Billy’s penchant for local references is an intriguing mix of show business and simple courtesy. As opposed to some performers who toss their gems out listlessly to the audience, Billy engages and, in searching glances around the audience, takes their temperature regularly during shows. The crowd as a whole gets a glimpse at what Billy’s seeing when Steve Cohen, toggling between shots from the live-feed video cameras, grabs a panoramic view of the front rows and projects it on the large screens behind the band. The unusually attractive array of happily cavorting young women seen at such moments might fairly be categorized as eye candy.
This arrangement has not gone unnoticed by various fans who comment online. Billy’s band and crew will often spot amusing items on the Web, and during a recent tour, one of the guys in his crew forwarded him a post from a woman named Ann who caught a show in Dallas. “Okay, I’ll admit that I’m naïve,” Ann wrote on a message board. “But what’s up with filling the front section with twenty-something blondes and continually showing them on the screen?”
“We didn’t really plan it that way,” says Billy. Twenty-five years ago he and his company had stopped selling the front rows the traditional way after they noticed that those choice seats were being snapped up by the well-to-do folks, whether in initial ticket buys or through scalped tickets. “We’d end up looking out there at these rich guys and their blasé girlfriends, sitting on their cans like, Okay, entertain me, piano man,” he remembers. So production instituted a routine of distributing those tickets to the crew guys, with instructions to go out and circulate where the real fans were, find the people headed for the cheap seats, and make them a gift of these tickets in the front two rows.
“Being guys, they picked out the best-looking girls,” says Billy. “Sure, I may have hung up a poster of Nicole Kidman in the production office as a sort of guideline. And sometimes when they were down to just a pair, they would give them to the female half of a double date, a policy they named Dump a Chump. And it all helped the show—it perked the band up, it perked me up. Once Elton learned the trick, there was a kind of counterbalance, because the way his distribution worked, the seats on his side of the stage got filled up with good-looking guys. And it really helped his show a lot, too.
“So, Ann in Dallas,” concludes Billy, “guilty as charged.”
AFTER A PAUSE for the holidays, and some downtime in warmer climates while New York was freezing—Billy typically tells his friends that he’s “practicing to be an old Jew” when he retreats to Florida, for some years in Miami and more recently a swank community about an hour north—he and the band were back on the road in early 2008. They toured California in February, hit Montreal in April, and played Jazz Fest in New Orleans at the end of that month. They also did ten dates at Mohegan Sun in Connecticut that induced a hundred thousand people to tear themselves away from the slot machines to see them.
But the most memorable moments of 2008 were still ahead. This had been clear since Dennis first hinted to the fans, back in September 2007, that Billy aimed to schedule a performance to coincide with the closing of Shea Stadium in Flushing, Queens: the Last Play at Shea.
Billy was aware that it was going to be a bit of a hullabaloo. He had resolved to never again have a manager since Frank Weber was sent packing, so his business discussions with his team of experts—sometimes a team of rivals—were always personal. From the first mention of him playing Shea, Dennis looked Billy in the eye to be sure he fully understood what he was signing on for. “Bill,” he said, not without some savor, “it’s going to be the circus.”
The Mets had wanted Billy to play the ballpark in ’07, but, says Dennis Arfa, “Billy and I were on the same page about wanting to close the stadium, wanting to be the last act in the building. And it was not something that the Mets wanted to do. The Mets wanted McCartney. And I told the Mets, ‘You can wait for McCartney and get nothing—but we’re ready to go.’ ”
Paul and Billy were friendly, from years of sharing stature as icons and both having John and Lee Eastman as their attorneys and advisers, and it soon became clear to Billy that Paul felt he couldn’t top what the Beatles had done at Shea in 1965—so why even try? With Paul out of contention, Dennis negotiated with the ball club, who would take a goodly percentage of the gate and also bear some of the costs. Although the overhead would run up quickly, to the tune of several million dollars, they wanted to keep the bulk of the tickets at ninety-five dollars each. The club would sell some of their suites and elite box seats at a premium, but most of the fifty-five thousand seats would cost two digits.
