Speaker 1: This is Alec Baldwin and you're listening to Here's the
Speaker 1: Thing from iHeart Radio. Billy Joel's fans have gotten to
Speaker 1: know him quite well over the past four decades.
Speaker 2: Don't go change it.
Speaker 1: To dry please me.
Speaker 3: You never let me down before.
Speaker 1: From the open hearted declarations of old fashioned love and
Speaker 1: She's Got Away and just the way you are to
Speaker 1: the hard rocking social commentaries we didn't start the fire
Speaker 1: and Alentown we're living here sunny. If like me, you
Speaker 1: grew up listening to Billy Joel's music, you can chart
Speaker 1: phases of your life by each of his albums. Maybe
Speaker 1: that's because Billy Joel's songs are so passionately connected to
Speaker 1: who he was at the time he wrote them. No, No,
Speaker 1: testing one two, testing one two three, And when you're
Speaker 1: actually sitting in the same room as him with a
Speaker 1: piano nearby, well you can't help yourself. I stilways. Remember
Speaker 1: you said that to me years ago, how predictable it
Speaker 1: was wherever you were that there was a piano. Bots like,
Speaker 1: Billy could you eh, do you mind right? We just
Speaker 1: a couple of songs, Yeah, that's your life.
Speaker 4: Yes, but you know it's fun. You can't have act alongs.
Speaker 4: You're an act you can't act along, but you can
Speaker 4: have sing alongs. I can always sit down at a party,
Speaker 4: play the piano and everybody starts singing.
Speaker 1: I go to a pub in England, Hey, come on,
Speaker 1: vinegarys and having his owns go there. You go, yes,
Speaker 1: uptown girl up and they all sin around and sing
Speaker 1: and everybody has a bliss. It's fun. It creates a
Speaker 1: community instantly. Billy Joel is the third best selling solo
Speaker 1: artist of all time in the United States. He sold
Speaker 1: more records than The Stones, Bruce Springsteen, and Madonna, but
Speaker 1: he admits there's still room for improvement.
Speaker 4: I know what good piano playing is, and I'm not good.
Speaker 4: My left hand is lame. I have a two finger
Speaker 4: left hand piano player, as opposed to post to somebody
Speaker 4: who knows what they're doing with their left hand. I
Speaker 4: never practiced enough to use all my fingers on my
Speaker 4: left hand, so I just play octaves, bass notes. My
Speaker 4: right hand tries to compensate for my left hand being
Speaker 4: so GIMPI, so I overplay on my right hand. My
Speaker 4: technique is horrible. I can't read music. I never really
Speaker 4: don't read music. I used to, but I don't anymore.
Speaker 1: I forgot how So if I took a piece of
Speaker 1: music that you didn't know, if I got a score,
Speaker 1: I wouldn't. And I put in videos to play this,
Speaker 1: I would not. It would be Chinese. It would be
Speaker 1: Chinese too. Yeah, I don't know how did that happen.
Speaker 1: It's like a language. If you stop speaking it often enough,
Speaker 1: you can't forget. When did you stop?
Speaker 4: In one Dances with Wolves, she forgot how to speak English.
Speaker 4: I started taking lessons when I was about four or five,
Speaker 4: and I went up till I was about sixteen, so
Speaker 4: it was almost twelve years.
Speaker 1: Of classical piano lessons.
Speaker 4: I loved it, but I just when you become a teenager,
Speaker 4: everything changes. I didn't want to read other people's dots anymore.
Speaker 4: And I also realized early on, I'm not going to
Speaker 4: be a concert pianist. I don't have the rockmanning Off hands,
Speaker 4: the Horowitz hands. I had strong hands, but the short fingers.
Speaker 1: You were Johnny Frimley's hands. Who's Johnny Frimly from on
Speaker 1: the waterfront?
Speaker 3: Oh?
Speaker 1: You were a union boss doing the shape up down
Speaker 1: to the dock and hopboken. Yeah, yeah, you're not you're not.
Speaker 1: It was my brother. You stoildn't taken better care of me, Charlie.
Speaker 5: He should have looked out for me, Charli, just a
Speaker 5: little bit, a little bit. So what did I get it?
Speaker 1: One way?
Speaker 5: Thick of I'm a bum, Charlie. Let's face it, that's
Speaker 5: what I am.
Speaker 1: That's what I am. So you're a kid and you
Speaker 1: was there an intimation in your household? There was a
Speaker 1: classical music, right, my faical music. Yeah.
Speaker 4: He was a classically playing trained pianist. He grew up
Speaker 4: in Nuremberg, Germany, and he also went to school in Switzerland.
Speaker 4: His father was quite well off. They had a mail
Speaker 4: order textile business, Joel Mocht fabric. So he had learned
Speaker 4: to play the piano. It was a very musical family.
Speaker 4: He could play chopin, he could play all the great stuff.
Speaker 4: He should have become a musician. He became an engineer.
Speaker 4: He worked for ge and then he was in promotion.
Speaker 4: But he was never really happy because he didn't become
Speaker 4: a musician. We had an old, upright piano in the house,
Speaker 4: a leicster piano, real piece of junk, and I happened
Speaker 4: to inherit that thing and ended up being a planter
Speaker 4: in the garden.
Speaker 1: My mom used it to grow a honeysuckle. She sang.
Speaker 4: Her family were all singing Gilbert and Sullivan, English music
Speaker 4: hall people. Her family was English, so I grew up
Speaker 4: in a very musical home. I heard music all the time.
Speaker 4: My father was playing, my mother would sing. Radio was
Speaker 4: always on, listening.
Speaker 5: To Milton Cross on the Opera. On Sunday, Leonorda enters
Speaker 5: wearing a white gum.
Speaker 1: So I used to bang on the piano.
Speaker 4: My mom got sick of hearing me bang, and she
Speaker 4: dragged me down the street and I started taking lessons,
Speaker 4: and I took to it.
Speaker 1: You and the lester, and your mother and your father.
Speaker 1: Where is this the Bronx. This is in Hicksville. Everybody
Speaker 1: was in Hicksville. We were in Hicksville when my family
Speaker 1: moved with me out of the Bronx. When I was
Speaker 1: a baby, I think maybe a year old. Basically grew
Speaker 1: up on the island.
Speaker 4: I grew up on the island in the Levittown section
Speaker 4: of Hicksville. We had a Levett house, you know, the
Speaker 4: cape cod on the quarter acre. Everybody's house looked the same,
Speaker 4: started out looking the same. Now it doesn't look anything
Speaker 4: like Levittown, right like my town.
Speaker 1: Yeah, sixteen years old, Hicksville, Long Island, Vietnam War going on, Yes,
Speaker 1: very very tumultuous times, and all of a sudden, what
Speaker 1: do you decide you want to do well?
Speaker 4: I joined a band when I was fourteen. I was
Speaker 4: asked to be in a band, the Echoes. This was
Speaker 4: the Echoes garage band. All guitars because there really were
Speaker 4: no keyboards that you could amplify. I played the piano.
Speaker 4: I never played the organ. Finally figured out how to
Speaker 4: amplify keyboards. I think the Dave Clark five was the
Speaker 4: first band that had an organ. You could hear a
Speaker 4: vox organ.
Speaker 1: It was cool, pieces, bits and pieces, and I'm feeling
Speaker 1: it's the most unglad sounding song. He was constant you,
Speaker 1: so you amplify the keyboard. We got an organ and
Speaker 1: I and I was.
Speaker 4: They decided I had the best voice in the band,
Speaker 4: which isn't really saying much because nobody could sing all
Speaker 4: that well in the band. We couldn't even harmonize. We're
Speaker 4: very bad singers. But they decided you would have got
Speaker 4: the best voice. You'll sing the songs.
Speaker 1: Okay, how did you feel about that.
Speaker 4: I felt a little funny about it because I'm not
Speaker 4: a front man where you stay with Michael mc jagger.
Speaker 4: I didn't have the mic jagger moves. I had a keyboard.
Speaker 4: You kind of locked in. You can't move around. You
Speaker 4: can't carry a keyboard around unless you were accordion player.
Speaker 4: And that looks like Lawrence welk Avan. Then the two
Speaker 4: so I stood at the piano or I sat at
Speaker 4: the piano. But then I realized, you know, that girl
Speaker 4: I always had a crush on, is actually looking at me.
Speaker 4: She never looked at me twice all those years in school.
Speaker 4: And we're playing at the Holy Family Church, the church dance.
Speaker 4: I was about fifteen sixteen. Virginia is looking at me.
Speaker 1: You know, come out Virginia at that Virginia she's looking
Speaker 1: I said, my my god, she's looking at me. And
Speaker 1: the band sounded great. I love what I was doing.
Speaker 1: The crowd went yay.
Speaker 4: When we finished every song, and at the end of
Speaker 4: the night, the priest gave us each fifteen dollars, which
Speaker 4: in nineteen sixty five was fifteen hundred dollars.
Speaker 1: That was it.
Speaker 4: The door locked behind me. This is what I'm going
Speaker 4: to do. I don't want to go to Corneghill anyway,
Speaker 4: And I ended up going to Corneghill anyway. What music
Speaker 4: were you performing covers of other people? Jukebox bands were
Speaker 4: playing early Beatles, Stones, Sam de Sham and.
