Billy and the Joels--The American rock star and his German family story

by Steffen Radlmaier

  For “Code of Silence”, singer-songwriter Cyndi Lauper (“Girls Just Wanna Have Fun”) helped her colleague out of a stubborn case of writer’s block and is listed on the sleeve notes as co-writer of the song.

  On “Baby Grand” Billy was able to fulfill a long-standing dream, duetting with his idol Ray Charles. It’s a song about a musical love affair that outlasts all the harsh demands life throws up: a declaration of love for a beautiful musical instrument. As the title suggests, “Baby Grand” is all about a grand piano. Quincy Jones had told singer and pianist Ray Charles that Billy had named his daughter after him, and Ray readily agreed to the recording.

  This is how Billy described his deliberations: “What the hell do I have in common with Ray Charles? He’s an African-American blues singer who’s had a rough life. He’s from Georgia and he’s been around for a long time. And I’m this schnook white kid from Levittown, Long Island. What do we have in common? Then I realized, ‘Wait a minute. The piano. We both played the piano.’ And my daughter had just been born, so I had ‘baby’ on my mind. I thought, ‘Baby grand – this would be an interesting idea to pursue.’ I wanted to write a standard kind of song, and I wrote this love song to the piano, and I thought Ray could relate to it, because he’s had friendships come and go, and he’s had love that’s come and gone, and money that slipped through his fingers, and business that screwed him – just like what happened to me. The one thing that’s been consistent in both our lives has been the piano.”103

  When it came to recording the song there were two grand pianos waiting in the studio. Billy imitated the soulful phrasing of his hero, while Ray Charles delivered the original version.

  Reviews of “The Bridge” were predominantly positive, and the album made the charts in both the USA and Great Britain.

  Billy Joel was happy with the general recognition he was receiving. In various interviews he talked about the art of songwriting. He was always quick to stress that, for him, the emphasis lay on the music, whilst the lyrics tended to be of secondary importance. His strength lay in his ability to write catchy melodies. However, he was never able to knock out songs just like that; writing an album often turned out to be a difficult undertaking for him.

  “Some people write a hundred songs a year, and choose what they like. I’m not one of them. When I’m doing an album, I only complete 10 or 11 songs. If I don’t like something I’ve started, rather than continuing to work on it, I toss it into the trash can. There’s no backlog of Billy Joel material. You’ll never hear my basement tapes, because there are none. While I get ideas for songs all the time, I’ve found that the pressure to record has been the major motivation for me to finish anything. Once I get an idea, I write it down in a notebook. Six months later, when it has marinated, I’ll look at it and probably think of something better. I enjoy catching up with myself like that. Then when I finally go into the studio 80 percent of the actual recording process consists of cutting things out, changing, revising, and editing.”104

  In September 1986, after a two-year break, Billy and the band started once more on a world tour. At the same time, the album track “A Matter of Trust” was released as a single along with a video clip. Christie Brinkley and Alexa Ray can be seen in the clip, which shows the band at rehearsals in Manhattan.

  Billy Joel hadn’t given up his fundamental reservations where music videos as an advertising medium were concerned. His opinion of video clips was that this was a case of the tail wagging the dog. A dire development in which a whole generation starts connecting music with a series of prefabricated images: “I would really hope that people wouldn’t judge my music based on the videos. One of the reasons I became a musician is because it had nothing to do with visual. It had to do with the imagination of the listener. When I’m in the studio and I’m creating beauty, I’m six foot nine and look like Cary Grant. And then I see that reduced to this nebbish little guy with a double chin. Come on. That ain’t music. Can you imagine Beethoven doing this?”105

  The 1986/87 tour lasted almost a year and took in the whole of North America, Europe, Asia, and included two trips to Australia. In the band were long-standing members Doug Stegmeyer and Liberty DeVitto, as well as Russel Javors, David LeBolt, Mark Rivera, Kevin Dukes, Peter Hewlett and George Simms.

