“I feel the same way about music.
“I love to play around with genres—blues, doo-wop, a waltz—and because of that, I’ve often been accused of being derivative. You know what? Hell yes, I’m derivative. Nobody grows up in a test tube. We’re all influenced by what’s come before us. But what is it that you’re always drawn back to? What is it that speaks to your soul?”
Recognizing the overlap between Billy’s taste in music making and motorcycle building, Steve Cohen was unsurprised at his boss’s new regime. More than perhaps anyone, he knows the ebb and flow of Billy’s interest in music: “Having been there for four decades, I can set my watch to when Billy gets tired of being Billy. And sometimes it’s a two-year period, sometimes it’s a three-year period. Sometimes it’s a six-month period. But there’s always a point where after we’ve done however many shows, after he’s strapped on the Billy Joel face night after night, he gets fucking tired of being that guy. He’d rather just be Bill.
“And then after a period of time, whatever it might be, whether it’s relationships, whether it be a bilateral hip surgery, whether it would be turning sixty, whether it would be 9/11 for that matter, there’s a place in his head where he goes through a couple of different changes.”
When Cohen pauses, the hesitation reverberates momentarily; he doesn’t need to explain that once or twice such fallow periods have ended in troubles—and just as surely, a spate of musical activity provides a welcome focus. “And then what ends up happening is it suddenly isn’t painful or arduous to be that guy again. And I can see him embrace it. Look, we all know that with the advent of the Internet and the fact that he’s now got access to all of that stuff, he got really fed up with celebrity for celebrity’s sake.”
Perhaps his awareness of just how deep underground he was going led to Billy’s thorough involvement in the editing of Last Play at Shea. He had mandated that he appear only sporadically, as the mostly unseen “shark,” as in the film Jaws, and Cohen, as a coproducer, leaned in with director Paul Crowder to enforce that strategy. The New York Times’s Stephen Holden found it “exhilarating … guaranteed to put lumps in the throats of longtime New York residents and suburbanites, especially Long Islanders, this fist-pumping, backslapping film is, first and foremost, an up-close record of Mr. Joel’s two Shea Stadium concerts.”
As a portrait of “the quintessential smart, streetwise, hardworking guy from a suburban neighborhood in emotional lockstep with his audience over the long haul,” Holden found the tunes he heard to comprise “hearty, tough/tender little monuments to growing up in a certain time and place … today Mr. Joel, who largely abandoned songwriting in the mid-1990s, sounds more and more like the rock ’n’ roll answer to Irving Berlin and George M. Cohan. His blunt, irresistibly tuneful songs, however autobiographical, are also nuggets of American cultural history.” His enthusiasm was hardly dimmed by the “almost too good to be true” arrival of Paul McCartney to close the show: “The final number, ‘Let It Be,’ rings as a sweet valedictory to all the struggle, the teamwork and the glory captured in this wonderful film.”
Though Variety would snark that “Billy Joel may look like a mob lawyer these days” and compare the work to “90 pounds of film stuffed into a five-pound bag,” it also saw Billy as “the supremely down-to-earth, gimlet-eyed charismatic Everyman.” Such reviews, along with strong word of mouth, set the film up not so much for its fleeting, token theatrical run in October as for the later DVD release, ultimately to be joined by a more straight-up concert documentary.
MEANWHILE, ANY NOTIONS that Billy was precious about his catalog were put at least partly to rest when he gave the young choristers on the network television hit Glee free rein to choose from it for the October 5, 2010, episode, “Grilled Cheesus.” The previous year Neil Patrick Harris had covered “Piano Man” for the show. But this time, Billy told Access Hollywood (in an unusual nod to the electronic tabloid press, for a man likelier to be watching black-and-white footage of German tanks grinding over rubble), “Yeah, go ahead, use my stuff. I was in a chorus when I was in high school, so why not?”
This new accessibility of Billy Joel—a pop star who previously seemed to occupy his own outlying, if expansive, area in pop culture—had begun with the lovingly sardonic angle taken by the arrival in June 2009 of The Hangover, in which Zach Galifianakis’s pathetic wannabe Alan is a die-hard Billy fan, down to the Glass Houses poster in his room. Perhaps the most perverse use of Billy’s work came from Ed Helms’s character, migrating down a Thai river in the second of the three films, strumming a guitar as he sings a bawdy, shamefaced variation of “Allentown.” Not pleased, Alan stands in for a whole new generation of Joel fans when he says: “You totally butchered that song.”
