But a few months later, after Billy had recovered, he received one of the great honors of his career, and it gave him the major lift he badly needed.
THERE’S AN AXIOM that all manner of public figures become respectable if they hang around long enough, and in late 1998 Billy was informed that, having reached the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame’s minimum twenty-five-year anniversary of the release of his first record, he was on the short list for induction the following year. Five years prior, he’d attended the Hall’s groundbreaking tenth-anniversary ceremony in Cleveland, along with Pete Townshend and Little Richard. He would be there again for its twenty-fifth-anniversary celebration, held at Madison Square Garden in October 2009. But a nomination for admission into the hall isn’t a guarantee of being voted in, and in 1999 two of the places were assuredly going to his fellow nominees Paul McCartney and Bruce Springsteen. (Ultimately joining them were performers Curtis Mayfield, Del Shannon, Dusty Springfield, and the Staples Singers.)
In the end Billy was voted in, and that evening, March 15, 1999, felt more significant to him than all the Grammy ceremonies that brought him awards over the years. When he heard that Ray Charles himself would induct him, he was all the more gratified. Ray did not disappoint, winning fervent applause as soon as he appeared onstage. With his wonderfully ragged-but-right style of speechifying, he gave Billy a great introduction, in which feeling, at times, trumped coherence:
I’m here to say something to you that, sincerely from my heart.… My friend, Billy Joel, I want you to know, first of all, I genuinely love and respect this man. He’s ultratalented—that’s number one. Now, some of you are gonna say, “Well, wait a minute, now—where do you come off.… Why do you feel like that, Ray?” Well, I’ll give you just a little insight into my brain. First of all, if you think about a man who has maybe thirty-seven, thirty-eight huge hits, thirteen of ’em went in the top ten, three of ’em were number one, that gives you what they say, “the proof of the pudding is in the eating.”
Billy Joel said, “I want to play my music from my experience,” which said to me he wanted to play his music according to the life that he saw around him, what was important to him. Beautiful man. Piano Man, they call him. I like that. “Just the Way You Are,” yeah, okay, man, I hear that. And you know—I don’t want to bring myself too much into this, but I have to say, to me, he wrote one of the most beautiful songs that we sung together, called “Me and My Baby Grand,” you know. And I guess I’ll leave you with this thought, because he said it himself. He said, “Yeah, but it’s still rock and roll to me.” I like that. All right. All right. Did y’all hear and see all of that? I would like to say, ladies and gentlemen, it is truly my privilege to introduce a man, as I said earlier, that I truly love and admire, into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame: Mr. Billy Joel. You’re inducted, Brother. You’re inducted now. I got you!
Ray seemed like a tough act to follow, but Billy had prepared some remarks, and he managed a few thank-you’s to some of his longtime bandmates and crew members, including Ruggles, Cohen, and production manager Bobby Thrasher. The emotions flooded in as he spoke. “Can you believe this?” he began.
That’s the Washington Monument, you know?… I’ve had the most amazing life, and it’s mostly because of rock-and-roll music. I love all kinds of music, and I’m right now writing what would be considered romantic mid-nineteenth-century classical music.… Music has made such a wonderful life for me.…
Now, I grew up in Levittown, okay? Not exactly the epicenter of soul in America, you know?… So where were we gonna find soul? Where were we gonna find the soul of America? You know where we got it? We got it from the radio. We got it from rock-and-roll music—that’s where we got it from. And I’m not talking about Pat Boone. And I’m not talking about Fabian. And I’m not talking about Frankie Avalon. I’m talking about Ray Charles, and Little Richard, and Chuck Berry, and Fats Domino, and Wilson Pickett, and James Brown, and Otis Redding, and Little Anthony and the Imperials, and Frankie Lymon and the Teenagers—that’s where we got it. So I wanna thank those people, ’cause they were the real pioneers. And I know I’ve been referred to as derivative.
The charge still rankles: “What I said that night was, if being derivative was a reason to exclude a musician from being inducted, then there wouldn’t be any white people here at all.” He concluded, “ I know we’re on TV, but we’ve gotta get some outrageous shit started here, you know what I mean?