  Christie and Alexa went along for most of the tour, as Billy wanted to have his family with him. Thus, two completely different worlds met backstage: family life and show business. A couple of the musicians also had their wives and children with them. A special play zone was set up for the children who – fitted out with thick ear protectors – were able to watch their fathers working on stage. And while the children were enjoying the fun of this rock and roll circus, the musicians were getting their enjoyment in other ways. Alcohol and drugs – cocaine in particular – were virtually part of the luggage.

  The tour routine was somewhat broken by two special events: In 1986, along with other big names like Bob Dylan, Randy Newman, Tom Petty and Johnny Cash, Billy Joel took part in the “Farm Aid” charity concert. Country and Western artist Willie Nelson had organized the event in aid of struggling American farmers.

  And in 1987 a historic series of concerts in the Soviet Union took place: Billy Joel became the first rock star from the West to perform in the huge communist country, where he presented his current show.

  This had been made possible by the political thaw between the USA and the Soviet Union. U.S. President Ronald Reagan and Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev had agreed upon a reciprocal cultural exchange. “Glasnost” and “Perestroika” became the two buzzwords that were soon to signal the end of the communist system.

  Having grown up in the time of the Iron Curtain, Billy was immediately aware of the uniqueness of the situation, and organized three concerts in Moscow and Leningrad at his own expense. His aim was to redeem the more than two million dollar outlay by means of a TV documentary and a live album. Some of his musicians were less than enthusiastic about playing the six concerts for nothing but expenses.

  In August, Billy Joel, his wife, daughter and entourage traveled to the Soviet Union. A black and white photo shows little Alexa being held by Mikhail Gorbachev. “The fact that I took my little daughter with me was a symbolic act, proof of trust. I wanted to show the Russians that I trusted them”, said Billy Joel in retrospect. He considers the concerts in the Soviet Union to be the most important he has ever played: “That was finally the end of the Cold War for me. And it all happened two years before the fall of the Berlin Wall.”

  He enjoyed playing the part of an American ambassador for culture and, with time, brought the crowd in Moscow’s Olympic Stadium to their feet. The spotlights of the camera team recording the concert had somewhat intimidated the audience, causing them to keep quiet. Furthermore, Soviet officials, who had absolutely no interest in rock and roll, occupied the front rows. It wasn’t until Billy overturned an electric piano and swung a microphone stand over his head before smashing it on the ground while performing “Just a Fantasy” that the ice was broken. This harmless incident in Moscow made international headlines.

  Although he was ordered not to perform any encores, Billy ignored the Russian rules and played an extra seven songs after the concert was officially finished. He dedicated “Honesty” to the Russian singer-songwriter and dissident Vladimir Vysotsky, before rocking the house with the Beatles’ “Back in the U.S.S.R.”. Rock and roll had become the continuation of the policy of détente by musical means. Billy Joel was aware of that: “A Russian teenager came up to me after concert and said: ‘That was the most important thing to happen in Russia since the October Revolution.’ Even if I didn’t quite believe the boy at the time, it was still a very flattering and moving moment for me.”

  The concerts became an international media spectacle: Numerous press agencies had sent reporters, there was a live broadcast on American radio and, on October 24, 1987, HBO broadcasted the documentary “Billy Joel
Live from Leningrad USSR”, which was also released on video (“The Russia Collection”).

  Billy Joel on stage, Munich, 1990 · © Helmut Ölschlegel

  A live album recorded in Russia and entitled “Kohuept” was also released in October. In addition to several of Billy Joel’s hits, it included the Russian traditional “Odoya”, sung by a Georgian choir, as well as two carefully selected cover songs: The Beatles’ “Back in the U.S.S.R.” and Bob Dylan’s “The Times They Are A-Changing”.

  However, the ambitious expectations were not met: Except for in Australia, the album sold inexplicably poorly.