Lastly, they wanted to play during the baseball season. In recent years, Bruce and the Stones had played Shea dates in the off-season, but the stadium hadn’t permitted a show during the season since Elton John and Eric Clapton played there in 1991. Its proposed late-July date would leave the team with some home games still to play, and Billy and the band would be setting their stage up in center field facing home plate, so the groundskeepers would have their own set of demands for protecting the playing surface.
“We were going to use the history of Shea Stadium—that the Beatles opened it and that Billy closed it—as a marketing event,” says Dennis Arfa. “You have to be here because this is historic. And Billy at one point said to me, ‘Do we have to say “historic”?’ Then he goes, ‘I guess it sells tickets.’ My daughter at the time was fifteen, and her friend was at sleep-away camp. And the dad said he felt that he had to bring her home to go to this show, so she could be a part of this history. I heard that and I said, ‘Mission accomplished.’ ”
Finally Billy bought into the plan, and the concert was officially announced during the last week of January 2008, when Dennis bought a full-page ad in the New York Times (at about $88,000, a third of a hefty promotional budget that included other newspaper ads and a heavy rotation of ads on the local NBC station).
By that time, Billy had begun reaching out to various guest artists, especially his old label mates, such as James Taylor and even Bob Dylan, as well as Jimmy Buffett, John Fogerty, and Brian Johnson of AC/DC. (“Let’s face it, he’s one guy who could give my roadie Chainsaw a run for his money on AC/DC’s ‘Highway to Hell,’ ” says Billy.)
While a number of them had scheduling conflicts, thanks to their own summer tour dates, an impressive list began to solidify. None of those names were released to the public, but Billy, the band, and his crew could already feel reverberations through the media, simply from the number of friends and cousins they were suddenly hearing from.
Billy also did a press conference on February 7, days before the tickets went on sale. When asked whether he would consider adding a second show, he said it was a possibility, if the demand was that great. But at that stage the Mets weren’t interested in a second show, so Billy and his circle all thought it was unlikely.
When the tickets for the July 16 show went on sale in late February, they were surprised by the reaction—the show sold out in forty-eight minutes. Dennis even claimed that if the online orders had been done by the Ticketmaster computers instead of the rather more rudimentary Mets ticketing system, they could have thrown in six more dates and sold those out.
It soon became clear that a substantial number of tickets had actually landed in the hands of scalpers—prices on even the legitimate resale site Stub Hub escalated into five figures—and that the great majority of real fans hadn’t even gotten a crack at buying seats. Meanwhile, the Mets, who had been hanging back for their own reasons, offered them the facility for a second night, Friday, July 18. Billy consulted with his brain trust—Dennis, Lee, business manager Todd, crew bosses, and so on—and, after some debate about how the original ticket buyers would react to a second, later show going up for sale, they decided to go ahead and do it. They had enough guest artists lined up to cover the two dates, and Billy would have a night in between to rest his voice. When the tickets for that second, Friday-night show went up for sale, they sold out in two minutes less than the first bunch. The Daily New
s would report some fervent complaints from fans who felt their tickets for the sixteenth had been devalued, but the groaning was stilled when the Mets released a transcript of Billy’s February 7 statement affirming that more shows would be possible.
And so on the afternoon of the Friday show, the final concert, Billy found himself standing on the yacht club dock in Oyster Bay looking at one of his favorite things in the world, a black beauty with great curves, an impeccable pedigree, and a name out of a James Bond film, coursing across that flat, glassy surface of the bay at low tide.
Designed to emulate industrialist John Hay Whitney’s Aphrodite commuter boats of the 1930s, Vendetta was mostly custom-built, down to the hatches, chocks, and cleats. She cost a couple million dollars and guzzled fuel, but Billy couldn’t imagine any better way to travel down to Shea: “We planned to dock a stone’s throw from where, in 1964, my old band the Hassles came in second in the talent competition at the New York World’s Fair.” Each time he rode past that decrepit and squat but somehow dignified cylinder that was the New York State Pavilion, he envisioned the calendar pages flipping backward.
