Billy Joel, Tchotchke Man

In 1993, I was the pop music critic for Newsday, the Long Island institution that was then attempting to compete in New York City with a second daily edition. Given geography and the paper’s sense of suburban purpose, it was mandatory for whoever occupied the role to cover Billy Joel from time to time.

I watched the new documentary recently and found it extremely well-made (if a little generous in length). It put me in mind of my one sit-down interview with him, which took place in the summer of 1993. (I can’t recall where we did it. ) He was then married to Christie Brinkley, in the midst of a legal battle with his former manager (and former brother-in-law) and promoting a new album, River of Dreams, which I didn’t much care for.

But the man himself was far more charming than I expected: oddly self-deprecating, a funny mixture of pretentious and offhand, just like he comes off in the documentary. Even though hating music critics was his default stance, I didn’t feel like an enemy in his midst.

My tenure at Newsday required a degree of open-mindedness and tolerance that was not innate, but I managed to keep the most antagonistic elements of my views of mainstream pop to myself. As this piece demonstrates.

By Ira Robbins

John Sebastian of the Lovin’ Spoonful was all of 22 when he sang, “I think I’ve come to see myself at last.”

      Billy Joel has taken twice as long to become sure of his own place in the creative world. In his third decade as a five-zillion-served pop composer and performer, the 44-year-old finally understands where he stands. Now confident rather than cocky, he seems remarkably comfortable and relaxed in the knowledge.

      “I always found people who elevated themselves because they thought they were artists to be somewhat ridiculous and pretentious,” he says during an interview Saturday. One is easily put in mind of Sting’s haughty condescension, Paul Simon’s world-beating appropriations or Bruce Springsteen’s gold-plated populism.

      America’s real middle-class icon is a forthright suburbanite who has never striven to be placed above his audience or disclaim his beloved musical influences, a real-world nebbish whose stubby fingers put the Midas touch to instantly memorable songs. Without a trace of hubris, this superstar – who can attempt a Flaubert quote in one breath and compare musical sidemen to erstwhile Yankee utility infielder Fred Stanley in the next – says, “I’ve tried to stay away from the artsy-fartsy artiste aspect of it. Now I can see, at this age, I am an artist and very proud of it. I’ve come to understand that I don’t need anybody else to tell me I’m good enough.

      “You watch these award shows where all the artists are in one room hoping to win the tchotchke,” he says, momentarily affecting an announcer’s voice: “Here we are, ladies and gentlemen, The 25th Annual Tchotchke Awards. “And here you’ve got Eric Clapton, Sting, Nirvana, Natalie Cole, Whitney Houston, Billy Joel, blah, blah, blah. This is a pretty power-packed room, therefore you get some major advertising dollars spent on the time. The producers of the show make the money. The artist who wins the tchotchke gets a tchotchke, which is worth about $5.98. The plaque falls off, but there we all are, wanting that tchotchke. We think it is going to legitimize what we do. It never does.”

      Switching to the comic delivery of George Carlin, Joel continues. “`How many tchotchkes did you win?’ `He’s got three tchotchkes.’ `Well, he’s a five-time tchotchke winner.’ `He’s one of the living tchotchke legends.’ “

      On River of Dreams (Columbia), his first album since 1989’s triple-platinum Storm Front, Long Island’s living tchotchke legend takes philosophical stock of middle age and what’s truly important in life. “The essence of the album is a loss of faith, a search for and understanding of how to deal with that, and a renewal of faith in substantial things: faith in love, faith in one’s self, faith in the things that have always been there.” (For those keeping score, the word also appears in six of the 10 songs.)

      Although the album contains a compassionate, sweet lullaby to his 7-year-old daughter that, he says, answered her questions about what happens when you die, Joel rejects the suggestion that yesterday’s angry young man has achieved serenity.

      “I always assumed that when you got to this age, life would calm down, things would become boring and mundane. That I would start to vote . . . Republican. That when you got into your forties you were no longer in any way that crazy guy that you were when you were a teenager.

      “I found that not to be the case. I am as crazy as I was when I was a teenager, and as wildly romantic, and as emotional. I just know more stuff. I have acquired some wisdom – not enough, I want more – and I don’t get as angry about nickel and dime stuff. I get angry about bigger things now.”

      One of the bigger things Joel is angry about now provides a central theme of the album. Having spent much of the prior week giving depositions in his four-year-old lawsuit against ex-manager and ex-brother-in-law Frank Weber, Joel – who at one point in the conversation changes chairs, explaining that the one he’s in feels like a witness stand – acknowledges that River of Dreams partly concerns “the foolishness of the search for justice. There is no justice. There is no justice,” he says emphatically. His voice is steely and bitter.

      The depth of Joel’s disillusionment surfaces in a musical hate letter, “The Great Wall of China,” clearly aimed at his former associate, whom he accuses of mismanaging and misappropriating his money. “Your role was protective, your soul was too defective,” he sings. Asked about the song’s use of the Great Wall as an anything-is-possible metaphor, Joel notes that he played Cuba in 1979 and the USSR in 1987. “China is still one of the last exotic unknown places to people who live where I live.”

