Irwin Mazur confronted Billy sometime after he was released from the hospital: “I asked him, ‘What the hell did you do?’ and Billy says, ‘I drank furniture polish.’ And he says, ‘Listen, I can’t take this music business anymore.’ I said, ‘Have you been writing songs?’ And Billy says, ‘Yeah, I have.’ And there was ‘She’s Got a Way’ and ‘Why Judy Why’ and ‘Everybody Loves You Now.’ He played me those. So he says, ‘Listen, I’m ready.’ ”
Billy was determined to get one of his songs covered soon, ideally by an artist he admired, or he’d find some alternative path through life, some other means of self-support. “Look,” he warned Irwin, “I’m going to go to the Midwest. I’ll be a bartender. I’ve had enough of this. If it doesn’t happen soon, I’m not hanging on anymore.”
Photographed for his first Columbia LP in 1974: “From a town known as Oyster Bay, Long Island / Rode a boy with a six-pack in his hand.” (Photo credit pt2.1)
CHAPTER 4
SAY HELLO TO HOLLYWOOD
As Billy Joel gave one last push for a music career in the early 1970s, he did so in the era of the singer-songwriter—a period that saw the rise of Joni Mitchell, Carole King, James Taylor, and other sensitive balladeers. It was a turning point when folk-rock began to emphasize highly personalized emotions and shrug off the more generic conventions of its folk origins—though Billy, as he tuned in to these new voices, would always remain fond of the full-throated, throwback style of Gordon Lightfoot. Along with more rock-oriented figures like Neil Young and Jackson Browne, the lyrics-centered balladeers were the most influential musicians of the day—certainly to the ears of one newly solo performer. “Well, I’d like to do that,” Billy recalls musing as he grew familiar with the postfolk types, but he wasn’t overeager to showcase himself. “I don’t want to be a ‘rock-and-roll star’ anymore,” he thought. “I want to write songs for other people.” But Irwin Mazur made it clear to his neophyte charge: “All the people I’ve talked to in the music industry say if you want to get your songs heard, you should make your own recording.”
At that point, as his work would later chronicle, Billy was living in Oyster Bay, Long Island, and writing productively—if in impatient obscurity. He recorded some demos that would become part of Cold Spring Harbor. He also wrote a few that ended up on Piano Man three years later—songs like “Captain Jack,” part of “The Ballad of Billy the Kid,” and the beginnings of “Scenes from an Italian Restaurant.” The lyric that became “Things are okay with me these days,” in fact, was originally “Things are okay in Oyster Bay.”
Soon “things” actually started looking up. Irwin got Billy an advance, based on two or three songs, from Woodstock impresario Michael Lang—a minor irony, given Billy’s dislike of his trip to that festival—who had a company called Just Sunshine. Lang had a production deal at a Gulf + Western subsidiary called Paramount Records, and he recorded a demo with Billy in a conference room at Paramount. However, Lang wasn’t fully invested in Billy’s music; he was concentrating on a Jimi Hendrix wannabe named Velvert Turner. But Lang felt he might have just the guy for Billy, a mildly notorious music business character named Artie Ripp. Together Ripp and Lang would each add a piece to their respective legends—in part because they’d each also take a piece of much of Billy’s future earnings.
“I WAS ENJOYING an evening with Michael Lang, who had an office next door to me at Paramount Music,” remembers Artie Ripp. “It was maybe midnight. He says, ‘I got a tape. I don’t get it, maybe you will.’ And he plays me the tape—piano, vocal, a demo. I said, ‘The guy that’s singing and playing, that’s his words, his music?’ He says, ‘Yeah. And what you’re hearing got turned down by every record company in New York City.’ I said, ‘Oh really? I think the guy’s terrific. What’s his name?’ ”
“ ‘Billy Joel,’ he says.
“I said, ‘Okay, give me the manager’s name and number.’ And I pick up the phone. And at that point, I don’t know, it’s four-thirty, five o’clock in the morning in New York. I say, ‘Michael Lang just played me a tape of your artist Billy Joel. I think he’s wonderful. And I’d like to sign him. What do you want?’ ”
Irwin Mazur would have been well aware of Ripp’s close professional relations with Irwin’s mentor-of-sorts, Morris Levy; eventually Ripp’s Family Productions would funnel several artists to Levy’s Tiger Lily label, which, due to the practice of regularly dumping hopelessly unsalable albums into the marketplace, was investigated by the authorities as part of an alleged tax scam. (In fact, when he died at sixty-two in 1990, Levy was due to surrender for a ten-year sentence in a federal prison for extortion.)
