sex Pistols who were debunking the great rock and roll swindle (only to later become its victim themselves); at the same time the Bee Gees were spreading their “Saturday Night Fever” throughout the discotheques of the world.

  Billy Joel was annoyed by the bad press and had no problem retaliating, even in public: sometimes on stage he’d read out a bad review before tearing it up in front of the audience. His relationship with the press remains extremely ambivalent to this day. He was also considered a difficult and unpredictable ‘angry young man’ when it came to public relations. And his huge success was often the very reason critics remained wary of him.

  At the same time, his fan base was getting bigger and bigger, with no small thanks to “Just the Way You Are”, and Billy and his band were now able to demonstrate their live appeal on the stages of the large arenas. “The Stranger” tour of the USA, Europe, Australia and Japan began in September of 1977 and went on until the summer of 1978 with very few breaks in between. It was about this time that Billy came up with a saying that became an inherent part of his show for many years to come: “Don’t take any shit from anybody!” It was a call for his audience to come to their own opinions, but one which also questioned his own status as a rock star. The singer from Hicksville, Long Island preferred an audience that made up their own minds and didn’t blindly believe all their idols told them.

  The long months on the road bonded the band together, but were exhausting. Touring had its downsides too: the endless bus rides, the impersonal hotel rooms in strange towns, and the temptations of alcohol, drugs and groupies. They were wild days, on and off stage.

  Billy Joel didn’t allow himself time off, he wanted to seize the moment and, just one year later in the summer of 1978, he was back in the studio with Phil Ramone, recording a new album. The intention was to repeat the success of “The Stranger” without simply copying its recipe for success. This is how he explained it: “Listen, it’s a definite temptation to repeat a successful formula. But I have never done the same thing twice. I don’t care what anybody says! After Stranger, I could have done Son of Stranger, but I’ve never done that. To keep me interested, there always has to be something new, something different.

  When I come up with a melody, it is not calculated. It’s like an erection: It happens. There’s no formula. I do try to write complete melodies; that’s a constant. Because there are only so many notes and so many combinations, it gets tougher all the time to stay away from what’s been done before. But everything I’ve done is different. The proof is that some people think I’m a balladeer, others think I’m a rock and roller, still others think I’m the ‘Piano Man’.”76

  The new album was to be entitled “52nd Street” in memory of the street in New York where numerous jazz clubs – including the legendary Birdland – were once located; a street that can be mentioned in the same breath as names like Billie Holiday, Chet Baker, Sarah Vaughan, Charlie Parker and Miles Davis. It was also the street in which CBS, the parent company of Columbia Records, had opened its headquarters in the 1970s. And last but not least, it was where the recording studio was located.

  Phil Ramone invited several renowned jazz musicians to play on the album, including Michael and Randy Brecker, Dave Grusin and Freddie Hubbard. But Billy’s tour musicians formed the core of the studio band. Ramone’s challenge was to combine jazz-flair and rock-power into a homogeneous entity. He achieved this with aplomb, and the result was one more a highpoint in the career of Billy Joel.

  “52nd Street” featured several key songs, including “My Life” and “Rosalinda’s Eyes”. And Billy’s father, Helmut Joel, visited the studio a couple of times to watch the recording process: “He’s been in recording sessions. He was there for “My Life”, and he said, ‘You’re making the piano sound out of tune.’ And I said, ‘That’s the idea, pop.’ You can’t explain Elvis Presley to my father.”77

  Billy explains the self-confessional character of “My Life” as follows: “When I was a kid in school, I always saw how stupid rules were. I would do something that didn’t hurt anybody, but it broke the rules and I would get in trouble for it. My life has been a constant rebellion against that. ‘This is my life … leave me alone.’”78

  The Cuban influenced “Rosalinda’s Eyes” was written for his mother. In it he sings:

  “Oh Havana, I’ve been searching for you everywhere / And though I’ll never be there / I know what I would see there / I can always find my Cuban skies / In Rosalinda’s eyes.”

