CHAPTER 8
EVERYBODY’S TALKIN’ ’BOUT THE NEW SOUND
As The Stranger racked up platinum credentials through 1977—on its way to selling, over time, ten million copies and counting—Billy was running on adrenaline. Realizing that he owed Columbia a sequence of releases within a certain time frame, he was pumping out albums at a pace of nearly one a year—the kind of productivity rate that record companies thrive on.
When Billy set to work on Glass Houses, he’d just had back-to-back critical and commercial successes. “Just the Way You Are” won Record of the Year and Song of the Year at the Grammys in 1978, and 52nd Street won the Grammy for Album of the Year in 1979. Now thirty, Billy was the guy to knock off the pedestal.
This was the era when punk and New Wave were clawing their way into the spotlight and leaving not a few old-school music corpses behind. Billy liked several of the New Wave artists, and at some level he respected punk’s raw vitality in the face of an increasingly sluggish medium. But most of the insurgent music didn’t viscerally resonate with him: “I always heard it as a reiteration of garage band rock. It reminded me of the Seeds, or Question Mark and the Mysterians, and all those early sixties bands. But everything was being recategorized now, because they needed to define it against something. In my neighborhood you didn’t call yourself a punk; other people called you a punk.”
Music critics at the time, searching for ways to contrast what Billy did with the new music, couldn’t decide how to pigeonhole his sound. He wasn’t fully rock, as capably as he sometimes could bring the noise; and he wasn’t really soul. As for his supposed revolutionary opposites, Billy didn’t buy the terms punk and New Wave.
Still, he agreed, “The music business needed a major enema, because you had these big, bloated prog-rock bands such as Emerson, Lake and Palmer and Genesis and Rush—these self-indulgent pseudoclassical rock bands—and also the soulless studio bands like Bread, Toto, and REO Speedwagon, or white-boy disco like KC and the Sunshine Band. And the enema was punk. No wonder it caught people’s imagination.”
Nonetheless, the Glass Houses album wasn’t done to co-opt the spittle-flecked energy that was bouncing back and forth between London clubs and the New York scene centered at CBGB’s. If anything, it was a return to Billy’s roots, to the kind of stuff he played in high school: “I thought I’d do an album of that breed of mid-sixties rock. That was the whole point of it: it was guitar-based, driving, had a lot of punch to it. We had a great guitar player at the time, David Brown.”
The defining song of Glass Houses—and the first song of Billy’s to hit number one on the charts—was “It’s Still Rock and Roll to Me,” which became a critical lightning rod. “They were saying, ‘Oh, he’s making fun of the fans.’ This was a misinterpretation of the lyric ‘aimed at your average teen.’ Some people thought I was saying, ‘Ain’t that your average teen?’—as if I were putting kids down,” says Billy. “In fact, I was just pointing out that this supposedly new genre was actually quite familiar, despite the hype in the media.” (The song even inspired a parody by Weird Al Yankovic, “It’s Still Billy Joel to Me”—which Billy played at a college lecture in 2012.)
Still, Billy felt that he and the band “really rocked out” on that album. “I credited Elizabeth’s son, Sean, for ‘inspiration,’ ” he says, “because, at the time, he was tuned in to that kind of disruptive energy that was coming out of punk and New Wave. I shared some of his enthusiasms, like the Cars and Elvis Costello.”
Meanwhile Billy and his band were starting to get booked in stadiums and arenas, big places that demanded guitar-driven, hard-rocking energy. On a song like “You May Be Right,” which leads off the Glass Houses album, says Billy, “You can feel that energy pouring out, and hear it in the crunch of the guitar and the sound of broken glass that precedes the song.” Reading between the lines in that song’s lyric, he adds, “Perhaps I was wrestling with the differences Elizabeth and I were having”:
Now think of all the years you tried to
Find someone to satisfy you
I might be as crazy as you say
If I’m crazy then it’s true
That it’s all because of you
And you wouldn’t want me any other way.