If the Hangover films add future iterations, perhaps Alan himself will join the legion of fans (and wedding singers) who themselves have butchered a Billy Joel song. And yet the professionally rendered cover versions are legion, from the Beastie Boys’ “Big Shot” (live) to Barbra Streisand’s and Tony Bennett’s respective versions of “New York State of Mind” to Sinatra’s “Just the Way You Are.”
One of the better efforts to pop up in recent years came when a British department store appropriated British singer Fyfe Dangerfield’s tender yet not sappy cover of “She’s Always a Woman” and played it under a clever ninety-second ad showing a girl growing from infancy to old age. The resultant attention would vault Billy’s version of the old song, which was number fifty-three in the U.K. in 1986, to number twenty-nine as a reissued single on the May 2010 British charts. Dangerfield would be rewarded with a few opening-act spots on Billy’s late-2013 U.K. tour.
Only two weeks after the Glee episode aired, Two and a Half Men broadcast an episode called “The Immortal Mr. Billy Joel,” in which Jon Cryer’s character attempts to entice a girl with his cover of “We Didn’t Start the Fire.” His jittery shtick, as he invokes “the piano man,” feels at least partly sincere, and it asks the question fans and critics keep asking about Billy Joel—is he an entertainment deity or that guy whose songs play too often in the drugstore sound system? (It is a grisly irony that the song playing on piped-in music system of the pedestrian mall below the World Trade Center towers minutes after 2 WTC was struck—as heard on the first street-level video from the scene, taken by a Fox News cameraman—was an instrumental version of “She’s Always a Woman.” For Billy, who was so profoundly disturbed by the events of 9/11 that he would later say they cast a pall over a decade or more for him, it just folded into the unthinkability of the entire cataclysm.)
It happened to be the day after the Glee episode aired that Billy acceded to his friend Howard Stern’s request and made a “surprise” (to the audience) visit to Stern’s satellite radio show to discuss Last Play at Shea on the eve of its one-day theater unspooling. An adoring Stern stoked Billy’s witty responses, as they chatted about song origins and the never-fulfilled notion of Billy’s forming a supergroup with Sting, Stevie Winwood, and Bruce Springsteen. Because Billy made passing mention of the drug experiment that led to “Scandianvian Skies,” the lengthy chat was widely distilled by avid media reports down to “Billy Joel Tried Heroin.”
In the same week came the announcement that Billy was allowing aspiring musicians to learn his tunes for the video game Rock Band 3. Pop culture continued to rummage through his catalog with the mid-February episode of The Office, “Threat Level Midnight,” named after a film supposedly made by regional manager Michael Scott. Called “outstandingly bad in every way” by one recapper, the film used Billy’s “Running on Ice” for a Karate Kid–style hockey training montage, and “Pressure” for a gunfight/speed skating scene. (In season nine, in September 2012, The Office would deploy “She’s Got a Way,” for Roy’s marriage scene—naturally, given Billy’s stature as go-to bard for decades of America’s nuptials.)
Further proof that both the public and the media had a renewed appetite for news of Billy came with the release of the Last Play at Shea D
VD in early February 2011. Per the marketing plan, the release prepared the ground for its late March follow-up Live at Shea Stadium: The Concert (directed by old pal Jon Small), with a series of PBS showings of the latter film in the network’s Great Performances series.
Upon its release, the concert package, stadium package, two CDs, and a DVD shot to number one on Billboard’s Top Music DVD/Video chart. Added in with the box office from the 115,000 tickets sold for the shows themselves (a $12.9 million take against some $2 million in production costs), those two July 2008 evenings made for a pretty fair payday.
JUST AS BILLY’S woodshedding period was going peacefully, Elton John gave an interview to Rolling Stone for the fortnightly magazine’s early February 2011 cover story. The interview, perhaps more than Elton could have calculated, brought a lot more attention to Billy than to its ostensible subject.
