Billy Joel by Fred Schruers

Author:Fred Schruers [Schruers, Fred]
Language: eng
Format: epub, mobi
ISBN: 978-0-8041-4020-1
Publisher: Crown Publishing Group
Published: 2014-10-27T16:00:00+00:00

“I think ‘Big Man on Mulberry Street’ works as a portrait of a nebbish who thinks he’s cool, and it is an excursion into a jazz style of singing. From its title, ‘Temptation’ sounds like it’s about a woman, but it’s actually about being unable to leave the side of my new baby. ‘Code of Silence’ was a terrible song and very nearly got scrapped.” In fact, Billy wound up enlisting Cyndi Lauper, who was working in the studio next door, to help him finish the song. “She came in and said, with that great Noo Yawk accent, ‘I can see ya going through awl kinds of tawment. Lemme help you write it.’ ”

“I don’t know …” Billy replied. But Cyndi insisted. “You just throw out some words,” she said, “and I’ll help ya awganize it.” She pushed Billy to finish the song. “She’s a funny girl. Great singer, too. I like her part of the track, anyway.”

The bottom line was that Billy was fed up. He actually thought he was going to retire. But he hadn’t released a newly recorded album in three years, and the label had other ideas.

The Bridge was released in July 1986 and soon reached number seven. Billy and the band then started the extensive preparations for a sidetrack from the promotional tour. As the featured event in their travels, they would undertake the first set of American rock concerts in the Soviet Union, which had just introduced its new policy of glasnost. Despite the news that the IRS was coming after Billy for $5.5 million in unpaid back taxes—his accountants were still figuring that tangle out—he planned to finance the tour and its filming himself.

“I remember the Russian tour very fondly, almost as a series of snapshots,” says Billy. “There was Christie with her cargo load of bottled water, to be used for everything from drinking to washing her hair—an outgrowth of her antinuclear activism combined with her fear that Chernobyl’s aftereffects might still be poisoning the environment. There was taking Alexa, who wasn’t quite two, to Gorky Park and meeting Viktor the clown, who so charmed her that we became pals and I wrote the song ‘Leningrad’ as a tribute to him. And of course, there was the episode of me getting so pissed off at the film lighting guys for pinning the crowd in their zillion-candle-watt spotlights that I tossed my electric piano off the stage.”

It wasn’t the first time Billy had done that—on a few U.S. tours it was his standard signal to his piano techs that his keyboards were malfunctioning—but in this context it became the smashed instrument heard ’round the world. “Rockin’ Billy’s Red Rage” was how one British tabloid billed it.

Billy initiated the trip to the Soviet Union in 1987 because he felt he and the band could make a little history, but it followed an intense string of European dates, so that by the time Billy arrived, his throat was shot and he was bone weary. The

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