“I don’t know—if you see a guy standing in front of his own glass house, as I am on that album cover, with a big rock in his hand, you might think that here is a man dealing with high degree of ambivalence about his life and career.”
AS THE TOUR for the 52nd Street album drew to a close, Billy was invited to be part of an April 1979 concert in Cuba. The country was mostly off-limits to Americans at the time, so given Billy’s personal history—had his dad’s family not been allowed into Cuba, chances are he would not have been born—and an ongoing curiosity about life there, he jumped at the chance. Concert sponsor Columbia called the event Havana Jam and recruited some jazz acts, such as Weather Report and John McLaughlin, along with a folk-rock lineup—Kris Kristofferson, Bonnie Bramlett, and Stephen Stills. “We had some fun in the streets of Havana, checking out spots where Ernest Hemingway had drunk, laughing at the cheerful little kids who were trying to sell us pot,” says Billy. “When it came time to perform, I purposely didn’t fool around with any speeches. I just said, ‘No hablo español,’ and got on with my set.”
Just prior to that concert in the Karl Marx Theater, Elizabeth, in her capacity as manager, had what would later become a semi-legendary meltdown. Columbia had always planned to record the concert for a video release—and for history’s sake—but Billy wasn’t entirely comfortable with the commercial aspect of this plan. He was on a journey of discovery, to see where his father had gone as a young boy while fleeing the Holocaust, and he had every intention of performing “Rosalinda’s Eyes,” the song he had written as a tribute to his parents. He was, as the New York Times’s John Rockwell noted, “the only American pop performer here whose career is in full tide [which] lent the proceedings a legitimacy they might otherwise have lacked.” Rockwell also wrote that the performance was “stirring … and he drew the most fervent response of the entire festival.” Partly due to Billy’s feelings that he was being exploited as the lead dog for a second-tier roster, Elizabeth flexed her managerial muscle and decreed that the Columbia film crew not shoot Billy’s set.
The result would be a damaging report in Rolling Stone. In retrospect, Billy would wish the show had been filmed, if only for archival purposes. However, backstage and about to go on, he was in no position to correct that situation. Elizabeth may well have felt she was doing what Billy preferred; no deal had been signed yet. In any event, Elizabeth reportedly went in and said, “Pull the plug. Don’t you put that damn camera on him.”
Afterward there were some hard feelings about the way Elizabeth had handled everything. Many viewed her action as nasty, and Billy wasn’t comfortable being represented that way: “I know controlling situations as they emerge is what managers do, but there’s a way to do it diplomatically. You don’t throw your power around and use me as the leverage. I didn’t like being used like that.”
Rolling Stone’s Chet Flippo wrote about the incident in his piece in the May 1979 issue called “Rocking Havana: ‘Yanqui Musicians Find Rebels, Repression and Bad Cigars.’ ” Using the local Spanish speakers’ phonetic spelling, he reported that Billy’s set was the highlight for the audience: “Billy Yo-el closed out the show with a bang. When he jumped on his piano, the kids in the crowd surged past the guards and really tried to get down. If the Cuban government thought they were keeping rock & roll out of the country, Joel proved them wrong, prompting the American press to dutifully record that he had proved rock & roll can still be subversive.”
Flippo also reported that a collection of jazz worthies, including Dexter Gordon and others billed as the “CBS Jazz All-Stars,” were “highly pissed off” that Joel was the only musician who refused to allow the network to record and videotape his performance: “That made for some ugly words between [CBS
president Bruce Lundvall, who organized the show and planned the recording] and Elizabeth Joel, Billy’s wife and manager.”
The article cited CBS’s $235,000 investment in what they hoped would be a series of albums and a network TV special: “One CBS Jazz All-Star said Joel’s decision was ‘a slap in the face to the rest of us. We agreed to come down and so did he. Now he becomes a prima donna.’ ”
In the end, Billy’s set at Havana Jam wasn’t recorded. Elizabeth, by pulling the plug, had not only superseded Billy’s authority, she’d also left no chance to work out the deal down the road or simply quash the footage later. In time, Billy and his team might have found a use for the video, at least as a keepsake of an unusual moment in his history.
