Meanwhile, Billy’s relationship with Phil Ramone, who produced The Bridge as well as his previous six Columbia albums, had also changed—and not for the better. The excitement and fun they had had making their earlier albums was gone. Now it was almost drudgery. “The writing process should have warned me,” says Billy. “At one stage I cloistered myself in a ten-thousand-square-foot space in the Puck Building in downtown Manhattan—just me with a piano and a notebook in the corner of this sprawling space. There was a lot of pacing back and forth along a span of windows and also out in the surrounding streets, where the espresso bars were. But no matter what, I really didn’t like most of the songs. I just didn’t think the material was there yet.”
Billy asked the label if he could have another year or two, but they wouldn’t grant him the extra time. “We’ve got a lot of pressure and we’ve got to put it out,” they said. And Billy couldn’t do anything about it. They owned the recordings and thus could pretty much do whatever they wanted.
Looking at the list of songs on that album, Billy saw what he felt was weak material. “ ‘Running on Ice’ is crap,” he says. “I was trying to do Sting there, and the lyric is okay, but the words and the music just don’t line up. There was kind of a frenetic urban thing to it. I was living in the city and I was feeling the pressure now”:
They say this highway’s going my way
But I don’t know where it’s taking me
It’s a bad waste, a sad case, a rat race
It’s breaking me.
“I was still scooping up things from prior years, for example, ‘This Is the Time,’ which came out of the realization that Elle Macpherson and I were not meant for the ages”:
This is the time to remember
’Cause it will not last forever
These are the days to hold on to
’Cause we won’t although we’ll want to.
“A Matter of Trust” effectively retraced his courtship of Christie:
I know you’re an emotional girl
It took a lot for you to not lose your faith in this world …
So break my heart if you must
It’s a matter of trust.
Amid the stress of getting the album in the can, Billy got a new jolt of enthusiasm by doing “Baby Grand,” with Ray Charles himself playing on it. Because Billy wanted to pay tribute to Charles without simply co-opting his sound, “writing ‘Baby Grand’ was like a tightrope walk, and the prospect of actually getting to record it with him had me a bit petrified. I was tentative, doing my humble acolyte thing.”
Phil, knowing Billy was very practiced at doing a Ray impersonation, told Billy, “You’ve got to go after him, kid … get Ray to sing like Ray.” And it worked.
Another thrill for Billy was having Stevie Winwood play with them on “Getting Closer.” “The lyrics to that song, by the way, should have made Frank Weber paranoid,” says Billy. “They were very predictive of the lawsuits to come—as in, ‘I don’t have all of it worked out yet, but I’m getting there’… getting closer”:
I went searching for the truth
But in my innocence I found
All the con men and their acrobats
Who stomped me in the ground …
What was ripped off by professionals
Is not all that it seems
While I must live up to contracts
I did not give up my dreams.
“I think ‘Big Man on Mulberry Street’ works as a portrait of a nebbish who thinks he’s cool, and it is an excursion into a jazz style of singing. From its title, ‘Temptation’ sounds like it’s about a woman, but it’s actually about being unable to leave the side of my new baby. ‘Code of Silence’ was a terrible song and very nearly got scrapped.” In fact, Billy wound up enlisting Cyndi Lauper, who was working in the studio next door, to help him finish the song. “She came in and said, with that great Noo Yawk accent, ‘I can see ya going through awl kinds of tawment. Lemme help you write it.’ ”
“I don’t know …” Billy replied. But Cyndi insisted. “You just throw out some words,” she said, “and I’ll help ya awganize it.” She pushed Billy to finish the song. “She’s a funny girl. Great singer, too. I like her part of the track, anyway.”
The bottom line was that Billy was fed up. He actually thought he was going to retire. But he hadn’t released a newly recorded album in three years, and the label had other ideas.
The Bridge was released in July 1986 and soon reached number seven. Billy and the band then started the extensive preparations for a sidetrack from the promotional tour. As the featured event in their travels, they would undertake the first set of American rock concerts in the Soviet Union, which had just introduced its new policy of glasnost. Despite the news that the IRS was coming after Billy for $5.5 million in unpaid back taxes—his accountants were still figuring that tangle out—he planned to finance the tour and its filming himself.
“I remember the Russian tour very fondly, almost as a series of snapshots,” says Billy. “There was Christie with her cargo load of bottled water, to be used for everything from drinking to washing her hair—an outgrowth of her antinuclear activism combined with her fear that Chernobyl’s aftereffects might still be poisoning the environment. There was taking Alexa, who wasn’t quite two, to Gorky Park and meeting Viktor the clown, who so charmed her that we became pals and I wrote the song ‘Leningrad’ as a tribute to him. And of course, there was the episode of me getting so pissed off at the film lighting guys for pinning the crowd in their zillion-candle-watt spotlights that I tossed my electric piano off the stage.”
It wasn’t the first time Billy had done that—on a few U.S. tours it was his standard signal to his piano techs that his keyboards were malfunctioning—but in this context it became the smashed instrument heard ’round the world. “Rockin’ Billy’s Red Rage” was how one British tabloid billed it.
