Copyright © 2014 by Fred Schruers
All rights reserved.
Published in the United States by Crown Archetype, an imprint of the Crown Publishing Group, a division of Random House LLC, a Penguin Random House Company, New York.
www.crownpublishing.com
CROWN ARCHETYPE and colophon is a registered trademark of Random House LLC.
Photography credits can be found on this page.
Grateful acknowledgement is made to Newsday LLC for permission to reprint excerpts from “Look What Grew on Our Lawns” by Harvey Aronson (October 28, 1967), copyright © 1967 Newsday LLC, and “Joel, Wife Splitting Up” by Glenn Gamboa (June 18, 2009), copyright © 2009 Newsday LLC. All rights reserved. Reprinted by permission of Newsday LLC.
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Schruers, Fred.
Billy Joel / Fred Schruers. — First edition.
Includes bibliographical references.
1. Joel, Billy. 2. Rock musicians—United States—Biography. I. Title.
ML420.J72S34 2014
782.42166092—dc23
[B]
2014034084
ISBN 978-0-8041-4019-5
eBook ISBN 978-0-8041-4020-1
Jacket design by Michael Nagin
Jacket portrait by Mark Hanauer
Author photograph: Kate Rocky
v3.1
CONTENTS
Cover
Title Page
Copyright
PROLOGUE
I. ORIGINS: THE BALLAD OF BILLY THE KID
CHAPTER 1: Living Here in Levittown
CHAPTER 2: Piano Kid
CHAPTER 3: Tomorrow Is Today
II. BREAKING THROUGH: THEY SAY THERE’S A HEAVEN FOR THOSE WHO WILL WAIT
CHAPTER 4: Say Hello to Hollywood
CHAPTER 5: Sing Us a Song
CHAPTER 6: Goodbye to Hollywood
Photo Insert 1
CHAPTER 7: Just the Way I Am
CHAPTER 8: Everybody’s Talkin’ ’Bout the New Sound
CHAPTER 9: Uptown Girls
CHAPTER 10: Christie Lee
III. PAYING THE PRICE: IT’S ALL OR NOTHING AT ALL
CHAPTER 11: Storm Front
CHAPTER 12: The River of Dreams
CHAPTER 13: The Night Is Still Young
CHAPTER 14: Movin’ Out, Again
CHAPTER 15: A Wild and Restless Man
CHAPTER 16: Goodnight, Shea Stadium
Photo Insert 2
CHAPTER 17: Another Day Comes to an End
CHAPTER 18: Careless Talk
IV. A LEGEND IN HIS TIME: AIN’T IT SWEET AFTER ALL THESE YEARS
CHAPTER 19: The Idol of My Age
CHAPTER 20: I’ve Loved These Days
CODA
Note on Sources
Photo Credits
Acknowledgments
PROLOGUE
It’s five o’clock on a Monday, and the regular crowd shuffles in … to the chilly, unpopulated great hall of Madison Square Garden, where a crew is still slapping down chairs on the big slabs of decking that cover the hockey rink.
Toting guitars, drumsticks, horns, and earpieces, Billy Joel’s band arrays itself for a sound check, and now up a metal staircase comes the man himself. You could say he’s shuffling as well; both hips were replaced in mid-2010, and now, January 27, 2014, he’s fully mended—but not likely to be doing the backflips off the piano that, he’ll occasionally speculate, led to that operation.
As he perches on his compact stool, checking settings on the hybrid acoustic/synthesized piano he uses, the band looks up expectantly. He’s notoriously bored by sound checks, which means there’ll be plenty of japes about his age, certain band peccadillos, or the world situation, all delivered with ready wit. But at the same time, all hands had better be “on the one” when he delivers a casual instruction, because the message won’t come twice.
From time to time, as in an open-air-arena sound check in Perth in December 2008, he’ll get a wild hair and lead the band through pretty much an entire classic album. In that case, it was Disraeli Gears by Cream—at least until the constables put a stop to it after a volley of noise complaints from the neighborhood.
Billy, warmed by a plain black watch cap and a wool sports coat, plinks out a few exploratory notes as the others tune up around him. He gazes about—“I don’t hear the room as well I used to hear it.”