Speaker 1: The Finger in that time when you're seeing Tommy James
Speaker 1: and the Chandell's and all that music. Who were you
Speaker 1: saying to yourself, if at all, were you saying, that's
Speaker 1: why I want to be That's why I really admire
Speaker 1: or look up to, or I think I want to
Speaker 1: have his career.
Speaker 4: Well, I liked a lot of different kinds of music.
Speaker 4: I already came out of a classical background, and I
Speaker 4: really dug jazz when I was in my early teens.
Speaker 4: Dave brew Beck, Scarpedison, Art Tatum, Jimmy Smith, Bill Evans.
Speaker 4: I loved jazz. But I realized I ain't gonna be
Speaker 4: one of those guys either. Why because I wasn't a
Speaker 4: good enough pianist.
Speaker 1: I mean, these guys are as virtuostick, virtuistic what virtuostic virtuostick?
Speaker 1: They're good good, They're just really good. I mean the
Speaker 1: top of the line, guys at the top of the
Speaker 1: line in classical and jazz. They could have gone either way.
Speaker 4: The top of line classical guys, how they decided to
Speaker 4: be jazz guys could have been just as good as
Speaker 4: the top jazz guys, and vice versa.
Speaker 1: I wasn't good enough. I was good enough to play
Speaker 1: rock and roll and pop.
Speaker 4: But when I really fell in love with as a
Speaker 4: teenager with girls and stuff was first.
Speaker 1: I like soul music.
Speaker 4: James Brown, Wilson, Pickett, Otis Redding, the Temptations, Marvin Gay,
Speaker 4: Marvin Gay, Smokey Robinson, Gladys.
Speaker 1: I mean, I just loved Did you cover that music
Speaker 1: as well? I try to?
Speaker 4: You know, well, it was all you know they were.
Speaker 4: They were all white people, yeah, exactly. And there wasn't
Speaker 4: Long Island. There wasn't anybody but white people in my school.
Speaker 4: I think there were a couple of Jews, some Latinos.
Speaker 4: That was sprinklings. But everybody's white. But everybody likes me
Speaker 4: it twist and shout what everybody would do?
Speaker 1: Come on now, shout, come on? Yeah, and Louis Louis.
Speaker 1: I think there was the Kingsman. What I say, Ray Charles,
Speaker 1: So you the girl all dressed in green and you'd
Speaker 1: make up really dirty words to that. We came up
Speaker 1: with some really good stuff.
Speaker 4: So I love that stuff. And then the Beatles came
Speaker 4: around and there was boom. Four working class guys from Liverpool,
Speaker 4: which is as close to Levittown in England, I think,
Speaker 4: and sounding anyway, then you can be okay if four
Speaker 4: guys from Liverpool, yeah, Liverpool.
Speaker 1: And it's possible. It's possible. They don't look like.
Speaker 4: Frankie Avalon, they don't look like Bobby ry Dell. They
Speaker 4: look like four working class guys from anywhere. They could
Speaker 4: be from Ckxville, they could be from Livetown. So I said,
Speaker 4: that's that's possible. That's what I want to do. I
Speaker 4: want to write my own songs.
Speaker 1: I want to play in my own band, do our
Speaker 1: own arrangements and make our own way.
Speaker 4: When did that start? This is before the Echoes, before
Speaker 4: before I joined the band. The Beatles came out.
Speaker 1: You were a kid. I was a kid.
Speaker 4: I was thirteen and you started writing music. Yes, started
Speaker 4: writing Arizot's Beatles songs.
Speaker 5: Well, I climbed the highest mountaine trying to sound Liverpolon
Speaker 5: live Apudlian, Pudlian, Yeah, you know, she don't love me
Speaker 5: like before my own song she Don't Love Me Anymore,
Speaker 5: But I believed all the lad she told me.
Speaker 1: Ah ah, you know that kind of thing, trying to
Speaker 1: sound like the early Beatles. And it was fun.
Speaker 4: It was a lot of fun. But I was asked
Speaker 4: to join a band after the Beatles came out. Now
Speaker 4: you got to remember November of sixty three, John F.
Speaker 4: Kennedy is assassinated. The country goes into the dumps. Even
Speaker 4: though we didn't know that much about politics or government,
Speaker 4: he was our guy. He would the young, vigorous progressive.
Speaker 4: He represented youth and vigor and he was booming. He
Speaker 4: was shot taken away, and everybody just turned off, like
Speaker 4: a switch turned off. We became very cynical to press.
Speaker 4: The whole nation had the blues. February of sixty four,
Speaker 4: who comes out? The Beatles come to America. We took
Speaker 4: them in. We just embraced oxygen that they walked into
Speaker 4: that space, hopeful, funny, it was they were warm.
Speaker 1: Yes, everything everything that was taken away from us, great,
Speaker 1: let's go have a party. Let's party. So you start
Speaker 1: writing songs and you're saying, airsat's Beatles songs. What's the
Speaker 1: first song you write that you can remember? Was called
Speaker 1: My Journey's End. I could play it. I fil me too.
Speaker 2: Let's it We'll climb the highest mountain, swim with Dick.
Speaker 1: If I knew you were there at my journeys and.
Speaker 6: Waiting for me, I can tell them the letters.
Speaker 1: That you you said, jes I go anywhere.
Speaker 3: If I know you were waiting at my journey, He's in.
Speaker 1: What's the first song you wrote that was on a
Speaker 1: record that you sold? Can you remember?
Speaker 7: Well?
Speaker 4: It was probably in the Hassles. The Hassles sold records
Speaker 4: a few on Long Island, probably maybe Jersey.
Speaker 1: At the Woodrow Wilson rest stop.
Speaker 4: Yes, I think it was the Coffee chot Full of
Speaker 4: Nuts in Paramus, because we opened it. We Hassles played
Speaker 4: at the opening the first time.
Speaker 1: I we sold anything.
Speaker 4: So I was signed originally with the Echoes to Mercury Records,
Speaker 4: and we changed the name to The Lost Souls. Were
Speaker 4: the Lost For a while, we made a couple of records.
Speaker 4: Nothing ever happened. Uh what was the other one? Though
Speaker 4: she don't.
Speaker 1: Love me A lot of people she don't love me
Speaker 1: any more.
Speaker 8: I believe all the last she told me.
Speaker 1: Don't you know it's true that she stole me away from.
Speaker 5: My true love and Nama lul Love doesn't love me anymore.
Speaker 1: Almost like mister Mike. That's like the Beatles.
Speaker 4: And then we became the Lost Souls, and it turns
Speaker 4: out there was an English band called the Lost Soul,
Speaker 4: so we had to change our name. So the president
Speaker 4: of Mercury Records, brilliant guy at the time, So, okay,
Speaker 4: we're gonna give you a new name, the Commandos Vietnamers.
Speaker 1: Sure at the time, you're gonna be the Commandosh we
Speaker 1: hate that name. Nobody likes or yeah, no, we likes
Speaker 1: that stuff.
Speaker 4: I know you're gonna be the comand it's gonna be
Speaker 4: great and we're gonna get your outfits. And so that
Speaker 4: lasted about fifteen minutes and we got dumped off the label.
Speaker 1: So it's Echo Lost Souls, Lost Souls and then command
Speaker 1: Mandos for a weekend. For a weekend. It opened up
Speaker 1: one quick chuck full of nuts.
Speaker 4: And then I there was a band on Long Island
Speaker 4: which was making a lot of local noise called the Hassles.
Speaker 4: They asked me to join the guys in my band
Speaker 4: and the Echoes, Lost Souls Commandos Room. They were all
Speaker 4: going on to either the military or college. None of
Speaker 4: them were really seriously going to be musicians except the
Speaker 4: bass player. And I said, I'll join all right, I'll
Speaker 4: join the Hassles. They wanted me to play organ I'll
Speaker 4: join the if I can bring my bass player with
Speaker 4: me because they didn't have a bass player. They said okay,
Speaker 4: So that became the Hassles. And then there was another guy.
Speaker 4: He got a lot of Mick Jagger moves, Little John.
Speaker 4: His name was fun, great hair, good looking guy, couldn't
Speaker 4: sing to save his.
Speaker 1: Ass, didn't matter, you can wiggle it.
Speaker 4: He was gorgeous and women just went nuts and I'm
Speaker 4: in the back door were death well, but they had eyes,
Speaker 4: you know, they could they.
Speaker 1: Could see the music video killed the radio absolutely glad.
Speaker 4: I came up in an air where it wasn't that
Speaker 4: prep record. So then I was in the Hassles. Now,
Speaker 4: the Hassles were a band, blue white soul band. There
Speaker 4: were a bunch of them. The Vagrants was another one.
Speaker 3: Uh.
Speaker 4: They used to play at the Action House all the
Speaker 4: time on Long Island. We made two albums with the
Speaker 4: United Artists and they both bombed out. That that's the
Speaker 4: first time we started selling anything. Every step I take.
Speaker 4: Was the first song that I wrote that actually sold something.
Speaker 1: Was the vamp Everything I Do I don't know. The
Speaker 1: chorus went every step by say, every move I made.