After this episode, the relationship between Elizabeth and Billy unraveled quickly. It didn’t help that Elizabeth had insisted on making an approach to the Dakota—in 1980, prior to the death of Dakota resident John Lennon—that had been rebuffed: the building board contended that Billy had a history of drug use (based on an admission to Playboy magazine about smoking pot). The New York Times picked up the New York Post account, which incensed Billy; so did a Times piece by lead music writer Robert Palmer that acknowledged his success but said, “This listener can’t stand him … he’s the sort of popular artist who makes elitism seem not just defensible but necessary.” Billy would rip both articles up onstage in his summer 1980 Madison Square Garden shows.
By August he was equally fed up with a review by Ken Tucker in the Los Angeles Herald Examiner that said he had “hopped all over the stage in a self-sustained fit of self-glory. He has always been a megalomaniac.” Billy brandished the offending newspaper, tore it up, and hollered, “Fuck you, Ken Tucker!”
Then Tim White pursued Billy to Detroit to do an interview, after Rolling Stone’s planned cover for that fortnight fell through. Billy insisted White match him drink for drink from a bottle of Johnnie Walker Red but showed a willingness to reassess his relations with the press: “If I’m considered part of that overhyped, overproduced, overindulgent super group style, then I’m bummed—but I do admit some of my albums had that quality.”
Billy took pains (in a passage not quoted in the article) to point out that he wasn’t swimming in money, as some thought: “People think I’ve got this multi-million dollar mansion. It isn’t. I paid three hundred thousand dollars.… I’ve got a mortgage. And I just wanted to do a photo of me chucking a rock through the window of the house—through the whole false image. I’ve been throwing stones my whole life and people have been throwing them at me.… So I figured, what the hell, I’m gonna throw a rock at myself—at the whole narrow image people have of me!”
In the piece, published in the September 4, 1980, issue of Rolling Stone under the headline “Billy Joel Is Angry,” he made the professional if not the personal relationship with his wife quite clear: “Elizabeth no longer manages me.… She’s got twenty other things going. I said, ‘Enough of the strain of being wife and manager, let’s just be man and wife.’ ”
The following spring Billy and the band did an international tour through Europe and Israel. Elizabeth joined them on the road, which Billy, in retrospect, believes was a last effort to reassert her management position. As Billy and Elizabeth traveled about, whether on the plane or in a car or a bus, the tensions were evident. No one felt them more keenly than Billy: “I think that was the last time she was actively involved with anything I did. After that we parted ways, professionally and personally.”
Elizabeth ended up living mostly in New York City, while Billy stayed in a place he’d acquired in the rustic harborside village of Lloyd Neck, near Oyster Bay. You can glimpse the setting of the Lloyd Neck place on the back cover of The Nylon Curtain, where Billy is sitting with a cup of coffee. “I really loved that house. It was actually a small English Tudor-style cottage, but to me it felt like my first baronial-style waterfront mansion,” he remembers.
Aside from the pall cast by the dissolving relationship with Elizabeth, another dynamic influenced The Nylon Curtain, one that Billy didn’t realize until after he finished the album: how profoundly John Lennon’s death in December 1980 had affected him. “I felt a genuine sadness that John was gone, that there were never going to be any other John Lennon recordings. The Beatles were over; we’d all accepted that. But as much as I had loved them and as easy as it was for me to idolize Paul McCartney, I had never realized how much John Lennon meant to me, how much he and Paul were the irreplaceable sweet and sour. It was only later that I realized I was channeling John in a lot of the vocals on that album.
