Shortly after leaving the West Coast and returning to New York, Billy was finished dabbling with pot, too. All it took was a bit of chemically induced paranoia: “I smoked what turned out to be my last joint in the Upper East Side apartment that Elizabeth and I shared, and then I thought I’d stroll down Madison Avenue. But as soon as I walked outside, I panicked. I was convinced beyond any doubt that every single person in New York City, certainly those within eyeshot, could tell I was stoned. And I said to myself, This sucks. It brought me back to the day in 1966 when my high school vice principal, seeing my stubble and bloodshot eyes—the result of my playing gigs into the wee hours and then popping out of bed to go to school—called me into his office and said, ‘You’re stoned on pot, aren’t you?’ I wasn’t. And now it was time to just say nope again.”
Alcohol was, for better or worse, Billy’s drug of choice—and the one that created a thorny problem for him in terms of drawing the line. “Alcohol was the most relied-upon escape from whatever ailed me, whether it was social, emotional, or psychological in nature,” says Billy. “No matter what, alcohol was always there for me.
“Alcohol is so socially acceptable that it amounts to a kind of religion, with dedicated houses of worship spread around the globe—they’re called bars. It’s part of a lifestyle, especially in the Northeast, where, at a certain socioeconomic level, it’s often the center of the community. Ireland is like that, as the U2 boys showed me when we went to Dublin. England has its pub culture; Germany has one too. Even the French have their wine bars. When you go on the road, where do the local big shots want to take you? To their favorite bar. Booze is just an ingrained part of our shared experience, across the globe, and that’s doubly true in rock-and-roll circles.
“But if you do go over the line, you have an issue. Some people never believe they have a problem—or maybe they have the problem and don’t really recognize it. As a high-profile guy who eventually went to rehab, I have always felt a certain amount of pressure to be some kind of spokesperson about it. But I’ve never been comfortable with that.”
Billy recalls seeing a big billboard in L.A. with David Crosby’s picture on it, along with the slogan DON’T DO DRUGS, shortly after Crosby had had a very public reckoning with his own history—right down to a weapons charge and a liver transplant. “So there it was, ‘Don’t do drugs’—and it’s not that I disliked David Crosby, but I got so pissed off looking at that sign. My thought was, You’ve had your innings. Who the hell are you to tell other people what they can and can’t do? You got wasted and you blew all your money. Well, good luck with that, but it’s not the world’s problem.
“I often get all bent out of shape with these temperance spokespeople reminding everyone, I know better than you. Sorry, no, you don’t; you’re no better than me. You were just an idiot, and now it’s my turn to be an idiot. So anytime I’ve been asked to talk about it—sorry, no thanks.
“The truth is, I don’t know much about sobriety. I know a hell of a lot about drinking. And there’s no point in my talking about that, because everybody has his or her own experience. So I’m not going to be the poster boy for AA. I don’t really follow the program. Yet I’m not going to diss it, either, because it works for a lot of people. As I see it, I had my time, I came through it, and that’s that.”
BILLY HAS ALWAYS been a contradictory mix, sometimes a loner, sometimes almost desperately eager for female companionship. One thing he’s seldom done is go for long without a woman in his life. It was obvious to his cadre that after his breakup with Christie, the Carolyn relationship would take root—she had an expansive but also breezily accommodating personality. Carolyn often went on tour with Billy during their time together, to Europe and Asia, and was part of the road gang for the initial 1994 tour with Elton John. Billy even took her to Christie’s next wedding, to Peter Cook in September 1996.
All the guys in Billy’s circle loved Carolyn, a working-class girl from Queens who was “like the Shirley MacLaine to our Rat Pack,” says Billy. “Put her in a gown—like the one she wore at my Godfather-themed fiftieth birthday party—and she looked like Rita Hayworth come back to life: tall, angular, all dramatic curves and high cheekbones and a mane of red hair.” The latter attribute was never lost on Billy, back to the days of Patti Lee Berridge. “Her sense of humor came directly out of her keen intellect. She knew history, she knew literature, but she used that knowledge without pedantry. And she was always ready to make a night of it. Carolyn was just like one of the boys, but with a hell of a hollow leg: she could drink those boys right under the table.”