Speaker 1: You know, I'm trying to a knife with that, I
Speaker 1: turned eye run, eye hid really no, deep inside, A
Speaker 1: part of me has died. He said, like, I didn't
Speaker 1: know you wrote that. That's great. That's how my father
Speaker 1: used to tell it. Sounded like Pompey. Yeah.
Speaker 4: So that was probably the first thing that solo was
Speaker 4: on the first Hassle's album. I think we saw a
Speaker 4: dozen copies and I actually heard it on the radio once.
Speaker 4: But our big single was actually a cover of a
Speaker 4: Sam and Dave record, You Got Me Humming.
Speaker 1: I don't know what you got but it's good too, man.
Speaker 1: You got Me Humming, You got Me Huming. It's a
Speaker 1: big song by Sam and Dave.
Speaker 4: Everybody was covering soul records and doing them psychedelic or
Speaker 4: doing their own arrangements of them. That was the Hassles hit.
Speaker 4: First time was horrible, This second hal was really horrible.
Speaker 4: And then I, me and the drummers split off from
Speaker 4: the Hassles to form a power duo like I.
Speaker 1: Played Simon and Garfuncle. Yes, sure, we were.
Speaker 4: Going to destroy the world with amplification. This was like
Speaker 4: the heavy metal thing we heard Zeppelin.
Speaker 9: It blew on mind Iron Butterfly, Gotta DaVita.
Speaker 1: Don't you know that I love you? Ye went on
Speaker 1: and on and on. We tried to are we listening
Speaker 1: to that? Because that's what there was? A Garden of Eden?
Speaker 1: Isn't that what someone said? There was?
Speaker 3: That was?
Speaker 1: That was like a nonsense lyric. A friend of mine
Speaker 1: knows the guy that wrote that song. I think I
Speaker 1: think he was trying to say, in the Garden of Eden,
Speaker 1: you actually know the lyrics to it? Divita. Yeah, that's
Speaker 1: all I know in a Gotta DaVita. I don't remember
Speaker 1: the rest of it. I remember he explained that he
Speaker 1: was at a party in La years ago that they
Speaker 1: were really in the game. He made a gibberish version,
Speaker 1: so their bail out lyrics. Okay. So when you get
Speaker 1: to this point where you say, a couple albums the
Speaker 1: hassles and then when is it you Well, it's what happened.
Speaker 4: The band's got small and smaller and smaller. The Attila
Speaker 4: became a two man band.
Speaker 1: So when you and he went off, we went with
Speaker 1: Attila was the two of you. Attila was just the
Speaker 1: two of them. What did he play? He played drums, drums.
Speaker 4: I played Hammond organ wired directly through ham We're getting closer.
Speaker 1: To Lawrence Welk. Now the more we go, it's getting closer.
Speaker 1: I almost got that, according but it was louder. It
Speaker 1: was much louder.
Speaker 4: And we got signed to Epic, and we were on
Speaker 4: Epic for one album and it was in colossal failure.
Speaker 4: We played one gig I think it was on Ungano's
Speaker 4: on the West Side in Manhattan, and people went fleeing
Speaker 4: from the place. We were so loud you could see
Speaker 4: blood coming out of his ears, which is horrible. Thank
Speaker 4: god it didn't happen, because I would have screamed myself
Speaker 4: out of the right, out of the business.
Speaker 1: So after you nearly kill a room full of people at.
Speaker 4: On Commomy and then what happens then that we broke
Speaker 4: up and I decided I no longer want to be
Speaker 4: a rock and roll star. I got that out of
Speaker 4: my got that out of my system. I was about
Speaker 4: nineteen or twenty. I want to write songs now. I'd
Speaker 4: like to explore a little bit of folk new Where
Speaker 4: did you start to write? I started to write the
Speaker 4: songs that are run Now I'm called cold Spring Harbor.
Speaker 1: So give me, give me an except one of the
Speaker 1: earliest ones you remember writing, baby, all the lights are
Speaker 1: turned on you. Now you're in the center of the stage.
Speaker 1: Everything revolves on what you do while you were in
Speaker 1: your prime of comedy. Man, you can always have your
Speaker 1: wears somehow, because everybody want you know, it was kind
Speaker 1: of Dylanesque, you know. I wanted to I wanted to
Speaker 1: go play in the village. Actually I didn't even want
Speaker 1: to play anymore, just you, me with you and the piano.
Speaker 4: Well, I got a band to play this stuff with me,
Speaker 4: but I'm picturing it on guitars general maybe on a
Speaker 4: lands ten on you.
Speaker 5: You're in a center of the stage.
Speaker 6: Everything revelves on what you do.
Speaker 5: Hy you already primed coming.
Speaker 1: Did you send him that song to record? I wanted
Speaker 1: him to. But Bob writes his own stuff. He's not
Speaker 1: gonna do covers. He doesn't buy songs from other people.
Speaker 4: No, he does not, and he does very well with
Speaker 4: his own right, of course. But I no longer wanted
Speaker 4: to be the guy on stage. I wanted to be
Speaker 4: the guy behind the scenes. It's kind of a Jimmy
Speaker 4: Webb kind of thing. This just happened to coincide with
Speaker 4: the era of the singer songwriter Harry Chape and Jim Crochey,
Speaker 4: James Taylor was huge at the time, Jackson Brown, Jackson Brown,
Speaker 4: all these singer songwriters. Even Carol King, who was a
Speaker 4: great songwriter, became a singer songwriter.
Speaker 1: Sure.
Speaker 4: So the advice I got was, well, you want people
Speaker 4: of these songs, why don't you make your own album?
Speaker 1: Okay.
Speaker 4: I got a record deal, and then I got traded
Speaker 4: to a record company on the West Coast call Family.
Speaker 1: Records, a guy named already Rip, perfect name. I was
Speaker 1: like an Occhio. Yeah.
Speaker 4: I fell in with the you know, Hydrid lead actor's
Speaker 4: life for me, for those people. And I recorded an
Speaker 4: album in La. I lived in La for a little while.
Speaker 4: They said, Okay, you made the album. Now now you've
Speaker 4: got an album, you need to promote it. You need
Speaker 4: to go on the road and play and promote the album.
Speaker 4: Is oh okay. It's kind of a strange way to
Speaker 4: be a songwriter. But that's what other people were doing.
Speaker 4: But you know, other people be interested in my material
Speaker 4: if I promoted it, promote the album and we'll hear it. Well,
Speaker 4: the album was mastered at the wrong speed.
Speaker 1: So a song like this.
Speaker 8: She's Got Away about her, I don't know what it is,
Speaker 8: but I know that I can live without played like.
Speaker 1: This She's Got Away.
Speaker 5: I don't know what it is, but I know that
Speaker 5: I can't live without it.
Speaker 1: So if you hear that recording, I sound like the Chipmunks,
Speaker 1: well speed it up kind of. Yeah, it's terrible. The
Speaker 1: album never went anywhere.
Speaker 4: Nothing happened, and I went on the road and I
Speaker 4: promoted it and never saw it in the stores.
Speaker 1: But that was when I was me. That was just
Speaker 1: Billy Joel. So you when people buy that album, the
Speaker 1: album has been re released where it's not at that speed.
Speaker 4: It's been remastered, but it's still there's something wrong with it.
Speaker 4: It just doesn't sound right. I would advise people don't
Speaker 4: buy it. If you can steal it, steal it.
Speaker 1: We're taking a break, stay with us. So then, so
Speaker 1: Cold Spring Harbor is the first album. It's you, how
Speaker 1: Many Get You? And it's how many band members? Guitar, bass, drums,
Speaker 1: and there was some violins.
Speaker 4: That were put in by Audie Rip you know he
Speaker 4: was trying to be phil Spector. It got all glopped up.
Speaker 4: It was supposed to be more of a folky. You
Speaker 4: recorded that in La, recorded it in La. How long
Speaker 4: were you in l A?
Speaker 1: Three years? What was that like for you? Weird?
Speaker 4: How I went there and I stayed on Santa Mia Boulevard.
Speaker 4: It's just dun't be a little place called the Tropicana
Speaker 4: Motel right there on Santa the Duke's where the Duke's car,
Speaker 4: Duke's coffee shop, and they mean the huge sandwiches for
Speaker 4: the poor.
Speaker 1: Musicians have breakfast at Duke's. It was great.
Speaker 4: Yeah, you know a buck, you're gonna eat like a can.
Speaker 4: The place was a dump, but the postcards said the
Speaker 4: Tropic Canna and it had like a palm tree on it.
Speaker 4: So I sent postcards all my friends.
Speaker 1: I've made it. I'm in Hollywood, coming together a cat.
Speaker 1: I'm having omelets on Santa Monica Boulevard for a dollar.
Speaker 1: I mean to play it my song at a Chipmunk speed. Well,
Speaker 1: it's all going great. Yeah, if you're from Long Island,
Speaker 1: you get a postcard with a pomp. It says the
Speaker 1: Tropic Canas. Oh my god, he's made it because you
Speaker 1: and I from the same background. Yes, I mean I'm
Speaker 1: from southsho Wanga and when I when people would do
Speaker 1: and I can see you're probably your friends. You grew
Speaker 1: up with a propleate like mine, with a provate at
Speaker 1: that post because like Joey come here, I got a
Speaker 1: postcod from Billy. He's at the Tropicana here. It's unfucking believable, right, Wow,
Speaker 1: he's on the beach with girls like the beach boys.
