Billy Joel

by Fred Schruers

  Also, the system that had brought the Grubman firm to unmatched prominence had made it too big to be marginalized. Sony was simply too deeply in business with Grubman—he represented clients in its executive ranks as well as its biggest acts in the music marketplace—to turn on him. Grubman also could make some quite convincing arguments that the label was complicit in his mishandling of Billy’s interests. Still, Marks rattled his saber, darkly warning in American Lawyer that “if they play out their cards and take this to trial they will destroy Grubman’s career.”

  Abruptly, what had been very quiet, behind-the-scenes negotiations—principally between Billy’s attorney John Eastman and Sony Music chairman Mickey Schulhof—brought a settlement (that included an improved label deal for Billy). Eastman issued a purposefully terse statement: “It’s done. Full stop. No one is going into any detail. Everyone believes it should remain dead-ass neutral.”

  Although it was widely perceived that Schulhof had a vested interest in continuing to do business with Grubman’s firm, which ran the books for Bruce Springsteen, Michael Jackson, and other valued acts on the label, few in the business even bothered making cynical comments.

  But the combative Leonard Marks still had his blood up, especially when Grubman began saying to the media that he had “totally defeated” Billy. In early April 1995, Marks, resenting Grubman’s braggadocio, filed an affidavit in New York Supreme Court stating that the $3 million that John Eastman had once insisted Grubman pay to Billy had in fact been quietly funneled through Sony: “Sony’s payments were for one purpose only, to get Billy Joel to settle his case against Grubman.”

  It was a somewhat quixotic move by the feisty Marks, who clearly joined Billy in resenting Grubman’s cockiness. Grubman’s attorney Bert Fields vigorously denied it—“Grubman did not directly or indirectly pay one dime to Mr. Joel, nor did he funnel any money through Sony”—but Marks cited a check for $2.4 million that went from Sony to Billy on October 22, 1993, the day the lawsuit was dropped. Another coincidence noted by Marks was that on that very day Billy signed a contract with Sony to endorse some of the company’s gear in Japan. The fee was $2.4 million. Marks had filed an affidavit pointing out that various settlement drafts with Grubman along the way had been run through the Sony offices.

  As Billy now sees it, “I know Sony engineered the settlement so that they wouldn’t be implicated, because they had personal relationships—Allen was representing the executives at Sony Music, too. And neither one of them wanted anybody looking too deeply into all these conflicts of interest. Mickey Schulhof knew, ‘The Japanese don’t want this. They don’t want a scandal. Do it quietly.’ This was like a big publicity case, which was bad for business for everybody. And it got settled. It wasn’t a large amount; it kind of covered my legal fees. I didn’t really get any of my money back. And they didn’t go after wherever the money went. For all I know, it could be in the Cayman Islands right now, or a Swiss bank account. I have no idea.”

  One of the more dire examples of pure greed in a notoriously corrupt business would end in a pathetically scattered way. As in the denouement of the film Treasure of the Sierra Madre—when the ironically dubbed “noble brotherhood” falls apart, and the gold the main characters lusted over is blown away in the wind—Weber would plead bankruptcy while lieutenant Rick London’s finances were a muddle. (Embarrassingly, London’s claim to be living on unemployment benefits was contradicted when a 1990 payment of $100,000 from Frank Management was revealed, and London ended up suing to legally detach himself from the Weber settlement.) Finally, fed up with the whole ordeal, Billy and his lawyers simply walked away, with a motion that the presiding judge approved, to discontinue the suit against London. Billy would eventually forgive Rick London: “I think he just kind of went along, because that’s where the powers that be were [leading him] at that time.”

  What remained for Billy to reckon with, beyond the financial setback he’d have to work in earnest to remedy, was the emotional residue of broken faith, gut-shot friendships, an evaporating marriage, and the prospect of trying to help raise his daughter while urgent necessities forced him onto the tour treadmill. To listen to his statements in various interviews, depositions, and court filings, is to witness a cavalcade of dashed expectations in two marriages and in almost all his business relationships.