Then they got the obligatory jam going, and due both to the elite cadre of musicians present and to the raw emotion that followed Paul McCartney’s tribute to his recently deceased wife Linda, the evening would be described by Rolling Stone as “the most emotionally moving, musically satisfying night the Hall has ever seen.” The stage was crowded with musicians, Billy’s peers, and even his idols. He even got to kick off “Let It Be,” singing the first verse himself. Then Paul McCartney made his way onstage and took it home.
* * *
BY THE FALL of that year, 1999, Carolyn and Billy were nearing the end of a great run. They had traveled the world together, and she had stood beside him both figuratively, as a boon companion who could handle herself well in any setting, and literally, such as when they stood at the door of his house on his fiftieth birthday greeting his friends and family. But the things she wanted and needed from the relationship—stability, starting a family of her own—just weren’t what Billy could offer at that stage.
While Carolyn and Billy never really lived together, she may have been hoping they’d get married someday—although Billy had told her from the start that he didn’t want that again. He was still feeling burned from his second failed marriage to Christie, and he was pretty sure it would be a mistake to go for a third. If she wanted a chance at marriage and kids, Billy wasn’t going to stand in the way.
The couple finally accepted romantic defeat one night shortly before the end of the year. It was the dawn of the new millennium, and to Billy it seemed like everybody was trying to reprioritize, to do the right thing. He was thinking about Carolyn and himself—how they weren’t going anywhere—and it felt to him like a stalled situation. So after a series of very amicable conversations, they decided to go forward as friends, before any bitterness developed. By all accounts, Carolyn seemed to agree, although Billy learned later that she had been seen parked in a driveway not too long afterward, sobbing that it was really over.
Looking back, it might have been naïve for Billy to assume that no matter what happened later in his life, he and Carolyn had built such a strong bond that their friendship could survive anything. But then he started seeing Trish Bergin, who wasn’t keen on him maintaining his close friendship with Carolyn. Years later, neither was his future wife Katie Lee. “Nobody wants an old flame around,” says Billy. “You’re only asking to get burned.”
CHAPTER 14
MOVIN’ OUT, AGAIN
Part of the reason there’s been almost no new pop music from Billy since 1993 is that after eleven albums of thorough self-revelation, he felt a barrier building, preventing him from writing much about his personal life. He’d given a great deal away in his lyrics over the years, revealed a lot emotionally, and he “just plain didn’t want to do that anymore.”
Early on, his label, his band, and his fans on the street must have been baffled as to why he’d stop at this stage. The title cut from River of Dreams came out on the last day of July 1993 and quickly rose to number three on the singles charts. The album followed ten days later and became his first album to enter the charts at number one, in the third week of August. Three more singles charted, though not as impressively.
The reviewers reached deep in their praise, with Rolling Stone saying Billy was “diving further into the philosophical abyss of middle age with the fury of a dreamer searching for an answer before time fades away.” Entertainment Weekly called the album “a popmeister’s epiphany, a pensive record that manages to be irresistible.” Billboard pointed out that this was his fastest-selling alb
um ever and a top-ten hit in many foreign markets. The by-now-familiar Stephen Holden byline in the New York Times review of an October 4 Madison Square Garden show said that both Billy’s performance and the success of the new album suggested that “he is one of a handful of pop entertainers who need not fear middle-aged obsolescence.”
But neither the praise nor the avid commercial reception seemed to induce Billy to make plans for the next album, and his resistance speaks to the sincerity of his stance, which by now few doubt. His deep reluctance to further dredge up and churn out his inner self in his music is evidenced in an experience he had—almost writing a song. One night on his 2008 Australian tour, sitting at a baby grand piano in a nearly empty nighttime bar in a Melbourne hotel, Billy played a few chords to a poignant melody he was still hashing out. It was a love song that had been in his head, and in the bar that evening he got an idea for a lyric. The visual in his head was of a young woman standing on a hill in a meadow calling to an older man, “Come on, come with me. Don’t stay mired in the past.”