Speaker 1: He's driving cars. And I would make movies like my
Speaker 1: friends to be like they say, let me ask you
Speaker 1: a question. Will you do a love scene with a
Speaker 1: broad movie? Like? Do you ever get excited like yourself?
Speaker 5: You know what I mean?
Speaker 1: There's a weird you know, to make love to a
Speaker 1: woman in front of all them people. Can you pick
Speaker 1: who you make out with? Yeah? They're like, do you
Speaker 1: enjoy that? It was a fun you mean he groupies
Speaker 1: out there. I'm like, no, it's not fun because it's
Speaker 1: one hundred and twenty five people staring at you like,
Speaker 1: oh yeah, I forgot about that, Yeah, I forgot. We
Speaker 1: got those questions. What's it like in the studio? I
Speaker 1: mean like a lot of drugs and girls and stuff.
Speaker 4: No, you're actually in a factory and you're surrounded by equipment,
Speaker 4: and you know, I don't.
Speaker 1: Have like big fish tanks full of cocaine, like chicks
Speaker 1: coming in with bikinis and stuff from the beach rubbing
Speaker 1: your neck and shoulders while you're playing. Yeah, and that's
Speaker 1: what it looks like in the movies. Yeah, did you
Speaker 1: meet the movie stars some of a musician. I'm like,
Speaker 1: you haven't done it with all the big stars, right,
Speaker 1: and a fish tank full of blow when chicks and
Speaker 1: bikinis rubbing the shoulders right, day and night. That's what
Speaker 1: people think now when you did the you did Cold
Speaker 1: Spring Harbor? There? I did? Did you do the next album?
Speaker 1: Out there? I did two more albums out there? So
Speaker 1: what'd you do out there? Actually?
Speaker 4: I got a job after I did the Cold Spring
Speaker 4: Harbor album. I dropped that aside. I had to get
Speaker 4: out of this horrible deal and I'd signed. I signed
Speaker 4: away everything, copyrights, publishing, record royalties, everything, my first child
Speaker 4: I gave away at all.
Speaker 1: And I said that I got to get out of
Speaker 1: this deal, and.
Speaker 4: I hid in La and I worked in a piano
Speaker 4: bar under the name Bill Mortin. This was down in
Speaker 4: the Wilship District, and it was it's not a real
Speaker 4: bar town LA. You know, Long Island is a pub
Speaker 4: on every corner. It's a pub culture.
Speaker 1: So when people close their eyes and they think a
Speaker 1: piano man, I think of a guy bending over, you know,
Speaker 1: leaning over a piano, and I think of a guy
Speaker 1: in a place on Long Island or in New York.
Speaker 1: But you recorded that out of Los Angeles.
Speaker 4: I recorded in LA and that's where I worked. Some
Speaker 4: people think I did it for years. I worked in
Speaker 4: this piano bar for six months. I needed to make
Speaker 4: some money. I made Union scale, I get tips. Mostly
Speaker 4: played the you know, major seven chords.
Speaker 1: Anything I don't, But how does piano man start? Right?
Speaker 4: That kind of thing? That guy in the hotel lot lobby.
Speaker 4: They would request songs I didn't even know the song.
Speaker 4: Can you play what's that? Hogey Carmichael's song?
Speaker 1: Startups? And I would go, sure, do you play mystery? Sure?
Speaker 1: And everybody was drinking pretty heavy because in an l.
Speaker 4: A bar, these were all people who lost at the track, losers.
Speaker 4: I just like drink like fish and I got free drinks.
Speaker 1: Oh my god. So then you do piano man. That
Speaker 1: was the next album after that, You do in La.
Speaker 1: We did Piano Man in La, and there was an
Speaker 1: album that wasn't a hit album. People perceived that to
Speaker 1: be a hit.
Speaker 4: It was not a hit Piano Man. Piano Man was
Speaker 4: not a hit record. It was with a turntable hit.
Speaker 4: In other words, it didn't sell through. But this is
Speaker 4: back in the early seventies. In those days they still
Speaker 4: had FM, progressive radio. Disc jockeys could spend whatever they wanted.
Speaker 1: W L I R. Dennis McNamara, that's it under him.
Speaker 1: I was a kid home. I was smoking, you know what,
Speaker 1: leaning out the window, so my mom didn't know. And
Speaker 1: on the video here w L I R. This is
Speaker 1: Dennis smack namara Jackson Brown right. I listened to this guy.
Speaker 1: He was my childhood Dennis mc We grew up with
Speaker 1: these dis jockeys at night. Allison steel Alis, the night Bird,
Speaker 1: Roscoe Zacherley, was Vin Skel Vince Skels, and my favorite
Speaker 1: guy was Scott Me and he coming at Chess got
Speaker 1: me with a little spooky tooth from England. Spooky too.
Speaker 4: This got me and you're coming at you right now
Speaker 4: and it was great voices just coming out of the
Speaker 4: air and they played whatever they wanted. They didn't have
Speaker 4: program directors, they didn't have consultants, and people would call in.
Speaker 4: If they got enough request they would play a track.
Speaker 4: So Piano Man got requested all the time. It was
Speaker 4: a five and a half minute record. I mean, he's
Speaker 4: not an am hit an amount of time. It's too long,
Speaker 4: and it was in three quarters time.
Speaker 1: It's a waltz popa.
Speaker 4: And it's and it's not really lyrics. Dilimeerates John at
Speaker 4: the bar is a friend of mine. He gets my
Speaker 4: drinks for free. He's quick with the joke and a
Speaker 4: lot of you smoke with us. Somebody did he rather be?
Speaker 4: It could be one of the girl from Nantucket. Yeah,
Speaker 4: so it's the Limericks. And if anybody said this was
Speaker 4: going to be a hit record, I tell him right
Speaker 4: of their minds. But it became a trying table hit,
Speaker 4: so people perceive it to be a sell through.
Speaker 1: It wasn't.
Speaker 4: The next album comes out Street Live Serenade, it's the
Speaker 4: sophomore Jenks I did not have enough time to write
Speaker 4: new material after the Piano Man.
Speaker 1: Alm came out.
Speaker 4: Piano Man made a lot of noise, got a lot
Speaker 4: of attention paid to it, record company wanted another follow
Speaker 4: up right away. Okay, new album now, But I've been
Speaker 4: on the road. I haven't had a chance to write.
Speaker 4: I need it now. I didn't have any material and.
Speaker 1: You can hear it. So what do you do? What
Speaker 1: do you do when you got nothing? What do you play?
Speaker 1: I had nothing. I was empty. I was running on empty.
Speaker 1: But there's not nothing on the album. Where'd that come from? Well?
Speaker 1: I had one song that I thought, which was the Entertainer.
Speaker 1: Which is that? Another folks on I am the Entertainer.
Speaker 1: I know just where I was done. Another surtinator. I
Speaker 1: had another long haired band today, I am the Champion.
Speaker 1: I made one your hearts, but I know the game.
Speaker 1: You're forgetting my name.
Speaker 4: I won't be here in another year if I don't
Speaker 4: stay on the charm. I wrote it on the guitar, actually,
Speaker 4: but that was it. That was probably the one song
Speaker 4: that I had finished. And the boom in the studio
Speaker 4: the clock is ticking. So there's two instrumentals on that album,
Speaker 4: the root beer rag, which is just a piano rag
Speaker 4: time thing, and this air zots Western movie theme called
Speaker 4: the Mexican Connection. Because I was living in LA was
Speaker 4: fascinated with westerns.
Speaker 1: That's it. There's a song actually on the piano.
Speaker 4: Man, I'm called the Ballot of Billy the Kids historically
Speaker 4: completely inaccurate. I just used Western sounding things from a
Speaker 4: town known as Wheeling, West Virginia.
Speaker 1: It wasn't from Willie, West Virginia. He was actually from Brooklyn.
Speaker 4: Boy with a six gun in his hand, and then
Speaker 4: he robbed his way from Utah to Oklahoma.
Speaker 1: He never got out of New Mexico. You're ruining the
Speaker 1: song for me now. I don't want to know how
Speaker 1: Saua made East and West Pallida. Billy the Kid is
Speaker 1: fine by me the way it is. Don't screw it
Speaker 1: up for me. No, But I think it's funny.
Speaker 4: The fact it was just Western sounding things east and
Speaker 4: west of the Rio Grant. Well, it can't be eastern west,
Speaker 4: because the real Grand runs.
Speaker 1: East and west of the Rio Grand. God damn it.
Speaker 1: I know which way the Rio Grand runs. And the
Speaker 1: crab poured in to watch the hanging of Billy the Kid. Well,
Speaker 1: Billy the Kid wasn't hung. He was shot, of course,
Speaker 1: we don't know if he was. Okay, now now you win.
Speaker 1: Now I hate the song. Okay, I hate it. It's
Speaker 1: a fraud. What are the songs came off of Street
Speaker 1: Life that were nothing, that were memorable? Nothing that We're
Speaker 1: pretty is the only one.