      The stately and handsome “All About Soul” – which began as “The Motorcycle Song,” a fast number about “middle-aged dentists and insurance salesmen getting themselves in biker gear and buying Harleys” – bears some of the same frustration at venality, but mends the psychic wounds with love: “She comes to me at night and she tells me her desires / And she gives me all the love I need to keep my faith alive.” Through all the adversity, the love of a good woman – namely Joel’s wife, Christie Brinkley, who painted the album’s primitivist cover – comes to the rescue.

      The crucial line of the song (if not the entire album) provocatively announces, “Under the love is the stronger emotion.” What does Joel consider the underpinning of love? “The things that sustain love when you question love, when love alone isn’t enough,” he replies. “The basic inner something which I refer to as soul, the inner core: what you call on when the shit really comes down. Soul is what each person has within before there is love, or even after there is love.”

      On this introspective, personal record, besides venting his spleen and opening his heart, Joel allows himself a long-denied indulgence: to sing the blues, on “A Minor Variation,” a song he compares stylistically to the Memphis soul sound of Otis Redding and Wilson Pickett.

      “Who the hell am I to complain? I’m supposed to have this phenomenal life. But I had the blues, and it felt good to actually say, `Some days I have to give right in to the blues.’

      “I was suicidal when I was 21. I checked myself into an observation ward; it was a great experience for me, because I saw people who had really incredible problems. When I got out of there I never looked back. I said I will never feel sorry for myself for another two seconds. This time, I happened to go, OK, I do have the blues, and I went on with it.”

      The year it took to write and record River of Dreams began last summer, in a Southampton (Long Island) church where Joel had installed a temporary studio to cut two Elvis Presley tunes for the “Honeymoon in Vegas” soundtrack. When he needed to relocate, “I looked around in my neck of the woods – out in the East End [of Long Island] – and I went over to Shelter Island. In a boatyard, I found a lobster shed, where they used to store lobster traps, which was big enough and secluded enough. That became the Shelter Island studio.

      “I was producing; we recorded half a dozen or more songs. My idea of production is non-production. I don’t do any more than three takes when we’re recording, ‘cause I still wanna like the thing.”

      Joel ultimately decided there was a “lot more that could be done” with the songs he had recorded. Enter producer-guitarist Danny Kortchmar, a New York-born veteran known for his Southern California work with James Taylor, Don Henley, Stevie Nicks and many others. Joel played Kortchmar the tapes from Shelter Island. “He listened to it and had some very, very strong ideas.” The two decided to re-record the songs.

      One of Kortchmar’s ideas was to get Leslie West, the Mountain guitarist whose first band, Long Island’s own Vagrants, had a big local influence on Billy Joel’s late-’60s outfit, the Hassles. Ironically, “Shades of Grey,” the track which actually invokes West’s signature American Cream sound, features guitarist Tommy Byrnes firing up the fuzzbox. “Cream would write songs about so many fantastic colors, use these bizarre colorful images,” notes Joel. “I was talking about exactly the opposite: shades of gray. I thought this was a terrific chance to use the Cream arrangement as irony.”

      River of Dreams was more or less created in the sequence it appears. “Each song got written in reaction to the song which came before it, and recorded likewise. Once I’ve gotten to a certain point, [an album] becomes its own entity, and I work towards the resolution, which is why I don’t write that many more songs than are on the album. “Some artists write twenty, thirty songs and pick the best ones. What you hear is what I’ve written. [Although] there was a song, “You Picked a Real Bad Time,” which didn’t end up on the album but may end up on a B-side.” And, he admits, there was one total reject. Joel describes the discarded number as “a dog. It was an art song called ‘The Winter Crossing’ which I took out back and shot. It was really pretentious and stupid.” He played the doomed tune once for Danny Kortchmar and engineer Niko Bolas. “I’m watching Danny and Niko behind the console. I see their entire faces, and as the song goes along I see less of their faces. Now I only see up to their noses. Then, as I’m further into the song, I just see eyes – very wide, open eyes. And I realize, as I’m singing it, that this really is a piece of shit. And I stopped and I said, OK. I’m sorry. And that was it.”

      Looking in a different direction, Joel says, “I talked with Pete Townshend in Cleveland; we went for the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame hodgepodge thing. I have a great deal of respect for Townshend. He said, `Billy, you’ve got to write a Broadway musical.’ He was insisting that I do this. He said, `You’re probably the guy best suited to do this in this day and age, to bring pop and the rock and roll sensibility into the musical theater.”

      “I had been approached by other people about doing a Broadway musical, but when Pete Townshend told me that, it was the first time I really seriously have considered that I am going to do that. I intend to do it.”

   For Billy the Man, at 44, the curtain also rises.