All this activity was welcome news to Steve Cohen, who is sought after by the film as well as the music industry and would factor into any new planks Billy establishes. “If Billy were to decide to author something fresh again, I’d be really interested, because I think there are so many more layers to him. I think he is all the more an incredible artist now because of life experience. I think the craftsman that he is could probably sit down and pick up a new set of paints and just come up with something incredible.”
“I think people have this idea,” says Billy, “that Billy Joel is set in concrete. They either like my stuff or they don’t like my stuff. They either like me or they don’t like me. I don’t think they really know a lot about what I can do. Maybe I don’t even know anymore what we can do, what we can’t do. But I suspect there’s a lot more that I can do.”
DURING HIS LOS ANGELES stand, Billy was spending his days in Santa Barbara in a house overlooking a long curve of shoreline. It offered ready access to hill-climbing two-lane roads, the kind ideally suited to the small gaggle of motorcycles his road crew had ferried across the country and loaded into his garage. Alexis gamely rode along with Billy on an expedition into the hills, her underpowered Vespa gruntingly trying to outpace the barreling delivery trucks that came up fast behind the pair. As Billy mused on the relationship, in comparison to the lost love with Katie Lee, he was reflective but upbeat: “She’s exactly the same age as Katie [who was born in 1981], but she’s from Long Island, not too far from Hicksville, so we have a lot more in common right off the bat.”
A goodly part of the unusually comfortable philosophical resolve Billy seems to have found of late clearly comes from the fulfilling relationship he and Alexis have built from this foundation. He sums things up this way: “We’ve been together more than three years now, and she left her job. She went from Morgan Stanley over to Merrill Lynch and was having to schlep into the city, do the Wall Street commute, and was working well into the night. She took on a lot of work with the new job and would come back just stressed out. I said, ‘Stop—life’s too short.’ I see how Wall Street firms, they chew people up, they just spit ’em out. Yeah, there are big bonuses handed out. But she was hitting her head against the glass ceiling. I said, ‘Just hang out for a while. Take some time off. Live my lifestyle for a while. I’ll cover you.’ And it’s been like that for a while now. And I like it. It’s nice.”
“Alexis made her own money. She has her own house. But she’s decided she likes to live with me. We live together, and we get along really, really well. And she enjoys my cooking. I’m the housewife. She would come back from work, and I’d have dinner ready, and I’d clean up. ‘How was your day, honey?’ I’m a homey guy, so I kind of enjoy that. Things are very good. She’s intelligent. Except we can’t watch TV shows together. She likes Seinfeld and Friends and Golden Girls. And I’m watching the History Channel and MSNBC, and I’m always yelling at those sons of bitches—Rachel Maddow, she gets my blood going, she’s so smart.”
As a matter of fact, Alexis is a few degrees to the right of the multi-millionaire socialist Billy (a contradiction he jokingly asserts and embraces), and yet in another proof of love, that doesn’t bother him much. “She’s very good to me. Really very patient and kind and thoughtful, a lot of good things. As for the future growth of the relationship, I’m not closing any doors.”
ANY ROMANCE UNDERTAKEN as late in life as Billy’s—he celebrated his sixty-fifth birthday in May 2014 with eighteen thousand fans at the Garden—has to take account of the end game; ideally, you find a boon companion for the declining years, for which he’s beginning to prepare. He says, “I’ve got to start setting that up, because decrepitude isn’t that far off, and before I get too old to do the traveling and the schlepping and the organizing of it, maybe I should just get ready. It’s a fun project. When I go, I’m going to go big time and do it right. Katie didn’t get it. ‘Why are you talking about death? It’s so morbid.’ I said, ‘It’s actually part of life, and I don’t want to end up being caught short.’ I’ve seen people who have these catastrophic illnesses when they’re old, and then they’re screwed, and they’re stuck in a hospital room with a big, nasty old nurse. I want my nurses all picked out beforehand, from college. Send them to nursing school—I’ll pay for it. I’ll even pick out the outfits.”