  The singer is dreaming of Cuba, where his father had lived in exile, and simultaneously fantasizes the broken marriage of his parents back together. As a teenager he’d often imagined one day finding in a drawer a love letter that Helmut had written to Rosalind. The song sounds like one such fictitious letter: “For me it’s a substitute for the letter that my father should have written to my mother, but never did” explains Billy.

  “52nd Street” was released in October 1978 and was topping the Billboard charts by November of that same year – the first Billy Joel album to make number 1. Four of the albums songs became international hits: “My Life”, “Big Shot”, “Honesty” and “Until the Night”.

  Nevertheless, once again, the music critics remained guarded. Rolling Stone’s Stephen Holden, who seemed to have made it his business to pick on Billy, pulled no punches when airing his dislike: “Billy Joel is the quintessential postrock entertainer: a vaudevillian piano man and mimic […] able to caricature both Bob Dylan and the Beatles as well as ‘do’ an updated Anthony Newley, all in the same Las Vegas format. […] A bantam, hyperkinetic Rocky Balboa onstage, Joel works audiences into a lather of adulation with the snappy calculation of a borsch-belt ham. As cockily aggressive as Sammy Davis Jr., he lards his performances with schtick. […] Neither a great singer nor a great writer, Billy Joel is a great showbusiness personality in the tradition of Al Jolson. […] Joel’s songwriting forte is pop pastiche. […] Billy Joel would probably still be only a cult figure, idolized in concert but poorly represented on record, if he hadn’t found the perfect studio collaborator in producer Phil Ramone.”79

  However, the artist’s increasing success brought not only the music critics, but the begrudgers into the arena too. He suddenly saw himself facing a slew of accusations of plagiarism: A certain John Powers claimed Billy had stolen ideas from a demo of a song entitled “We Got to Get It Together” that Powers had sent to Columbia, and had used them in “My Life”. Billy was furious at the absurd accusation and publicly vented his anger. His good name was at stake. The litigation lasted well over ten years, and later involved not only the matter of plagiarism, but slander and libel too.

  Billy Joel wasn’t particularly happy in the role as rock star that he’d always longed for. This is how he expressed his displeasure at his burgeoning fame in an interview with The New York Times:
“I have a real cynicism about this whole star thing. I don’t think I’m so special – I just do what I do. I put myself down onstage, I kid around. I’ve read where that ‘cheapens my persona.’ But I do it because I want to de-mythify myself. ‘Hey, I’m a human being, just like the rest of you.’ There’s an edge to success that makes me not trust it or dwell on it. The minute you’ve made it, you start to become extinct, especially in rock and roll; rock and roll doesn’t forgive. That’s the nature of this business – new blood, all the time. The bigness of this last year, I don’t understand. It’s a manager’s game, an agent’s game, a numbers game. It may be the American ideal of success, but I never bought that. I don’t feel that much different. I’ve always liked what I do; I still like what I do, and I hope to God I can keep it in perspective. I am going to be a musician my whole life. I look at Coliseum rock groups that I think are horrible, and they draw millions of people. Now, is that success? As long as I got my self-respect, that’s all I care about.”80

  However, neither music critics nor self-doubt could stop the rapid development of Billy Joel’s career. On February 15, 1979, he was awarded music’s most prestigious prize – the Grammy: “Just the Way You Are” won the Song of the Year and Record of the Year awards.

  Following the release of “52nd Street” the band toured relentlessly for a total of more than nine months, playing first in the USA, then Europe, Asia and Australia. In between they made two highly symbolic detours to Cuba and Israel.

  Billy was particularly keen on visiting Cuba’s capital city, Havana, the place where his family had found a temporary haven after their exile from Germany. He wanted to use the opportunity the trace the footsteps of his father. And it was a minor sensation that an American musician should perform in the land of the socialist dictator, Fidel Castro.