Billy pointed out that even his more celebratory songs usually had an element that was emotionally a bit dissonant. “Sometimes your limitations become your greatest gifts,” he said. “I just don’t believe too much in sugar and sweetness—there’s always that knife in it, and that’s what makes it real.”
“His best performance of the night, undeniably, was his ‘Vienna,’ ” a student journalist wrote. “The song, he said, is for his father, who died last year. The audience, completely silent, watched Joel’s passionate delivery. His scatting, which he’d added to other songs during the night to make up for lack of instrumental breakdowns, was anything but corny.”
A week later Billy was in Manhattan, at the city’s temple to the piano and its masters, attending the unveiling of his Steinway Hall portrait at the flagship store of Steinway & Sons on Fifty-seventh Street. A drape was pulled off a large canvas to show artist Paul Wyse’s lifelike portrait of a reflective Joel with arms folded across a leather jacket. Predictably self-deprecating, Joel explained that he’d bought the jacket in Miami without female supervision and only later did a girlfriend remind him that the members-only look “went out in the eighties.” Still, he said, “I’m really honored to be hung,” waiting a beat for the startled laugh from those assembled, then closing with an anecdote about his younger, shaggy-haired self accosting—and scaring away—Vladimir Horowitz in a chance encounter on the street nearby.
During a Florida college tour he visited Boca Raton’s Lynn University and was asked about “Lullabye.” He pointed out daughter Alexa in the audience and spoke of writing it for her when she was age seven, to explain death, no less—but he declined to sing it because it was “personal.” (And as he knew, it often brought her to tears.) A man in the audience waving a cane asked, “Can I shake your hand?” Years before, he had fallen six stories and broken his back, but was visited in the hospital by Billy, a stranger to him. A standing ovation followed their handshake. A few days later he was at another school doing an amused version of Weird Al Yankovic’s 1980 parody song “It’s Still Billy Joel to Me.” By this time a blogger named Will Stegemann, who started his “A Year of Billy Joel” Web log hoping to understand why Joel fans were so avid and widespread, had gone from skeptic to unabashed fan. Next thing he knew, he was personally in touch with an amused Billy, and soon thereafter would be welcomed into backstage hospitality suites.
BACK ON HIS home turf, in search of what another Long Island summer might bring, Billy made the rounds, with the hope that, as he wrote in “The Night Is Still Young,” “I’m young enough to see the passionate boy I used to be.” Sure enough, his fortuitous chance meeting with Alexis Roderick happened in mid-2010, at a bar-restaurant in Huntington, not far from his Centre Island home. “I was with friends waiting for a table. Here was this attractive woman at the bar, and we just started talking.” He persuaded Alexis to give him a ride home when his friends wanted to leave earlier than he did: “It’s a bit of a schlep to Centre Island, a dozen miles, and I was laying it on thick. And I remember going back to my house, and if you’ve seen the movie The Seven Year Itch with Tom Ewell and Marilyn Monroe, he’s got a cigarette holder and a silk cravat and a dressing gown and he’s playing Rachmaninoff, trying to impress Marilyn Monroe, who lives upstairs, while his wife is away.” Though it quickly became apparent that Alexis didn’t really buy the act, she did entrust him with her contact info and they stayed in touch.
At that stage she was still working as a senior risk analyst in the Garden City office of Morgan Stanley brokerage, he approaching sixty-one and she, twenty-nine. Some months after they began dating, the relationship hit a bump—only scanty details emanated, but the speculation was that she wanted to solidify the relationship.
Perhaps not coincidentally, Billy was anticipating, then undergoing, double hip replacement surgery—doing both hips because, as still-supportive ex Christie Brinkley told Radar Online, he had said, “If I do it one at a time, I know I’ll never go in for the other.” When he had visited Howard Stern’s Sirius radio broadcast in mid-November, he utilized twin walking sticks and looked all but infirm to those who saw him there. But the day after the November 20, 2010, procedure in a Long Island hospital, he was on his feet and on the mend with Alexis at his side.
By the time he was reinstalled at home, Billy and Alexis were ready for something of a formal coming-out. The couple decided to go public on December 9, and she spared a thought for the Daily News, noting, “We were friends for a while before we started dating.”