Speaker 3: Uh.
Speaker 4: There was a song about a hooker I was in
Speaker 4: love with. I wanted her to leave her profession and
Speaker 4: be with me, but she made too much money and
Speaker 4: I couldn't afford her.
Speaker 1: It's called Roberta. What else was on that album? Souvenirs?
Speaker 1: A nice song, a picture postcard, a folded stub, a program.
Speaker 3: Of the play.
Speaker 1: Fall Away, the photographs of yourlity and the old old Man.
Speaker 4: It doesn't only like another fifteen seconds of it. That
Speaker 4: was a nice song, but it was like this short
Speaker 4: and other than that is the Mexican connection ruper ragg.
Speaker 1: It was okay, and you finished street Life and you're
Speaker 1: in LA and then what do you do?
Speaker 4: I finished Street Life and it comes out and it
Speaker 4: goes yeah, bum dives right off the charts. The album
Speaker 4: after that was Turnstiles. I moved back to New York.
Speaker 4: I said, I'm going back to New York. This is
Speaker 4: when this nineteen mid seventies, New York was in the dumps.
Speaker 4: They were gonna default Ford to New York, drop dead,
Speaker 4: Ford to New York dropped. I saw that headline, and
Speaker 4: people in la were like, a screw new York. We
Speaker 4: can't wait to New York goes down the dumps. And
Speaker 4: I said, the hell with that. If New York's going
Speaker 4: down the tubes, I'm going back. I want to be
Speaker 4: there for this, and I'm picturing this apocalypse. I actually
Speaker 4: wrote a song called Miami twenty seventeen thinking about the
Speaker 4: year twenty seventeen.
Speaker 1: I'm an old man.
Speaker 4: I'm telling my grandchildren I was there. I saw the
Speaker 4: lights go out on Broadway. That's the it's a science
Speaker 4: fiction song, see.
Speaker 3: In the lights going out on brow.
Speaker 1: I saw the empire state of La Loo, and life
Speaker 1: went on beyond the palaces. We all bought cadillacs and
Speaker 1: left there long ago. And I'm picturing I'm an old
Speaker 1: man in the year twenty seventeen, and I'm living in Miami.
Speaker 4: Which I'm closing in there now you would need. I'm
Speaker 4: kind of fulfilling my own prophecy here so and the
Speaker 4: other song, which is.
Speaker 3: Some folks like to get away, take a holiday from
Speaker 3: the neighborhood, have a flight to Miami Beach on the
Speaker 3: Hollywood Wood.
Speaker 1: I'm taking a Greyhound on the Hudson river Line. I'm
Speaker 1: in the New York state of mind. We could do
Speaker 1: it like this. Some folks like to get away, Tony,
Speaker 1: come on, Chicken, take a holiday from the neighborhood.
Speaker 3: Have a flight, tromple, fly to Miami Beach out of Hollywood.
Speaker 1: Yeah, I'm taking it.
Speaker 3: That's right, hud Susan really yeah, yeah, New York.
Speaker 1: That's yeah, that's it.
Speaker 4: And he recorded it, and that was I was hoping
Speaker 4: other people would do that song.
Speaker 1: But I was back in New York. I was homework
Speaker 1: and glad you were. I was thrown so leaving La
Speaker 1: it just was meant to be. I even wrote it
Speaker 1: from home, say goodbye to Hollywood here right exactly, you know,
Speaker 1: say goodbye to Hollywood. Thanks, it's been great, but goodbye.
Speaker 1: After three years it went sour on me.
Speaker 4: And when I first moved out to the weather's great
Speaker 4: and all the chicks and the palm trees.
Speaker 1: After three years, everybody's full of crown. Yeah, I'm a
Speaker 1: producer of what you know. We all produced gas, we
Speaker 1: produced something. But I found that for me, it was
Speaker 1: healthier for me to be in an environment where show
Speaker 1: business was one mountain peak in a range of mountains,
Speaker 1: meaning when you're in New York and I'd be at
Speaker 1: a party and some kind of real tweety looking Daniel
Speaker 1: moynihan looking type of guy would be at a party
Speaker 1: and say to me, and what do you do for
Speaker 1: a living? Young man? They say to me years ago?
Speaker 1: I go, well, I work in the movie business. How
Speaker 1: have you made any films? I might have seen Olivia
Speaker 1: and I don't go to the films very often, And
Speaker 1: I thought, this is great. The guy who doesn't I
Speaker 1: can talk to, who's not going to have his hand
Speaker 1: down my pants or rub my neck to dance with
Speaker 1: a hand in my pants from the entertainer. When you
Speaker 1: go back to New York to where do you go
Speaker 1: the city?
Speaker 4: I moved to Highland Falls, which is right up the Hudson.
Speaker 4: Why because we we weren't ready to move lockstock and
Speaker 4: barrel back into the city. I was married at the time.
Speaker 4: My first X one, Sure where's she from?
Speaker 1: From? Sciacid?
Speaker 3: Right?
Speaker 4: And uh so she went out there with you and
Speaker 4: came back. She went out there with me and came
Speaker 4: back with me. And this was uh Turnstiles was recorded
Speaker 4: in New York. I produced it myself, which you know
Speaker 4: in hindsight was probably not a good idea, but I
Speaker 4: didn't want people telling me what band to work with,
Speaker 4: how to do the songs.
Speaker 1: I wanted to do it my way. Are you glad
Speaker 1: you did?
Speaker 4: I'm I was glad I did at the time because
Speaker 4: I needed to use my own musicians. I didn't want
Speaker 4: to use session man. I didn't want to use studio players.
Speaker 4: I wanted my road band. It was a long island band,
Speaker 4: and we were doing great on the road. We weren't
Speaker 4: selling any records, but the crowds were going crazy. We
Speaker 4: were blowing headliners off the stage, the Doobie Brothers, everywhere
Speaker 4: we played, the Beach Boys.
Speaker 1: We would get better plugged than when Turnstiles came out. Yes,
Speaker 1: but Turnstiles sold records. Didn't No Trench Starles didn't sell anything.
Speaker 1: You gotta be kidding me. No, No, no.
Speaker 4: Hits New York State of Mind is now perceived to
Speaker 4: be a hit, but it wasn't a hit. It say
Speaker 4: about how Hollywood wasn't a hit. None of the records.
Speaker 4: I love all those songs, but you know that from
Speaker 4: FM radio that was still playing those things on FM,
Speaker 4: not until The Stranger, which was the next album in
Speaker 4: seventy seven, and off that.
Speaker 1: Comes how Many It's four which were just the way
Speaker 1: you Are moving out only the good die young. And
Speaker 1: She's Always a Woman, So She's always a woman, and
Speaker 1: just the way you Are are love songs. Well, She's
Speaker 1: Always a Woman is a love song. I'll perceived this well,
Speaker 1: remember well, I was just saying, but they're very romantic songs.
Speaker 4: Yeah, well, I'd had romantic ballads before that. From the
Speaker 4: Cold Spring Harbor, She's Got Away Piano man, if I
Speaker 4: only had the words to tell you You're my home and
Speaker 4: then Turnstiles Summer Highland Falls no atomatic depression, but about
Speaker 4: a relationship. But I was writing ballads I've loved these
Speaker 4: Days about a man and a woman, and then the
Speaker 4: stranger just the Way you Are, which is just a
Speaker 4: pure out and out love song. She's Always a Woman,
Speaker 4: which is kind of a double edged sword there. I'd
Speaker 4: had ballads before them.
Speaker 1: But did you find that people sort of to buy
Speaker 1: the ballads that they did? All of a sudden became
Speaker 1: the most popular song you could often do. I had
Speaker 1: no idea it was such a big record. Just the
Speaker 1: Way you Were became this monster like the Beatles. Yeah, Stranger.
Speaker 4: After The Stranger that we started playing colosseums and arenas,
Speaker 4: the big, big rooms, and I went right back on
Speaker 4: the road again, and I started writing again, and.
Speaker 1: Fifties started writing for bigger rooms. Yes you did. Yeah,
Speaker 1: I had to be. I was aware.
Speaker 4: Now we're playing the big places, and we got to
Speaker 4: write bigger songs. I gotta have bigger users energy, because
Speaker 4: you can't play to a colosseum with a handful of ballots.
Speaker 4: You got to knock them out. A big shot was
Speaker 4: on an album sands a bar stiletto. It got bigger,
Speaker 4: it got rounder, fatter, fuller, fuller, faster, you know, more
Speaker 4: high energy stuff.
Speaker 1: And harder, faster, deeper, as they say in the adult
Speaker 1: film Innistry.
Speaker 4: Yeah, that was it. Pretty much went into the triple X.
Speaker 4: Do you started going triple X? Yeah, acoustically and that
Speaker 4: that one album of the year they A Stranger actually
Speaker 4: should have. But I was up against Saturday Night Fever,
Speaker 4: which nobody was gonna touch on ten foot trll. Everybody
Speaker 4: even said that the only reason you got fifty secretary
Speaker 4: because we should have get a straight plasure.
Speaker 1: This was your color of money. Yes, exactly. This is
Speaker 1: a poleman getting an Oscar, it's all political, it's fun.
