Billy Joel sat smoking a cigarillo on a patio
overlooking Oyster Bay. He had chosen the seating area under a trellis in
front of the house, his house, a brick Tudor colossus set on a rise on the
southeastern tip of a peninsula called Centre Island, on Long Island’s North
Shore. It was a brilliant cloudless September afternoon. Beethoven on Sonos,
cicadas in the trees, pugs at his feet. Out on the water, an oyster dredge
circled the seeding beds while baymen raked clams in the flats. Joel surveyed
the rising tide. Sixty-five. Semi-retirement. Weeks of idleness, of puttering
around his motorcycle shop and futzing with lobster boats, of books and dogs
and meals, were about to give way to a microburst of work. His next concert,
his first in more than a month, was scheduled to begin in five hours, at
Madison Square Garden, and he appeared to be composing himself.
“Actually, I composed myself a long time ago,”
he said. He told a joke that
involved Mozart erasing something in a mausoleum; the punch line was “I’m decomposing.”
He knocked off an ash. Whenever anyone asks him about his pre-show routine, he says, “I walk from
the dressing room to the stage. That’s my routine.” Joel has a knack for delivering his own
recycled quips and explanations as though they were fresh, a talent related,
one would think, to that of singing well-worn hits with sincere-seeming
gusto. He often says that the hardest part isn’t turning it on but turning it
off: “One minute, I’m Mussolini, up onstage in front of twenty thousand
screaming people. And then, a few minutes later, I’m just another schmuck
stuck in traffic on the highway.” It’s true: the transition is abrupt, and it
has bedevilled rock stars since the advent of the backbeat. But this schmuck
is usually looking down on the highway from an altitude of a thousand feet.
He commutes to and from his shows by helicopter.
Joel was wearing a black T-shirt tucked into
black jeans, black Vans, and an Indian Motorcycle ball cap. The back of his
head, where hair might be, was freshly shorn, and his features, which in dark
or obscure moods can appear mottled and knotted, were at rest, projecting
benevolent bemusement. To prepare for the flight, he’d put on a necklace of
good-luck medallions—pendants of various saints. The atavism of Long Island is
peculiar. Though Jewish, and an atheist, he had, as a boy in a predominantly
Catholic part of Hicksville, attended Mass, and even tried confession. His
mother took him and his sister to Protestant services at a local church; he
was baptized there. Still, a girl across the street said he’d grow horns, and
a neighborhood kid named Vinny told him, “Yo, Joel, you killed Jesus. I’m
gonna beat your ass.” Vinny did, repeatedly. Joel took up boxing to defend
himself. The nose still shows it.
There was a rumble in the distance. “That’s my
guy,” Joel said. “He’s early.” A helicopter zipped in over the oystermen and
landed down by the water, at the hem of a great sloping lawn, where Joel had
converted the property’s tennis court to a helipad. He’d recently had to resurface
it, after Hurricane Sandy. Joel often attempts to inoculate himself with
self-mockery. “Oh, my helipad got flooded,” he says, with the lockjaw of
Thurston Howell III.
He got up to go. He has the short, wide,
halting gait of an old lineman—two fake hips. He called through the screen
door leading to the kitchen: “A-Rod!” A-Rod was his girlfriend, Alexis
Roderick, from Northport, a thirty-three-year-old former risk manager at
Morgan Stanley. They met five years ago at a restaurant in Huntington, where
they’d both gone with friends. He introduced himself, got her number, and,
when he was done eating, called her on the phone from across the restaurant
and asked if she would give him a ride home. “I always try to go out with
North Shore girls,” he likes to say. “They usually have a car.” She drove him
back to Centre Island. He asked her if she wanted to hear him play. She said
no. He played anyway—Rachmaninoff, on the living-room grand, a move he got
from “The Seven Year Itch.” She says, “It was like he couldn’t not be ‘Billy
Joel’ at that moment.”
“I may have got a little fresh,” he recalls.
She drove off that night, but months later they began seeing each other. She
moved in with him, and he persuaded her to quit her job on Wall Street. Joel,
who refers to his former wives as Ex 1, Ex 2, and Ex 3, says that he is in no
hurry to be married again.