By the summer of 2012, Billy’s renewed contentment would be summarized rather endearingly in a late July post on his website, showing their newly adopted pug, Rosie, hanging out with Alexis and Billy in their barn-scale Centre Island kitchen. Rescued from a puppy mill by the North Shore Animal League America (the charity of choice for Howard Stern’s wife Beth Ostrovsky and later a beneficiary of the take from Billy’s May 9, 2014, Garden show), the compact pooch joined the much-loved pug Sabrina, age eight. The new pug sits on Alexis’s lap staring at Billy in what looks like outrage, but as Alexis explained, “She is in love with him!”
The quiet domesticity that the couple, and their pugs, were enjoying as the months passed would be interrupted by the approach of Superstorm Sandy in late October. Forming around Kingston, Jamaica, it would span eleven hundred miles and become the largest Atlantic hurricane on record before being downgraded to a (nonetheless ferociously destructive) storm that affected twenty-four states. When the time came to sign on for the benefit concert to relieve Sandy victims, Billy was quick to join up.
As he told an interviewer in a promo for the concert, he watched his patch of the harbor with shock as the storm hit with “traumatic” effect: “I saw boats being torn off moorings, crashing onto the shore … houses being flooded, it was scary. It hurts to see all the lives that were disrupted. People were stranded—people died. I’m a Long Islander, and to see something like this happen, it’s devastating. A way of life has been disrupted.” Centre Island, perched on its hill, was largely spared, though as he said to friends with rueful irony, it flooded his helipad. He didn’t mention the giant munch it took out of the shoreline near his white elephant of a Sagaponack house, a washout that was later remedied by fresh truckloads of sand.
The eventual charitable effort to cure some of Sandy’s ills with a benefit concert not quite two months later would join up with, and serve to highlight, changes that were arriving on a parallel track for Billy’s public persona.
His quietly expanding fan base would understand and appreciate his revival in 2012 before it was really discussed in the media. But the world of pop culture that had been sliding away from beneath the feet of most of his musical peers had somehow come to a halt immediately beneath Billy’s body of work. The culture was clearly having a positive rethink about a performer who had once divided it into lovers and haters.
CHAPTER 20
I’VE LOVED THESE DAYS
When in mid-November the invocatory media tom-toms announced “12.12.12 The Concert for Sandy Relief,” the initial concert lineup hewed to a kind of geographical billing, with hard-hit New Jersey’s Jon Bon Jovi on top and Long Island’s Billy named next. But it also included Alicia Keys, Paul McCartney, Bruce Springsteen and the E Street Band, Roger Waters, Kanye West, and the Who, along with other world-class artists (the Rolling Stones and Eric Clapton) yet to be announced.
“When we did 12.12.12,” recalls Steve Cohen, “Billy was really nervous, because he didn’t know whether he was going to be good enough. And he said, ‘I’m not going to do this if I can’t be as good as we used to be.’ ”
When the night arrived, Billy readied himself much as he would for any other gig, with a major difference in the cameo players. Owner of the dressing room closest to the stage, Billy mostly stayed within the cinder-block retreat, Godfather-style, while politicians (Governors Andrew Cuomo and Chris Christie), actors (Jake Gyllenhaal), comics (Chris Rock), and of course musicians either looked in or
greeted him at the doorway or briefly inside. A sweaty Pete Townshend, traipsing back from the Who’s set, gave him a slow, comradely smile and an enveloping, slack-limbed hug. Paul McCartney all but skipped by with his band (on the run, as it happened), singing, “Hey, hey we’re the Monkees” in unison en route to the stage.
“It was a lot of fun,” Billy recalls. “A lot of kibitzing backstage, and everybody else doing everybody else’s material. Keith Richards comes over, and he starts—[singing in a gravelly south-of-London drawl], ‘You may be right, ah may beyah crazy …’ ”
But the case of nerves Steve Cohen noticed was only amplified by the surrounding star power. “When you stand to lose something, that’s when you really got to deliver the goods,” Billy was thinking. “I wanted I see how it feels.”
According to Billy, the tightness of the set list was a product of necessity: “It came about by the producers saying, ‘Here’s how much time you’ve got.’ I think it was twenty-five or thirty minutes. And we said, ‘This is going to run late, and we’re probably going to have to chop something.’ So we rehearsed six or seven songs, knowing that we’d probably have to edit the list. That dictated that the set had to be power-packed—’cause it’s the Garden, and we were near the end.”