Speaker 1: Well you know how this works? Sure? What was after that,
Speaker 1: Glass Houses was nineteen eighty and that was pure power pop.
Speaker 1: Is there ever one you sit there and you really
Speaker 1: have to strained? I mean you get it and you
Speaker 1: like it and you love it and it does well.
Speaker 1: Is there a song that didn't come easily to you
Speaker 1: that you really had to work to crack it? So
Speaker 1: to speak?
Speaker 4: The whole Nylon Curtain album, which was nineteen eighty two.
Speaker 4: The album before it, which.
Speaker 1: Was Glass Houses, was just pure fun playing with the band,
Speaker 1: got a good guitar player.
Speaker 4: It just had a blast making the record. The next album,
Speaker 4: I wanted to write my masterpiece, my Sergeant Pepper as
Speaker 4: it were. Instead of writing from the inside out, like
Speaker 4: having starting with the seed of a song, we started
Speaker 4: with sand sounds and ideas and thoughts and studio techniques
Speaker 4: and we went from the outside in. So it was
Speaker 4: a whole different technique of creating recordings. And we didn't
Speaker 4: really know what we had until almost the final mix.
Speaker 4: What is this thing we're experimenting but stuff?
Speaker 1: And it was? It took a year? Were you still producing? No?
Speaker 3: No?
Speaker 1: Phil Ramone who started remote Stranger in nineteen seventy seven.
Speaker 1: Now when you have someone like Ramone, because and again
Speaker 1: I know nothing about your business except what I see
Speaker 1: and observe, Like, what is someone like Ramone? What did
Speaker 1: he do for you? How did he help you? Well?
Speaker 4: Phil Vermont has a background. When he was a kid,
Speaker 4: he was a child prodigy on the violin. He was violinist.
Speaker 4: He was from South Africa. Actually he knew music. And
Speaker 4: now he had years and years in the trenches as
Speaker 4: an engineer. He recorded a JFK speeches.
Speaker 1: I think when you see the Marilyn Monroe thing, a
Speaker 1: Madison Square Gard Happy Birthday, mister President, that's Phil Ramone.
Speaker 4: Wow, he was the engineer on those things. I mean,
Speaker 4: he's with some amazing recordings, but never got credited as
Speaker 4: a producer.
Speaker 1: So I see, who's this guy?
Speaker 4: Philermon It keep seeing Philermont Filder more for remote Paul
Speaker 4: Simon used him as an engineer, and I said, I
Speaker 4: want to use I want to work with this guy
Speaker 4: because he looks like he knows what he's doing. He
Speaker 4: knows how to get good sound, he knows how to
Speaker 4: deal with sonic things sonic and when he came in boom.
Speaker 4: We knew we had a professional guy. I was like
Speaker 4: working with another great musician. He knows how to play
Speaker 4: the studio like we know how to play our instruments.
Speaker 4: Everything changed. The band just roasted the occasion. We were
Speaker 4: having a blast.
Speaker 1: So like a great producer. Very often in films, like
Speaker 1: anywhere anything, any creative enterprise, I find the people that
Speaker 1: are the most successful and talented producers are the ones who,
Speaker 1: although they may not be able to do it themselves,
Speaker 1: they know what you need to do, you know and
Speaker 1: how to help you get to your highest level.
Speaker 4: They cut to what the synergy should be. They know
Speaker 4: what the dynamics should be in the studio.
Speaker 1: Does he come to you and go, don't do that
Speaker 1: doesn't work and you listen to him.
Speaker 4: I would listen to him and we would try it
Speaker 4: his way. We tried it his way, his mutual respect
Speaker 4: when we did just the way you are. Originally the
Speaker 4: drama was playing it like a chacho.
Speaker 1: Don't go change one to chat John. We hated it.
Speaker 1: Hated the things I hate this hated.
Speaker 4: Drummer couldn't figure out what to play. Phil actually told
Speaker 4: play a backwards samba boom that boom bop boom chat
Speaker 4: boom boom.
Speaker 1: And it worked.
Speaker 4: It was like a backwards so what are we doing?
Speaker 4: We didn't know what we're doing, but Phil was right.
Speaker 4: I came in with the idea of playing only the good.
Speaker 4: Diana is a reggae Come out Virginia.
Speaker 1: Let me wait. Can't let us star much doing.
Speaker 4: Liberty throws his sticks at me, because why are you
Speaker 4: doing Because the closest you've been to Jamaica is Queens.
Speaker 1: What are you doing is changing trains to go down
Speaker 1: to Sea Fort, change at Jamaica, change at Jamaica.
Speaker 4: So the train to spik That's it. He said, I'm
Speaker 4: not playing this. I'm not playing what to do? So
Speaker 4: Phil came up with this shuffling against straight fours.
Speaker 1: And are going banana banana banana, and we were playing
Speaker 1: and it worked. It was like two things jammed into
Speaker 1: each other. Phil knows how to do that.
Speaker 4: And when we would get tired and we get discouraged,
Speaker 4: it says, just stay, stay a little longer, try one more.
Speaker 4: All right, take a break, Let's have some Chinese. Okay,
Speaker 4: go back in the post. Chinese food takes were always good.
Speaker 1: I don't know why that was that, MSG man, it
Speaker 1: gets it gets right into the fingertips. It worked, and
Speaker 1: then you do Nylon Curtain. That's eighty two. Eighty two
Speaker 1: was the Nylon and you said you wanted to be
Speaker 1: your Sergeant Pepper and what was it? It was.
Speaker 4: It's my favorite album I'm Upfroid because I could hear
Speaker 4: all the work that went into it, all the textures,
Speaker 4: all the layers.
Speaker 1: It's a song that you're particularly fond of from that.
Speaker 4: Oh geez, every song on that album really surprises that.
Speaker 1: It's very obscure.
Speaker 3: Don't get excited, don't say nobody knowes.
Speaker 5: Nothing was her.
Speaker 3: It was committed discreetly, it was handled so neatly, and
Speaker 3: it shouldn't.
Speaker 1: Surprise you at all.
Speaker 3: You know, break all the records, Berma cassettes. I'd be
Speaker 3: lying and the fact told you that I had no regrets.
Speaker 3: There were so many mistakes. But what a difference it makes,
Speaker 3: and now it shouldn't.
Speaker 1: Surprise you at all. No hits. Allentown was kind of
Speaker 1: a hit off that I remember that. Yeah, didn't really
Speaker 1: sell a lot of records. Pressure was the biggest. I
Speaker 1: think the me as Tchaikowsky. What was that. It's the
Speaker 1: one from Swan Lake. At least you up the greats
Speaker 1: with those Russians, watch them for the Germans stuff. What
Speaker 1: did you do after Nylon Curtain? After the Nylon Curtain?
Speaker 1: Because it was such an intensive labor, the Nylon Curtain,
Speaker 1: something very dense and very complex. I wanted to do
Speaker 1: something simple and dumb and happy, and I did an
Speaker 1: Innocent Man, which is really an homage to all the
Speaker 1: music of my teenage years. Frankie Valley in the Four
Speaker 1: Seasons was Uptown Girl, and that was a hit. That
Speaker 1: was a big hit. It was a joke. It was
Speaker 1: an up chown girl.
Speaker 5: I'm trying to sing, she's been living in her uptown world.
Speaker 1: I bet she never had a backstreet gack and he
Speaker 1: had this impossibly high bod told her why I'm gonna
Speaker 1: track you? And I realized something that I remember the
Speaker 1: song ragged all we read yeah, and then the verse
Speaker 1: was I love you just the way you are? Is
Speaker 1: that where I heard that before? Just the way you were?
Speaker 1: And then there was a song I was trying to
Speaker 1: do Little Anthidine Imperials and didn't not say shoe up.
Speaker 1: I wasn't ready for romance. Shoop shoe up.
Speaker 8: Didn't we promise we would only be friends all and
Speaker 8: so we danced, though.
Speaker 3: It was only a slow dance.
Speaker 1: I started breaking my promises right there. And you'll recognize
Speaker 1: the chorus because it goes like this this night, it's
Speaker 1: min it's only you and is a long time away.
Speaker 1: This night can last for it, which is the pathetic
Speaker 1: by Beethoven, and I gave I gave credit on the
Speaker 1: back of LV.
Speaker 4: Beethoven. So somebody's bill he's co writing with somebody LV
Speaker 4: Beto Beethoven for coring outline. But that was a fun album.
Speaker 4: I had met Christy. I had just gotten divorced from
Speaker 4: X one and here I am meeting Whitney Houston when
Speaker 4: she was a model Elle McPherson.
Speaker 1: I'm dating her.
Speaker 4: I'm dating Christy Brinkley. This is fantastic. I feel like
Speaker 4: I'm sixteen years.
Speaker 1: Old again now going on.
Speaker 4: It's going well, girls, It's all going great, and I'm
Speaker 4: a rock star. I got a pair to the old
Speaker 4: Sam Maritz on Central Park South, which is now that
Speaker 4: I think the Rich Carlton, which is now the Ritz Carlton.
Speaker 4: But the elevator would open and there was my apartment.
