Billy Joel

by Fred Schruers

  Regardless of the recording and technical issues, the music that emerged from the session showed early signs of the artist to come. Billy’s musical style, which would prove to be perhaps the most broadly eclectic of any major pop star inhabiting the half-century he was working in, was still emerging. Even now he will speak of preferring to be simply “a guy in a band”—his recording career was coming at him faster than he was prepared for. Neither the schooling in cover bands—even the original songs on the Hassles albums were greatly derivative, if not covers—nor the feverish psychedelia of Attila had begun to forge the songwriter and live performer he was to become.

  Largely because Billy had been writing songs that he hoped his more folk-oriented role models would cover, Cold Spring Harbor centered on Billy’s deft work on piano, organ, harpsichord, and harmonica, leaning toward midtempo tunes that ran from 2:42 to 6:05 in length. It was a doleful set of songs, with “Why Judy Why” showing the singer pleading for emotional succor from a woman with, not coincidentally, Billy’s adoptive sister’s name.

  Some of the lyrics were essentially lovelorn plaints emerging from the uncertainty that had dogged his romance with Elizabeth ever since the topsy-turvy scene at the Rock House. But by the time he was actually singing the songs in the studio, he and Elizabeth were committed anew to trying to stay together. Out of the relationship’s confusion, at least one gem came to the fore. “She’s Got a Way” would lead off the album, a more than sensible choice given its virtues—a now-surging, now-relenting melody; a stately accompaniment on Billy’s piano; and four verses of plainspoken, never-quite-corny adoration of a loved one. When Billy aims to plumb his lover’s “way of pleasin’,” he can’t quite do so: “I don’t know what it is / But there doesn’t have to be a reason anyway.”

  The last word hangs in the air, completing the thought but also trailing off, disrupting the tempo and seemingly giving in to the emotion, to the state somewhere between heart and hormones sometimes known as being in love with love.

  To dissect it is almost to spoil the subliminal impact, because Joel isn’t trying for cleverness so much as what John Donne was seeking in his sonnets: an exploration of his own passion. Although Billy would give his fans a new, live version on 1981’s Songs in the Attic—a technically better performance much more in a chest register—it can’t quite trump the poignancy of that 1970 session. It’s a tremulous but precisely enunciated reading, the vocal growing more resolute, then almost fainting away before the final verse and its recall of that crucial word: “anyway.”

  If Billy would aver on the live album’s notes a decade later that the song was “written in 1970, [but] I still feel the same way,” the album’s other standout, “Everybody Loves You Now,” is the flip side of a relationship apparently fallen on hard times. Stoked by hammering, almost barrelhousing piano chords, it’s both a rebuke and confession of tangled desire:

  Ah they all want your white body

  And they await your reply

  Ah, but between you and me and the Staten Island Ferry

  So do I

  It’s a thrumming march reminding its target, “You have lost your innocence somehow,” while sometimes finding itself interrupted by asides at a conversational pace: “Ah, but you ain’t got the time / To go to Cold Spring Harbor no more.”

  By the time he revisited it in a live version on Songs in the Attic, he’d call it “a macho rationale for being rejected. Her? Leave me? She must be a self-possessed bitch! Anyway, everybody didn’t really love her. I just thought they did.”

  Though he’d be divorced from Elizabeth two years after those liner notes were set down, Billy stops short of attributing all the song’s invective, whether it sounds forth in 1970 or a decade later, to that relationship: “It’s kind of a sour grapes, unrequited love song, inspired in part by Bob Dylan’s kind of alienation—‘This is what you wanted, ain’t you proud / ’Cause ev’rybody loves you now.’ I still love to do that song.” He says the vituperative performance under Ripp’s command was in part a reaction to being fed up with the sessions and even with the songs he’d been repeatedly asked to perform as the producer sought better takes. But yes, in some part it must be attributed to the agonies of picking up the pieces of a troubled love triangle: “Because of the traumatic life experience I had just been through, I thought this was fertile ground to write about.”