Billy initiated the trip to the Soviet Union in 1987 because he felt he and the band could make a little history, but it followed an intense string of European dates, so that by the time Billy arrived, his throat was shot and he was bone weary. The recorded performances were, in his opinion, horrible: “I was doing interviews by day and then singing at night in arenas/venues where the PA system was second rate at best. The result was another album that should never have come out.”
Another alienating element was the reluctance of some in the band to take a partial cutback on their paychecks. Such a move would have lessened the logistical challenges to mounting a full-on, multi-big-rig tour, transporting tons of steel and personnel across sprawling Russia. To the band—because the producers planned to shoot the stage shows for a concert album and film—it made sense that they should earn more, not less. Phil Ramone backed Billy up on that point, but the band didn’t make it easy on him.
“We were asked, because of the production budget, if the guys in the band would do it at a special rate,” says Ramone. “At this point in their lives, they could have easily done it—it wasn’t going to break them to put a week in at a particular price.” Guitar player David Brown had simply gone awol and was replaced. “Just go along with the rest of the band,” Ramone recalls thinking, “and say ‘We agree.’ It was an opportunity for an American band to be the first top rock-and-roll band to go to Russia.”
Frank Weber and his lieutenant, Rick London, both integral to the Russia planning and to overseeing the album and film’s release, were executive producers. This would be their peak as Billy’s handlers, as they took on the massive task of taking the circus through the crumbling veil that used to be called the Iron Curtain.
The trip to Russia was emotionally uplifting for Billy, as he loved being part of thawing relations between the countries, and day by day he enjoyed seeing that process personalized by connections like the one he and his family made with Viktor the clown (as celebrated in “Leningrad”).
That idealistic moment faded rapidly back home, though, as the label’s pressure to release the album
grew intense. The sixteen-song distillation of Russian performances was entitled Kohuept (Concert). “It was hardly our proudest effort,” says Billy, “which is why we refer to it to this day as Kaput.” He felt the label released it almost automatically, “not out of any belief on their part that those Russian shows needed to be documented for posterity—or that the concerts were even good enough as performances to include on an album.”
Billy approached the label and asked if they could at least price the record as dirt cheap as possible, telling Frank, “I’ll do it if they’ll agree to put it out for, say, a buck ninety-nine or something, as a discount item.” The label came back with its justification for not lowering the price, which was: It’s a historic event.
Later, Billy and company would claim in a lawsuit that the then-president of Columbia Records, Al Teller, had been in cahoots with Frank Weber to “wash” money from a pension fund Billy had set up. They also alleged that Frank and Teller had cooked up a deal to ensure that a live album came out of the Soviet trip.
Teller, who was buying a new place in New York, wanted a loan, and Frank agreed to front him the money based on the advance he and Billy got from the record company. “It was all very shady crap,” says Billy. “I hated the whole scam. I was so pissed off. This entire period is what really flushed the toilet for me with the music industry.”
The Russian tour would mark the end of Doug Stegmeyer’s long tenure, stretching back to 1974, with the band. He was the original New York band member whom Brian Ruggles had recruited as Billy was getting ready to move back from L.A.. He had been the key player for twelve years in the highly successful rhythm section. Doug was one of the Mean Brothers, an insiders’ clique in the organization consisting of Brian Ruggles, Doug, Steve Cohen, and Billy. The clique had their own jackets made up with Doberman pinschers on the back. They were the senior members of the band and crew, and they hung out with one another all but exclusively. On road trips by car, they had CB radio “handles,” Billy’s being “Serenader.” Doug’s was “Dr. No,” due to his extremely dark, if often witty, negativity about other musicians, pop music, women, and show-biz excesses in general.
Doug drifted away from the close-knit group when his depression deepened due to heavy drinking. He became more of a loner and eventually stopped interacting with anyone on the road. In the Soviet Union he never left his hotel room. Things got to a point where his enthusiasm for the music dimmed, even as he regularly voiced his resentments over the band’s financial arrangements.
Compounding Doug’s expanding moodiness was the band’s increasing exclusion from input on the recording sessions for The Bridge. Moreover, the core of the band was changing. For the next album, 1989’s Storm Front, Doug was eased out of the bass player role—he simply didn’t get the call when it was time to re-form the band—in favor of Schuyler Deale. “I’m still friendly with him,” Stegmeyer would tell Newsday at the time (October 1989), but added, as did Russell Javors, who was also not invited, that a more personal farewell conversation with Billy would have been appreciated.
Another part of the creative reboot was bringing in Foreigner’s Mick Jones after a number of albums with Phil Ramone. Says Jones: “I think Billy just wanted to have some freedom in a way. And maybe some new blood. Doing this album was a new direction for him and I think he wanted to be master of his own ship a bit more.”
