When Billy saw his new lodgings for the first time—the house they rented would later be reconfigured by hoteliers as a bed and breakfast, themed to the couple’s stay there—he gave Elizabeth a hug and a kiss and blurted, “Do we have a piano here?” Hearing they did, he rushed upstairs to it and finished composing the song in a matter of minutes, as the Hudson rolled past outside the window.
TO BILLY, THOSE days with Elizabeth were a period of ambivalence, notably in his marriage. In “Summer, Highland Falls,” the songwriter’s state is described as swinging between “sadness or euphoria,” but it’s much more subtle than that: “I still get a lot of people telling me that ‘Summer, Highland Falls’ is a favorite song for them. It will always have a place for me as a kind of veiled autobiographical account of perhaps the last really good season—although it was in the summer of 1976, still six years before our divorce—that Elizabeth and I would share.”
There’s more than a hint of the long fade-out of their romance in the song:
Now, I have seen that sad surrender in my lover’s eyes
And I can only stand apart and sympathize
For we are always what our situations hand us
It’s either sadness or euphoria.
Billy would always find the “spilling your guts” aspect of songwriting challenging, but he was benefiting from a greater sense of what its crucial tools were. “Melody is a sensual thing, just as the sounds of a child’s laughter or a marching band, a church hymn or someone in sexual transport, are highly evocative,” he says. “As I was composing ‘Summer, Highland Falls,’ I found a pattern with my left hand that was up-and-down, both in terms of the keyboard and the mood that it created. I knew I had something, but it lacked an element. Then I began knocking out a fast, arpeggiated pattern of ‘straight eights’ with my right hand, almost like something out of Bach. I was trying to communicate that sometimes frantic, scurrying side of how we live our lives, and how we think about them. Between the up-and-down and fast-and-slow elements, I had the music to match my mood; the emotion of the language was already encoded in the music. And the words came with relative ease. I call it an ode to manic depression.”
When he was working that way, he’d push the “record” button on his little Sony cassette deck. In this case the process was happening upstairs in the location that lent its name to the song, at a Baldwin baby grand that Elizabeth had arranged for. The rollingly melodic opening couple of lines—“They say that these are not the best of times / But they’re the only times I’ve ever known”—of course echo Dickens at the start of A Tale of Two Cities. “I suppose at some level I was writing about a certain sadness I felt on behalf of Elizabeth and myself as the relationship began to show cracks,” Billy says. “You try to address your times. There’s some inspiration in a figure like Beethoven—of course he had magical talent, and the opportunity to work on a much larger canvas. He began by calling his third symphony the ‘Bonaparte Symphony,’ inspired by Napoleon and the revolutionary energy coursing through Europe. When he felt Napoleon had broken faith with the movement, he tore the title page up and retitled it ‘Eroica.’ ”
A hallmark of Billy’s work has been his ability to take his own deeply rooted emotions and universalize them, and “Summer, Highland Falls” finds its lovers as they “stand upon the ledges of our lives.” After spending much of 1976 in the Highland Falls house, they’d soon be back in the city, grinding through the continuing effort to break through with a hit song and album but increasingly alienated. That very effort would damage the relationship, which would finally crash in 1980. As would happen often in a career that was inseparable from his life, Billy, pugilist that he was, would stay on his feet, hoping the next round could win the day.
IRONICALLY, THE ROAD band that had been such a point of contention due to Billy’s loyalty was about to be reshuffled. Billy had met Doug Stegmeyer, the bass player for Streetlife Serenade and the subsequent tour dates, years before in the Long Island bar band scene. A Syosset native, two years younger than Billy, whose dad was a professional horn player, Stegmeyer had been part of a high school band that included rhythm guitarist Russell Javors and drummer Liberty DeVitto. They became the group Topper, featuring Javors’s songs and, along with lead guitarist Howie Emerson, who had backed eminent folkies Eric Andersen and Joni Mitchell, formed a tight unit.
