Billy's 88 ways to woo a goddess

How did Billy Joel get Elle and Christie? By being the Piano Man, Pete Paphides learns
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“Birmingham — it’s an R&B town, right? Didn’t Cream come from Birmingham? Can we do a Cream song tonight?” Three hours before the first show of this greatest hits tour, Billy Joel sounds out anyone within earshot about the possibility of a last-minute cover version.

“I don’t think Cream came from Birmingham,” suggests his guitarist. “How about Black Sabbath?” Looking more like a member of the road crew in his baseball cap and khaki shorts, the 55-year-old singer pads off to the dressing room doing a surprisingly good impression of Ozzy Osbourne on War Pigs. Joel is in ebullient form. His only palpable vice since last year, when he checked out of the Betty Ford Centre after being treated for alcohol addiction, is an occasional cigarette.

He won’t be joining his band for the soundcheck, which means that while a stand-in gives his piano a thorough workout he can ponder the thorny subject of tonight’s set list. Tonight, apparently, sees the first performance of Uptown Girl for two decades. It’s not a prospect that Joel sounds overly excited about. “Do I want to sing it again? No, I can’t say I do. It was sort of a novelty song. I mean, that whole album An Innocent Man was a homage to The Four Seasons. Frankie Valli sings as though someone’s squeezing him in the corleones, you know. It’s supposed to sound like you’re in pain. But that’s easier to do in the recording studio than night after night on tour.”

Still, I suggest that, as a memento of his early courtship of the supermodel (and mother of his daughter, Alexa Ray) Christie Brinkley, it must hold a special place in his heart. Judging by the reaction on Joel’s face, it’s not the heart that springs to mind. “You want to know what that song’s about?” he smiles. “I had recently gotten divorced (from his first wife, Elizabeth Weber). And now, here I was, a rock star who was suddenly single.

I made the most of it. I dated Elle Macpherson half a year before Christie. So the original song was called Uptown Girls. I was like a pig in s***.”

There’s no delicate way to approach this inquiry, but it’s worth a try. How does a short, “schlubby” ex-amateur boxer from Long Island pluck up the courage to hit on Elle Macpherson? Joel’s answer? With a piano you don’t need to. Holidaying in the Caribbean, he found himself at a hotel where Macpherson, Brinkley and a yet-to-be-famous Whitney Houston were staying. “Whitney was a model then, and there was a photoshoot. I went to the piano in the bar and started to play As Time Goes By. I looked up and there were these three gorgeous women looking at me from the other side of the piano. I looked back down at the piano and just said: ‘Thank you!’

” If Joel evinces the Zen candour of a millionaire in retirement, then it’s not altogether surprising. It’s been 13 years since he abdicated the singer-songwriter mantle with River of Dreams. Since then, and mostly for his own pleasure, he composes the odd classical piece. With the exception of It’s a Good Life — an anniversary present in 2005 for his current wife, the food writer Katie Lee — he has written only one pop tune since 1993.

Once in a while he takes to the road and bashes out a set of his most well-loved songs. But, save for a live CD, entitled 12 Gardens, and another compilation (this time entitled Piano Man) there’s nothing new to promote.

Joel is visibly amused by the quandary in which this leaves his record company. When he first served notice of his withdrawal from the recording process, Columbia’s response was disbelief. “Actually, they thought I was just negotiating — and this was the start-off point.”

Since then, Joel’s profile has been kept high by a procession of compilations. “It’s ridiculous,” he says, “If it’s not The Ultimate Billy Joel, it’s The Essential Billy Joel or Really and Truly the Very Best of Billy Joel." The lion’s share of his disdain though, is reserved for My Lives, the 2005 box set that gathered together four CDs of outtakes spanning his entire career. “The idea as it was presented to me was: ‘OK, we’re going to take everything you left on the cutting room floor, we’re going to put it in a box and charge people 50 bucks.’

“It’s not like I had a choice — they own it all. I read in the liner notes that I personally ‘curated’ all this stuff, which is a crock of s***. I didn’t curate a single thing.”

If there’s no love lost between Joel and the music business, perhaps it’s not so surprising. By the time he scored his first hit with Piano Man in 1973 — the song inspired by his six-month stint playing a Los Angeles bar — he had already accrued first-hand experience of the industry’s shady underside. When he was 20 he famously signed away his publishing rights to the (now defunct) Family Records in order to record his 1971 debut album Cold Spring Harbor. By the time the record appeared, a mastering error meant that Joel appeared to be on helium for all ten songs.

All things considered, it’s little wonder that this was also the year he attempted to end his life. Unable to pay the rent, he was forced to take a job in a factory. His girlfriend had left him. It was, as he tells it, a Woody Allen kind of suicide — death by furniture polish. “What does furniture polish taste like? It tastes like s***. I looked in my closet and it was a straight choice between chlorine bleach and furniture polish. They both had a skull and crossbones on, so I that was promising. I thought, ‘Hmmm, which one will taste better?’ “Well, the polish said that it was lemon-scented, so I figured it had to be that one. I didn’t die, obviously. I just farted furniture polish.”

He says that checking himself into an observation centre directly afterwards “was probably one of the best things that could have happened to me, because I met people who had real problems”.

Though Joel got better, his cynicism never quite dissipated. One notable outtake on My Lives is Oyster Bay, a 1973 vignette about a rock star who yearns simply to escape his punishing schedule and go out fishing off the picturesque Long Island coastal town. Tellingly, the song was written when he had yet to score a hit single. Even when Piano Man finally arrived, Joel followed it with The Entertainer, which suggested that his ultimate fate was “to get put in the back at the discount rack/Like another can of beans”.

His outsider’s perspective has served him well, though. At the show later on, the bestreceived songs are Movin’ Out and Allentown, journalistic paeans to the travails of ordinary people. Unlike Bruce Springsteen, Joel sees no innate virtue in their workaday struggles. “What Bruce does,” he ponders, “is consciously write about a working-class guy. I don’t set out to write about any particular life. It’s just how it comes out.”

Except, of course, that it no longer comes out — a fact that seems to cause Joel no discernible heartbreak. Now clean for over a year and free of the album/tour cycle, he says his life is better than it has ever been. Following the success of Twyla Tharp’s Movin’ Out — the Broadway show based around his music — he has fielded further ideas for musicals. If he is to get involved, though, he says it has to come from within.

An idea for a possible book suggests that Joel has some distance to go before he moderates his thoughts on the industry that brought him to prominence. Entitled A Good Career Move, the plot is predicated, Joel says, on the record industry's belief that established rock stars are much more useful dead than alive. If he gets around to writing it, then he’ll come up with some songs to go with it.

Right now though, music is just one of a range of outlets available to Joel. In 1996, seeking to buy himself a yacht “that didn’t look like a penis extension”, he reawakened his childhood interest in technical drawing and took his design to a Long Island boatmaker, who made the craft. The ensuing interest in Shelter Island Runabout — a modern version of the yachts used by wealthy New Yorkers for commuting to Manhattan in the 1930s — prompted Joel to go into business. Since then he has sold 42 of them at $500,000 a throw.

Then there’s his motorcycle design company, which takes new Harley-Davidsons and “soups them up to look like 1946 Knuckleheads. But you know, these things don’t take up a whole lot of my time. I probably spend more time with my wife or walking my two pugs around Oyster Bay.”

So he really did end up in Oyster Bay? Just like the guy in the song? Joel shows momentary surprise, as though the thought hadn’t occurred to him. “I did. But let me tell you, that’s where the similarity ends. I’m always on my f***ing boat.”