  DESPITE THE RECORDING disaster, Billy went on a multicity promotional tour for Cold Spring Harbor in late 1971, with the album’s drummer, Rhys Clark, anchoring his road band. Artie Ripp tried to pitch in via the old-school means he knew best. He began by slathering on some promotional perks. Small squads of girls were showing up for the shows in various towns along the tour, and Billy and his bandmates couldn’t figure out where they were coming from. “They were kind of like college girls, but they seemed more like marketing types,” Billy recalled. At first he suspected that they were the sort of swimsuit-clad models who typically stood next to cars at the big auto shows of the era. “And then we finally figured it out—they were hookers whom Artie had hired to convince the local deejays to play my album.”

  The deejays of the era lived in relatively high style, and Artie was just the man to encourage that: “I’m not gonna say that I was some sort of a goody-two-shoes,” he says. “I was the guy who would fill up a hotel floor and put chicks in every room for the disk jockeys and say, ‘You finish the redhead, now you got to get to the blonde. But I don’t know if you’re man enough to be able to deal with the blonde.’ ”

  Possibly because airplay showed no noticeable spike, though not without causing a stir in a few diners and truck stops, the band kiboshed the caravansary. Says Billy: “We told them to get lost.”

  After some time playing in clubs, showcases, and music conventions, Billy and the band were headed for a debut international tour. One key date was an April 1971 appearance at the Mar y Sol Festival, Puerto Rico’s answer to Woodstock (complete with rain), and the island’s first international festival. There were prestigious names on the bill, including Dave Brubeck, a jazz eminence Billy was almost tongue-tied to meet. But when relative unknown Billy took the stage, the soggy mud flats just in front of the stage were all but empty of concertgoers. Irwin Mazur claims that he hissed to Billy to do “The Letter”—not just the Box Tops’ number one hit but Billy’s expert, full-on mimicry of the Joe Cocker cover version, complete with gesticulations and rasp. Soon a steady stream of fans who thought Joe himself was onstage began to arrive, and the resultant outbreak of enthusiasm permitted Billy to not only do his set but throw in a few more impersonations.

  Don Heckman of the New York Times would say much of the festival “droned on” as the food and sanitary facilities “continued to deteriorate,” but he found something to praise in Billy’s set: “The first real excitement was generated by Billy Joel’s gospel-tinged rock band.…[They] brought some life to what had been a generally dispirited environment.”

  An apocryphal tale has it that Clive Davis, supposedly in attendance, caught the show and set his sights on signing Billy. However, in Davis’s autobiography, he recounts that Billy came to his attention “through a Columbia promotion man named Herb ‘The Babe’ Gordon, who had heard a live version of ‘Captain Jack’ on the radio in Philadelphia.”

  The partnership with Clive was only about a year away, but first Billy had the tour to complete—a passel of European dates that, much like the previous swings across America, produced virtually no income for the band. Returning home to Long Island, painfully aware he’d barely sold any albums, Billy wrote the whole tour off as a waste of time and effort.

  At that point, Artie was still paying the rent on the place in Hampton Bays where Billy and Elizabeth were living. But with even the paltry tour receipts now spent, there came a day in the summer of 1972 when the rent check didn’t go out; some days later, the landlord came looking for it.

  Embarrassed and not a little disgusted by the situation with Ripp, Billy sat Elizabeth down and t
old her, “I’ve got to get out of this.” “I remember very clearly. I had just seen the movie The Godfather, in March 1972, and it had had a profound impact on me, as it had with most guys,” says Billy. “We quoted it like it was Shakespeare. How you have to take care of your family, and you have to do whatever it takes. Al Pacino goes through the complete transformation from being this nice guy, Marine hero, to becoming a Mafia chieftain. So I said to myself, I have to do whatever I have to do. We’re going to get out of here; we’re going to go back to the West Coast. I’m going to get an attorney. I’m going to get a whole new team of people to help me with this situation. I’m going to do whatever I have to do to make this right.”

  There were two immediate impediments. The chief one was Elizabeth’s five-year-old son, Sean, from her marriage to Jon Small. She wanted to bring him along to the West Coast, but she feared that his father would never consent to it. Once again there would be a miscommunication between Elizabeth and Billy. Billy assumed that she and Jon had worked out the arrangement “and that he’d agreed to our taking Sean with them.” He was soon to find out this was not the case.