  THROUGH ALL THE legal and financial drama, Billy’s career sustained itself. In 1989, “We Didn’t Start the Fire” earned Grammy nominations for Record of the Year, Song of the Year, and Best Pop Vocal Performance, Male. The following year, Storm Front was nominated for Best Pop Vocal Performance, Male, and Billy and Mick Jones received nods for Producer of the Year. That same year, Billy was presented with a Living Legend Award at the Grammy ceremony. “Now, I know I’ve said disparaging things about these kinds of awards, but to get that Living Legend Award along with Johnny Cash and Aretha Franklin felt pretty special,” says Billy.

  If Billy had the proper share of Mets loyalty that is many a Long Islander’s prerogative, he also knew, as he sang in “Zanzibar,” that “The Yankees grab the headlines every time.” Born just minutes from Yankee Stadium, he had a literal birthright to become part of the lore of the storied venue. He’d even entertained a gaggle of Yankee stars at his home and was the clear choice to perform the first-ever rock concert at the ballpark, playing back-to-back on Friday and Saturday in the next-to-last week of June 1990. “It was 52 years ago,” the inveterate history buff informed the Friday night crowd, “on June 22 in this stadium that Joe Louis knocked out Max Schmeling!” Donning a Yankees cap, he threw some acrobatic moves around the piano to perform “Big Shot” (he laid on the piano and tossed in some lines from “Singin’ in the Rain” as a freshening downpour arrived during that song the next night).

  The New York Times’ Stephen Holden opined that “right now Mr. Joel is enjoying one of the happiest moments of his career,” pointing out that Storm Front had already sold three million copies and adding that “Mr. Joel probably comes closer than any other contemporary pop singer and songwriter to being the everyman of the New York metropolitan area.”

  The twelve songs included on the video release Billy Joel Live at Yankee Stadium later that year were shot (by director Jon Small, as always still in touch with his friend) in a rather kaleidoscopic, busy style that may see some revising with a planned recutting of the concert film in the near future.

  A much more compact celebration of his place in the local lore came later that year when, in early September 1990, Billy proudly did a benefit performance for the baymen at Long Island’s Jones Beach Amphitheater. (He also pledged to the group’s fund-raising the royalties from “The Downeaster Alexa” sales as a single.) He reminisced for a bit to Diane Ketcham of the New York Times, citing the increasingly upscale succession of Long Island towns he had lived in—“Hicksville, Oyster Bay, Dix Hills, Cold Spring Harbor, Cove Neck, Hampton Bays, East Marion, East Hampton”—and also how he first met lifelong friend Billy Zampino: “ ‘When I was about five or six,’ Mr. Joel said, ‘my mother told me, “Here’s a quarter. Go buy some candy and make a friend.”… It was the best quarter I ever invested.’ ”

  There would be other highlights during this time, including the news that one of Billy’s favorite places, a park in his adoptive town, would be named after him: the Billy Joel Cold Spring Harbor Park. “That was kind of a gas for my mom,” says Billy. “A choir sang ‘The Downeaster Alexa,’ and they handed my daughter a bouquet during the ceremony.” Then Garth Brooks recorded Billy’s song “Shameless”—originally written as an homage to Jimi Hendrix—and made it a number one country hit in late 1991.

  During his years with Columbia, when Billy would hit a dry spell between studio albums, the label would exercise its contractual right to put out various compilations or live albums—they would be titled Greatest Hits, Complete Hits, Essential Hits, 2000 Years: The Millennium Concert, and the like. Billy could usually be relied upon to mock or even disavow these releases, at one poi
nt describing them collectively as the “We Really Mean It This Time” series.

  One way to interrupt that process, of course, was to create a new album of fresh material. Billy had been begun, in the summer of 1992, staging a series of recording sessions in a Southampton church that had been outfitted as a temporary studio, while he also cut two Elvis Presley tunes for the sound track to the film Honeymoon in Vegas. But he wanted to immerse himself even deeper in the work, so he cast about on Shelter Island, a ferry ride away from Long Island’s easternmost tip, and found a lobster shed that once stored traps. Installed there with the core players—Liberty DeVitto, Tommy Byrnes, and Schuyler Deale—he self-produced a half-dozen tracks, one of which, the hard-rocking Cream-style “Shades of Grey,” would make it onto the album that eventually emerged.