  Stormy Times

  In an interview, Billy Joel commented on this period as follows: “It still surprises me that I’m this very naïve, non-capitalist type of person dealing with what is the American dream. It scares the hell out of me, because I don’t know what’s going on. I wouldn’t know how to invest money. I’ve never been in a bank in ten years, I don’t know what it all means. I mean, I go to a bar in Manhattan, and there are these Wall Street brokers sitting around talking earnestly, in detail, about achieving exactly the kind of thing I’ve achieved. I sit there thinking, ‘I got more money than everybody at that table, but I don’t know what they’re talking about.’ It scares me. I’m kind of glad I’ve retained a lot of that innocence.”106

  This (only partially feigned) naivety was once again to cost him dearly.

  He’d already been the target of the US tax authorities in 1986. The International Revenue Service demanded payment of income tax arrears to the sum of 5.5 million dollars, dating back to the time of Billy’s first marriage. Elizabeth was his manager at that time, receiving half of his royalties after the divorce. According to Billy, therefore, she should also be liable for half of his tax arrears.

  However, this was just the beginning of a series of financial inconsistencies that gradually came to light as time went by. It was Billy’s confidante and CBS president Walter Yetnikoff who started the ball rolling. Yetnikoff became suspicious after hearing Billy tell him that he was in financial straits. He’d had to sell his Manhattan apartment to Sting in order to get enough money together to buy a bigger house for Christie in East Hampton.

  As Yetnikoff was aware of Billy Joel’s huge profits from record sales, and was able to estimate his resulting earnings, he advised his protégé to hire an independent consultant to take a look at his finances. His suspicions were confirmed when Billy’s attorney Alan Grubman refused to comply with this request.

  The New York firm of Grubman, Indursky, Schindler & Goldstein also looked after such artists as Bruce Springsteen, Michael Jackson and Madonna. Becoming increasingly wary, Billy cancelled his contract with Grubman and sought the help of acquaintance John Eastman, brother-in-law of Paul McCartney. Eastman immediately engaged the services of renowned New York auditors Ernst & Young, to clarify Billy Joel’s financial status.

  It didn’t take long to discover that his money had been anything but well managed. And it was soon confirmed that Billy’s manager and ex-brother-in-law Frank Weber had for years been negligently and criminally filling his own pockets. Risky stock exchange transactions and fraudulences (such as overpriced video productions) meant Weber had in part earned more money from the Joel music companies than Billy himself.

  After the problems he’d had with Artie Ripp and financial disputes with his ex-wife Elizabeth Weber, Billy felt he’d been cheated by someone he implicitly trusted for the third time in his life. Frank Weber was even Alexa Ray’s godfather. This personal disenchantment hurt Billy Joel almost more than the financial loss, and it probably explains why he now views the world with increasing distrust.

  On August 30, 1988, Billy finally parted with Frank Weber, who had been defrauding him for all these years. It all ended in a lawsuit – there was a lot of money involved, after all: In 1980, Billy Joel’s attorney Leonard Marks filed a lawsuit against Frank Weber for 90 million dollars. Thus years of litigation began, with lawyers on both sides seeing the prospect of big money ahead.

  Once more, Billy had had to learn a hard lesson. Often more interested in their music than in their finances, a great number of rock stars have become victims of their own insouciance – and once again, show business turned out to be a pool of sharks. Although the situation was not really comparable, it seemed to be irony of fate that Billy Joel had to fight for years for money that was due to him, just as his grandfather before him had done. For both of them, it was a matter not only of money, but of principle too.

  Billy’s private life with Christie Brinkley also went through some changes about this time. After selling the New York apartment, the couple moved to East Hampton on Long Island to fulfill their wish of living near the ocean; a town where wealthy New Yorkers have their summer houses, places that increase in value the nearer they are to the beach. This was where, in 1974, Swiss author Max Frisch wrote his autobiographical novel Montauk. It’s also a place where working-class people have always lived and earned their money working for their richer neighbors. Some still work as traditional baymen: fishermen who, in the centuries-old tradition, go to sea to catch scallops and sea bass. But their business is getting increasingly tough and their existence under threat.

  Billy and Christie knew the area from their summer vacations and had friends there. They found a huge property by the sea and had it customized to suit their tastes (adding a recording studio and library); there was room in the expansive gardens for their own guest house.