According to Billy, the equation goes something like this: “You can grow up poor in a Levittown tract home, but if you keep working at your trade, down the years and decades till your back aches and your hair goes, with a little luck you get to have your Jay Gatsby moment, you get some ownership of the things that you once thought belonged only to the privileged class.”
Unlike Gatsby, part of Billy always knew that entering that highsociety world when you’re not born into it is a sucker’s bet—thus the name Vendetta. The idea for the name goes back to another set of Fitzgerald’s characters, Tender Is the Night’s Dick and Nicole Diver, who believed the adage that “living well is the best revenge.” “Just what I need revenge for sometimes eludes me,” Billy says. “But I can still remember sleeping in Laundromats back when I was inventing who I would become, and that’s a memory that sticks with you.”
Now here was Billy on the North Shore, in the heart of Long Island’s Gold Coast—where Fitzgerald briefly lived and found his inspiration—standing on the weathered but impeccably maintained dock of the Seawanhaka Corinthian Yacht Club, a refuge for white-shoe yachtsmen since the 1800s. Says Billy, “Some years back, the club’s good gentlemen even accepted me for membership.” (Billy’s Centre Island home was a short drive from this dock. When he bought the place, he had planned on traveling to the city from his own beachfront, but environmental regulators refused to allow construction of a dock along the rocky shoreline.)
Captain Gene Pelland was the ace skipper Billy employed for Vendetta and various other watercraft—all the way up to the eighty-five-foot “expedition ship” Audacious that capped the fleet when Billy was deeply invested in boating and boat-building, for a decade or so beginning in 1998. Captain Gene had first suggested the elegantly simple solution for getting Billy to the stadium, though the idea also had a historical precedent.
Even during the Depression that followed the Crash of 1929, John Hay Whitney and some of the other swells from this neighborhood—people with names like Vanderbilt and Pulitzer—had used powerful commuter yachts much like Vendetta to zip down to Wall Street, avoiding traffic and the street-bound common folk. Billy had made the same trip to Shea just two days before, and at forty-five knots, it had taken just half an hour to coast out of Oyster Bay Harbor, then round the top of Centre Island, head west through Long Island Sound, and wind south to a channel in Queens that leads to the stadium, just in time for the first concert.
“Now, I’m no major league baseball player. And I certainly don’t look like a rock ‘god.’ Yet all those people who were going to schlep to that place were expecting me to put on a great show,” says Billy. The Wednesday event had gone well, though Billy had begun with something of an apology: “After all, that Wednesday night crowd had bought tickets to Last Play at Shea, and there they were watching the Second to Last Play at Shea. When I said into the mike, ‘I want to apologize to those of you who bought tickets thinking this was the last show at Shea,’ some of those present gave me what you might call a rousing New York welcome or, as one magazine described it, ‘a chorus of jeers.’ I added, ‘I know. I suck. A lot of scalpers got ahold of tickets, and a lot people who wanted to go couldn’t get in. They don’t enforce the frickin’ laws in this state anymore!’ ”
The upshot was that the Friday show, the last of the last, was indeed pressurized. “If this had been a show at any other arena, I wouldn’t have been so concerned. But living up to that tag ‘Last Play at Shea’? In many ways I felt unworthy of the whole thing. I’ve had a great career, but it was mind-boggling to think that I would be the guy who turned off the lights at that stadium. So I was really grateful for the backup.”
Billy had persuaded some big names to perform with him that night—Tony Bennett, John Mayer, Roger Daltrey, Garth Brooks—but there was still that one person he had fervently wanted from the beginning: Sir Paul McCartney. “I don’t care who you are,” Billy says, “as far as I’m concerned, that stadium still belonged to the Beatles. It was still their room.”
“Billy had always wanted to have Paul play at this show,” says Steve Cohen. “He had asked him before we went on sale, asked him after we went on sale, and the line that we had heard back was he had to respectfully decline because he believed that the Beatles at Shea Stadium was a onetime event and could never be topped.
“But deep down inside we knew what it meant to Billy. No matter what goes on in Billy’s life, there’s always something more that he wants, there’s always something more in his mind that’s going to make this thing perfect.”