While Irwin was far from naïve about the music business’s underbelly of alleged racketeers, his first thought when Ripp called was to make haste because Billy was on the point of giving up. As Lang recalls, “In that first meeting, Irwin said he had to get fifteen thousand dollars, ’cause Billy was considering suicide.” It was an exaggeration by now, if a useful one. “So we met, and the next day Billy came in and sat down and sang me a dozen songs, and then we talked for a while. And I didn’t get the suicide thing that day, but Irwin was adamant.” When he saw Billy perform his songs in person, using his virtuoso piano skills to re-create a range of effects indicating where other instruments would chime in, Lang was “blown away” by Billy’s talent: “I knew I’d sign him, [but] you could see that there was always this possibility of an accident waiting to happen. This train wreck that was potentially around the corner.”
If Lang saw a certain instability in the artist, Billy himself was relieved to be on any label; he’d had enough rebuffs to be hungry for any deal he might latch onto. Aptly enough, Artie’s Family Productions logo was derived from the classic Etruscan sculpture showing Romulus and Remus, the mythological twins who founded Rome after being suckled in their infancy by a she-wolf. A history buff from early on—it was Romans, of course, that Attila had warred against—Billy knew that legend. The tale goes that the twins were rescued after being cast into the Tiber River. Perhaps his salvation was at hand.
If this was the start of his journey, though, as a practical matter it was to be transcontinental. Ripp was based in Los Angeles, and Billy was told that Artie was going to get him out there, and they’d make the album.
* * *
THE PRESENT-DAY MODEL for emerging artists in the music business is building an audience by slow accretion, using readily accessible and inexpensive electronic tools to get a few songs online, then diligently touring to support them. (In many ways it resembles the cost-conscious late-1950s–early-1960s model of trying to break a one-off hit single and proceed from there.) But the business Billy stepped into in the late 1960s mandated that aspirants find a label with pockets deep enough to make an entire “long-playing record,” then stoke the market with promotion and tour support. With the right combination of talent, luck, and radio play, both artist and label could make plenty of money just by selling albums.
In 1967 the best-selling album was More of the Monkees, Billboard’s first pop/rock number one, with the Neil Diamond composition “I’m a Believer” played by session men. At a then-staggering five million copies sold, it eclipsed competing albums from the Beatles and Rolling Stones. The numbers would ascend the following year, with the Beatles’ White Album on top. Soon the medium would become accustomed to sporadic buying frenzies as artists from the Bee Gees to Michael Jackson to Peter Frampton headed toward the twenty-million-copies mark.
Billy could hardly have compared himself to those Olympian figures as he debuted in the late 1960s, and yet in 1979 his 52nd Street, released the previous October, would be the year’s best seller. And these days, comfortably and profitably filling any arena of his choice with sellout crowds often approaching twenty thousand fans, he doesn’t have to care that the megaselling album days are over for all but a few acts: “People forget that those numbers were part of that 1970s album-oriented label-and-radio machinery for selling albums—not singles, and God knows,
not downloads you could steal off the Internet. That whole formula is shot to hell now.
“I don’t want to sound like the old guy yelling at the kids to get off my lawn, but back in the early days of rock and roll—back when, say, Elvis recorded ‘Heartbreak Hotel’—somebody in your family got you the Elvis album as a Christmas gift. And even though kids didn’t run out and buy albums, they still bought 45s. The girls would spin them on their little record players. That’s how the rock-and-roll era in the record business took off.”
As an early and ardent admirer of the Beatles’ 1965 Rubber Soul, Billy was attuned to how the British had led the way in energizing the album as an artistic format. The long-playing record had been created by Billy’s label-to-be, Columbia, in 1948, in part to showcase star conductor Bruno Walter’s symphonies uninterruptedly. (Toscanini, distributed on 78s by RCA, soon forced his label to follow suit.) The format thrived with show recordings like South Pacific, the ubiquitous must-own for anyone with a turntable circa 1958, and through the era of Sinatra and Tony Bennett. As Billy recalls, the adult ethos of the time was, “Put on an LP, stir up some martinis, and maybe start making out with your wife.”