Kanye West’s grinding set half-emptied the hall, which was unfortunate given how generally old, white, and school-of-rock the rest of the lineup was. Says Billy, “McCartney was going to go on after us, and we followed Kanye, who had a lot of people leaving. And I’m just watching this going, Oh, shit, thanks a lot. I’m going to play a half a house. And I went onstage, and we saw people coming back in, roaring in.”
Six powerfully delivered songs later, the exultant crowd’s standing ovation left little doubt who owned the evening. Beginning with an appropriately updated “Miami 2017 (Seen the Lights Go Out on Broadway)” and moving through the classics “Movin’ Out (Anthony’s Song),” “New York State of Mind,” “The River of Dreams,” and “You May Be Right,” to finish off with “Only the Good Die Young,” Billy galvanized the arena and reminded all watching of the seasoned command he has onstage. Afterward, Paul, before he went on, passed Billy’s dressing room and stuck his head in, saying, “Thanks for bringing ’em back, Bill.”
As they clambered into a van near the Garden’s vehicle exit, Billy remembers that he, Cohen, and Brian Ruggles shared a look, thinking: “What’s the big deal? We did six songs. This is nothing. This is like a sissy set. And everybody’s raving about it. I said, ‘I guess we must be pretty good.’ ’Cause I do have doubts about how good I am anymore.”
At long last, the critical establishment, almost unanimously, didn’t join him in that doubt. “And who won the evening?” mused the New Yorker’s Sasha Frere-Jones. “… The Yanks—along with Bruce and Kanye, Billy Joel sounded fantastic. We know the rap sheet. Joel hasn’t lived clean, and yet there he was, his voice appearing to have aged only about a week since 1987, and his piano playing fluid and strong. The mood relaxed, as if someone who really knew how to play a stadium was in charge, and the crowd really wanted to hear him. ‘Movin’ Out’ and ‘New York State of Mind’? Perfect.”
Opined Rolling Stone, “Billy Joel hasn’t lost a step. Joel was the only performer of the night who has been out of the public eye for a few years. The time off seems to have treated him well. He may look more than a bit like Brian Dennehy these days, but his voice is absolutely unreal. If you closed your eyes you’d think you were listening to Songs in the Attic. It’s impossible to pick one highlight from his six-song set. Backed by his longtime touring band, Joel … almost blew every other performer off the stage.”
Entertainment Weekly admired Billy’s sure-handed touch in delivering appropriate, heartening sentiment: “Following a guy like West can be difficult, but Billy Joel was up to the task. The veteran piano rocker put forth the evening’s most thematically consistent and aesthetically pleasing performances: ‘Miami 2017’ featured all the lyrical modifications he made when he played it at the last Sandy telethon a few weeks back, and the inclusion of ‘River of Dreams’ was a nice nod to Sandy-affected Connecticut.”
As a Rolling Stone interviewer would assert while interviewing him some weeks later, “It may finally be cool to like Billy Joel.”
Perhaps the most cogent essay on this would be by Grantland’s Steven Hyden in April 2013. Citing the Sandy show triumph as “kind of a big deal,” he set the context: “Outside of a stray appearance here and there, including cameos at Paul McCartney’s Yankee Stadium concerts in 2011, Joel had not commanded the public’s attention on a big, important stage in many years.”
The gaggle of rock critics assessing the show on Twitter, with “catty comments about the overwhelmingly geriatric bill,” had piled up a widely negative, “all-out classic-rock turkey shoot—except for Joel. The sea of snark miraculously parted for him. Here is a guy whom music scribes have historically gone out of their way to slag … and yet this wretched hive of cynics and grumps was stumping on behalf of the Piano Man with unbridled enthusiasm.”
Noting that Billy’s look—“an Atlantic City pit boss”—was a logical acceptance of his age, he applauded that Billy acted his age: “He merely sat behind his keyboard and played some very old songs very, very well.” Hyden even seemed to like the “characteristic prissiness” of Billy’s reply to Rolling Stone about whether it’s cool to like him: “I suppose after a long enough time as the Antichrist, it has its perks. ’Cause I don’t give a shit.”