  The smaller problem was that he didn’t have a driver’s license. (He’d finally get one in 1973.) Though Billy had been driving motorcycles for years, he had no liking for four-wheelers. (A much-repeated motif of his younger days is that friends, or girlfriends, almost always drove the car.) Elizabeth owned a compact, manual-shift green Datsun station wagon, so they loaded it up, with Sean in the backseat, and Elizabeth drove the three of them across the country. The licensed-driver problem was solved—but the Jon Small issue remained.

  They planned to stop in Albuquerque, where Elizabeth’s sister Josephine lived. “There’s a line in the song ‘Worse Comes to Worst’ on Piano Man:…‘it doesn’t matter which direction though / I know a woman in New Mexico / Oh worse comes to worse, I’ll get along.’ That’s what that whole song is about,” says Billy. “I didn’t know what the future was going to hold. I didn’t know how we were going to make ends meet. We had no prospects. Everything felt so uncertain. I was trying to make the best out of a bad situation. This meant going into hiding, and there were all kinds of legal and contractual complications.” Would Artie come after Billy for some unfulfilled tenet of their deal? And an angry Jon on his heels? The getaway was to be done covertly, but neither of the escapees had the kind of spycraft to really get off the grid. What were they going to live on? “Worse Comes to Worst” starts with the lyric: “Today I’m livin’ like a rich man’s son / Tomorrow mornin’ I could be a bum.”

  Elizabeth drove a few hundred miles a day. As the eastern states dropped away in the rearview, for moments at a time, the two felt free. They had no plan and crashed in whatever motel they got to at day’s end. A song he’d write soon afterward, “You’re My Home,” would surface on Piano Man and later on Songs in the Attic. He describes it this way in the liner notes: “Corny but true; I was broke at the time (’73) so I wrote this for my wife as a Valentine’s day gift.”

  Home can be the Pennsylvania Turnpike

  Indiana early morning too

  High up in the hills of California

  Home is just another word for you

  About a week after departing, Billy, Elizabeth, and Sean arrived in L.A. a little bleary. Billy had wanted to leave the East Coast and the misadventures with the music business behind—“to drop off the face of the earth.” But he really hadn’t managed that—at least not as far as Jon Small was concerned.

  “ONE DAY I went to see my son Sean, and he wasn’t around,” says Jon. “And I’m calling everybody, looking for them. Nobody knows where they are. On the same day, I get a call back from Billy. ‘Hey, I heard you’re looking for me.’ I go, ‘Yeah, hey, where are you?’ He goes, ‘Well, I’m in California.’ I go, ‘Oh. Well, it’s funny—Elizabeth’s gone and Sean’s gone, too. I don’t know where they are.’ ”

  After a few uncomfortable moments, it became clear that Elizabeth hadn’t told Jon the trio was decamping for L.A.

  An angry Jon didn’t linger on the call. “As soon as I hung up that phone,” he says, “I got on the plane and flew to L.A., rented a car. I drove up La Cienega, because he’d told me he was playing at the Troubadour. The club wouldn’t tell me where he was, but the next day, I’m on Santa Monica Boulevard, calling my mom. And I look at the Tropicana Hotel, and there’s Billy coming out of the office. A second later I see Elizabeth and Sean coming down the stairs, and I say, ‘I got them, I got them, Ma’—and I run across the street as they’re getting into the car, and I go right up and bang on the hood and go, ‘I got you.’ ”

  Despite all that had gone on, including something one might describe as a kidnapping, the sheer tomfoolery of the absurd moment struck them all at the same time. Says Jon, “We went back to the hotel, and within twenty minutes we were all laughing because we all realized how much we missed each other. All of a sudden I felt great. There I was with my buddy, and even though I didn’t like what Elizabeth had done, I still liked Elizabeth. They were my two best friends. And we all were having a good time. And there was Sean—everything was great.”