Tonight will be his forty-seventh show at what’s pretty much the most storied concert venue in the world. You get here just the way you get to Carnegie Hall—“Practice”—but it really helps if you sell tens of millions of albums. In his case the figure is 110 million or so, and that’s part of the reason he’s playing this inaugural gig to kick off an open-ended “residency,” a series of monthly Garden dates that will continue, as he said in a recent press conference, “as long as there’s demand.”
A blogger for Forbes computed that, based on rapid sellouts, the strength of the Joel catalog, and what demographers might call his enormous local and worldwide fan base, something approaching forty shows might match that demand.
No one’s expecting him to do that many, of course, but you never know.
Billy’s still eyeballing the arena’s distant reaches, somewhat obscured by new carpeted catwalks leading to bunkerlike luxury suites. He’s wondering why the sound waves seem muted: “Either I’m going deaf or the room is different. Is there a big sponge up there?” He waits a beat, as the band, knowing his timing, remains at parade rest—“Ah, I guess it’s the hair in my ears.”
At sixty-four, he’s allowed to kvetch a bit. Three hours from now, a few songs into his set, when the packed house has already marched in place to the epic sweep of “Miami 2017,” bounced in rhythm (the Garden is on massive, pulsating springs) to “Pressure,” crooned along to the enchanting soliloquy that is “Summer, Highland Falls,” and ditty-bopped and doo-wopped to “The Longest Time,” he pauses: “Good evening, New York City …” A roar like a gut punch breaks over the stage. “I have no idea how long this is gonna go.”
The alert eyes, somehow made more magnetic by the bald pate above, swivel around the room as he takes a sip of water. The guys in the crowd give their dates a knowing look—You think it’s really water? “This year is my fiftieth year in show business.” A subtle resettling of his spine—as in, We’re practicing our trade here. Another beat. “What was I thinking?” Now he turns to peer at the image of his head and torso, many times life-size. “I didn’t think I was gonna end up looking like that in 1964.”
The big banks of speakers are putting out their crisp, almost subliminal exhalations as the crowd noise modulates down—the fans are thinking what fifty years means to Billy, and to them. They’re hoping to hear “Movin’ Out (Anthony’s Song),” “New York State of Mind,” and “River of Dreams,” which are all but a certainty, as well as “Piano Man,” which is a certainty, and the set list sites have hinted they’ll be sent out into the night after a four-song encore capped by a tub-thumping, horn-washed take of “Only the Good Die Young.”
There’s time enough for the key anthems, and time, too, for some “deep cuts” like “Where’s the Orchestra?” But first Billy’s got one more observation about the doo-wop moment: “It sounds better in the men’s room,” as he and his bandmates demonstrated, bouncing “The Longest Time” off dingy tiles in the song’s 1984 video. “We used to sneak out at night and sing it on the street corner—and people would throw shit at us!”
Well, clearly that was then. And tonight, when he’s sixty-four, they still need him, too, to borrow a phrase from a song. Mike DelGuidice, new utility player in the band, centerpiece of his own Joel tribute band called Big Shot, and maybe the number one fan in the room, will sum it up later in t
he bar where the band gathers. “He’s just the guy. That is the guy. He’s more loved than anyone on he planet, musically.” Mike has just come down from the hotel room he hurried to after the gig to take a family phone call. When he sat on the bed and started to think about having just played opening night alongside Billy in the Garden, he “wept like a baby for a good five minutes.”
That Billy’s even here in this sacramental spot, soon to be filled with eighteen thousand faithful fans, goes against the steepest of odds. If a harbormaster in Havana hadn’t let his father’s family disembark to find refuge from the Nazis; if his mom hadn’t found that piano teacher; if he hadn’t drilled into his own alienation to write his saga as that piano man; and if some label bosses hadn’t stuck by him after his first two albums tanked, he might be sitting down to the keys at a very different spot on the map.