  Billy had read Peter Matthiesen‘s book Men’s Lives, which tells of the hard lives of the Long Island fishermen, and was moved by their fate. He contacted the East Hampton Baymen’s Association and offered his help. The 40-year-old rock star explained his motives in an interview in the local paper, Newsday: “My feeling is they’re being put out of business by politicians, developers, industrial pollution, agricultural insecticide run-off and the sport-fishing lobby. I feel that if these guys disappear we’ve lost a lot of the identity of what Long Island is, especially if you go back in the history and culture of Long Island. Herman Melville wrote stories about them. Winslow Homer painted them. Walt Whitman wrote poems about them…a lot of cultural identity of Long Island has a lot to do with these people. If they go, we’re just a suburb. We’re no longer an island. People forget that – we’re an island.”107

  Billy committed himself to public activities in aid of the threatened fishermen. His “Charity Begins at Home” organization, which supports the needy in the tri-state area, gave donations and – last but not least – his song about the fishing boat “Downeaster Alexa” helped bring the attention of a wider public to the plight of the baymen. However, these activities did not turn out to be too successful. The negative development proved difficult to check.

  In July 1989 Billy Joel, who himself had never properly graduated from school, experienced something completely new, holding a workshop at Long Island University’s Center for the Performing Arts. This event was so successful that he later offered this unusual teaching method to several other American universities. He enjoyed the mixture of question-time and talkshow, demonstration and discussion, as much as the students did. These “An Evening of Question & Answers” events offered them entertaining and surprising insights into the life and works of Billy Joel. They were intended to give future musicians first-hand information about their chosen career paths. (Excerpts can be seen on the “Complete Hits Collection 1973–1997” CD.)

  Shortly before the release of his fourteenth album, Billy was forced to cancel a tour of Europe at short notice, due to being taken ill on the way to the airport. Kidney stones had to be removed in an emergency operation in the New York University clinic.

  His album was released while he was recovering in the hospital, and while the legal battle concerning his finances was continuing in the courts. The album was appropriately entitled “Storm Front” and the cover featured a red warning flag. There really were stormy changes
taking place in Billy Joel’s life, and there were more to come.

  Surprisingly, “Storm Front” was not produced by long-time partner and producer Phil Ramone. Billy had replaced him with Ex-Foreigner guitarist Mick Jones, in the hope he would bring fresh ideas and musical stimulus to the production. Furthermore, a few of the old band members were no longer involved: Doug Stegmeyer and Russel Javors only finding out through the press that they had been replaced. (Stegmeyer struggled with a drug problem, he committed suicide in 1995.) But it was the way in which these reshuffles were carried out that caused resentment and chagrin, and the parties affected would have liked an explanation. This type of behavior is allegedly typical of Billy Joel, who tends to shy away from open conflict. He’s considered to be extremely loyal, but only up to a point, after which he creates a fait accompli and simply breaks off contact, instead of trying to solve a problem.

  Billy Joel attempted to play down the subject: “It got to the point, it became such a big business, what we were doing. We did arena tour after arena tour, and rather than be friends like we used to be, we became business associates. People would kvetch about money, and their deal, and we weren’t close. Everybody was looking in everybody else’s pocket. On the “Bridge” album, it came to a head. We weren’t having fun; it just wasn’t fun. And before I came to do this album, I realized you not only had to reinvent yourself, but you have to refresh your memory about why you’re doing what you’re doing. It wasn’t a matter that I called people up and fired them. I discussed it with the guys who aren’t with me, and they were gonna do other projects anyway. I haven’t closed the door on working with anyone again; I just wanted to try something different. As a writer, you have an obligation to explore other means of expression.”108

  The only member of the original 1970s band to remain in the new line-up was drummer Liberty DeVitto. The other musicians were David Brown (guitar), Mark Rivera (saxophone), Schuyler Deale (bass), Jeff Jacobs (keyboards) and – the first female member of the band – Crystal Taliefero (saxophone and percussion).