Speaker 4: I was the only apartment on that floor. It was
Speaker 4: very impressive. So this music was me being a teenager
Speaker 4: all over again, falling in love, having romance and all
Speaker 4: that great stuff.
Speaker 1: We're taking a break, stay with us. So why did
Speaker 1: you get married? I don't know. Yeah, love, you're asking
Speaker 1: me exactly. But I was gonna say, well, that's funny
Speaker 1: because you think to yourself, why get married? It was
Speaker 1: all going so good, but not getting married means bad.
Speaker 1: But it was saying, but is that a part of
Speaker 1: your makeup, which is married? Family? Was marriage the right
Speaker 1: thing to do? I was merely in love and love.
Speaker 1: You marry him? That's it. That's how I feel.
Speaker 4: But I still feel like I can be merely in
Speaker 4: love and not be married. Yes, I was married three times.
Speaker 1: When did you go to Russia? Eighty seven?
Speaker 3: Right?
Speaker 1: And how did that happen?
Speaker 4: Well, we went to We played in Cuba in nineteen
Speaker 4: seventy nine. They did this thing called the Havannah Jam.
Speaker 4: Cubans came up here and we went to Havana. We
Speaker 4: played at the Karl Marx Theater in Havana. It looks
Speaker 4: like Bloomingdale's. It's crypt the Karl Marx Theater. It looks
Speaker 4: like a department store and everybody gets up on stage,
Speaker 4: these other American artists, Steven Still's Viva Revolution, Viva Fidel,
Speaker 4: Chris Christopherson Viva Evolution, Riva fitting on.
Speaker 1: He's talking in Spanish. I get up on stage. I'm
Speaker 1: in the last act. Don't take any shit from it.
Speaker 4: I say, you'll know Ablo Espanol. And I went to
Speaker 4: Big Shot and the kids were storm the state. They
Speaker 4: don't want to hit Viva. We hit his crap all
Speaker 4: the time. We want to hit Big Shot. I said,
Speaker 4: we got something going here. We're being subversive with rock
Speaker 4: and roll.
Speaker 1: This is what I loved you there, I love How
Speaker 1: did that feel to you? What was the first place
Speaker 1: you played a big concert at when you were a star.
Speaker 1: You're a big music star, you one of the biggest
Speaker 1: music stars ever, and you go to a foreign country
Speaker 1: and you realize music just transcends all of it.
Speaker 4: Germany, I think it was in Frankfurt. What year, seventy seven,
Speaker 4: seventy eight. We'd had a hit with a stranger and
Speaker 4: I played in England. In the English they're kind of fickle.
Speaker 4: They like you for about a month and then you're
Speaker 4: yesterday's papers.
Speaker 1: Oh we like that. Billy Joe l Billy Joel and
Speaker 1: they Actually.
Speaker 4: I wasn't big there until Uptown Girl. But Germany we
Speaker 4: had a couple of its and the Germans went Bersark Lot.
Speaker 1: They don't have seats.
Speaker 4: You're getting a standing ovation when you walk on the
Speaker 4: stage because they can't sit down. This is great and
Speaker 4: it actually changes the energy and they're all.
Speaker 1: Standing yeah, Billy, Belly. I'm thinking, Oh, I guess they
Speaker 1: don't know what they did to my family. Yay Billy.
Speaker 1: But I'm thinking, so this is how Adolph must have felt. Yeah,
Speaker 1: you know, they love you. They let you know her.
Speaker 4: You're like, okay, let's go in vade poland co on,
Speaker 4: let's go. But there was a great, great audience.
Speaker 1: You know, they're tearing at your hand like a Detroit
Speaker 1: heavy metal crowd, ripping at my hands and tearing my clothes.
Speaker 1: This is great. That was the first time in a
Speaker 1: foreign country where I knew something. How they the trip
Speaker 1: to Russia in eighty seven, was that your first time there?
Speaker 4: It was the first time they'd ever had a major
Speaker 4: act from the West America. People had gone there before,
Speaker 4: but played with small PA systems and little private rooms.
Speaker 1: We played at the Lenin.
Speaker 4: Stadium, the Olympic Stadium, and We brought a Western PA system,
Speaker 4: the same pit with paces and we'd use at Madison
Speaker 4: Square Garden. They'd never heard a PA system like that.
Speaker 4: They were scared shitless. You know, the helicopters come in
Speaker 4: at the beginning of Good Nights Ago and they're looking
Speaker 4: around for the helicopters, and then the hard rock is
Speaker 4: hitting and the drums.
Speaker 1: They started going berserk. There were security guards going around
Speaker 1: giving people sedatives because they thought they were having fits.
Speaker 4: The Cold War ended for me, right then. This is
Speaker 4: still when it was. Reagan was calling it the evil Empire,
Speaker 4: and we're not gonna have a war.
Speaker 1: With these people. They can't even get toilet paper, right, you.
Speaker 4: Know, we're not gonna have a We're not gonna fight
Speaker 4: with them. I don't want to fight them.
Speaker 1: They don't. They love us everywhere I went, Viva America,
Speaker 1: Long Live America. This is great. Cold War ended. I
Speaker 1: was thrilled that went the way it did. Let me
Speaker 1: ask you a question. You're funny. You could have done
Speaker 1: that with your eyes. Every thing it takes to be
Speaker 1: an actor, who could have done you? Never wanted to
Speaker 1: do that. Never. I never was comfortable in front of
Speaker 1: a camera. Really. Yeah, as a matter of fact, even
Speaker 1: though I had to perform in front of a camera
Speaker 1: for the last thirty years. Basically, yes, uh make videos
Speaker 1: which I was told you were comfortable in front of
Speaker 1: but you were. But I guess to a degree, you
Speaker 1: were comfortable in front of a camera as long as
Speaker 1: you were playing, not even.
Speaker 4: Stand there, not even I was aware of the camera.
Speaker 4: It was like it was an invader, was invasive to me.
Speaker 4: I became a musician because I never felt I was photogenic.
Speaker 4: I was never happy with how I looked. It's about
Speaker 4: a microphone, not about a camera. I was very comfortable
Speaker 4: in a studio. I'm very comfortable far away on a stage.
Speaker 4: Or an album cover. You could make it look and
Speaker 4: however you want, and people would say, oh, you're shorter
Speaker 4: than I thought. I said, well, the album cover is
Speaker 4: only this big.
Speaker 1: How do you know. Whenever there was a camera, it
Speaker 1: kind of destroyed what I was trying to create.
Speaker 4: It took away the imagination. You could I could look
Speaker 4: however I want. I could look like Carry Grant. But
Speaker 4: I saw it reduced to an image. I went, no, no, no, no, no, no,
Speaker 4: that's not who I am. Don't look at that guy.
Speaker 1: I realized I could have done that, but I love
Speaker 1: music so much. That's the way I went. Some people
Speaker 1: can do both. Most don't. Well, Bowie didn't do it,
Speaker 1: really really he tried. Sting didn't do it. No, Jagger
Speaker 1: didn't do it. Beatles never did it, except as they
Speaker 1: played the Beatles.
Speaker 4: But then there's some actors who were originally musicians and
Speaker 4: they they now just basically acted.
Speaker 1: But I always say that, I said, this acting is
Speaker 1: what you do when you have no musical ability. If
Speaker 1: I could do what you do, I would never do
Speaker 1: what That's what actors say. I would never, ever, ever,
Speaker 1: ever waste five minutes of doing what I do. If
Speaker 1: I could do with you. That's a lot of actors. Yeah,
Speaker 1: you're so good at what you do. No, if I
Speaker 1: could do what you do. Music is Music is saying
Speaker 1: if I could play, if I could write a film
Speaker 1: or a television program, you have to make an appointment
Speaker 1: with that and watch that. When you listen to music
Speaker 1: while you're jogging, while you're at the gym, while you're
Speaker 1: making love, while you're having dinner, while you're in the car,
Speaker 1: it can be the soundtrack to your life all day long.
Speaker 1: If you want to in church, anywhere. Music is everywhere,
Speaker 1: Music is everything, and acting is, like I said, what
Speaker 1: you do when you have no musical talents. So you
Speaker 1: got divorced the second time, Yes, and got remarried and
Speaker 1: divorced the third time. Right, And when you have these
Speaker 1: things happen Because I know that these situations in my
Speaker 1: life have a big effect of life. Does it affect
Speaker 1: Do you write songs about that? No?
Speaker 4: I stopped writing songs about it when I got divorced
Speaker 4: the second time. That was in ninety three, actually ninety four.
Speaker 4: The divorce happened, the album River Dreams came out, and
Speaker 4: I realized, you know what, I'm spinning out the story
Speaker 4: of my life to all these strangers. I'm kind of
Speaker 4: sick and tired everybody knowing my personal life and how
Speaker 4: I feel about you. Just one on that one? Did
Speaker 4: you resent that? I didn't resent it. I just decided
Speaker 4: to clam up. I feel like I've given away pieces
Speaker 4: of myself, maybe something I should have given to the relationship.
Speaker 1: I gave to the work.
Speaker 4: And the work was so important and it's all consuming.
Speaker 4: If you're going to do it right, you have to
Speaker 4: jump in with both feet and do it one hundred percent.