There’s a particular moment in almost every one of his shows when, a song or two in, while listening to that odd sonic tumult of roaring approval, hollered song titles, and proprietary shout-outs of his first name, he leans left and forward on his piano stool and searches the faces of the crowd in his periphery. There’s usually a tentative grin, but there’s also a jigger of uncertainty—and therefore vulnerability—that stops short of neediness but is still somehow in touch with it. Tonight it will come before “Summer, Highland Falls,” with its telling lyric: “And as we stand upon the ledges of our lives / With our respective similarities / It’s either sadness or euphoria.”
On a different day, in a different city, in what his intimates still think of as the bad, sad old days of 2009, he grew reflective on a hotel balcony: “Obviously I have plenty of regrets. Whenever I hurt somebody, whether it was inadvertently or rashly, I still regret that to this day. I’ve never wanted to ever hurt anybody, and those are regrets I’ll take with me to the grave. But I don’t think you’ve lived unless you have regrets. I don’t think you’ve had that experience without them, where you can say honestly, when you’re ready to kick, hey, I lived. Good Lord, man, what a life I’ve lived.
“I think I’m going to do that. That may take some of the sting out of dying—to say, I did it all.”
Billy Joel was born in the Bronx in May 1949. Whether he’s teething on an old-style shellac 78 rpm disc or an LP record—as introduced by Columbia Records in 1948—is unclear. (Photo credit pt1.1)
CHAPTER 1
LIVING HERE IN LEVITTOWN
A smokestack rises from a hulking brick factory. Along its flank, large descending letters read “JOEL.” It is a grainy black-and-white image, part of a documentary called The Joel Files that was made about Billy Joel’s family and their struggles to survive—and escape—the rise of the Nazis in Germany. In a striking film portrait of war’s aftermath, Billy and his half-brother Alex meet the family of the Nazi industrialist who usurped the Joel family fortune—and went on to be a highly regarded member of the German commercial elite in the postwar years. The shot of the factory was taken in Nuremberg during the height of the family’s textile operation in the late 1930s. There’s no trace of the factory now, but there is a small family cemetery where some of Billy’s relatives are buried.
As a student of history, Billy knows that the odds his father beat in getting out of wartime Europe were long. Only when he visited that graveyard in Nuremberg did he fully realize how many of his family members—uncles, aunts, granduncles, grave marker upon grave marker of Joels—were less fortunate. And there’s also the knowledge of those who were never brought back, whose bodies are gone forever. Billy grew up hearing the names of the lost sporadically in family conversations, but only in recent years has a fuller picture of his family history emerged.
Of course Billy Joel’s stature as a celebrity, as well as the existence of a body of work that has touched so many lives and even transformed a few, does not make the Joel family’s Holocaust saga any more tragic than millions of obscure ones. In fact, Billy’s very existence is the result of a rare happy ending. But over time, that happy ending has not been his alone. It’s filtered out into the broad swath of people to whom Billy’s music has meant so much. Along with his peers Bruce Springsteen and John Mellencamp, he has addressed both the hopes and the heartbreaks at the center of the American dream—the one his forebears, he has learned, traveled far and struggled hard to experience.
THE JOEL FAMILY’S tumultuous journey to America began with Billy’s paternal grandfather, Karl Amson Joel, who came from a family in Coburg, in Bavarian Franconia, in Germany’s scenic southeast. The patriarch was a man named Faustus Joel, whose son Julius became a tailor and eventually began the small textile business Billy’s grandfather expanded into Waschenmanufakturer Joel. Karl married Meta Fleischmann, and their only child and Billy’s father, Helmut (later anglicized to Howard), was born in 1923. By the time Karl was thirty-nine, in 1927, he had enough savings to start a business in household linens, the Karl Joel Linen Goods Company, which grew from a four-room apartment foothold into a substantial line of mail-order clothing. By the early 1930s, the family had moved into an imposing villa in a prosperous section of Nuremberg.