Billy has said that when he dies—and as a committed atheist, he’s not anticipating any postmortem surprises, positive or negative—he’d like to buried in Bloomingdale’s department store, “so my wives will come visit me.” He also has at times had his eye on a small graveyard, a “burying ground” since the 1960s at a peaceful backroads intersection in Sagaponack, not far from his house on Gibson Lane there: “Recently my lawyer had me go over various documents, a will and a living will—after you’re sixty or so, you’d better have that ready to go. So I thought about where I’d like to be interred. It would either be in that little graveyard in Sagaponack or in Sag Harbor.”
Of the former, he says, “I don’t know if you’re allowed to inter people there anymore. They could be maxed out, and it’s not like calling the maître d’ at a restaurant to get in. I don’t think I’d like to be cremated—although it might have been kind of appropriate to have the ashes scattered in the water, since I’m such a water guy. But nope, I think I want my spot—just bury my ass in a nice little graveyard. I like real estate. I can’t give up on the real estate. You can’t take it with you, but maybe [the soil he lies in] can take me with it. There’s something about it that’s strangely comforting to know—I’m not going to be just another headstone in one of these mass places; give me a nice little spot, and maybe have my family think of me as they drive by and throw a flower down once in a blue moon, maybe think about me.
“As much as I feel that I’m a lifelong native of Oyster Bay, I feel actually more of a kinship to Sag Harbor and the east end, because that really looks like the Long Island of my childhood, the greener, small-village feel things used to have when I was a kid. I think people are so conscious now about preserving what is left that this area may stay pretty much like this, not get developed like the rest of the island did and lose its soul. I’d like to be a son of Sag Harbor when I go.”
As to any observances, he hasn’t really thought about that in detail. “But,” he says, “I don’t want a religious ceremony. I don’t want some priest or rabbi, waving their hands around. You keep those guys away from me. Music—I’m sure they’ll probably play something of mine that’s appropriate, maybe the Elegy, which is called ‘The Great Peconic,’ that would be nice. Or ‘And So It Goes,’ or ‘Lullabye.’ Alexa will probably pick out some kind of apt piece, and there are classical pieces I would find really emotionally appropriate, like Barber’s ‘Adagio’ or a Beethoven piece. It would be nice if it was a simple local ceremony, and I do like churches. The old whaling church in Sag Harbor would be nice. Or however big they want to go with it, that’s their call—hell, do it at the Cathedral of St. John the Divine. It should be more of a celebration than a dirge.”
These days Alexa is never far from his thoughts. He naturally roots for her in her career and agonizes when, in her vulnerability, she has a setback of some sort, as in the late 2009 Traumeel incident, or in May 2014 when she collapsed onstage—though she was quickly revived without any aftereffects—during a Hotel Carlyle performing stint. Sometimes he wishes she had more skepticism about people and would put up more of a protective barrier between herself and an often hurtful world: “She likes to believe the best of people, will always give somebody the benefit of the doubt and doesn’t have a shard of mistrust. And I’m trying to tell her, ‘Yeah, you’re Pinocchio,’ just like sometimes I’m Pinocchio. That’s where she gets it from.”
Their shared, trusting nature reminds him of a scenario he’s had in his head for a while—one he wishes he could figure out what to do about: “What would it be like if, when you were that eighteen-year-old idealistic, naïve, sweet kid, you met yourself at an advanced age?
“When I was eighteen, I was almost a socialist, and a liberal and an idealist and naïve. I trusted everybody and believed in the greatness of humanity and the kindness of strangers. And here I am, the sixty-plus-year-old—it would be an interesting meeting. What would I say to that eighteen-year-old and what would that eighteen-year-old say to me? Would he be disappointed in how I turned out, or would I think he was a young idiot and a fool?”