They were in the right place at the right time to team with Billy, who was still finding his way back into the New York scene. After all the stress and confusion of the producer search, says Billy, “I ended up producing Turnstiles myself, back in New York, with a few overdubs at Caribou. I don’t know how to produce to save my ass. I know what I’m going for, and as time went on, I learned more and more and more. I didn’t know how to translate it into the technology. I didn’t know what was available. I didn’t know how to get a drum sound. I don’t know how to EQ [equalize, or boost sound levels on certain instrumental or vocal recorded tracks] anything.”
Engineer John Bradley, who had done some work on Cold Spring Harbor, was recruited to help with the technical side. The sessions took place at the UltraSonic Studios in Hempstead, which given its location about fifteen minutes southwest of Oyster Bay provided a comfort zone. (The studio had been the site of a row of Tuesday-night radio concerts featuring acts from Lou Reed to Little Feat and had proved to be a congenial setting for Billy’s November 1971 four-song set in that series.)
Billy recorded Turnstiles’s basic tracks with Doug and Liberty, with sound man Brian Ruggles kibitzing. When it came time to add guitars, he took the advice of his rhythm section and simply moved Javors and Emerson into place, and with Richie Cannata joining in on sax, keyboards, and vocals, he effectively formed his new recording and road band. They would stay together for more than a decade to come.
The eight tracks of Turnstiles, at 34:18, made for a pretty lean piece of product. (Streetlife had come in at 37:41, thanks only to two instrumentals of genre fare totaling 6:36.) But most of the eight songs are keepers, half of them concert staples. An argument can and has been made that this album is an indispensable time capsule not just of Billy in the mid-1970s but of that moment in pop music. The octet of songs insightfully evokes life at a time when America’s leisure class and those who aspired to it somehow turned inward. (Tom Wolfe’s landmark essay “The Me Decade” would come out three months almost to the day after Turnstiles’s May 1976 release.) As “I’ve Loved These Days” would put it, over one of Billy’s more Sinatra-esque vocal monologues:
We drown our doubts in dry champagne
And soothe our souls with fine cocaine
I don’t know why I even care
We get so high and get nowhere
We’ll have to change our jaded ways
But I’ve loved these days.
Aware they had goods worth handling with care, Billy and the bandmates involved flew to Denver and headed off into the mountains to complete the album overdubs and mixing. Months before, when the experiment with Elton’s sidemen didn’t take, Billy had departed quickly from Caribou Ranch, but the recording complex was still state-of-the-art and would serve their purpose now. (The Ranch would eventually spawn albums that sold many millions of copies for various artists.) Howard Kaufman describes it as “a beautiful, 4,000-acre ranch with state-of-the-art studio in the barn, bungalows all around, a fishing hole, and a full staff—eight or ten beautiful women. [Billy] probably would have been happier without his wife there, but people paid a lot of money to record up at Caribou.”
Billy recalls the climbing drive to the ranch through the foothills around Boulder: “You go past these sleepy little hamlets with the last of the hippies sitting on the porch of the general store with their dogs asleep on the sidewalk. I remember how, on our way, we kept winding up the mountain road until the Woody-Allen-city-boy-lost-in-the-woods aspect of me came out. And that air—it was so thin.” (The story goes that Freddy King went up there to record when he weighed about three hundred pounds, and he stepped ou
t of his bus and said, “Yeah, I’m gonna need the oxygen mask right away.”)
“It’s said you can hit high notes up there you can’t hit at sea level, but if you’re a singer or a horn player, you may not have the wind to get to them.” Ironically, horns were a key element of these latter sessions there.
At a time when an album’s reception by the popular press could do considerable good or harm, Turnstiles’s reviews were mixed. In a lengthy 1994 feature in the record collector’s magazine Goldmine, William Ruhlmann quoted from the downbeat critical consensus on the album at the time. Robert Christgau’s Village Voice summary was a “C+”: “As Joel’s craft improves … he becomes more obnoxious.” In the same pages Stephen Holden called him “boring as hell” but called the album “extraordinarily ambitious … in some ways the most impressive record Billy Joel has ever made.” He made an apt comparison to F. Scott Fitzgerald’s precedent: “ ‘I’ve Loved These Days,’ with its beautiful melody and its lyrics that incriminate the singer, has a brilliantly Gatsby-like tone that is emotionally intricate—the wealthy, as they go down, are as aware as anyone of their immorality … but they can’t help raising a last toast.”