  But Billy felt there was more to get out of the songs, and based on the recommendation of Don Henley, he brought on veteran session guitar man Danny Kortchmar—Kootch, as he was nicknamed—to bring the best out of the material. While Danny admired what Billy had accomplished with Phil Ramone, and Mick Jones’s production had made Storm Front a success, he knew Billy had hired him because “he wanted a change—everything can’t remain static.”

  A point of pride for Kortchmar is that River of Dreams became the album in which Billy shed, rather than revisited, many of his influences. Aside from “Shades of Grey,” an inheritance from the lobster shed sessions that hung in to be one of the final album’s ten cuts, “there’s no tune on there where Billy’s flat-out doing someone else. He really sounds like himself. One of the things he told me was: ‘You know, all my hits were novelty records—“Tell Her About It” was Motown, “The Longest Time” was doo-wop, “Uptown Girl” was the Four Seasons.’ ” Kortchmar can’t resist adding that the latter song remains “the best Four Seasons song ever written or recorded, by the way. Vastly superior to anything they could ever do.”

  Billy gave Danny the Shelter Island tracks, and after a listen (with Niko Bolas, who would engineer and mix the work to come), Kortchmar was frank about being unimpressed with what he heard, even though he feared his reaction wouldn’t be that welcome: “We’re snotty L.A. guys; we think we know everything, right? Got a major chip on our shoulder. It’s true. But finally I realize, Oh my God, we’re going to have to tell Billy. So I called him and I said, ‘Well, I listened to the tapes.’ He said, ‘So what did you think?’ I said, ‘I loved three guys in that band. I loved the piano player. I loved the singer. And I loved whoever wrote the songs.’ ”

  Though Kortchmar would ultimately welcome Tommy Byrnes in for overdubs on guitar—“a great guy and a really good, versatile player”—he had session men in mind. “Believe me,” Kortchmar shares, “I wanted that gig. It wasn’t like I wanted to risk everything asking him to try other guys.” But first came the meet-up with the existing band. They were slumped in the studio lounge, unenthusiastic to meet him, recalls Kortchmar: “Liberty particularly was kind of defensive in that he was ‘Oh, you L.A. guys, I know what you want. You want me to play just like Russ Kunkel, I can do that.’ I never said anything, haven’t said a word. Yet.” In the back of Danny’s mind were his intended drummers: “Everybody knows Steve Jordan’s one of the most killer funksters ever. He’ll cut your throat from across the room with his beat. And Zach Alford is badass.”

  The band was grudgingly willing to go at a couple of the tracks again. Kortchmar, remembering the band’s apathy, seethes about it to this day: “ ‘Okay, you want to hear it again, it goes like this.’ No dynamics at all.

  “The first thing you learn as a sideman,” adds Kortchmar, “and I’d been one for a long time, is you are not James Taylor. You are not Jackson Browne. You are not Billy Joel. They’re Billy Joel. And if you don’t believe me, go into Madison Square Garden and say, ‘Here I am,’ see what happens. I’ve never said, ‘I’m so cool, I’m here forever.’ ”

  Relations between Billy and Liberty were strained, and when Billy perceived the same attitude that Kortchmar did, he was willing to make the change. He had watched when Danny asked Liberty to “bring it up,” and he had watched when, as Kortchmar recalls, Liberty played the whole song “real quiet.” Billy then became resolute about finding new players.

  “In that way he’s kind of like Keith Richards,” says Danny, “who is the sweetest guy you’d ever want to meet—just the loveliest fellow. Right up until you fuck with him.”

  As the enterprise moved into midtown Manhattan’s Hit Factory, Kortchmar’s first priority was setting Billy up to bring the most out of what was clearly a heartfelt set of tunes. “Billy is a guy capable of melancholy,” he says, “as many great artists are. To be that smart and that talented means you’re going to be miserable at least part of the time.

  “But he’s so lovable, just a lovable guy. And I felt I didn’t want to probe into his life, and I also wanted to be very protective. In some ways this is his most personal album. Whatever he was going through, I wanted to make sure that none of us added to it.”