The song, according to Billy, had a bit of an “Innocent Man” feeling, and it moved into an even more direct beseeching—Come, trust me. I’m not those people, I’m not your past. I’m the future, come with me. “Though it would probably make for a damn good song,” said Billy, he wouldn’t be writing that one. It felt too personal, and at this point Billy claimed to not enjoy sorting through his romantic history.
But while Billy’s decision to stop writing for a pop audience roughly coincided with the Christie breakup, it wasn’t only about that—or Billy’s fatigue with the music business. It was largely because he felt he could continue to express himself musically without having to struggle to find the right words, and without grinding on as part of the machine that was engineered to create and distribute pop music.
In a sense, the classical compositions that would make up his next album, 2001’s Fantasies & Delusions, forced themselves into being. The inspiration for these pieces would come somewhat randomly to Billy. “Waltz No. 1” is subtitled “Nunley’s Carousel,” after an old carousel, built around 1912, that is part of Nunley’s Amusement Park, the Long Island family institution that closed in 1995. That waltz would have an added life when it was adopted by classical pianist Jeffrey Biegel, who had grown up riding that same carousel (and had taken piano lessons from a friend of Billy’s dad’s named Morton Estrin). Biegel assembled a concerto based on “Waltz No. 1” and several of Billy’s other Fantasies pieces that he called “Symphonic Fantasies for Piano and Orchestra.”
Another waltz had been playing in Billy’s head for a while, and one day it just started to spill out. He happened to be in midtown Manhattan, near the Steinway showroom where he was well known, so he walked in and asked to use a piano. They offered him the Rachmaninoff Room, which was empty at the time, and he went inside and wrote the piece down, not a little intimidated to be doing so in full view of a mammoth oil painting of Sergei Rachmaninoff himself looming over him. (Not many years later, his own portrait would be hanging very near the master’s.)
Over the next few months, Billy finished the waltzes with the help of pianist Richard Joo. He would take Billy’s compositions, which mostly existed only in his head, notate them, and undertake the actual piano playing. By April 2000 they had recorded six pieces, with three more in the hopper.
One composition that illustrates how some emotions seem to run deeper than Billy can comfortably express in words is “Soliloquy (On a Separation).” About being apart from Alexa—a scenario he often faced during the time she was in Christie’s custody—the song grew out of a kind of internal set of lyrics: “I let the piano give voice to phrases I never would have sung—‘We say goodbye’ and also ‘I watch as you leave and then I slowly return to this quiet house.’ As Alexa was being driven away, not only literally but figuratively as well, a sadness would come over me, and the notes would just come—more and more minor key, sadder and more somber. I realized that adding lyrics could not make the piece any more expressive of what I was feeling.”
When Billy announced that he actually intended to use this music on an album, the reaction in the music business was: You’re gonna do what? You’re gonna do an album of piano pieces in the Romantic era, with no lyrics—and you’re not even playing them yourself?
“That’s what I wanted to do,” says Billy. “And I absolutely had to have another pianist play them—I’m not nearly good enough to perform those pieces. I can write them, but I can’t play them.”
While the material worried Sony, it gave Billy a certain freedom. He could continue to express himself musically, and by stepping off the pop music treadmill, he could create music without subjecting himself to his emotional ups and downs. Also, the meanings of the songs would not be scrutinized under the sometimes-blinding spotlight he’d worked under for four decades.
There was no shortage of material, after all, to take on the road. Despite a certain wariness in both camps, in mid-January 2001, after talks between Elton John’s longtime agent Howard Rose and Dennis Arfa, the reconciled piano men launched an ambitious series of shows that began in Honolulu, took in the West Coast hoops courts and hockey rinks that hadn’t been serviced in recent swings, then hopscotched across the continent to end in Minneapolis in mid-May, having scooped up some $56 million in gate receipts from some 530,000 fans.