The road dogs could be something of a tough crowd, even for male newbies. Not everyone can handle being on the road in close quarters and often under duress, a life Billy compared to “running off with pirates.” Though stories about touring as a rock band—the groupies, drugs, backstage fighting—are legendary, it has been said that until you’ve been in the thick of it, you really don’t know it. Touring involves much in the way of puerile humor, which, in the context of a rock tour’s garrison mentality, can seem a lot funnier when you’re there.
A typical example Billy cites was the band trying to crack him up while he whistled the intro to “The Stranger”: “They’ve never been too proud to act like idiots to do it, either, like the time they all blacked out their teeth and grinned at me in unison as I started that supposedly forlorn intro. But payback is always available when you’re the bandleader.” He owned the floor and the microphone, plus a ready audience, when it came time to taunt his mates.
After adding a new face to the band—master trumpeter and flugelhorn player Carl Fischer, who received his musical graduate degree as part of the great Maynard Ferguson’s band—it was Billy’s duty to introduce him at concerts, to “let people know he’s about to blow them away. So because Carl is at least feasibly Austrian, and he’s a big, jolly guy, I began doing ersatz Schwarzenegger impressions—‘Yah, da Trumpinator’s gunna play for you now …’ The you-had-to-be-there part is watching how uncomfortable this makes him.”
According to Billy, the point to all of the humor was to keep the band loose—to keep them “on the front foot.” Sometimes the band couldn’t believe where Billy went with these bits. One time in Hong Kong, instead of singing the line “She can ruin your faith with her casual lies” from “She’s Always a Woman,” Billy sang, “She can ruin your face with her powerful thighs.” “Trust me, if you do it straight-faced and sing your heart out, the band cracks up. It’s the little things that keep you going when you’re on the road,” says Billy.
“Sometimes, when I’m singing onstage, my mind wanders—to some buried moment in my own life, or even to Where’s a good steakhouse in this town?—and suddenly I can’t get back. Then I’ll shoot a glance at another member of the band, like I’m losing the lyric, where the hell am I? And they’ll always pretty much know where I am, because they’re cueing what they play partly based on where I am in the song.”
Billy used to shoot this glance to Liberty DeVitto all the time, especially when it came to playing “Just the Way You Are.” One night, when he was supposed to be singing, “I couldn’t love you any better” (which is followed by the line “I love you just the way you are”), Billy reached “I couldn’t love you” and got lost, singing “uh-oh … hunnhhh … nnn huuuh hnnhnn …” Liberty helpfully threw in, “She got the house, she got the car …”
Billy understood that people had been coming to his concerts chiefly to see him and couldn’t necessarily name the musicians around him, but he always felt that, onstage, you couldn’t separate them; it was all about the band dynamic. He believes that you can always tell when musicians are having fun onstage: “If it’s a slog for any one of them, the audience will know it. It’ll drag the whole arena down. So it was very important to me that the band’s morale be way up and stay there; I need them to be kicking this thing as much as they can; I need them to sell it, play it, believe in it as much as I do. Otherwise, it all comes down to me alone.
”
Mistakes are going to happen with any band, he says: “Someone will miss a change, there’ll be a clinker now and again.” To Billy these errors are forgivable and forgettable—once the band has properly mocked the culprit after the gig. (He’s not immune; after a few miscues he committed vocally and on the piano in a mid-2014 Phoenix, Arizona, show while dogged by allergies, Billy sent the band an e-mail saying, “Sorry for all my clams.”) But the one thing he won’t excuse onstage is an absence of clear commitment: “Nothing is more important up there than passion—that’s what it takes to have a successful performance. And I don’t think I’ve ever lost sight of that. Even if you’re not feeling all that hot up there, or you’re sick or just not in the mood, you’ve still got to make that gig work. You’ve got to give a hundred percent no matter how you’re feeling, and that takes its toll, emotionally and physically.”