Elton, sixty-six, said he was bringing “tough love” to his sometime friend and road partner, insisting Billy wasn’t taking care of himself: “At the end of the day, he’s coasting. Billy, why can’t you write another song? Billy’s a conundrum.… We’ve had so many canceled tours because of illnesses and various other things, alcoholism.… He’s going to hate me for this, but every time he’s gone to rehab, they’ve been rehab light. When I went to rehab, I had to clean the floors. He goes to rehab where they have TVs.”
John added, “I love you, Billy.… You have your demons and you’re not going to get rid of them at rehab light. You’ve got to be serious. People adore you, they love you and respect you. You should be able to do something better than what you’re doing now.”
Billy quickly defused the situation: “I’ve worked with Elton for such a long time and I’ve enjoyed our relationship too much to let something as random as these comments change my affection for him.… Elton is just being Elton.”
Still, the attack nettled.
Perhaps the most aggravating slap was that Billy needed to “do something better” with his life. Privately, Billy sent off a palpably angry note, asking, “What gives you the omnipotent moral certainty and authority to justify the public humiliation of anyone—especially of someone to whom you should, at the very least, consider according a modicum of honor?” He closed with a curt, “We are done.”
About a week later John appeared on Today and updated Matt Lauer: “Billy hates me at the moment. He sent me a message and he’s not happy. I understand that. I’m sorry I had to say it, but I’m saying it because I really want Billy to live a long life and be very happy. That’s all it came from. I understand why he’s mad at me. I’m only trying to help. Maybe I should have done it privately, but I’ve been so frustrated over the years.”
He added that Billy, perhaps metaphorically, wanted to punch him in the face.
That blend of contrition and prickliness brought the following public statement from Billy, who included a reference to a film Elton had been plugging when he appeared on the show:
1. I do not hate Elton John.
2. I do not want to “punch him in the face.”
3. If he wants to call me, my number is still the same.
4. Good luck with the movie.
—BILLY JOEL
Time was on the side of reconciliation, especially given Billy’s capacity for forgiveness over the years. But even a year later, in another Today show appearance, Elton was still troubled and confessed he had not heard from Billy in over a year, apart from the single letter that had never gone public.
“He wrote me a thing, ‘You’re—you—you shouldn’t judge people. Who are you to judge?’ ” he told Matt Lauer. “And I said it because I thought it might get through. And I can understand him being angry about that. And we haven’t really communicated since.”
Still, Elton said, “Billy Joel is the kindest, sweetest man, and the most talented songwriter and great, great artist. If he called me tomorrow and said, ‘Let’s have lunch,’ I’d go like a shot. ’Cause I adore him. I only said it as tough love. But he was upset. And I’m sorry I upset him.”
By April 2013, although the two had not been in the same room since the 2010 Albany gig, the dance continued with Billy’s statement to Rolling Stone: “It’s absolutely possible I’d play with Elton again. Sometimes he runs off at the mouth. But … I would always work with him again. I still love the guy. He’s a great guy.”
Then two months later, as both attended at the 44th Annual Songwriters Hall of Fame event at a Manhattan hotel, Elton picked up his award and offered, “Mr. Joel, I haven’t seen you tonight, but I love you dearly.”
Later during the ceremony, Billy took the stage for his award and reciprocated: “Is Elton still here, by the way? We’re okay,” he said. “Call me.”
Finally, capping the diplomatic saga—until, perhaps, negotiations for a different brand of shared tour in the future—Billy attended the October 2013 benefit for the Elton John AIDS Foundation. There, finally, as described by Billy in his April 2014 visit to Howard Stern, came the rapprochement and Billy’s Godfather-style reminder: “Don’t ever talk that way about me.” And the historic photo was taken, Billy in a dark suit and shiny scarf, Elton all in black and shiny bloodred sunglasses, with a firm grip on his best-friend-forever’s shoulder (or was it his neck?). In any event, they were finally back.
IN CONTRAST TO the ups and downs of his relations with Elton, Billy’s relations with Bruce Springsteen have always been easy, and the time off the road gave them a chance to further the friendship with their overlapping enthusiasm for motorcycles.