They got their stuff
together in the kitchen. She had on a short light suède jacket and jeans. “Do you have your
shots?” she asked. He retrieved a padded envelope with allergy medication and
stuck it into a small black wheelie bag containing throat spray and some
motorcycle magazines for his longtime lighting man and fellow-gearhead, Steve
Cohen. Outside the kitchen, he tossed the bag in the back of a Polaris U.T.V.
and drove down toward the helipad. “This doesn’t suck,” he said. Along the
way, he passed Roderick, who was on foot. “Hey, chicky baby!” he called out,
in his Vinny voice. The pilot, in uniform, took his bag and escorted them to
the chopper, a sleek black Bell 430, twin engine. Within moments, it was
soaring across the bay and over the wooded estates of Nassau County. Joel
name-checked harbors, parkways, and golf courses, some of which he’d caddied
at as a kid. To the south, Levittown, where he grew up. To the north, Kings
Point and Sands Point, Fitzgerald’s models for West Egg and East Egg. “And
now we’re over the great gray ash heaps,” Joel said, still on “Gatsby” and
referring to the once blighted section of Queens. Cemeteries, row houses,
projects: the copter tacked southwest over Brooklyn and aimed for Manhattan’s
lower tip, towers sparkling in the late-afternoon sun. “This is the beginning
of the psych-up for the show,” Joel said. “You see this and you tell
yourself, ‘I gotta do a good one.’ ”
Since the beginning of the year, Joel had been
playing the Garden once a month. This would be the ninth such show so far.
All twelve had sold out well in advance, and the secondary market was tight.
He intends to continue the residency, as they are calling it, for as long as
both ticket demand and his level of performance remain strong. He’s not quite
sure which he’d rather see fall off first.
The chopper turned up the Hudson, flying low,
and eased down to the heliport, a few blocks west of the arena. “You know, if
you type ‘Billy Joel’s house’ into Google maps, you get Madison Square
Garden,” Joel said. The flight had taken sixteen minutes. An S.U.V. whisked
him and Roderick and his tour director, Max Loubiere, crosstown and then up a
ramp to the passageway behind the stage, where crew and band members were
milling around. Sound check. “Back in the salt mines,” Joel said.
Steve Cohen, who has been Joel’s lighting
designer since 1974 and his creative director since the mid-eighties, handed
Joel his suggested set list. It doesn’t vary much from show to show, but
there are always a few wild cards, and this time Cohen had inserted “Just the
Way You Are,” the 1977 ballad that became Joel’s first big hit, propelling
sales of the album “The Stranger,” and of Joel’s earlier albums as well,
which up until then had languished. (Among those was “Piano Man,” the title
track of which became, to his increasing weariness, his signature song; that
album, Joel was told, initially earned only seven thousand dollars.) Joel
hadn’t played “Just the Way You Are” in five years.
“The set’s a little M.O.R.,” Joel complained,
meaning “middle of the road,” the soft-rock category now called Adult
Contemporary. He made his way onto the stage and sat down at the piano and
knocked out a little Beethoven, before the band members, most of whom have
been with him for more than ten years, worked out the backup vocal harmonies
to “My Life.” They vamped for a while on “Sledgehammer,” by Peter Gabriel,
and ran through the end of “Movin’ Out,” to get the right level for the
horns. And then Joel was doing “Just the Way You Are.” He’d written it for
his first wife and manager, Elizabeth. When he told her, “This song is for
you,” Donna Summer, standing nearby, said, “Does that come with the
publishing?”
Before long, at the sound check, he began
substituting bawdy lyrics: “I just want someone . . . to have
sex with” and “Now you know I’m . . . full of shi-it.” “I
couldn’t have loved you any better, unless . . . you grew some
bigger tits.” Cohen walked by, shaking his head.
After a while, Joel
stopped. “Should we really do that one? Really?”
“There won’t be a dry
eye in the house,” the saxophonist Mark Rivera said.
Joel continued to
argue against playing it. (He’d wanted to leave it off the album, too, but
Linda Ronstadt and Phoebe Snow, dropping by the studio one day, told him he
was nuts.) He usually won these arguments. At other sound checks, I’d seen
him scrap such mainstays as “Angry Young Man” (the tempo was lagging, and the
sentiment felt false) and “Captain Jack.” (“Dreary, dreary, dreary,” he said.
