Fred Schruers - Billy Joel: The Definitive Biography

Copyright 2014 by Fred Schruers

All rights reserved.
Published in the United States by Crown Archetype, an imprint of the Crown Publishing Group, a division of Random House LLC, a Penguin Random House Company, New York.
www.crownpublishing.com

CROWN ARCHETYPE and colophon is a registered trademark of Random House LLC.

Photography credits can be found on .
Grateful acknowledgement is made to Newsday LLC for permission to reprint excerpts from Look What Grew on Our Lawns by Harvey Aronson (October 28, 1967), copyright 1967 Newsday LLC, and Joel, Wife Splitting Up by Glenn Gamboa (June 18, 2009), copyright 2009 Newsday LLC. All rights reserved. Reprinted by permission of Newsday LLC.

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Schruers, Fred.
Billy Joel / Fred Schruers. First edition.
Includes bibliographical references.
1. Joel, Billy. 2. Rock musiciansUnited StatesBiography. I. Title.
ML420.J72S34 2014
782.42166092dc23
[B]
2014034084

ISBN 978-0-8041-4019-5
eBook ISBN 978-0-8041-4020-1

Jacket design by Michael Nagin
Jacket portrait by Mark Hanauer
Author photograph: Kate Rocky

v3.1

Its five oclock on a Monday, and the regular crowd shuffles in to the chilly, unpopulated great hall of Madison Square Garden, where a crew is still slapping down chairs on the big slabs of decking that cover the hockey rink.

Toting guitars, drumsticks, horns, and earpieces, Billy Joels band arrays itself for a sound check, and now up a metal staircase comes the man himself. You could say hes shuffling as well; both hips were replaced in mid-2010, and now, January 27, 2014, hes fully mendedbut not likely to be doing the backflips off the piano that, hell occasionally speculate, led to that operation.

As he perches on his compact stool, checking settings on the hybrid acoustic/synthesized piano he uses, the band looks up expectantly. Hes notoriously bored by sound checks, which means therell be plenty of japes about his age, certain band peccadillos, or the world situation, all delivered with ready wit. But at the same time, all hands had better be on the one when he delivers a casual instruction, because the message wont come twice.

From time to time, as in an open-air-arena sound check in Perth in December 2008, hell get a wild hair and lead the band through pretty much an entire classic album. In that case, it was Disraeli Gears by Creamat least until the constables put a stop to it after a volley of noise complaints from the neighborhood.

Billy, warmed by a plain black watch cap and a wool sports coat, plinks out a few exploratory notes as the others tune up around him. He gazes aboutI dont hear the room as well I used to hear it.

Tonight will be his forty-seventh show at whats pretty much the most storied concert venue in the world. You get here just the way you get to Carnegie HallPracticebut it really helps if you sell tens of millions of albums. In his case the figure is 110 million or so, and thats part of the reason hes playing this inaugural gig to kick off an open-ended residency, a series of monthly Garden dates that will continue, as he said in a recent press conference, as long as theres demand.

A blogger for Forbes computed that, based on rapid sellouts, the strength of the Joel catalog, and what demographers might call his enormous local and worldwide fan base, something approaching forty shows might match that demand.

No ones expecting him to do that many, of course, but you never know.

Billys still eyeballing the arenas distant reaches, somewhat obscured by new carpeted catwalks leading to bunkerlike luxury suites. Hes wondering why the sound waves seem muted: Either Im going deaf or the room is different. Is there a big sponge up there? He waits a beat, as the band, knowing his timing, remains at parade restAh, I guess its the hair in my ears.

At sixty-four, hes allowed to kvetch a bit. Three hours from now, a few songs into his set, when the packed house has already marched in place to the epic sweep of Miami 2017, bounced in rhythm (the Garden is on massive, pulsating springs) to Pressure, crooned along to the enchanting soliloquy that is Summer, Highland Falls, and ditty-bopped and doo-wopped to The Longest Time, he pauses: Good evening, New York City A roar like a gut punch breaks over the stage. I have no idea how long this is gonna go.

The alert eyes, somehow made more magnetic by the bald pate above, swivel around the room as he takes a sip of water. The guys in the crowd give their dates a knowing lookYou think its really water? This year is my fiftieth year in show business. A subtle resettling of his spineas in, Were practicing our trade here. Another beat. What was I thinking? Now he turns to peer at the image of his head and torso, many times life-size. I didnt think I was gonna end up looking like that in 1964.

The big banks of speakers are putting out their crisp, almost subliminal exhalations as the crowd noise modulates downthe fans are thinking what fifty years means to Billy, and to them. Theyre hoping to hear Movin Out (Anthonys Song), New York State of Mind, and River of Dreams, which are all but a certainty, as well as Piano Man, which is a certainty, and the set list sites have hinted theyll be sent out into the night after a four-song encore capped by a tub-thumping, horn-washed take of Only the Good Die Young.

Theres time enough for the key anthems, and time, too, for some deep cuts like Wheres the Orchestra? But first Billys got one more observation about the doo-wop moment: It sounds better in the mens room, as he and his bandmates demonstrated, bouncing The Longest Time off dingy tiles in the songs 1984 video. We used to sneak out at night and sing it on the street cornerand people would throw shit at us!

Well, clearly that was then. And tonight, when hes sixty-four, they still need him, too, to borrow a phrase from a song. Mike DelGuidice, new utility player in the band, centerpiece of his own Joel tribute band called Big Shot, and maybe the number one fan in the room, will sum it up later in the bar where the band gathers. Hes just the guy. That is the guy. Hes more loved than anyone on he planet, musically. Mike has just come down from the hotel room he hurried to after the gig to take a family phone call. When he sat on the bed and started to think about having just played opening night alongside Billy in the Garden, he wept like a baby for a good five minutes.

That Billys even here in this sacramental spot, soon to be filled with eighteen thousand faithful fans, goes against the steepest of odds. If a harbormaster in Havana hadnt let his fathers family disembark to find refuge from the Nazis; if his mom hadnt found that piano teacher; if he hadnt drilled into his own alienation to write his saga as that piano man; and if some label bosses hadnt stuck by him after his first two albums tanked, he might be sitting down to the keys at a very different spot on the map.

Theres a particular moment in almost every one of his shows when, a song or two in, while listening to that odd sonic tumult of roaring approval, hollered song titles, and proprietary shout-outs of his first name, he leans left and forward on his piano stool and searches the faces of the crowd in his periphery. Theres usually a tentative grin, but theres also a jigger of uncertaintyand therefore vulnerabilitythat stops short of neediness but is still somehow in touch with it. Tonight it will come before Summer, Highland Falls, with its telling lyric: And as we stand upon the ledges of our lives / With our respective similarities / Its either sadness or euphoria.