Though “concept” albums emerged sporadically from such forerunners as Woody Guthrie and Johnny Cash with their populist-themed collections, Billy’s awareness of what Sinatra was up to on 1955’s In the Wee Small Hours, with its hymns to loneliness, is bone-deep in his artistic makeup. He would compose one of his exceedingly rare post-1993 songs, 2007’s “All My Life,” as a ballad squarely in the only-the-lonely Frank tradition—right down to the making-of video in a cavernous studio, wearing the fedora and loosened tie.
But as the 1960s turned to the 1970s, the Beatles were the most reverberant presence in music. “It’s hard to separate the simple youthful exuberance the Beatles represented from the musical trailblazing they accomplished,” recalls Billy. “They arrived as a singles band and erased all sorts of records for selling forty-fives. But their real accomplishment was what they did with the LP. By the time I was trying to catch up with them, they’d taken that three-minute-length limit for songs and moved it to a more conceptual level.”
That process fascinated Billy, even though, given the arduousness of composing just a single song, it tormented him. Having grown up in the era of concept albums, he would stick by the ethic of linking songs to a theme, however understated, throughout his recording career: “When I was writing music, there was that opportunity—sometimes it felt like a burden—to have a coherent feel and message across nine or ten cuts. Right through River of Dreams, that was the discipline.”
Thus, even as the Beatles stamped out further templates like 1966’s Revolver and 1967’s Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band (third and first, respectively, on Rolling Stone’s list of the 500 Greatest Albums of All Time; Rubber Soul is fifth), it was clear to Billy that “not just the Beatles but other people got really good at it: Cream, the Who, Hendrix, Traffic—lots of great bands. And I got good at it. But think about how far these songwriters and these bands had to stretch themselves to come up with an album’s worth of material. Essentially they were usually a guitar player and a drummer and a bass player, and they had to have a really good songwriter—or two—for the album to stand up to its competitors.”
If the album cleared that bar, not just the poppier tracks got played, thanks to the then-deejay-friendly freedom of FM radio. It was a moment in rock music both unprecedented and never to be matched. “And the people who liked the last album you did were going to buy this one,” Billy says. “If they didn’t like your last album, if there were some weak cuts because you hurried things or didn’t live up to your concept, they were going to buy somebody else’s.”
To be embarking on a solo career in this commercial and artistic climate, as Billy was in 1970, meant entering a heat with top-charting records that included the blues-stoked bombast of Led Zeppelin’s “Whole Lotta Love,” the propulsive rasp of Creedence Clearwater Revival’s “Fortunate Son,” the hypersensitive poeticizing of Simon and Garfunkel’s “Bridge over Troubled Water,” and James Taylor’s “Sweet Baby James.” Those nearly irresistible hits lifted off the long-playing records and into a whole generation’s rock canon. And that’s before you got around to certain wildly popular holdover hits from 1969, like the Beatles’ Abbey Road with George Harrison’s lilting balladry (“Something”) and the cosmic—in the vernacular of the day—Lennon crunchiness of “Come Together” and “I Want You (She’s So Heavy).” Throw in Joe Cocker, Crosby, Stills, Nash & Young, and various other acts who were not just rock stars but cultural heroes, and the depth of the challenge to be heard was clear.
BILLY’S MANAGERIAL GUIDE into this proving ground was not the new-model, laid-back-hipster L.A. impresario like Lou Adler (of both the Monkees and the Mamas and Papas) or Elliot Roberts (Neil Young and Joni Mitchell), but a rough-edged Bronxite: “When I got to L.A., my first impression of Artie Ripp was that he was more than a little theatrical—he had a deep voice, the ponytail, and there was a lot of gesturing, a lot of hand movements,” recounts Billy. “I guess you could say he came across as gangstery.”