“It just goes on and on. I’m sick of the thing. It didn’t age well. It’s been
busted down to ‘Private Jack.’ ”) But this time Cohen and Brian Ruggles,
Joel’s sound engineer since the early seventies, prevailed.
A few hours later, the arena was full, and he
was back onstage with the band, delivering the familiar hits in full voice.
He was all in. The cynicism surfaced only between numbers, such as when,
after playing “The Entertainer,” he repeated, in a quizzical tone, the line
“I won’t be here in another year / If I don’t stay on the charts”
and then exclaimed, “Bullshit!” A roar greeted the opening notes of “Just the
Way You Are,” and up in Section 106 I could see some women of a certain age
singing along and dabbing their eyes. When the song was done, Joel turned to
the audience and said, “And then we got divorced.”
Joel’s show hasn’t changed much over the
years. Songs cycle in and out, and he and the band play many of them in a
different key, to accommodate his aging vocal cords (he says that he prefers
his late-career baritone to the tenor of his prime), but for the most part
the big hits are always there, presented in the same arrangements and sonic
array. The saxophone is the radiocarbon. Close your eyes and it’s 1982, which
in many ways is exactly what his fans want. The delivery was tight and
strong. Long ago, Joel grew tired of having to look out at the fat cats in
the two front rows, the guys who’d bought the best seats and then sat there
projecting a look of impatience and boredom that Joel characterizes, using
his Vinny voice, as “Entertain me, Piano Man.” So Joel’s people stopped selling the two
front rows and instead send the crew into the cheap seats before the show to
hand out tickets to people of their choosing. That this usually results in a
foreground that is both young and female may or may not be an unintended
consequence, but Joel believes that it helps buck up the band.
To close out the set,
he sprayed his throat, donned a harmonica rig, and launched into “Piano Man”
without betraying any exasperation, only wonder, as thousands of people, many
of them about half the song’s age, sang along. You could stand behind the
stage and look out at the throngs, lit up by Cohen, and begin to understand
why a man might rouse himself from hibernation and go through the motions
again. “Gotta feed the elephant,” he likes to say. He means all the
stakeholders in Joel, Inc., but the phrase also suggests his own desire for
validation or love.
He closed out his customary five-song encore
with “Only the Good Die Young.” It’s one of those songs that get the Garden
arena, which is built on springs, to start bouncing. The bouncing had hardly
ceased by the time Joel’s S.U.V. was gunning down the ramp and west toward
the helipad, where the chopper waited. Ruggles and Cohen got aboard with Joel
and Roderick. Someone had rescued a gigantic bag of popcorn from the dressing
room; Joel liked to have it at home. The helicopter lifted off, tracked north
over Central Park, and then out over Queens and LaGuardia. The metropolis
alight. Joel leaned over to Cohen and said, “This is a great fucking job.”
Over Long Island Sound, Joel pointed out a
mass. “That’s J. P. Morgan’s old island,” he said. “I rented a house there
for a while, after I sold the house in East Hampton.” The helicopter cut
south along the eastern shore of Centre Island. The helipad’s lights flashed
on. As the passengers disembarked, Roderick quietly urged Ruggles, who was
going through a divorce and living for the time being in one of Joel’s
guesthouses, to take the popcorn.
Joel drove Roderick up the hill in the U.T.V.
Soon, the helicopter was gone and all was quiet, except for the whir of
katydids and a Beethoven violin concerto on the Sonos. Joel was back out
under the trellis with a cigarillo. He’d given up cigarettes—he’d gone to see
a hypnotist in Boston. Dock light from across the bay wobbled on the surface
of the Sound. Less than a half hour before, he’d stood at the lip of a stage,
sweaty and beaming, absorbing an arena’s adulation: Mussolini. Now just a
schmuck. The commute had earned him more than a million bucks. He projected
contentment and ease, and seemed in control of his appetites, as though he’d
learned how to bank the endorphins and draw on the account as needed—rock
stardom on time release. Roderick brought out a tray of cheese.