  “I really wanted to close the door on the whole angst behind the lawsuit stuff,” Billy told Tim White in an interview for Billboard in December 1994. But exploiting all he’d been through in the legal wrangles was a double-edged sword. Asked if he really wanted to relive it, Billy said he used to make albums, not dispassionately, but reluctantly: “When I had to deliver an album, I would sit down and write. I’ve reached the point in my life where I’m not gonna write unless I have something to say, and it makes it much more substantial for me to feel that … and I did have something to say on this album.

  “I think the song ‘The River of Dreams’ is the critical point,” he says. “I keep referring to this character because that’s who I was then and not now. When I was writing, I was actually living through these feelings and working things out—a very cathartic album for me in terms of how I was gonna come to grips with the things that were troubling me.

  “I didn’t realize how pissed off I was until I got halfway through this thing, and I realized what I’d been writing was angry, bitter, mocking, cynical, disappointed, disillusioned. I mean, ever look at the sequence of the songs? The first song was really just ‘the whole thing is a cesspool’ ”—an echo of his father’s disturbing sentiment from Billy’s boyhood—“ ‘the whole thing is a crock of shit.’ The second song—completely mocking, completely betrayed, wounded. There’s a scream at the end of that song, which I don’t know if I’ll be able to hit that scream again—just this primal thing.”

  On that cut, “The Great Wall of China,” which began with the working title “Frankie My Dear I Don’t Give A Damn,” Billy vents the rage he had publicly kept bottled up:

  Your role was protective, your soul was too defective …

  All the king’s men and all the king’s horses

  Can’t put you together the way you used to be

  We could have gone all the way to the Great Wall of China

  Now all you’re going to be is history.

  In composing the songs more or less in the sequence they’d follow in the recording process and on the completed album, Billy was returning to his original template—making concept-driven albums, that, in their striving to have a beginning, a middle, and an end, in some ways resembled musicals. “I’m a real album artist,” he continues. “I write an album to be an album from beginning to end, and I only write about ten to twelve songs, tops. Then I’m completely exhausted, destroyed at the end of this thing—emotionally, physically, mentally—every which way. I’m empty. It’s hell being in the middle of it … and there is nothing more satisfying than having written it all.”

  On an album that was meant to blow the doors off musically even as Billy sorted through some demons, “No Man’s Land” was an excellent starting point. He had all the wrath he needed to perform that song as well, he told White: “What’s happening is rampant consumerism.… We have destroyed a lot of the physical aspects of the country, and the spiritual aspects. It’s this ongoing development of su
burbia [that] for so many years we’re all programmed to think we want, that everybody wants. We’ll make a unique manicured place to live out in the sticks, or we’ll gentrify the city or all these things that they look nice on the surface. Everything is pretty on the surface, but underneath it’s corrupt. The whole thing is built on crap.

  “There’s a line in the song that says, ‘I see children with their boredom and their vacant stares / God help us all if we are to blame for their unanswered prayers.’ I may sound like an old rock-and-roll biblical prophet because of the era I come from … but I think they’re being manipulated by TV, by the fashion industry. I don’t think [musicians] are leaders anymore. Rock and roll used to lead the whole thing, and now the tail is wagging the dog.”

  Kortchmar and Billy struggled at length to find the right setting for the album’s title track. “One version was with [vocal group] the Simms Brothers, and that was very doo-woppy,” says Kortchmar, “kind of greaseball Arthur Avenue style. Then the Floyd Brothers did a much more gospel-style version. And then [the one with] his own backup singers from the road, led by Crystal Taliefero, was the one Billy wanted.”

  Says Billy, “What happened when I got to The River of Dreams was that I had begun to reaffirm an underlying faith in myself that I had lost. I had questioned my judgment and my faith in mankind … lost faith in myself and my ability to discern and my ability to form any kind of judgment about what the hell was going on around me.

  “I had always written kind of as an onlooker from a journalistic sense, and then I realized I had been so wrong in my judgment about the people I trusted and held close—how could I have been right about anything else? It kind of just blew me out of the water, and I realized, by the time I got to this song, that I was looking for justice and nobody gets any justice. All you can have is faith. You gotta believe in something or else you’re lost—you’re in the abyss.