While Billy’s innocence has been tempered by the betrayals that have dotted his personal and professional lives, the same forgiveness he has granted his transgressors like Frank Weber extends to a sometimes hostile universe: “Out of disasters and catastrophes, somehow or another, it all made everything possible. It’s a good way of looking at things, I think. The management thing, if that disaster hadn’t happened, I might have just stopped doing what I was doing. I was ready to kind of stop it all by the time of the Bridge album. I was getting tired of the treadmill then. But because I had to make back the money, and I was going to be recording more albums, that kind of lit a fire. You can go all the way back—if it hadn’t been for the Nazis I never would have been here.”
As Billy passes the Medicare age, sixty-five, the question remains—just where is “here”? At the simplest level, it’s in his Centre Island house, a literal stone’s throw from the oyster-strewn inlet where he worked long, chilly hours as kid. “Here” for now is also the road, or even the nearby confines of Madison Square Garden. If sports teams call their home arenas “our house,” Billy, more than any other artist, and in fact by official proclamation as a franchise, can call the Garden home.
For Billy, his residency there comes down to a simple ethic: “I’m a working man. It’s still a job. And I work very hard when I work.” It reminds him of a discussion he and Bruce Springsteen had on a balmy day in Florida, looking back over their times and unlikely careers. “There’s an element of luck and timing—absolutely, we caught the wave. We were at the right place the right time doing the right thing.
“But aside from the luck and the timing, there’s a lot of dedication involved. You have to be completely committed, and it’s not about being famous, and it’s not about being a star. If I wasn’t as big a star as somebody else at a certain time in my career, it wasn’t an issue for me.
“It’s your dedication to your craft that really separates the men from the boys.”
AT SOME STAGE even a life lived in public must be recaptured, made one’s own. Billy’s life has never been an unexamined one: “I sometimes wonder, what if I had never lived at all, or what if my life had been cut short when I was young? You get what you get. Why are we being greedy and expecting more after that? Anything else is all made up. Mark Twain wrote a book about it called The Mysterious Stranger. The thesis is, because we have the power to reason, we came up with this whole afterlife thing. I’ve said since I was a kid—I don’t believe in an afterlife. I think you’re lucky to get what you get—so make sure that you live it well. And when you get to the end of things, you go, Boy, did I do that right, or not?
“While you’re living it, you hope to ensure that you can ultimately say, I did it as well as I could. And then you got to learn to let go. In Network, sometime after admitting he’s ‘run out of bullshit,’ Howard Beale says, ‘This is not a psychotic breakdown, this is a cleansing moment of clarity.’ I’m at that point in my life—I can see the end of things. And how am I going to come to grips with that? Dying is part of living. But you try to squeeze as much out of life as you can.
“I do have this theory that the person who steers us in the right direction is somewhere between the eighteen-year-old and the twenty-one-year-old, when you’re at the height of your idealism. You get to middle age, and you’ll know what the smart thing to do is, you’ll know what the good business move is, the diplomatic or the accepted thing to do, but that eighteen- or twenty-one-year-old is the one that’s telling you that’s the right thing to do. And you can’t fool that guy, and you’re going to wrestle with him your whole life. He’s a pain in the ass and he won’t go away.
“I recognize him in myself. I hope I haven’t compromised him too much because I have a lot of respect for that guy, even though he was naïve and he was foolish about a lot of things. It turned out he was wrong and self-destructive in some ways and was reckless and maybe inconsiderate, maybe self-absorbed, but he was full of idealism and always knew that the right thing to do was to be true to these ideals.
“I look back on the younger guy—who the hell was he? He was so ambitious, and he worked so hard, and he accomplished a lot. I almost don’t recognize who that is at this point. What was your problem? Were you overcompensating, overachieving? What are you doing? Like almost listening to the words from ‘Vienna’—‘Slow down, you crazy child.’ Like how about living your life a little bit? But this has been my life for a long time.
“Nobody’s immortal, of course, and as much as I believe that someone like Beethoven will live as long as people listen to music, I don’t know that my work has that kind of staying power. But I am glad that the music I’ve created over the past four-plus decades is an important part of a lot of people’s lives. And I hope it lasts at least another four.
