They say he stumbles like a blind man
They say he sold his saxophone
Even the band must face the music
That’s what the moral is to me
The only time you hit the high note
Is when you play for Christie Lee.
“It’s almost prophecy there, I guess,” says Billy. “Because I’m always assuming that things are going to have an unhappy ending.”
Billy Joel’s boxing stance served him well as a youth, and again as seen in this shot from 1989’s Storm Front. Four years later, in “The Great Wall of China,” Billy Joel would paraphrase Marlon Brando’s rebuke from On the Waterfront: “Charlie, you shoulda looked out for me.” (Photo credit pt3.1)
CHAPTER 11
STORM FRONT
As something of a reluctant pilgrim in the music business, by the late 1980s Billy had passed through the limbo of waiting out his Artie Ripp deal and seen a couple circles of suffering in the trade. Now he was about to encounter some deeper ones, including greed, fraud, and treachery. “It’s normal for kids,” Billy says, “to think that there’s no such thing as a completely bad person. Sure, people make mistakes or head down the wrong path sometimes, but in the mind of a kid that doesn’t necessarily make them rotten. But as we grow up, some of us confront people who make us believe that there really are people who are just that: rotten through and through.”
For Billy, that person was Frank Weber.
Had Billy been paying close heed to Frank’s managerial practices, he might have taken a warning from the complicated legal squabble Frank and Elizabeth had gotten into in the wake of the $5.5 million IRS levy notice that had popped up back in 1984. At the time, Frank’s gambit was to go after Elizabeth for half of the liability, on the premise that she had received 50 percent of the income generated during that time. Accordingly, Frank had a lien placed on Elizabeth’s portion of Billy’s copyrights, to theoretically cover her supposed share of the tax bill. Although Frank’s machinations quickly entangled brother and sister in lawsuits, Billy accepted Frank’s continued assurances then that he was handling the tax hit.
Frank liked casino gambling, and Billy, in hindsight, might have seen that as symptomatic of a larger problem. Frank would often take off for Vegas to play blackjack, roulette, and craps. He bet on horses, too, and even owned a few Thoroughbreds. Meanwhile, in a strategy separate from addressing the existing IRS claim, he had Billy invested in supposed tax shelters—oil, gas, and real estate deals. “And what did I know? I just figured, Well, he’s a businessman. He knows what he’s doing,” says Billy.
Christie was the one who saw the red flags: “I saw things that I don’t think Billy saw, because he’s a very loyal guy. He doesn’t like to think anything bad about people, and he likes to believe that if he is treating people right, then they will treat him right too. So he didn’t check to see if Frank was being honest with him. He just blindly believed that this guy would never do anything to hurt him.”
Christie has theorized that Billy may have transferred some of his desire for a father figure onto his manager, which not only gave Frank too much power, it closed his eyes to the betrayal—“because who wants to know he can’t trust his family, his own father?”
Even as Billy was reluctant to wake up to the situation, Christie was making her feelings known. “I kept seeing little things—‘Gosh, Billy, I don’t get it. Why is Frank going on a private jet? Isn’t it the rock star who’s supposed to be on the private jet? We always fly commercial, and he’s always on a private jet.’
“If a horse was making money, it was owned by Frank. If a horse broke down, it was owned by Billy. There was a real trail there. When I finally had enough, I said to Billy, ‘I don’t trust this guy. I don’t think he has your best interests at heart, and I notice before he does business with you, he takes you out for drinks.’
“And Billy’s first reaction was ‘Hey, I’ve known him a lot longer than I’ve known you. You don’t talk bad about him.’ ”
About then Billy’s troubles with the IRS over the pre-1984 earnings were compounded by the agency’s investigation of the tax shelters Frank had set up. “Wait a minute—how the hell did this happen?” Billy remembers asking. “I had all these successful albums. I’m supposed to be pretty solid here.… I owe Uncle Sam how many million?” Billy started investigating and learned about the schemes Frank had gotten him into: shady companies, bad investments, scams. “If the guy had just taken the money and put it in the bank, we would’ve been set. But I don’t think he believed in himself enough to leave things alone, let that nest egg grow. He had to prove somehow that he could turn it into real money. I was never like that; I’m not a gambler.”