“I wonder if I ever would have written ‘Laura’—which had some quirky late-Beatles touches, right down to the la la’s and the guitar break—if I hadn’t first heard how deep John went with his song ‘Mother.’ ”
“Laura” is emblematic of how seriously Billy took the task of writing his songs. In those lyrics, he put feelings about his mother that had seldom been heard, even among his longtime intimates. While Billy still rarely mentions Roz, her stature as a “mind upsetter” is storied. Their phone conversations tended to be one-sided, with Billy issuing reassurances over worries, real or imagined, that Roz cataloged during the call. Over the course of his career, anytime Billy has started to feel content in his work and life, he always faced the prospect of a late-evening call from a despairing or depressed Roz: “I must have been pretty fed up with some of my own mother’s manipulation by the time I wrote the song, as evidenced by the F-word in the lyrics”:
Here I am feeling like a fucking fool
Do I react the way exactly
She intends me to?
Every time I think I’m off the hook
She makes me lose my cool
I’m her machine
And she can punch all the keys
She can push any button I was programmed through.
Beyond the issues with Elizabeth and Roz, the Nylon Curtain album was a daunting effort for Billy. The United States was in the heart of the Reagan era, and he was aware of America’s diminishing horizons. “Things were really changing, and I wanted to tackle the issues that were important then,” says Billy. “I didn’t want to get up on a soapbox and become a sociopolitical songwriter, but I wanted to talk about people going through hard times. My ethic in writing songs throughout that era was always to be talking about people, whether it’s a love song, a song about a relationship, or a friend, or a barfly—it’s always got to be about a particular person. If you try to write for an audience or to a concept, I don’t think you’re really writing for anybody. But if you’re writing for a specific person and a specific situation, a lot of people might be able to identify with that.”
That’s how “Allentown” became one of the first songs Billy set to work on for the album. He knew that region in eastern Pennsylvania’s foundering steel belt, which was where heartland America reached farthest east. Because it was just a bit inland from two of Billy’s big audiences, New York and Philly, Billy and the band played the Lehigh Valley over and over again. As Billy recalls, “It was our bread and butter for a while. And I remember that when I started getting big, there was no large venue in Allentown, and some kid came up to me after the show and said, ‘You’re never coming back here.’
“I asked him why, and he said, ‘Because anybody who gets big never comes back here.’
“I was really was touched by that, and at the same time it stirred up a bit of guilt. I thought, Goddamn it, I’m not going to let that happen. Yet it did happen. He was right: there was no venue big enough to play in Allentown. So I thought, How do I write for that kid who told me I’d never be coming back?”
While Billy was working on the songs for that album, he was reading about what was happening with the steel industry and the economy in those depressed areas: “I had this melody that was originally called ‘Levittown,’ somewhat in the same way Paul McCartney’s ‘Scrambled Eggs’ became ‘Yesterday.’
“But what was there to write about L
evittown? That the candy store was understocked? I was thinking about Levittown, and I said, Wait a minute—Allentown. That sounds like the real America—which it is. Then when I was writing the song, I wanted to look back and talk about how our fathers had fought the war, and how they had met our mothers in the USO, but also about how the next generation, who thought they’d have a job—a little upward mobility—saw those hopes dashed.
“Look at what happened in that central Pennsylvania world that’s portrayed in The Deer Hunter: a generation of working-class guys were sent off to fight, and it kind of blew that world apart. Vietnam haunted this album, and you hear that in ‘Allentown’ ”:
Well we’re waiting here in Allentown
For the Pennsylvania we never found
For the promises our teachers gave
If we worked hard
If we behaved.
When the bridge kicks in, it changes from regretful to angry:
Every child had a pretty good shot
To get at least as far as their old man got
But something happened on the way to that place
They threw an American flag in our face.
Billy’s singing on the last line took Keith Richards’s vowel movements to an angry extreme. “I’ve never regarded myself as qualified to sound off on politics in one of the typical forums that are open to celebrities,” says Billy, “but with ‘Allentown,’ I felt I was presenting a reasonably accurate portrayal of the life lived by that kid who spoke to me after the concert.” At that time, the most serious unemployment and blight were in Bethlehem, where the Bethlehem Steel Corporation was headed for oblivion. Mack Truck’s big Allentown plant was being taken over by Renault. “I was trying to tell a story that a young fan and the people across the Lehigh Valley could relate to: ‘They thought they knew how their lives would go, and it just didn’t work out that way.’
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