  As night fell, some deeper consideration began for Jon: “Elizabeth told me she’d go home to New York the next day with me. We’d fly back. So now we’re in there, and it was funny: Billy and Liz went to the bedroom, and now I’m going to be out in this living room with Sean, going to sleep. And I call my mom. I go, ‘Mom, I’m here,’ and my mother says, ‘We’re sending detectives.’ I said, ‘No, it’s all set.’ She and my dad go, ‘No, no. Don’t trust him. They’ll be there around three o’clock in the morning. Be ready to go.’ ”

  Sleepless, brooding, turned around by what seemed to be the grave concerns of his parents, Jon was counting minutes. “So I was waiting. I figured that these hired guys would come; I’d take Sean—we’d just slip out. Billy and Elizabeth would be sound asleep; we’d catch that first plane, they wouldn’t even know we were gone. Well, these bozos come, and they knock on the door, and this little guy comes in: ‘We want to see her.’ And they wake Elizabeth up, and Billy, but she’s now not going to let Sean go. But they convince her that he’s got to go; they’re like scaring her. So it’s the two guys, me, Elizabeth, and Sean. And she’s so pissed at me—we’re in the backseat of this car trying to get to LAX. They’re asking Elizabeth for directions—‘How do you get to the airport?’ She goes, ‘Fuck you.’

  “We finally got to the airport. Soon as we stepped out, there was a policeman walking. Elizabeth went up and said, ‘They’re trying to abduct me.’ And the guy [with her] said, ‘Well, we’re private detectives from New York,’ and the cop said, ‘You have no jurisdiction here, goodbye.’ So they left, and I went back with Elizabeth, and when we drove back to the Tropicana, there was Billy standing in the middle of the parking lot, devastated. And here we are back forty minutes later. And then the next day we three—her, me, Sean—all went back. Billy stayed.”

  According to Jon, “It was a very heartbreaking thing, not just for me but for him, too. And I’m sure Elizabeth as well. If I was going to say one thing about it—love is really strong. When you love somebody, you step over anything else to get there. And Billy’s pretty much a romantic. I knew it hurt him, and it hurt me and—look, I know that even today it still bothers him.”

  “All I remember about that night,” says Billy, “were the two private investigators who said, ‘We’re taking Sean back to New York. You have illegally taken him, blah blah blah.’ ”

  Billy didn’t think he was ever in any physical danger, but he didn’t know what the legality of the situation was. “They seemed to have the law on their side,” he says of the investigators, “so Elizabeth left with them. I didn’t know anything about this.” What would eventually turn into mistrust and alienation between Billy and Elizabeth may have almost subconsciously commenced then.

  “It was pretty heavy. Now all of a sudden I was on my own at the Tropicana: no girlfriend and no kid. Everybody was gone.�
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  CHAPTER 5

  SING US A SONG

  If Billy was spiritually bereft, standing in the Tropicana parking lot effectively alone in the world, he also had little to cheer him professionally. In an effort to extricate himself from his deal with Artie Ripp, he executed on a blunt strategy to mark time, earn nothing, and force Ripp to free him from his contract. While Billy waited, any music he made would have to be made clandestinely. Los Angeles was the geographical center of the singer-songwriter movement—and yet he was living there in forced obscurity.

  After their brief stay in the Tropicana, on the promise that Elizabeth would be returning with Sean once she’d made a cleaner break with the East Coast and her dissolved marriage, Billy found an apartment in North Hollywood—a decent, cheap roost in a two-story building with a swimming pool in the middle of the communal courtyard. Now he needed to find a gig.

  What he found was a place called Corky’s, on Van Nuys Boulevard in “the Valley.” Corky’s was, in his words, “a big cafeteria-style restaurant that had a terrible piano and ‘entertainment.’ I played there for just a few weeks. They auditioned somebody else while I was working there—a girl with a big set of bongos; she also played guitar—and they shit-canned me right before Christmas, which I thought really sucked. One night after I got fired, I remember throwing a rock through their window.”

  The unceremonious exit from Corky’s—the rock-tossing would be mirrored on the Glass Houses cover many years later—spurred Billy to find a talent agency in Hollywood that booked what he soon perceived to be D-list acts for bars, clubs, and parties. The agency got Billy an audition at a spot called the Executive Room, on Wilshire Boulevard near its junction with Western Avenue in Koreatown. He was hired and played long evenings at the lounge, a gig that lasted six months—or, looked at in another way, it became the definitive employment of his life and a landmark in American popular song. As piano bar crooner Bill Martin, he was taking a detour that, thanks to its enduring musical rendering in “Piano Man,” turned out to be a signature moment of his career. It paid a union-scale wage, and Billy made steady money and tips—and got free drinks. He would work from after the dinner hour until two in the morning, six days a week, playing five or six thirty-minute sets a night.