Even as his financial life was in a shambles, Billy was getting some welcome feedback on his professional life, which increased his absorption in his music—possibly at the expense of minding the store. One night in 1988 Christie and Billy went to see Madonna in David Mamet’s play Speed the Plow. “I’m a big Mamet fan,” says Billy. “After all, he’s the guy who called show business a ‘depraved carnival.’ And even though I wasn’t so impressed with the play itself, I’ll never forget that night.
“Because when the show ended and people started exiting the theater, the great composer and conductor Leonard Bernstein, who was walking up the aisle with his little cape on, stopped right by my seat. He knew who I was.”
Billy was floored.
“Billy Joel,” he said. Then Leonard—a bit theatrically—put out his hand and added, “You should be writing musicals. Broadway needs you.”
Stunned, Billy thought, Good God, Leonard Bernstein knows my music? The man who wrote West Side Story thinks I should be writing Broadway musicals? He remembers that “Bernstein was dropping these song titles, my song titles—you know, ‘New York State of Mind’ and ‘Just the Way You Are’—and I hadn’t realized that he even knew I existed.
“There have been a handful of moments like this in my life, when it suddenly hits me that these monumental musical figures—people like Sinatra, Brian Wilson, Stevie Wonder, Tony Bennett, Paul McCartney—actually know my stuff. I always try to keep these moments in mind when the criticism stings. I say to myself, Wait a minute, what’s really important? Ray Charles, that’s what. Because when the troubles come, you have to be able to see the big picture.”
At that time, unfortunately, Billy’s big picture was clouded by the ongoing legal hassles, and as the accompanying financial troubles deepened, Christie Brinkley’s mother, known to not be shy with her opinions, lambasted her son-in-law: “How could you let this happen? How could you be so stupid?”
She was harsh, and Billy was already feeling bad enough. “I thought, I don’t need this from my own in-laws, from my own family. Although we’re friends now, Christie might have a selective memory about how grievous all this was to me, what a terrible time in my life that was. I was in the depths of despair.”
“He was going through that horrible period, and at some point in that period he grew a beard,” Christie remembers. “And he said to me later that that was like a symbol of trying to just push away some of the difficult things that were going on at that time—it was protecting him, in a way.”
What made Billy the angriest about the legal wrangling was that he knew he would have to rebuild the fortune that Frank had squandered, which meant month upon month on the road, away from Alexa, who was nearing her fourth birthday in 1989, a tender stage for her developing personality.
As if the revelations about Frank’s mismanagement weren’t enough, Billy also had to join in an expanding lawsuit levying a related set of accusations against his attorneys, then the most powerful lawyer partnership in the business, Allen Grubman and Arthur Indursky of Grubman Indursky.
With all of this meshuggaas going on, Billy was about to get to work on a new album, Storm Front. To complicate life still further, he had to do so while installing new bass player Schuyler Deale, once of the local favorites the Good Rats (“I just thought it w
as time to work with someone with a different spin on things,” Billy told Newsday). Even more challenging, he did so while working with new producer Mick Jones. As good as the work with Phil Ramone had been for Billy, with seven hit albums over ten years, it was time to start fresh.
Storm Front, in accord with its downbeat tone, had on the front cover a black-on-red nautical warning flag snapping in the wind, underscoring the ominous title. It was, in hindsight, proof of Billy’s prescience that “there’s some shit coming, follow me and you’ll see.
“Sometimes you really don’t know what the gist of an album is going to be until the last song gets written,” says Billy. Storm Front presented itself as an account of turmoil, in both personal and business relationships: “There was a lot of anger and frustration and bitterness and confusion in my life then, and I was working through that, I guess.”
“He got a lot of good songs out of it,” says Christie. “I think everything he did after that started with ‘I’ll prove [Frank] wrong, and I’ll earn it back, and I’ll make it happen,’ and we’re all the beneficiaries, with all the great music he’s made since then.”
