That said, Billy would be witness to more than a few of Elizabeth’s blowups, sometimes uncomfortably so. With Billy’s increasing clout in the business had come the natural corollary: “The people who work with you gain power and an ability to exert more leverage—on the label, on promoters, on media, the gamut.” Elizabeth gradually took on more authority and exercised it more blatantly.
Also around this time Elizabeth began to involve her brother Frank.
In 1978, two thieves broke into one of the touring party’s hotel rooms in Cincinnati with a shotgun and stole the proceeds of Billy’s ticket sales as paid by the promoter. The pair then lay in wait for Billy’s sound man, Brian Ruggles, and the tour manager, Rick London. (London was closely tied to Frank; he had married another Weber sister, Mary Sue.)
“We got robbed at gunpoint,” says Brian Ruggles. “Shotguns to my head. I was tied and gagged and everything. We’d been bringing a box of shirts and jackets, tour merchandise that I’d offered to help carry up to Rick’s room. We walk in the room, and these guys were in there, masks and overcoats. They shoved us down on the floor, and they were yelling at us, ‘Where’s the money? Where’s the drugs?’ We were thinking, Drugs? What drugs?’
“So Rick said he had some money—he had, like, fifteen thousand in cash, and some checks from the night’s receipts. They tied us to the beds, and they gagged and taped us. Meanwhile this whole time I’m thinking, I’m a dead man, because the guy had this shotgun right on my neck. Afterward, the mayor, who had been at the gig, asked if there was anything he could do. He said, ‘We’ll look into it.’ Nothing ever happened.
“Anyway, the next night we’re playing somewhere else in Ohio, and Billy did ‘Just the Way You Are.’ And where he’d usually sing, ‘Don’t go tryin’ some new fashion,’ he sang, ‘Don’t go tyin’ / Rick and Brian.’
“And then that was the big joke.”
In the days following the robbery, Frank was called to come out on the road and lend what help he could (that would later seem ironic, given how his involvement in alleged malfeasances eventually drained the Billy exchequer without deploying a single gun). With another show coming right up, the tour party felt under threat, and though Frank wasn’t exactly hired muscle, he had a bumptious edge to him, and the reflex was to get every possible hand on deck as they tightened up security.
Soon afterward Frank was on his way to becoming Billy’s new financial steward. Frank would tell author Stan Soocher in They Fought the Law that Elizabeth “was sort of secretive” when she invited him and his wife Lucille out to dinner: “She said Billy’s business had outgrown her ability to handle it. There were so many people—lawyers and accountants—involved.” Frank had virtually no experience in the law or accountancy, but if the experts minding the store took him for a rube, they would find out differently, if too late and much to their regret.
Elizabeth went off to do other projects; she talked about managing Meat Loaf and briefly worked with Phoebe Snow. Meanwhile Frank steadily pointed out all the places where he felt Elizabeth had made wrong business decisions. “He kept saying ‘She missed this, she missed that.’ ‘She didn’t do this, she didn’t do that.’ Frank was making himself look like the hero,” says Billy. “And I thought, Man, if this guy is taking my side against his own sister, he must be pretty devoted to my cause.”
The miserable experience with Elizabeth was, however, a great source of creativity for Billy: “Maybe if people had known just how personal the pain was, they wouldn’t have been so quick to accuse me of stereotyping women in certain songs. ‘Stiletto’—which I wrote during the same period I was writing The Stranger but which ended up on 52nd Street in 1978—also earned me a bit of a public wrist slap. ‘Oh, he’s calling a woman a bitch.’
“I said, ‘Look, it’s more about the guy in the song being an idiot than the woman being horrible.”
Then she says she needs affection
While she searches for the vein
She’s so good with her stiletto
You don’t really mind the pain.
“As always, the music led me through the lyrics. I was hearing one of those jazzy beats Steve Winwood and Traffic specialized in—a generation later, that beat got picked up by hip-hop guys.
“I don’t think Elizabeth took the sentiment in the song personally—again, it’s on the guy: ‘You stand there pleadin’ / With your insides bleedin’ / ’Cause you deep down want some more.’ ”
So Billy got tagged for misogyny again, “which comes with the territory when people start interpreting your songs,” says Billy. “Then again, I think I’m a little bit of an iconoclast. When something becomes too politically correct, I want to go against the grain.”