The tough part, he adds, “is when you’re not getting a great response from the audience—especially when coming off a few dates of being spoiled in cities where the fans are fervent. Whether you work the audience into a frenzy, or they psych you up into one—it works both ways—the effect is kind of like sex. There’s this exchange of energy and enthusiasm: you make them feel great, and so they make noise, and then it’s your turn to feel great, and you make noise. By the end of the show, it’s just, boom, there’s this big orgasm of applause, and everybody’s going Ahhhh. Then, when it’s over”—he laughs at his own analogy as it winds down—“you have a smoke and bathe in the afterglow of your performance.
“That’s really what you hope for, anyway. It’s what you go for every time. You work it and work it and work it—you’re supposed to kill yourself up there. And if you’re going to do it right, that’s exactly the way to do it.”
This exchange across the footlights was exactly what had made the concerts in the Soviet Union in August 1987 so much fun for Billy. The whole experience, especially onstage, was an exercise in subversion. “It was like they had no idea what to expect other than the very worst [disruptive energy], and we kind of liked that: Oh, we represent danger! For the first time in my life, I’m a threat to something! This is fantastic. What power! You can literally feel the sense of electricity bouncing back and forth between you and the audience.”
By contrast, apathy can unexpectedly rule in certain venues, in certain cities. “When there’s no vibe happening, no connection between you and them—then you’re like a soothing dose of herbal tea. It’s a bit of a downer, and everyone in the band and the road crew can sense it.”
Japan is a country where the politeness of audiences can often and notably does override the enthusiasm—the kind of audience that Billy terms “an all-too-respectful oil painting that can border on hostility.” But the band has encountered tepid audiences on random nights all over—in Canada, England, and Holland, among other places. “When an audience like that is out there, I’ll look over at Wayne Williams, my keyboard technician, and he’ll be shrugging his shoulders, as if to say, What are you going to do? We dread it,” says Billy.
A joking approach can be dangerous, as the band discovered one April Fool’s night in Chattanooga, Tennessee. Billy and the band went onstage and played their first song, then, with a few hollered thank-you’s and appreciative waves, bounded off the stage as a group.
“Hilarious, right? April Fool, right? And ‘Let’s make sure it really takes, let’s give it a good couple minutes,’ ” recalls Billy. “Then the crew guys were coming back saying, ‘They’re getting really kind of pissed off.’ We finally came back out. ‘Okay, April Fool.’ But the rest of the night was a smelly, cold, dead mackerel, just lying there, and we could not save that show no matter how hard we tried.”
All over the United States, and in Germany and Mexico, Billy and the band regularly see audiences “go apeshit.” “It sometimes makes me want to say to those other crowds, ‘Aren’t you folks having fun? I’m trying to make you feel good, baby. Let me know something. Give me a little feedback.’ ”
Experience and age have wrung most of the vanity out of Billy: “It’s when you lose sight of your role as a court jester and start taking yourself too seriously, like you’re the oracle of Delphi or something, that you’ve got a problem. As dark as my life has felt at times, I’ve always been able to get onstage and keep sight of the fact that I’m just a clown with bells hanging off his head.”
The self-deprecation doesn’t mean he can’t trace his métier back to some of the classical greats he so admires. “I’ve read a lot about Beethoven, so I know he resented the great class divide. Everybody who came before him had been hired to write music and perform for dukes and counts and princes and barons. And then Beethoven came along and said, ‘I’m not coming in through the kitchen door. I’m coming in through the front door like everybody else; I’m an artist.’ I respect that and I relate to it. But I am paid to be an entertainer. So I’m just hoping to get in and get out and put on a good show in between.
“At this point in time, I also have to consider that my core fans, baby boomers, don’t go to concerts the way they used to, and they’re not as wild when they do. So there’s not a whole lot of sexual tension you can feed on when you’re up onstage. I wasn’t exactly a matinee idol to begin with, and these days, when I’m playing ‘Still Rock and Roll to Me’ and doing my Elvis thing, flipping the mike stand around and stuff, I often feel like an idiot.