They were a perfect fit in concert, as they’d proved in 1974 doing “Twist and Shout” at a New Jersey college concert (Billy inviting Bruce up), and again onstage together at the 2008 Obama benefit show, then more recently in 2009 when Bruce, as ad hoc bandleader for the 25th Anniversary Concert of the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame, conspired with Jann Wenner to lure Billy to the show as a surprise guest. The Jerseyan and the Long Islander had combined on “You May Be Right,” “Only the Good Die Young,” and “New York State of Mind,” and they’d capped it all with “Born to Run,” Billy’s reading of his verses informed, as always, by his spot-on Bruce mimicry.
The two had been trying for a casual get-together for a while when, one brilliantly sunny midwinter 2011 day in Miami, Bruce drove down to visit Billy, pulling through the tall iron gate of his La Gorce Island manse in a man-of-the-people’s aging and faded SUV. After a mellow summit meeting over an Italian meal, they boarded the craft Billy sometimes preferred for jaunts across the bay, a battleship-gray re-creation of a World War II landing craft.
They discussed what kind of bike Billy’s motorcycle shop might one day build for Bruce. It would turn out to be a Sacred Cow “bobber”—in other words, a custom rebuild of a Kawasaki W650, a relatively stripped brute with a single seat, the front fender removed, and the back reduced or “bobbed.” It would emerge as a handsome, low-slung thing that might have looked all business before the black frame was topped with a metal-flake-gold gas tank.
This taste of the good life and conversation about bikes then evolved into a brief discussion of how very lucky they felt to have thrived at a time when their kind of rock-and-roll artistry lined up with a ready audience of album buyers. There was no need to mention that those days were gone forever, and given the track record each had, no need to moan about it, either.
Another man of the people who’s made his liking for Billy abundantly clear is country king Garth Brooks. Born in Oklahoma in 1962, Brooks emerged in 1989 to lead the infusion of rock music into country, bringing on his stature as the best-selling album artist in the nation in the Sound Scan era (i.e., since that rigorous tallying system became Billboard’s standard in 1991; Billy ranks sixth by its count). His cover of Billy’s “Shameless” was a number one hit in 1991, and his appearance singing it in Last Play at Shea marked a key surfacing in the period during which he largely stayed out of the spotlight, from 2001 to 2009. As Brooks said in an interview on show day for the documentary, to a baseball
nut/Billy Joel worshipper, it was irresistible: “I will forever love him for inspiring me to go do things that make my life better … time is a friend to all things good.”
A curious aspect of Billy’s relative isolation during the months spanning 2011 and 2012 was that he frequently seemed to leave his house to meet with, and assist, friends like Springsteen and Brooks, who have sold, well, tens of millions of albums. (The trend had started when Billy returned McCartney’s favor for Last Play at Shea and helped Paul inaugurate the renamed facility, Citi Field, in July 2009.) Then in October 2011, when Sting gave a birthday party for himself (the proceeds went to an antipoverty charity), Billy guested on “Every Little Thing She Does Is Magic” and “Don’t Stand So Close to Me,” hitting the high notes (but afterward clutching his throat theatrically).
More often in recent decades, though, Billy has taken time during breaks in his touring schedule to help young musicians—those with much less experience than his famous friends—gain a truer sense of songwriting and the music business than he had when he began. Over time he’s appeared everywhere from Harvard to the Oxford Union to less posh state schools and also some institutions with younger audiences. (He was even a mute but appreciative audience member for a Long Island elementary school’s spring 2014 concert, “The River of Dreams: A Billy Joel Tribute.”)
In some of the 2012 events, typically billed as question-and-answer sessions interspersed with “a little music,” Billy seemed to be building confidence for a return to the arenas. At the University of Connecticut in November, he pointed out that success is the product first of all of hard work: “Look at me, do I look like a rock star? No, I look like a guy who makes pizza.”
Several days later he turned up at Cornell University’s Bailey Hall for a similar session. No doubt the deans and human resources types had mixed reactions to his response when asked if he’d tried to write hits—“I was usually trying to get a girl into bed,” he explained. He then moved to the piano to play through snippets of Mozart, Bach, and Beethoven, breaking in to insist, “Beethoven got smoldery! He’s so deep! So troubled!” He politely declined one girl’s request to accompany her to her sorority’s formal party.
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