Mick Jones was very aware that he’d been brought to make a change, to push Billy in more of a rock direction. Billy told management aide Jeff Schock that he wanted a “roadhouse” recording, vigorous and lively.
Even given a firm mandate, Jones says, “It was a little daunting for me in that I knew Phil’s successful history with Billy. And I admired him as one of the leading producer-arrangers who’d been there from early on. He’d worked with Sinatra at one point, which was kind of wild. We had a certain mutual respect. And I just remember that afterward we bumped into each other at the Grammys, where I was up for producer [co-credited with Billy] with that album. And [Phil] said, ‘You know, Mick, if it was anybody else, I’d have been really pissed. But you did a great job, and I’m really very happy—and congratulations.’ And I thought, Wow, that’s a real gent.”
The big hit from Storm Front was destined to be “We Didn’t Start the Fire,” which came to Billy as the result of a conversation with Sean Lennon. Sean had been in school in Europe with Billy’s stepbrother Alexander, a credentialed orchestra conductor based in Europe, and his gang of musicians. One day Sean stopped by one of Billy’s recording sessions. It was 1989, and Sean, who was coming up on a birthday, was quite depressed about the times, with all the troubles going on in the news—war in Chechnya, the IRA setting off terror bombs in London, Iraq arming itself, tribal war in Africa, Mideast skirmishes. Billy listened to the litany and replied “Oh, man, we all thought that, too, when we were young: My God, what kind of world have we inherited?”
Sean’s response was “Yeah, but at least when you were a kid, you grew up in the fifties, when nothing happened.” Billy’s generation, Sean said, hadn’t really had scourges like the current generation had—like crack and the AIDS epidemic.
Billy, who had just turned forty, had been thinking of what had transpired in his own lifetime, so he said to Sean, “Are you kidding me? Have you ever heard of the Korean War? You ever hear of Little Rock? You ever hear of the Hungarian Uprising? All kinds of stuff happened.”
“Oh, not that I knew of,” Sean answered. Immediately Billy thought, I’ve got to write about this. He started with 1949 and then just went on through to 1989. The song was going to be Billy’s response to Sean, and to his generation, explaining that these epic struggles had been going on forever and would certainly continue.
“The chain of news events and personalities came easily—mostly they just spilled out of my memory as fast as I could scribble them down,” says Billy. “I had a chord progression that originally belonged to a country song I was trying to write, and I sandwiched the words into those chords—‘Harry Truman, Doris Day,’ okay, so far so good—but then I didn’t know what to call the song, and therefore what words to use in the chorus.”
Then one night, in the studio at the Hit Factory, Rolling Stone publisher Jann Wenner visited Billy. Jann was a friend of Mick Jones’s and a motorcycle-riding buddy and neighbor of Billy’s in East Hampton. “I was throwing all these ideas out for titles,” Billy remembers. “And each time Jann just shook his head. Dancing Through the Fire? That sucks. Waltzing Through the Fire? No from Jann. We Didn’t Start the Fire? And all of a sudden Jann went, ‘Yeah—that’s cool.’
“So it’s Jann’s fault,” says Billy. “I’m going to blame it on him. Because some people hate that song.” Though the single did ultimately go to the top of the Billboard chart, nagging criticism of it would remain. “Even I realized I hated the melody. It was horrendous, as I said at the time; it was like a droning mosquito. What does the song really mean? Is it an apologia for the baby boomers? No, it’s not. It’s just a song that says the world’s a mess. It’s always been a mess, it’s always going to be a mess. I’m not apologizing for anything. This is what happened.”
Having grown up with Scholastic Weekly as a schoolboy, Billy was especially glad to hear that the publication used that song as a teaching aid in one of its issues. Now the staccato rush of events and personalities can be found and studied at leisure online, at Wikipedia and in a couple of clever amateur videos, with the dates conveniently posted alongside.
We didn’t start the fire
No we didn’t light it
But we tried to fight it
Joseph Stalin, Malenkov, Nasser and Prokofiev,
Rockefeller, Campanella, Communist Bloc …
Ole Miss, John Glenn, Liston beats Patterson
Pope Paul, Malcolm X, British Politician sex
J.F.K. blown away, what else do I have to say?