Speaker 1: Music will do. That was a very harsh mistress music,
Speaker 1: you have to do it all.
Speaker 4: Maybe I didn't do things I should have done, or
Speaker 4: maybe I didn't take care of business the way I
Speaker 4: should have take here because the music and so I
Speaker 4: stopped writing songs about my personal relationships, but I kept
Speaker 4: writing music. And after the third marriage didn't work, I
Speaker 4: tried marriage. It's you know, three times.
Speaker 1: I tried three to much. I never gave up on it.
Speaker 1: I just realized that this just doesn't I don't know,
Speaker 1: it doesn't work right. People don't appreciate how it's like
Speaker 1: to have a relationship in this business that works. You
Speaker 1: got to be really lucky, man, It's got to be.
Speaker 1: It's so much luck, you know, because, like you said,
Speaker 1: the career is the mistress and you're out there working
Speaker 1: Like like I would look at my ex wife or
Speaker 1: ex girlfriends and I think, what would the alternative be?
Speaker 1: You want me to have no options and no work
Speaker 1: and I'm staying home all the time.
Speaker 4: Yeah, But on the other hand, how much of you
Speaker 4: are they getting? If you're in a part, you take
Speaker 4: on the role. It doesn't come off at five o'clock
Speaker 4: in the afternoon when work. Most people leave their jobs.
Speaker 4: You have to be that character through the whole project. Now,
Speaker 4: when I'm writing, I mean, I've got to stay in harness.
Speaker 4: I've got to be that songwriter guy I'm preoccupied. Maybe
Speaker 4: I should change that to a B flat, you know
Speaker 4: that quarterback. I'm obsessed with it. I wonder how much
Speaker 4: of me they're not getting because of that. I don't
Speaker 4: know if you were like that when you're doing a part.
Speaker 1: I find that in film it's different because you don't
Speaker 1: really have a chance unless you work with a tremendously
Speaker 1: intense group of people. I've never gotten close to that
Speaker 1: in film. Film is always in pieces. You know, you know,
Speaker 1: you're in your room. It's not linear. It's not like
Speaker 1: a play. When I've done that, when I've done play,
Speaker 1: is it's different When you do it well, you can
Speaker 1: sit back and you light up a cigarette and you're like, well, well,
Speaker 1: well well and we nail that way. I just just
Speaker 1: write it down in the books. There it is, We've
Speaker 1: done it again. You really feel some satisfaction. Yeah, you
Speaker 1: feel that way when you perform. When we perform, we
Speaker 1: got we do a show. We do a show. Do
Speaker 1: you come off stage after our show and you sit
Speaker 1: there and go, well, there it is. But that was
Speaker 1: a good ladies and gentlemen, Billy Joe. That is all.
Speaker 1: They'll be talking about this for a while, for a
Speaker 1: few days to the animal. But we also know when
Speaker 1: we stuck. We come over and that's yeah, oh we
Speaker 1: were terrible. Please don't remember that one right right? Why
Speaker 1: did they applaud you know, last play at Shay Yeah,
Speaker 1: do you think you did well? Yeah? That was good.
Speaker 4: They were both good shows that the double last double
Speaker 4: play at say we didn't do nights? Yeah, yes, that
Speaker 4: was exhilarating. It was a hometown crowd, and it's just
Speaker 4: it was exhilarating. We were on stage for three and
Speaker 4: a half hours and I didn't realize how hot it was.
Speaker 1: It was sweating. I'm watching the movie of me. Somebody
Speaker 1: give that guy a towel. Yeah, he's like soaky, he's so.
Speaker 4: Wet and slimy. Wipe him off and but we're having
Speaker 4: such a good time. We walked off, and for weeks
Speaker 4: after they were kind of amping from it.
Speaker 1: New York loves you. I know, I know, and I
Speaker 1: love New York. That's why I live here. I love you.
Speaker 4: But I put away the recording part of my career
Speaker 4: and I put away for the time being performing.
Speaker 1: What's that music? That's my telephone? The theme from the
Speaker 1: god that's interesting, that's perfect. The theme from The Godfather?
Speaker 1: Is your ring tone on your phone? Yes, that's amazing. Well,
Speaker 1: like I got to think about what my ringtone should be.
Speaker 1: That's the guys on the road call me you got Godfather?
Speaker 5: Why do you company?
Speaker 10: Bona Sarah Bona, Sarah onever. I haven't done. You'll never
Speaker 10: invite me the house for a cup of coffee.
Speaker 1: Do you appreciate who you are? People who love you,
Speaker 1: They adore you, and they love your talent. You are
Speaker 1: so talented, you are so like it makes me want
Speaker 1: to choke up. How talented you are? Do you know
Speaker 1: who you are?
Speaker 4: I know I have a talent for music. I don't
Speaker 4: think I'm all that good. I think I have a
Speaker 4: good perspective on it. I can separate the the star
Speaker 4: stuff from the musician stuff. The music is really import.
Speaker 1: They have to stay separate, don't they. Well, one is
Speaker 1: a job and one is a life.
Speaker 4: The job thing I can take off at five o'clock
Speaker 4: and the afternner and the rock star thing I go,
Speaker 4: I go shopping, I cook my own food, I wash
Speaker 4: the dishes, I take out the garbage. I know who
Speaker 4: that guy is and that that's and the music is
Speaker 4: has nothing to do with money or career or it's
Speaker 4: just it's just part of me. It's like love, music, love, food, friendship,
Speaker 4: my daughter. You know, all these great things.
Speaker 1: How's your daughter doing? She's great. But I you know,
Speaker 1: I know how to take the job hat off and
Speaker 1: h and just kind of be normal. I've learned how
Speaker 1: to do it.
Speaker 4: Took a long time to separate them out. Okay, I
Speaker 4: can be a musician and not be a rock star.
Speaker 1: You know. I'm still trying to convince people, well, I'm
Speaker 1: not a rock star. No, yes, you are. You are
Speaker 1: a rock star US star.
Speaker 4: So okay, fine, But a lot of that is has
Speaker 4: a job aspect to it. I work very hard at
Speaker 4: what in writing, because that's my deepest love. I think
Speaker 4: that's really where I belong. The rockstar thing I've never
Speaker 4: really been comfortable with because I don't think I looked
Speaker 4: like a rock star. I didn't really set out to
Speaker 4: be a rock star. I became a rock star serendipitously.
Speaker 1: You became a rock star in spite of yourself.
Speaker 4: In spite of myself, which is hysterical as hard, as
Speaker 4: much as you tried to kill it.
Speaker 1: Yeah, I mean, I don't put that camera too close
Speaker 1: to me, exactly.
Speaker 4: I don't want to make a good video. Let me
Speaker 4: make a bad video because I just want to get
Speaker 4: out of here. I don't want to be in a
Speaker 4: photo session. I hate taking pictures. I don't want to
Speaker 4: go to this opening. I don't want to go to
Speaker 4: that schmooze fest. I just didn't do any of that stuff.
Speaker 4: But I'm comfortable with it now.
Speaker 1: Billy Joel says he doesn't look back on his life
Speaker 1: that much. Last year, he decided not to publish his
Speaker 1: long awaited memoir, entitled The Book of Joel. He said, instead, quote,
Speaker 1: the best expression of my life and its ups and
Speaker 1: downs has been and remains my music, unquote. What's a
Speaker 1: song that you think yourself? You know, I really still
Speaker 1: enjoy hearing that song? Does it have to be a hit.
Speaker 1: What's one you dislike that you haven't played? Do you
Speaker 1: really really like it?
Speaker 11: The ones?
Speaker 4: I've been doing master classes at colleges, and I get
Speaker 4: to play all these obscure songs that I never played
Speaker 4: over the thirty forty years I've been playing played one
Speaker 4: the other night, and I said, well, that's a really
Speaker 4: good song. There's no rhyme, not until the very end
Speaker 4: is when rhyme can, but the lyrics work. It's from
Speaker 4: the Nylon Curtain, and it's called Where's the Orchestra?
Speaker 1: Where the orchestra?
Speaker 3: Wasn't this supposed to be a musical? There I am
Speaker 3: in the balcony. How the hell could I have missed
Speaker 3: the overture?
Speaker 9: I loved.
Speaker 6: The scenery, even though I.
Speaker 3: Have so ludly.
Speaker 8: No, I dear all.
Speaker 3: What has been said, despite the dialogue.
Speaker 9: There.
Speaker 3: The leading man, movie star who never faced an audience.
Speaker 3: Where's the orchestra? After all, this is my night on
Speaker 3: the town, my.
Speaker 1: Introduction to the theater Crown. I assume that a show
Speaker 1: I would have a song. So I was wrong. At
Speaker 1: least I understand.
Speaker 6: All the innuendo and the irony, and I appreciate the
Speaker 6: roles the actors played, the point the author made head
Speaker 6: of after the closing lines of after.
Speaker 11: The curtain calls, the curtain falls on empty chairs with.
Speaker 7: The orchestra, You're the king, thank you, No really, you're
Speaker 7: the king man, thank you?
Speaker 1: Thank you for coming. Thanks, I'm Alec Baldwin. Here's the
Speaker 1: thing is brought to you by iHeart Radio