“Did you tell Brian to
take my popcorn away?” he asked her. “Did you say, ‘Don’t give him the
popcorn?’ ”
“I would never—”
“He’s been with me for
fifty years,” Joel said.
“I didn’t tell him to
take it away,” she said. “What I said was I didn’t want it to exist in the
first place. It was really gross.”
“It’s not really
gross,” Joel said. “I like the popcorn.”
They sat outside until
almost 2 A.M. and then headed for bed.
People tend to assume, given the recent burst
of reputational favor and vigor in performance, that Joel must be sober, that
the narrative of redemption must rest on abstinence. But not everyone can be
George Jones. Joel steers clear of spirits, he says, and just drinks wine, in
moderation. “I think of it as a food group,” he told me. At one lunch, we
each had a glass of Chianti. At another, we had a little sake. He ordered
sashimi; he was hitting a steak house later with some friends. He likes to
eat. “I’m with the Jack Nicholson school, that it’s this flat-belly shit
that’s ruining America,” he said. “I don’t think there’s anything more
pathetic than a man on a diet.”
He is sensitive about the alcohol thing. He
cops to having had lots of problems in the past, drinking to excess, behaving
like an ass. He chalks it up to Long Island, the culture of day’s end at the
local pub. In the old touring days, the whole band boozed it up, and often
they were the last ones standing in the hotel bar, Billy at the piano, crew
gathered around with a few stragglers and girls, singing Sinatra and the
Beatles: not exactly “Hammer of the Gods.” He claims not to have ever really
got into drugs, though they certainly tried things, including heroin, on a
1981 swing through Amsterdam; in videos of concerts from the mid-eighties the
clothes and the hair styles alone seem to scream “Cocaine!” You’ll hear Long
Islanders tell old stories about the time they saw Joel at this or that
Huntington bar, the man not looking his best. There were, in the past decade,
a couple of interventions and a couple of stints in rehab, in 2002 and 2005.
Still, he rejects the A.A. approach and favors the kind of self-moderation
that A.A.’s devotees cluck at.
Elton John, who did a
number of tours with Joel, told Rolling Stone in
2011, “Billy’s a conundrum. We’ve had so many cancelled tours because of
illnesses and various other things, alcoholism . . . He’s
going to hate me for this, but every time he goes to rehab they’ve been
light . . . When I went to rehab, I had to clean the
floors. He goes to rehab where they have TVs. I love you, Billy, and this is
tough love.”
“Elton is just being
Elton,” Joel responded to Rolling Stone. But
he was pissed. According to a biography of Joel by the Rolling Stone writer Fred Schruers—the book was
originally intended as an as-told-to autobiography, but at the last minute
Joel, increasingly uneasy about revealing so much of himself, pulled out and
sent back his advance—Joel wrote Elton John an angry note: “What gives you
the omnipotent moral certainty and authority to justify the public
humiliation of anyone—especially of someone to whom you should, at the very
least, consider according a modicum of honor?” He signed off, “We are done.”
Whether it’s denial or a hard-earned aversion
to the intrusions of the celebrity-media complex and its twelve-step pieties,
Joel greets most booze-related reports or questions with a flash of
annoyance. He has protested that a trio of car accidents, in the early
aughts, weren’t actually booze-related. It was dark, it was icy, he’d had eye
surgery, the Citroën 2CV is a tricky little car. But it is true that these
incidents coincided with a rough patch in his life—one of many over the
years, the catalyst usually a breakup or a divorce. He takes it hard. His friends
and collaborators give these periods a wide euphemistic berth. Schruers, in
the biography, tells the story of an intervention led by friends in the
summer of 2009, at the house on Centre Island. The friends brought along a
trained counsellor, and Joel turned on him: ‘“Now, who the fuck are you? Who the fuck do you think you are?”
We don’t often side with the intervenee, but
there’s something to be said for defiance. As one of his biggest hits has it,
“I don’t care what you say anymore, this is my life.” “Go ahead with your own life and leave me alone.” The song’s peppy
electric piano—and its presence on the old cross-dressing sitcom “Bosom
Buddies”—disguises a sentiment that is at the core of Joel’s outlook on his
place in the world. When he plays “My Life” in concert, it can seem rote, but
the anger at the heart of it, misplaced or not, gives it a pulse.
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