We didn’t start the fire
It was always burning
Since the world’s been turning.
“Storm Front was poised a bit uneasily between songs about the wider world and more personal writing,” says Billy. “ ‘I Go to Extremes’ was clearly the latter. The presumption was that I was addressing Christie, but given my tendency toward mood swings, I was also talking to myself”:
Darling I don’t know why I go to extremes
Too high or too low there ain’t no in-betweens
And if I stand or I fall
It’s all or nothing at all
Darling I don’t know why I go to extremes.
Even as he contemplated the new material he was working on, Billy realized that his marriage, though stable enough, had drifted a goodly distance from what had begun as a delirious idyll: “I suppose ‘State of Grace’ is hard to tag as anything other than at least a subconscious attempt to figure out a way back to what Christie and I once had”:
I’m never certain that you read me right
Sometimes you don’t want to see …
Holding you here is so hard to do …
I’m losing you.
“When you’re facing a personal crisis, a natural instinct is to go to the basic truths in your life,” says Billy. Although he’d grown up in a neighborhood that essentially paved over one of Long Island’s traditional industries (farming), the time he’d spent dredging oysters and getting to know some of the Island’s native-born fisherman taught him to regard the baymen as the surviving heart of an increasingly crowded and industrialized environment. Under pressure from conservationists and sport fisherman, and forced to travel farther out to sea to find their catch, they were under serious threat from the twentieth century, as he all but roars in “The Downeaster Alexa”:
I was a bayman like my father was before
Can’t make a living as a bayman anymore
There ain’t much future for a man who works the sea
But there ain’t no island left for islanders like me.
“I composed a song that reminded me of an old-time sea chantey, with the pounding cadences of shipboard work—hauling up rope or an anchor chain.” In the mix with his full-throated vocal, Billy added his own accordion and a contribution from someone listed in the credits as “World Famous Incognito Violinist”—It
zhak Perlman, an adoptive Islander, who couldn’t use his name due to contractual obligations to another label. When it came time to name the boat in the song, Billy chose the Downeaster designation, which began among boat builders as a description of a Maine lobstering boat. And then his daughter’s name was a natural choice as one that would look good in black and gold on the fantail.
Jones knew the record had hits on it, but in the late stages, he felt it was shy one last potential winner. “There was a period when we were quite friendly,” he says, “spent quite a bit of time together socially too. And toward the end I sat down and listened to what we had, and I couldn’t help thinking that if we got one more song, maybe one more single, that the album would go completely over the top. I started to gently try and suggest it to Billy. I suggested once every few days. And then once every day, and then once every few hours. And Billy got almost down on his knees one night and said, ‘Mick, what are you doing to me? I can’t do this. I’m going to lose my family, I’m going to lose my wife, I’m going to lose—’ and I said, ‘Come on, you’re talking to me. I know what life as a rock star is.’ ”
And thus they put in the work, and the tenth cut on Billy’s eleventh studio album became Billy’s solo performance—on piano, synth, and vocal—of “And So It Goes,” one of the rare compositions that had survived for some time on his shelf. The song exemplified Billy’s practice of turning his love life’s reversals into relatable lyrics, as he recaptured the feeling from six years earlier (“And you can have this heart to break …”) that his romance with Elle Macpherson would probably be a short-lived one.
For a downbeat ballad, the song would make surprising progress up the charts, to number thirty-seven—as a sort of palate cleanser between “We Didn’t Start the Fire” and “I Go to Extremes,” which went to number six.
THE HITS WOULD come in due course, but at the time when Billy and company finished Storm Front, they didn’t know quite what they had. The charts were not a primary concern for Billy because he was seriously distracted by the financial and legal mess he was embroiled in. When it was time to hand in the album, the normal procedure would have been to give it to his manager, who would then go to the record company. But given the confusion that was breaking out, as Billy grew more aware of his manager Frank’s malfeasance, Billy handed it to the record company personally, saying that he was no longer working with Frank and that there was going to be a lawsuit.
Billy Joel Page 21