Hyden clearly framed how the attitude shift that evened the playing field for the Boss and the Piano Man had taken place: “Twenty years ago, Springsteen and Joel represented opposing sides in a debate—‘authenticity’ vs. ‘artifice’—that formed the crux of nearly every conversation about popular music. Today, this dialogue has been marginalized to the point of virtual silence. Hating Billy Joel is no longer a meaningful act; at best, it suggests that you’re the sort of person who’s actively annoyed by things that most people tend to like or at least tolerate.”
In fact, he added, “Joel’s strengths—his accessibility, his knack for romantic balladry, his understated versatility in adapting to different songwriting and production styles—are no longer held against him. As far as Billy Joel’s legacy is concerned, staying put has been the next best thing to dying.”
* * *
POST 12.12.12, BILLY kicked off the New Year with a January visit to Vanderbilt University. There, taking audience questions midway through his appearance, he called on a young man, Michael Pollack, who had played piano with sometime Billy band regular Richie Cannata and now asked to join Billy onstage. Billy waited the merest beat: “Okay.”
Pollack wanted to play “New York State of Mind,” and when Billy asked him, “What key do you do it in?” the reply came, “What key do you want it in?” In earlier times, Billy actually kept a gong onstage at such events in case he felt the need to ring an inept player off. But from the opening notes, Pollack showed an assured aptitude, and though Billy did some business donning sunglasses and threw in some light-hearted impersonations as Pollack began accompanying him, he soon shifted into a nicely committed vocal that drew sustained applause and eventually went viral online. “The kid had chutzpah,” was Billy’s summation, “and chops.”
It was nearly time to test his own. As his booker Dennis Arfa tantalized him with possibilities for the coming touring season, he was spurred to, in effect, open out of town, with an upcoming live gig in Australia, closely followed by a return to Jazz Fest. He had told Rolling Stone that even a return to touring with Elton was feasible—that in sum, he had no immediate intent to retire and that ultimately, “I just love the game too much to not play it well.”
At Jazz Fest, he lived up to a vow to pay tribute to the city with a surprise—during “Scenes from an Italian Restaurant,” as he sang the lyric “drop a dime in the box, play the song about New Orleans,” the Preservation Hall Jazz Band horns, plus bass drum, strutted onstage. “Pure joy coursed through th
e set” was the Rolling Stone précis, further noting he “held tens of thousands of visitors to the New Orleans Jazz & Heritage Festival in the palm of his hand.”
In May, as Carole King was awarded the prestigious Library of Congress Gershwin Prize for Popular Song—Billy would be the recipient the following year—he was among the guests paying tribute to her in the East Room of the White House, performing “The Loco-Motion” in a fashion that captured both the song’s propulsive playfulness and a certain gospel fervor. The president and first lady boogied discreetly in their seats alongside Carole and Joe Biden, before Billy ended with a throttled Ray Charles exclamation. He somehow brought out the nobility in the supposed novelty dance tune, then sang a duet with James Taylor on “Crying in the Rain.”
A less happy duty for Billy was the mid-May memorial for Phil Ramone, who had passed away on March 30. “Working with Ramone completely changed my life,” Joel told the mourners. “I am not just talking about fame and fortune, but also about joy and enrichment.” Phil had told him, when they made The Nylon Curtain, “This album needs an epilogue,” so he wrote, “Where’s the Orchestra?”—“which has been running through my head ever since Phil passed away.”
The mid-June ceremony at the Songwriters Hall of Fame that gave Billy and Elton a chance to start patching relations also renewed Billy’s friendship with sometime neighbor and producer Mick Jones, whom he inducted into the Hall along with fellow Foreigner Lou Gramm. Jones and Billy had been out of touch until, not long before, they’d run into each other in a Miami restaurant. “I hadn’t seen him for at least two or three years,” recalls Jones, “and we just picked it up as if it were yesterday. I had just been informed that we were going to be inducted. I couldn’t think of anybody better that I would love to have [to deliver Jones’s induction speech] … and I kind of popped the question at him. I was really nervous. I was building it up for like two or three hours. I don’t think he realized, but it was monumental for me. And he said, sure, no problem.”
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