Nonetheless, Artie sounded like he knew what he was talking about: “He gave me this great spiel that he had worked with the Lovin’ Spoonful and all these labels—Roulette and Chess and Red Bird—with all the girl groups, and Kama Sutra. He threw a lot of names around, musicians I’d heard of, and so I figured, okay, I guess this guy knows what he’s doing. He knows how to make an album.”
So Billy went along with Artie’s program, at least initially, as he began to record Cold Spring Harbor—named for a favorite picturesque hamlet near Oyster Bay—in July 1971 at the Record Plant in L.A. What sticks in Billy’s memory is that the studio was furnished with lawn furniture. Artie must have been the decorator, Billy thought, because it was his taste: “After all, in the office he had in his house, there was a chair that looked like an oversize hand. That should have been a dead giveaway: you were literally sitting in the palm of his hand.”
Billy hated the recording process. “I should have sung the tunes two, three, four times at most, with very simple arrangements, no orchestration, no bells and whistles, just get in and get out. Other singer-songwriters were doing that, very simple folk-oriented stuff.”
But as Billy remembers, Artie would call for fifteen or twenty takes: “It was like pulling teeth. This time can you do it with more feeling? I hated the strings. I didn’t want the session players. The whole thing was completely overproduced.”
Billy had a youthful, vigorous vocal instrument to deploy, a high, full baritone that could readily shade into tenor and even access a falsetto, but he lost all sense of perspective on how to sing the songs naturally because of the multiple takes Artie was having him do. “I didn’t even know how I should sing anymore,” he said. “I couldn’t wait to get it over with. It was sterile, it was cold, and I felt Artie was thoroughly incompetent in the studio.”
The infamous error Ripp would make was in the mixing. Billy would never know precisely how it happened. “All I know is that the master got sped up during the process—at that point, unbeknownst to me—and Artie had run out of money to fix it.”
Artie remembers the album sounding strange when they were mixing it, though he sounded no alert to Billy, and indeed he seems untroubled by any particular remorse over the snafu: “On one of the playbacks, I knew there was something wrong. And we had mixed to a machine, a two-track that was running slow. So let’s say it was running at fourteen point seven inches per second. When you put it on the standard fifteen-i.p.s. machine, it now speeded up.”
The first time Billy heard the test pressing Artie sent him, he was back in his little apartment in Oyster Bay with a group that included his tour manager, Bob Romaine (a Vietnam vet later portrayed in song as the “Angry Young Man”); his sound mixer, Brian Ruggles; a buddy from the Parkway Green gang, Bob Coilisanti; and some girls they knew. It was going to be an album-listening party; ever
ybody had a few drinks, and they dropped the needle on the record.
“I was humiliated,” recalls Billy. “Bob Romaine started laughing first. ‘It sounds like Alvin and the Chipmunks,’ he said. And then Brian started laughing. I was so bent out of shape, I just whipped the thing off the turntable and ran outside and threw it down the street. It took a couple of skips and then it shattered, because it was acetate. And that was the end of that. I wanted to crawl inside my piano and close the lid. I called Artie immediately—‘What the fuck happened?’
“Good God, it had already been a torturous process making the album, and misery working with Artie. Then after deciding just to go with it, that maybe he was right, that all our hard work would end up creating a great album, to have it be this horrible-sounding thing—it was so depressing.”
Irwin Mazur was supposedly delegated to help fix the album, but perhaps because of the lack of funds—which may have been part of Ripp’s reluctance to remedy the error—Billy recalls the situation as “all kind of turning into mush after that.” It was then that he realized, despite the résumé that reached back to Artie’s days with a white doo-wop group called the Four Temptations, he was living out a fantasy that was a bit beyond his grasp: “I believe that Artie saw me as his opportunity to be a musical impresario, some sort of studio wizard and not just a cigar-chomping producer,” says Billy. “I was going to be his instrument.”
Still, despite these snafus, Billy gives Artie credit: “After all the people in the industry who passed on me, Artie Ripp was the guy who wanted me to be his artist. Nobody else heard it, nobody else wanted to sign me, nobody else was making me a deal. Artie made me a deal. He heard something. Was what he heard what I wanted to be as an artist? No. Was it my vision of what the record should be? No. Was it a good deal? No, it was a horrible deal. But he’s the guy who got me on the radar screen.”
Billy Joel Page 8