If Turnstiles was in some ways Billy’s “Eroica”—a big canvas with a thundering farewell to Hollywood and the apocalyptic, crashing chords of “Miami 2017,” it also had “I’ve Loved These Days,” at times as ethereal as an oboe solo. The crowded cover photograph—with the giddy couple illustrating the latter song, and young Sean Weber-Small peering sullenly up from a supposed grandmother’s grasp—felt challenging. Perhaps that was part of the reason why the record, following two earlier LPs for the label that had cracked the Top 40, got no higher than 122 on the Billboard Hot 200 chart. “Say Goodbye to Hollywood” got a good deal of FM radio play, but that song and “Summer, Highland Falls” tanked as attempted hit singles.
His career still lacked a champion, but emerging as the most Napoleonic figure in Billy’s human landscape at the time was the increasingly active Elizabeth. The troublesome state of Billy’s career in 1976 is made evident by an interview she did with Forbes magazine in 1978 (in a sidebar called “They Were Mauling Her Man” that accompanied a record-biz story): “When we started to live together, I wasn’t even sure if Billy was talented. I thought I might have to support him. I was in love.”
She went on to depict how she spent three years extricating Billy from the old contracts (“The person in the middle”—between Bill and Columbia, in other words, Artie Ripp, who was disempowered but still taking his cut—“seemed to be making all the money”) and how she’d fall asleep over the payroll books at four-thirty A.M.
She blamed the Caribou Management hangover for the failure of Turnstiles and implied she’d more than merely rooted for it to die to prove a point: “Everything that was done on the Turnstiles album … I watched it go down the tubes [only 200,000 albums sold at the time, so-so for that era] and I guess I did it on purpose.” She adds, “I was sick of having Billy’s lawyers call and ask for advice at midnight and then hearing it be their idea the next day.”
One might ask, if consigning an album to cut-out bins was a good plan, what was the bad one? She points out she solved her issues with the concert policies the Caribou team had put in place. After getting a call from Billy’s original booking agent to have him open for the Beach Boys at Nassau Coliseum for a mere $2,000, “I told the guy, ‘Go to hell, you’re fired.’ ” An upcoming tour, she added, was predicted to gross $3 million.
Her concluding remarks are out of a Scorsese-film voiceover. “This is a business,” she asserts. “People never expected me to be as smart as I was, and they would be totally frank because they didn’t realize I was building my empire. They taught me that money is the bottom line of everything. It’s an actual, factual scale of how to see things.”
One might wonder if in the tetchy, male-dominated environment of the music business, feminism was being advanced or reversed by such representations, but her success helped lay the groundwork for what was soon to arrive.
“Streetlife Serenade in 1974 and Turnstiles in 1976 turned out to be disappointments, both to me and the label,” says Billy. “Jon Troy never could have ridden that out, but Elizabeth had just the right mix of finesse, manipulation, and the odd surprise move going for her.” Possibly the most advantageous thing that happened with Elizabeth in her role as manager was that she developed a relationship with the new head of Columbia Records, Walter Yetnikoff.
“At the time,” says Billy, “it was real important for us. We were just running out of money, just barely making ends meet on tour, and I had a band to pay. I had a road crew. We were becoming pretty well set as an organization, and we needed help from the record company, about eighty grand at the time.”
Elizabeth insisted Walter attend a New York–area show, and as he recalls: “My habit then as now is, I watch the audience. I know what the artist sounds like, I don’t have to watch him. I watch the audience. And they were really jiving and shucking and bubbling. Something was going on here. And I saw Elizabeth afterward and I said, ‘You’ve got to keep this show on the road. There’s something going on here.’ And she says, ‘We can’t—we’re out of money.’ I said, ‘So ask.’ She said, ‘I asked.’ I said, ‘Who did you ask?’ She said, ‘I asked business affairs.’ ‘What did you ask for?’ She asked for eighty grand. I said, ‘That’s it?’ She said, ‘Yeah, they said no.’ I said, ‘Call them tomorrow, they’ll say yes.’ ”
Billy recalls, “There was all this ‘bubbling under’ stuff that was going on, excitement that I don’t think the record company had been aware of. We were getting a lot of support from college radio, progressive FM radio, live audiences. Even the press was good. There was a lot of praise in the press in those days because they like to discover you before you’re successful.