But Hitler and the Nazis were steadily seizing power in 1933, bolstered by an influx of money from the major industrialists, who were hoping to collect favors later—and would do so, in one particular case, to the Joel family’s detriment. The family firm had grown prosperous during the 1920s, despite the post–World War I woes of hyperinflation and the communist uprisings it triggered. At one stage before the currency was revalued in the mid-1920s, inflation in Germany ran so rampant that Reichsmarks were virtually worthless. Billy recalls hearing the story that at that time, “You needed a wheelbarrow of bills to pay for a loaf of bread.” Still, Hitler’s ominous Munich (or “Beer Hall”) Putsch of 1923 failed. But later in the decade, as government cutbacks accompanying deflation mixed with fears of a worldwide financial crisis—the American stock market crashed in 1929—the national mood was bleak. Says Billy, “everybody started looking to the Nazis for salvation.” Young Helmut was part of the Jewish population that would be caught up in the building nationalistic fervor.
“I’ve read a lot of this history, and because it affected my own upbringing, it’s hard not to take it personally,” Billy says. “I think anti-Semitism was always kind of innate in those Middle European cultures anyway. In Germany, Austria, and even France, to an extent, there’s a long history of anti-Semitism that was simmering for generations. Hitler tapped into it. He knew how to exploit popular prejudice.”
Billy still wonders how his grandfather Karl, who was supposed to be sharp-witted, couldn’t see what was coming until Kristallnacht in November 1938. Even then Karl, loath to sacrifice what he had built through decades of hard work, was still trying to make a deal with his connections to get the proceeds from selling his business to German entrepreneur Josef Neckermann.
Neckermann was a Catholic conservative who joined the Nazi Party when he saw the advantage in it. Using a Nazi innovation known as Aryanization—by which the General State Prosecutor’s Office of the State Court of Berlin would put citizens on “trial” for being Jewish, homosexual, or “asocial”—he made the Joel family his first sizable target. In the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum database titled “Index of Jews Whose German Nationality was Annulled by Nazi Regime, 1935–1944,” Karl is listed as being accused of Devisenvergehen (monetary or currency offenses) in records of two separate “trials” in the 1930s. Says Billy, “After taking part in the making of The Joel Files, I realized what the film’s director, Beate Thalberg, had discovered: My relatives were hounded out of the country and forced to sell the largest business of its kind in Germany at an absurd price—a paradigm of the economic casualties during the Nazi takeover.”
The Nazi takeover rumbled up from below, as Karl and his lifelong best friend, Rudi Weber (actually not Jewish and later drafted into the German army) would experience. In Steffen Radlmaier’s German-language book on the Joel family history, Karl recalls the two boys passing a gl
ass display case with a newspaper bearing the headline, “The Jews Are Our Misfortune.” The headline was the work of a Hitler acolyte (so much so he was dubbed “The Franconian Führer”) named Julius Streicher. Streicher’s Der Stürmer, a propaganda sheet of a newspaper that he had founded as the hounding of Jews caught fire, was waging a vendetta against Billy’s grandfather Karl.
In May 1933 Der Stürmer ran a front-page article calling Karl a “Yid” and accusing him of underpaying and sexually harassing his workers. Just months before, the Joel family had epitomized comfortable normalcy, moving into a bosky section of the city where their sizable two-story home boasted a telephone and a gramophone, with a chauffeured sedan in the driveway. But as the Nazis rose in power, the party established a parade ground in the park near the Joel home. The commands, songs, and rallying cries of the brownshirts became the sound track for lives governed more and more by fear and a growing helplessness.
The Joel family’s situation was soon barely tenable. Radlmaier describes how on April 1, 1933, the “systematic persecution” of the Jews began with leaflets falling from the sky, and as part of the campaign admonishing the populace “Don’t buy from Jews!” the lingerie shop owned by Karl’s brother Leon in nearby Ansbach was listed as off limits to any not wishing to be marked as “traitors to the Fatherland.”
Helmut was one of four Jews in his Nuremberg classroom; they were directed to sit apart from their classmates. While the city’s Jews still had access to the zoo, where Helmut enjoyed the elephants and talking parrots, they could no longer use the public swimming pool.
“My grandfather thought he might still ride out the crisis,” says Billy. Karl traveled to Berlin, a five-hour train ride north, in early 1934 and sought supposedly neutral advice from a textile manufacturer named Fritz Tillmann, the Nazis’ “economic town counselor.” Later Tillmann would lead efforts to round up the city’s Jewish population and ship them to the death camps.
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