A similar thing happened with “Only the Good Die Young,” when the Catholic Church got perturbed by the line “Catholic girls start much too late.” “But I’m sure it sold me quite a few records,” remarks Billy. “I guess I do like to let the air out of things, to take the piss out of something. There were more than a few ruffled feathers over that song.”
Elizabeth would, in a couple years’ time, walk away from Billy with a quite generous settlement, with guaranteed future payouts from the continuing sales of the albums created during the marriage. However, the irony of her imminent decision to relinquish her managerial duties was that commercially, the very good times were just beginning. Everything clicked when The Stranger was released. Even a cut like “Movin’ Out (Anthony’s Song),” which made it only to number seventeen on the charts, seemed to be ubiquitous for a few weeks. “Time’s been good to that one, and also to ‘Scenes from an Italian Restaurant.’ They share that landscape I grew up in; they delve into the kind of things you hear on the street corner in an old-school neighborhood,” says Billy.
The couple at the center of “Scenes,” Brenda and Eddie, came to stand in as a sort of iconic duo, capturing a piece of people’s high school experience: “With that song, I wanted to explore the eternal question about the anointed kids we all knew: Whatever happened to them? If you peak too early, if you’re the hot lick in high school, it’s a good bet you’re gonna bomb out pretty early. And I had this song started with the title ‘The Ballad of Brenda and Eddie.’ Then I said to myself, Okay, I need to set this up better.”
The format of this songwriting was inspired by a chunk of material on the B-side of Abbey Road. “Anybody who’s familiar with that B-side has probably figured out by now it’s a series of song fragments,” says Billy. “The Beatles would come into a recording session, and John would go, ‘I’ve got a bit of this,’ and Paul would say, ‘I’ve got a piece of this,’ and then George Martin would say, ‘Well, let’s stitch it all together and we can make this work.’ It adds up to a sixteen-minute medley, and I thought it was brilliant.”
When Billy was working on “Brenda and Eddie,” he tried to do something similar: “I had an idea for another fragment that is about a couple that meets after a long time—okay, a bottle of red, a bottle of white. That’s it—they’re in their old Italian restaurant. Gradually it all came together.”
Billy was never quite sure why he subtitled “Movin’ Out”: “At the time I just pictured some lady yelling out of a house, ‘Anthony! Anthony!’ and I was thinking about a kid who’s been living at home and getting a lot of pressure from his family to do what they want him to do, and this is a guy who wants to go his own way. He isn’t buying into the upward mobility thing.”
Years later the song continues to resonate with audiences. When Billy and the band perform the song in a venue with any open space down front, the crowd surges toward the footlights. “I guess it’s something they’re real familiar with,” he says.
Billy also gives thanks to Twyla Tharp for popularizing the song. Twenty-five years after The Stranger was released, the dancer-choreographer brought Billy’s music to the Broadway stage—finding the thread that runs through the songs to effectively mount a musical that tells a story through choreography.
When Twyla first reached out t
o him, Billy admits, “I was a little dismissive, to be honest, despite knowing she was a real master. I just doubted the premise.” However, her gentle provocation was to ask him what happened to Brenda and Eddie in the Italian restaurant, and he didn’t have an answer. Nor did he have an answer for her when she asked what happened to Anthony from the grocery store.
It turned out that Twyla had quite a few ideas of her own. “She helped me see the logic of the story, with Vietnam and ‘Goodnight Saigon’ as a pivot point,” he recalls. “She quoted the first line of Homer’s Iliad, ‘Sing to me, muse, of the rage of Achilles.’ Ostensibly, I was the muse to that generation of American men who faced the war and represented the rage.”
What Twyla created in 2002 was a hit, Tony-winning Broadway musical. Plus, thanks to the involvement of Billy’s musical director, Tommy Byrnes, Billy ended up plundering the pit band—the musicians who are typically tucked beneath the stage front playing accompaniments—for musicians who would become some of his best players on the road.