“Elizabeth was telling Walter, ‘He needs this, that, and the other thing.’ And she looked after me. She would get Yetnikoff to get the company behind me for The Stranger album. I know there was a renegotiation with Artie Ripp on his percentage—he still stayed in the picture, but Walter got back my publishing rights.”
The passage of time may have enhanced the story, but Walter Yetnikoff relates his version, which can be heard in the Last Play at Shea documentary: “I said, ‘I want Billy Joel’s publishing back’—because it included ‘Piano Man’ and stuff. And he said, ‘It’s worth a fortune.’ I said, ‘I’m going to pay you, I’ll give you four hundred grand.’ He said, ‘No, no, it’s far more. I’m not selling the publishing.’ And I grabbed him, and I said, ‘I’ll fuckin’ kill you. I’m a guy from Brooklyn. You can’t start with me.’ I said, ‘Let me explain something to you. Even if I can’t put your head through the wall, you think you’re going to succeed in this business when I’m the great exec and I’m going to be pissed at you? Anyone that talks to you can’t talk to me. I represent CBS.’ I said, ‘Anyone who talks to you can’t talk to Columbia, Epic, or anything else. You think you’re going to live with that very long?’ As I recall, we bought it back, and I gave his copyrights to Billy as a birthday present.”
“Now, a lot of people might tell you that the kind of faith it took for me to hire my wife as my manager was delusional in some ways,” Billy says. “We were in love at one time, but you change a lot in your twenties. We wanted to have a kid around that time, not long before she started managing me, but it didn’t work out that way.”
Billy admitted to being fairly oblivious to the business side of his career, but he did start to notice how Elizabeth was representing him—and that she was not doing things in the firm but courteous way he preferred. The reports filtered in that Elizabeth was upbraiding business contacts, pulling no punches. Though Billy knew that a manager was supposed to play hardball sometimes, it wasn’t his style of doing business. He told her, at various points, “Please, don’t treat people like that. Don’t fuck people over.”
The business arrangement certainly didn’t help the marriage. Beyond the
stresses of her dispensing the orders, Billy was on the road a lot—and only in his midtwenties. Inevitably, the two spent a great deal of time apart. She developed her own social circle, while Billy hung out with his gang, the band.
Things also became strained between the couple because, while Billy struggled not to act like a rock star, Elizabeth embraced that life immediately. It became apparent that she felt she was entitled to her full share of the fame, the credit, and the money. “She played the game. She loved moving in circles with celebrities and the record company executives like a big shot,” says Billy. “I just wasn’t comfortable with it.”
Another thing Billy grew to be uncomfortable with was the math. The couple had married for richer and for poorer, so she had every chance of ultimately sharing his assets fifty-fifty, depending on what deals he had signed on to as his own, sole entitlements. But then Elizabeth started taking a management commission on top of that, so she was picking up not only half the money but a further chunk of the gross proceeds. Whatever tussles the divorce lawyers would later have, a goodly amount of cash was flowing into the shared kitty.
At the same time, Billy respected her effectiveness and her robust dialogue with the label. “It probably didn’t hurt that she got friendly with Walter Yetnikoff,” says Billy. The rumors afoot that Elizabeth had gotten more than casually friendly with the exec could probably be ascribed to the casual sexism of the music business, which only made them more persistent. “But Walter always denied it,” says Billy, “and since he’s the most shockingly honest person I know, I believe him.”
They didn’t call Walter Velvel, or “The Wolf,” for nothing. Yetnikoff wrote in his memoir of getting a birthday greeting from Billy, which his girlfriend Boom Boom stashed in a male stripper’s jock strap and fished out with her teeth: “Happy 50th birthday, Walter,” it read, “You redefine insanity.”
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