“I’m assuming some of my music will survive, either as I recorded it or in some other form. I don’t look to that as a consolation, though. For me, I see it as a justification for my having existed in the first place. You’ve created something, you’ve had an impact on your time.
“I don’t know why that is so important to me, but it is.”
NOTE ON SOURCES
This book is the result of research and interviews dating back to mid-2008, commencing around the time of Billy Joel’s landmark Shea Stadium concerts. Additional updates have been constantly added through the midsummer of 2014. All quotes from Billy, except where specifically otherwise attributed (including a pair of quotations from our 1985 interview for the New York Daily News), are from these approximately one hundred hours of interviews.
Beyond the interview sessions, I spent a significant amount of time in Billy’s company, at various homes and on the road, as he toured North America, Japan, Australia, England, and Ireland. In hotel rooms and lobbies, in cars, vans, buses, trains, and aircraft large and small, Billy was patient with the myriad queries and thoughtful in his answers.
At least another hundred hours of interviewing has included his friends, family, relationship partners, bandmates, crew, and close colleagues of all stripes. Some of these speakers have been with him for many years (more than forty in at least three instances), some for just a few months. These intimates have been forthcoming, articulate, and of enormous help in recounting their shared history and entrusting their insights to this effort.
Another great asset has been the opening of the Joel archive for research. The archive’s director, Jeff Schock, has been an invaluable resource. Beyond his indispensable firsthand recall from decades of working in close concert with Billy Joel, Jeff has freely shared the physical resources of a sizable collection of unique items. Along with its countless photos, illustrative materials, and transcripts, the archive is a rich trove of filmed and audio recordings of Billy Joel’s doings and those of his bandmates, colleagues, and peers. Along with the actual footage of the various films and the videos of concerts, highly informative master classes, and press conferences, the outtakes from various documentary histories of his career have been crucial in telling the story.
A great deal of what was once called ink has been devoted to Billy Joel since the first reviews and features emerged forty-some years ago, and the often-impressive insights and observations of various writers have been credited as they appear. The reliably informed work of sometime colleagues at Rolling Stone, early and late, has been a particularly helpful resource. The Long Island newspaper of record, Newsday, especially in the person of pop music writer Glenn Gamboa, has been a steadily informative asset. I would also like to mention earlier biographies by Mark Bego, Hank Bordowitz, a
nd Bill Smith. No such book of any heft is easy to write. Each effort inevitably adds context to a broader and hopefully deeper tale.
Special note should be made of the inclusion of some especially revealing and involving quotes Billy gave to the late Timothy White, a friend and colleague of mine at Crawdaddy! and Rolling Stone. Tim wrote the first cover stories on Joel in each magazine (over resistance in each case), tracked Billy’s career through the years as he edited Billboard magazine, and contributed the liner notes for the sprawlingly comprehensive My Lives collection. Through the graciousness of his widow, Judy Garlan White, I was given access to his thorough and unparalleled trove of interviews and articles, including some material coming to light for the first time.
Also deserving of special mention is the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum, notably Ron Coleman of the museum’s resource center. Not only did his help in exploring the archive’s deep documentation confirm time lines and events of the Joel family’s perils within and escape from Nazi Germany, his added historical information and context enhanced the account at both a highly personal level and a more universal one. (Through that research, Billy Joel would learn for the first time of a Holocaust survivor, cousin to his father Howard, who made it to America and is buried near Billy’s present home.) The museum’s work is a vital link to the past and could not have been more helpful to this particular effort.
Very much of a piece with the museum’s important work is that of distinguished film and theater director filmmaker Beate Thalberg, whose 2001 documentary The Joel Files was key to this book’s effort to capture both the factual and the spiritual implications of what Billy Joel’s forebears endured in the Holocaust. Like Alexander Joel, Billy’s half-brother whose life story led Thalberg into the larger story told in the film, she has been a friend to this project.
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