ROMANTICALLY SPEAKING, as the millennium arrived, Billy began a new relationship, with Trish Bergin. They had first met in 1995, when the local news personality interviewed him for a Long Island television station called News 12. What was just an acquaintanceship—she was married to her first husband at the time—gradually started to heat up just prior to New Year’s Eve 2000, as Billy was getting ready to play a Millennium Concert at Madison Square Garden. Trish arrived to interview Billy again, in a walk-and-talk on the grounds of the house he would soon sell. (It was actually Christie, who knew Trish as well, who pointed out to Billy that Trish was no longer wearing a wedding ring.)
By the spring, Trish and Billy were involved. Insiders said that theirs was the kind of relationship where, when everything was good, it was very, very good, and when it wasn’t good, it was awful.
Some of their problems were seemingly superficial. Billy’s reasons for leaving the Further Lane house in the Hamptons might very well have begun with Trish and her feelings about it. The house was a sort of French château, and Billy had added a few architectural details to it, such as stone balustrades.
But Trish didn’t like it.
The two had a conversation in mid-2000 when they started to get serious. Trish told Billy, “I’m not going to live here,” which floored him. “I mean, who wouldn’t want to live in that house? Are you kidding me?” says Billy. “But she was adamant about not wanting to live in a house she associated with another woman.” Billy had lived in the house for thirteen years all told, first with Christie and then from 1994 to 2002 on his own. “So even though I had mixed feelings about leaving, I decided to sell the place. If Trish wasn’t going to be part of the dream, I didn’t want the dream.”
Billy figured, Okay, it’s a big house; if she doesn’t want to live here, I can probably get good money for it. But first, let’s see who might buy it. One day Billy was talking to his actor friend Paul Reiser, who was friends with Jerry Seinfeld. They were part of a group of guys, mostly sometime Long Islanders, who had a yearly New Year’s party.
Paul told Billy that Jerry had been looking at his neighborhood, and the prices kept getting jacked up on him—everybody was giving him the runaround. Billy suggested that Jerry take a look at his place. Paul got hold of Jerry, and Jerry visited Billy at his home. It had recently snowed, but despite the soppiness underfoot, Seinfeld spent a good amount of time strolling the sprawling property, then came back into the house with a big smile on his face. Afterward he got his wife, Jessica, to come over and take a look. Then he turned to Billy and asked, “How much?” Billy pulled a number out of thin air: “Thirty-two point five [mill
ion].”
To which Jerry said, “Okay.” Just like that.
Billy replied, “Okay okay?”
Jerry laughed and said, “Okay okay.” Billy took them out to dinner that night, and it was a done deal, all in the same day. No house had ever sold for that much money in Long Island or, in fact, in all of New York State.
After Jerry purchased the home, which has since accumulated considerably more value, he referred to it as “Versailles,” to which Billy replied, “For that much money, call it whatever you want.”
Billy and Trish had deeper issues, to be sure. To begin with, Trish reportedly worried that Billy might wander romantically—he had to fight the shadow world of suspicion that is always at hand when you’re a popular entertainer—and the resultant jealousies damaged their rapport.
They were portrayed as a happy couple when the New York Times visited Billy’s sixty-five-foot yacht The Islander in August 2000, but a little more than a year later, right after 9/11, they made the decision that they shouldn’t get married. Trish was around thirty then and seemed eager to start a family, and as much as the decision was the product of considerable shared doubts, sources say she took it as hard as he did. “To this day I still regret that. I hate hurting anybody,” says Billy. “I think a lot of people, after 9/11, reevaluated where their lives were headed. You’re confronted with this great tragedy, and it made a lot of people question what was truly important in their lives.”
For the Concert for New York City, held on October 20, a grave-faced Billy (with a begrimed fireman’s helmet set before him) had the uniformed cops and firefighters in the audience punching the air with his fierce version of “Miami 2017.” Throttling strong emotions, he hollered, “We ain’t going anywhere,” to a heartfelt roar. (If the song saw Manhattan sink “out at sea,” the line that hit home this night was “We went right on with the show.”) Then he played “New York State of Mind,” and as he exited, he picked up a policeman’s cap tossed onstage as a tribute.
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