“I mean, I’m having a great time making believe this is what Elvis would do, but I’ve got no hair and I look funny on the screen, and it’s almost as if I’m sending up that whole hip-shaking thing, which is not why I’m doing it. I’m actually just forgetting my age. I’m gyrating because I feel, for a couple minutes anyhow, like I’m sixteen years old.”
IN THE SUMMER of 1998, Billy didn’t feel sixteen. He was exhausted from touring the globe—and the tour wasn’t over yet—and he wasn’t taking the best care of himself: “It started to feel like I was back on the treadmill that summer as we got ready to perform in the U.K. with a series of dates booked with Elton John.” What came to pass in the weeks that followed would mark a low point in relations with the Englishman.
“We did a show in Japan, and Billy blew his voice out really bad,” remembers Steve Cohen, who by then had grown into the role of production designer. “We were on our way to Scotland, and he knew on that flight that he was going to have a problem. We landed, and instead of taking four days off and going to bed and taking care of himself, he was with Carolyn Beegan, and we decided to go drinking. We were going to drink in every pub in Scotland—you know, where they make the Scotch.
“We were going to Mecca. It was like a junkie going to the poppy fields in Afghanistan. And I remember looking at him, thinking, This is going to be bad, because he had this real I-don’t-give-a-fuck attitude—My voice is gone, and it’s just going to go, and there’s nothing I can do about it.
“And I was thinking, No, Billy, there is something you can do about it.
“So we did Scotland, we did Ireland, we hung out with the guys in U2, and it just got worse and worse and worse. Every show was tougher and tougher and tougher, but he’s so powerful with a head of steam; you’re either on the bus or you’re off the bus, and I chose to stay on the bus.”
A throat specialist in Dublin warned Billy not to stress his voice and to rest as much as he could. But by the time the band got to Glasgow, he was already headed for a bout of sinusitis and general fatigue. Looming just ahead were a pair of early June shows at London’s Wembley Stadium, the “Hallowed Turf” of international soccer matches and near the top of the bucket list for the biggest rock acts to play.
“We were doing the concerts with Elton, and I was sort of the go-between between the two camps,” says Cohen. “And whenever Billy would fuck up or something would happen, my phone would ring, and it would be Elton saying, ‘Listen, we’ve got to look out for our boy. Tell me what’s going on. Is there anything I can do or fucking yell at him for?’
�
�It was torturous. We were in London, and there were a couple of moves that could’ve been made that could’ve saved the tour—namely, to cancel a Manchester show and a Birmingham show. But it turned out that on Elton’s previous solo tour, he had thrown a hissy fit in Manchester—he’d walked offstage—so he couldn’t cancel two times in a row. He had to play. But if we’d blown off Manchester, we would’ve had six days off, and Billy would’ve definitely recovered; we would have played the Wembley shows in London; and we would have done what was going to be a big deal, an HBO special.
“Elton would not cancel, saying ‘I don’t give a fuck. I don’t give a fuck. He’s not taking care of himself.’ That was his attitude. So Billy just continued. He was getting sicker and sicker. And in the Dorchester Hotel in London, I came into his room, and he and Carolyn were lying in bed. It was, like, five o’clock in the afternoon, and I said, ‘How do you feel?’
“And Billy said, ‘You know that scene from Patton where they ask Patton how he feels after he got fired for the second time?’ And then he did this George C. Scott impression from Patton. He said, ‘God, I feel low.’ ” Soon afterward he and Carolyn boarded the Concorde, flying home. The illness that developed from there took Billy six months to beat.
The collapse of the co-billed tour dates in the United Kingdom would scatter consequences across the years. Elton would resent Billy’s canceling, and Billy would resent Elton proceeding with the dates solo (even throwing in a couple of Billy tunes, including “Piano Man”), dimming future prospects for Billy and Elton touring those cities singly or together.
Billy Joel Page 25