BEYOND THE SONGS that would go on to be major hits, the tracks on The Stranger provide deeper insight into Billy’s psyche at the time. The album’s cover was Freudian in its own right, with Billy posed in suit and tie on an unmade bed in the company of a gaping commedia dell’arte mask and a dangling set of boxing gloves. Several questions in the probing lyrics of “The Stranger” came straight out of Billy and Elizabeth’s fraying relationship. The singer asks us directly:
Why were you so surprised
That you never saw the stranger
Did you ever let your lover see
The stranger in yourself?
The woman he comes home to—and there’s no use denying how autobiographical the song is, or that the song was the fitting choice for an album title—kicks him “right between the eyes.” Perhaps a more painful insight, in this case more prophecy than autobiography, is that these romantic disasters—or with luck, opportunities—will force their way into one’s life again:
Though you drown in good intentions
You will never quench the fire
You’ll give in to your desire
When the stranger comes along.
There’s an almost startling wistfulness to the whispery-voiced “Everybody Has a Dream,” as a gospel-tinged female chorus including Phoebe Snow backs the singer up. His dream, sadly in the context of the album, is “just to be at home / And to be all alone … with you.”
As The Stranger went platinum in 1977, Billy became aware that he’d moved to a different place in the music business. He had hit a level that required him to constantly concentrate on work: “It was all about: What’s the next project, what’s the next tour, what’s going on with the band? I was constantly thinking, Career, career, career, career.
“The song ‘Big Shot’ was about my realization that I derived no real satisfaction from the kind of public profile that had grown all around me. I certainly didn’t want to be part of the disco demimonde that was getting all the buzz in New York during that period. I hated that whole coked-out, disco-drenched New York club scene in the late seventies. I never went there. I shouldn’t put it down, because I don’t really know much about it, but it was very glitzy, and it just seemed trashy, the whole Studio 54 shtick of going into the back room and doing coke, or hanging out with Liza Minnelli and Halston—that scene had nothing to do with rock and roll.”
Still, June 1977 would see a moment that is a landmark in any entertainer’s book, a three-night stand at Carnegie Hall. The highlights of the first show on June 3 were captured and included in a reissue box of The Stranger album in July 2008. Though he’d reluctantly appeared—and stolen the show—as the opener for Jesse Colin Young in the legendary hall in 1974, this stand was all Billy, and featured mostly songs from Turnstiles with a couple of cuts from The Stranger, still several months from release. “Ev’ry year’s a souvenir,” sang Billy in the concert closer he relied on at that time, “That slowly fades away.” It was odd for a concert audience to be sent along home with the cautionary “Your mementos will turn to dust / But that’s the price you pay.” His heartfelt rendition of the melody is heard on the recording, producing applause and a few fading huzzahs from the fans.
As if to be contrary, Billy looked backward in time with this next album. Its emphasis was that Fifty-second Street was Swing Street, where the old jazz clubs used to reside. (The Cafe Zanzibar, which would get its own song, opened in 1943 at Broadway and Forty-ninth.) Referring again to the Beatles’ Abbey Road, he decided to title the album 52nd Street. Says Billy, “We were kind of channeling all this jazz stuff, even though we weren’t jazz musicians by any means. We were rock-and-roll guys. But I always felt like an adult when I attempted jazz, like the breakdown in the middle of ‘Zanzibar’ or the Latin jazz feel of ‘Rosalinda’s Eyes”:
Señorita don’t be lonely, I will soon be there
Oh Havana I’ve been searching for you everywhere
I’ve got a chance to make it
It’s time for me to take it
I’ll return before the fire dies
In Rosalinda’s eyes.
Billy thought of the song as a letter that his father, “an uncommunicative guy,” should have written to his mother early in their marriage: “It was kind of a romantic notion, and it told the story of a guy who’s got music in his hands—I’ll be home, I’ll be back, I’m always searching for my Cuban skies. Because my old man lived in Cuba for a couple of years, I just folded in some bits and pieces of what I knew about my family background and romanticized that situation.”
The jazzy piece at the end of the album, called “52nd Street,” was an add-on, “a little thematic cakewalk thing.”