Stegmeyer opened his own recording studio and did numerous sessions with other artists, and his sure hand as a producer won him an almost cultish following among Long Island musicians. Yet his demons were still very much present. “In 1995, when I heard that he had killed himself with a shotgun, I was completely shocked,” says Billy. “I had no idea he was that close to the edge.” Subsequently, Liberty DeVitto insinuated that Billy was somehow responsible for Doug’s death. However, Billy, along with many of Stegmeyer’s friends, had been unable to close the emotional gap between himself and the increasingly isolated musician. “I still miss Doug,” says Billy. “He was probably the most solid musician in my band during the years 1976 through 1988 and, in the days before his darkness overrode his humor, a good companion.”
The tension of those days wasn’t easy for Billy to live with. The external pressure from the record label about money, combined with the internal pressure from the band, sealed it for him—he needed a break.
“Thankfully, life at home was pretty wonderful,” says Billy. “Christie has a very witty streak—she’s a talented mimic, great with voices.” Her politically active streak—centered on environmental causes—happened also to fit neatly into Billy’s left-leaning politics.
Christie made fun of her modeling work, but her looks were not lost on her, and she did, reportedly, spend a good deal of time in front of the mirror. “Let’s just say it took her a long time to get ready,” Billy jokes. “I’m probably not the first husband to observe this in a wife. If we had an appointment at eight o’clock, I would tell her that it was at six-thirty—I had to build in a good ninety minutes of prep time.
“No matter what became of our marriage in the future, Christie and I did have a lot of good times,” says Billy. “She was very friendly with the guys in the band and, after Elizabeth, a breath of fresh air. When Christie was coming around, I’d let the guys know, and they’d all show up in nice outfits. I got a kick out of that.” Before the two got serious, he asked her to visit him in the studio while he was recording, and she invited Dudley Moore to come with her. (This was not long after he did 10, so at this point he was a true movie star.) During the recording session—where they were making what was basically Christie’s album, An Innocent Man, Billy could tell that Dudley was unhappy and did not want to be there, “and I thought,” says Billy, “This is kind of cool—she’s got a few guys who are battling over her, and she’s digging it.”
Christie had that kind of impact on men. “When you’re that good-looking, it’s almost freakish. I call it the Frankenstein complex. You’re beautiful now, you’re going to be beautiful when you’re older, you’re going to be beautiful till you kick off. You’re just one of those lucky people. And she understood that; she accepted her beauty. She wasn’t overly self-conscious about it. I guess I would compare it to when people tell me I’m talented as a musician. I don’t dispute it, but I don’t dwell on it either. It’s all about what you do with it.”
Genetically speaking, Billy and Christie didn’t know who Alexa was going to take after. Physically she looked more like Billy’s family, especially on his mother’s side, than Christie’s. (Pictures of Billy’s grandmother, a pretty young woman, make it evident that Alexa bears a striking resemblance to her.)
When Alexa was a kid, Christie would dye her hair blond; in fact, Alexa thought she really was a blonde until she was older. Over the years and particularly with the rise of the Internet, Alexa endured a lot of mean comments for not resembling her supermodel mom. She eventually had rhinoplasty on her nose, which she’d apparently been uncomfortable with for a while. As her public profile increased, the tabloid press in particular tried to spot more work—all of which she denied. She strove to get a singing career under way, debuting at a small Hoboken club in 2005 and releasing an EP called Sketches in 2006 and several singles since, but she has endured fairly steady jibes from the trolls of the blogosphere. “I used to want to go and smack people when I read some of the cruel stuff that was being said by amateur bloggers online,” says Billy. “Alexa is a beautiful girl. She enjoys her own exotic blend. She doesn’t look like Christie Brinkley, but all that means is that she doesn’t look like Christie Brinkley. It doesn’t make her any less beautiful.”
In 1988 Billy decided to take a brief break from his standard skill set and accepted an offer from Disney to be part of the animated film Oliver & Company. It was supposed to be an adaptation of Dickens’s Oliver Twist, and Billy would be portraying the Artful Dodger—as a dog. It wouldn’t pay much, but Billy thought it was cool, as he phrased it, that he was actually going to be an animated character i
n a Disney movie that his daughter could watch.
On the storyboards, the dog was sketched in as a scrawny, hungry-looking mutt. Later, in the recording studio, while Billy was doing the speaking parts, the animators were watching—and the next time Billy saw a drawing of the dog, he was “a lot huskier and more messed-up looking. They wanted me to be very New York, so I kind of laid on the New York accent pretty thick, like a Lower East Side, Bowery kind of accent,” he says. “It was fun. When I brought Alexa to see the movie, she was mad at me at first because I was mean to the little kitten, Oliver. And then when I stopped being mean, she said, ‘Daddy, you’re a nice dog.’ And I was a hero for a while just for playing a Disney character.”
Alexa grew up with vivacious parents, with Billy and Christie both known for having a ready sense of humor and larger-than-life personalities. “What I do is kind of crazy—musicians are akin to circus people—and Alexa was raised in that atmosphere,” says Billy. The couple always encouraged their daughter to be confident, telling her, “You’re not like everybody else—you are different. Now go for it.”
As wild as their life together seemed at times, Christie kept Billy grounded. And she still habitually called Billy only Joe, as she had when they first met. The guy in the jumpingly rhythmic song “Christie Lee” shares this pet name:
They say that Joe became a wino
They say he always drinks alone
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