THEIR ARRIVAL AT Shea on Friday went smoothly. Gene nestled Vendetta into a small marina, where Billy’s tour director, Max, and his security man, Noel Rush, were waiting in a golf cart. Billy hopped into the cart with his physician and pal, Anthony Ardito, who had traveled with him from Centre Island.
It may have been a way of deflecting any brooding about Billy’s own responsibilities to this landmark occasion, but for the next several hours, the topic of conversation was all Paul all the time. As Billy made the journey to the stadium, Lee Eastman was in touch by mobile phone to let him know that Paul was willing to try his best to appear, if only he could arrive in time. Paul had told Lee, “Tell Billy, ‘I Saw Her Standing There’ in the key of E,” Eastman recalls. “I said, ‘Key of E, right? If I can make it.’ So it was this high-wire act for the next few hours or so, where it was unclear if Paul’s plane was going to be late.” McCartney had boarded a plane at London Heathrow, bound for JFK, but there were no guarantees. He was due to land perilously close to the end of Billy’s show, sometime after eleven P.M.
“Friday afternoon, it was about four o’clock, we were in the corridor backstage, and I walked into the production office and there was a bit of a flutter,” says Cohen. “Noel looked at me and said, ‘Paul’s coming.’ ” The potential flight delays that might have undone the plan had been avoided. “And then I walked right into Billy’s dressing room, and the first thing out of his mouth was, ‘Paul’s coming.’ Then I walked out of the dressing room, and [tour director] Max Loubiere came up to me and said, ‘Did ya hear that Paul’s coming?’ So within thirty seconds the inner core of our group knew exactly what was going on.”
Whether Paul showed up or not, there were a whole lot of people out there who’d come to see an epic show. Says Billy, “We started, as we tend to, with ‘Angry Young Man,’ and I was pounding out that intro when I realized just how sweaty I was going to get under those lights on such a steamy night. Then, during ‘My Life,’ Steve put the lights on the whole house, and I looked out and told the crowd of fifty-five thousand exactly what I was thinking—‘Is this cool or what?’ ” Then Billy mentioned how the place really still belonged to the Beatles, and the impact that band had had on him in 1964, the first year he joined up with a band and started playing rock and roll, a year before the quartet played Shea.
&n
bsp; Then suddenly everyone was pulling in the same direction. Billy pounded out his set, with guests, as the road company clustered backstage to begin working the phones, contacting British Airways, U.S. Customs, the Port Authority, the state police, and the city police department—all striving to speed Paul’s arrival at Shea.
Sometime in the middle of the concert, Wayne Williams, Billy’s piano tech, brought him a fresh towel and let him know that Paul had entered New York air space. It turned out that both Billy’s doctor, Anthony Ardito, and his motorcycle-riding buddy, Rob Schneider (who was also his partner in a custom-bike business Billy had started recently) knew a guy in air traffic control. The controller had arranged for Paul’s British Airways flight to land well ahead of schedule. Once Paul was on the ground, the police ran out onto the tarmac and escorted him all the way from JFK to Shea—eleven minutes, door to door.
Says Paul McCartney, “I got off the airplane faster than anyone’s ever got off a plane before, and they just whisked me through. It was, ‘Ah, don’t worry about that, you’re coming with me!’ And customs—‘Just go through!’ You know no one’s ever had it so good—the best ride ever. I said, ‘I wanna travel like this all the time.’ ”
“Because I was so focused on Paul making it on time, much of the rest of the concert is a blur,” says Billy. “But there were definitely some high points for me. Tony Bennett went wonderfully off script on ‘New York State of Mind,’ and we were joined onstage by some cops and firefighters [as the chorus for a stirring treatment of “Goodnight Saigon”]. ‘Thank you,’ I said to the crowd, ‘and thank them!’ ” The ovation for New York’s finest and bravest, as Billy gestured to them, was huge. “Another moment was hearing John Mayer play so sensitively on ‘This Is the Time.’ He wrung music out of the song that I barely knew was there.”
Billy Joel Page 30