In the spirit of giving a nod to their jazz predecessors, Billy and the band posed for the album cover outside the wall of the “crappy little luncheonette on the corner of the building where the A&R studios were at Fifty-second Street and Seventh Avenue.” Billy leaned against the dirt-stained white brick wall holding a trumpet and giving his best jazz-cat look.
The album was not so relentlessly midtown New York as to leave out a nod to what Billy had left behind in Los Angeles: “The song ‘My Life’ is based on Tony Lawrence, a guy I knew who had a job on the East Coast but decided to be a comic and move out West to live out his dream: ‘Now he gives them a stand-up routine in L.A.’ It’s essentially about people who are making a transition in their life, who are moving out of a particular rut that they think they’re in.”
Tony had come into Billy’s life as a rock writer friend of the Gibsons and first met Billy after one of the early Troubadour shows. Tony had been recruited by the Gibsons and Artie Ripp for an ad hoc mission to set up a one-off Billy performance in a hotel suite in Kansas City during a record convention there. He’d moved on to a middle-management staff job at Columbia, shortly before Billy signed there. The Gibsons and Billy saw a lot of him—“I had the expense account,” Lawrence quips—before he moved along to Warner Bros. in New York. “I left the music business in ’77, and I started doing stand-up at [iconic Hollywood club] the Comedy Store,” recalls Tony, who went through some scuffling years during and after his stand-up phase and eventually moved on to work more lucratively in reality TV. Just as Tony was making his career transition in 1977, “I was talking to Billy on the phone about it, and he thought it was awesome.
“It was not long after that conversation he said to me, ‘Wait till you hear this song I wrote.’ He played the piano track and read it to me, and I was very touched by it because it really showed that he was zeroing in on what I was doing, who I was. He saw the independence and the courage it took to try to do that—because I eventually lost everything doing it. I really went bust chasing that dream and ended up at the bottom financially and living in a one-bedroom apartment in Hollywood with a twenty-five-year-old Fiat. So when he wrote that thing, it was very surprising to me that (a) he would even care what I was doing, and (b) he would take it in like that. But I knew he could be such a gif
ted, brilliant artist.
“Subtle things always reminded me that he wasn’t just some guy I knew in the music business. I remember once Jon Troy wanted me to meet Billy’s new agent, and we went to Dan Tana’s for dinner. We sat down, and Jon introduced me: ‘And this is Billy’s product manager at the label,’ and Billy said, ‘No, Tony’s my friend.’
“It doesn’t get much better than having a song written with you in it, but I just remember him always being accessible. And beyond working at the label, our friendship was based upon a genuine liking of each other as human beings—and me thinking, God, I hope this guy makes it—he’s so deserving.”
“My Life” didn’t exactly express such cheery sentiments—“Ah, but sooner or later you sleep / In your own space”—but somehow it sneaked around the corner to become a hit.
A few years later, in 1982, a wannabe singer-songwriter from Reno, Nevada, named John Powers accused Billy of stealing the song from a demo he’d sent to the record label. Billy felt the claim was absurd, but his lawyers told him the quickest way to make it go away was to pay the guy $42,500, with no admission of liability. They explained to Billy that this kind of nuisance suit was simply the cost of doing business, and you always stood the chance that a misinformed judge or jury would take your musical child, your song, away from you for good. Were that to happen, Billy would also lose the future financial benefits. Comparatively, the money to make Powers go away would be a pittance.
Billy agreed to pay Powers on the promise of a letter from him stating that “My Life” was wholly a Billy Joel song, and that Powers’s song was certainly not the same. Billy and his associates never received the letter, and instead of shutting up, Powers started taking out ads repeating his claim, waving the check he’d received before the media.
That year, in a Playboy interview, Billy was quoted saying, “I’m going to kill this guy. I want to break his legs with my own hands.” He called Powers a creep and a poor little schlump. Of course Powers then sued for emotional distress, which was thrown out by a Nevada judge in 1988. The judge pointed out that Billy had been introduced in the Playboy interview as a street kid and “a figure of fiery controversy,” fair warning that a guy like Billy might be prone to bursts of “rhetorical hyperbole.” To which Billy remarks, “Damn straight.”
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