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All Of It with Alison Stewart
'Billy Joel: And So It Goes'
00:28:16
The new two-part documentary "Billy Joel: And So It Goes" provides an in-depth look into the life and career of Long Island's beloved piano man.
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- [00:08]
Alison Stewart
You're listening to all of it. I'm Alison Stewart live from the WNYC studios in soho. Thank you for spending part of your day with us. If you missed any of our conversations this week, like with Josh Sharp and Sam Pinkleton about their show at the Greenwich House Theater. Ta da. Or our performance with Brandi Younger. She was beautiful with her harp. Please check out our podcast at your platform of choice. That's in the future. Now, let's get this hour started with Billy Joel.
- [00:54]
Billy Joel
Slow down, you crazy child. You're so ambitious for a juvenile. But then if you're so smart, tell me, why are you still so afraid?
- [01:08]
Alison Stewart
That is, of course, the Billy Joel classic Vienna. And we are playing it because we're going to be spending the next segment talking about the life and the career of the piano man himself. Billy Joel is a local legend. Raised in Hicksville, Long island. He spent a decade in residence at Madison Square Garden. He sold more than 150 million records. A new documentary seeks to go beyond the conventional wisdom. In the two part HBO film, Joel gets candid about his mental health, struggles with alcohol, his complicated relationship with his father, a German immigrant and his mother, a lover of music who could sometimes be unstable. And of course, the film looks into Joel's music and creative process. The movie is titled Billy Joel and so it goes. Part one premieres on HBO and HBO Max tomorrow night at 8pm Part two will air on July 25th. The film is directed by Jessica Levin and Susan Lucey. And Susan, excuse me, Susan Lacey. And Susan joins me now in studio. Hi. Hi, Susan Lacey, nice to speak to you.
- [02:08]
Susan Lacey
That wasn't live, right?
- [02:09]
Alison Stewart
That was live.
- [02:10]
Susan Lacey
Okay, so Susan Lacey here. Susan Lacey, right now. It's so nice to be here. Alison.
- [02:16]
Alison Stewart
Listeners, we want to hear from you. What's your favorite Billy Joel song? What memory do you have of seeing him in concert? What do you think makes him special? Give us a call. 212-433-969-2212-4433 w nyc before we get started, Billy Joel has announced to the public that he's had to stop performing due to a brain. Have you been able to talk to him recently? How is he doing?
- [02:41]
Susan Lacey
Oh, I actually haven't spoken with him in a while, but he is healing. He is recovering from surgery and, you know, we miss him and we wish him well. And I know that he hopes to be able to be back performing soon.
- [02:58]
Alison Stewart
You're a legend.
- [02:58]
Susan Lacey
I don't know about soon. I shouldn't say that. I really do not know. But I know that he's getting better.
- [03:05]
Unknown Interviewer
We send them all our best. You're a legend in this business for.
- [03:10]
Alison Stewart
Creating American Masters on pbs. So I'll ask you a question I often ask documentary filmmakers, was, what was.
- [03:18]
Unknown Interviewer
Your question about Billy Joel? What did you want to find the answer to?
- [03:24]
Susan Lacey
Well, why Billy Joel? Why make a film about Billy Joel? And for me, it was a incredible journey of discovery. I knew his hits. I did not know his catalog in any kind of deep way, but I did begin to discover, which I did not know, how incredibly, inextricably connected his life is to his music and his lyrics. It's a rip from the page of his life. Autobiographical journey. His lyrics spell out what was happening in his life. His loves, his loss, his betrayals, his struggles with alcohol, his financial woes, literally all documented in the lyrics of his. Of his songs. And that was a real surprise to me. The other thing that was a surprise to me, which I didn't know, is that he's an incredibly gifted classical musician, and he studied classical piano for 14 years. He had a huge. A wide range of influences of music he was listening to as a child. His father was a classical pianist who didn't think he was very good, but Billy thought he was pretty good. But I don't think he learned very much from his father. His father was tough.
- [04:38]
Unknown Interviewer
It was tough.
- [04:39]
Alison Stewart
Yes, it was.
- [04:40]
Susan Lacey
But his mother was a believer, and she made sure he had those piano lessons. She knew Billy was going to become something one day. And so he had a lot of influences besides classical music. He listened to Broadway, listened to jazz very much. The American Songbook, Tin Pan Alley, rock and roll, of course. But all of this found its way compositionally into his music. It was interesting.
- [05:04]
Unknown Interviewer
His sister said that he was an avid reader growing up on Long Island.
- [05:07]
Susan Lacey
Really, he's still an avid reader. He really knows history. He would sometimes pretend he was going to school to wait for his mother, went to work, and he'd go back in the house and go in the closet with a pillow and read all day long. And it's not in the film, but she told us once that you could open up a book of the World Book Encyclopedia, which everybody used to have back in the day, and say, okay, Great Wall of China. And he could tell you everything about it. And he's still an avid reader. And when we didn't start the fire, he didn't have to do a whole lot of research for it. He actually knew all that. Stu, I want to ask you a.
- [05:42]
Unknown Interviewer
Little bit about the filmmaking and Then we'll go into the content of the film. First of all, you interviewed him at a piano?
- [05:49]
Susan Lacey
Yeah, I made a decision early on that he should always be at a piano because I had seen a few things he had done. And he would get up and run over to the piano, and then he'd have to run back. And I thought, why take up that time? And besides, I really wanted to explore his craft. And I knew that the best way to do that was for him to be at a piano all the time, because he could. I'd ask a question about, you know, talk about the influence of Mozart, you know, and he'd go, okay, well, you know, Uptown Girl could have been a Mozart piece. And he plays it. So it was a really, really, really good. And also, he's very comfortable. He's not comfortable until he's actually at a piano. That's interesting. And I knew that, so I thought that was a good thing to do. I did all my interviews with him at the piano. We did about 10 funny hours worth of interviews.
- [06:33]
Unknown Interviewer
And it's interesting in the first part of the film, the rest of the film, it becomes more documentary like. But the first part is almost memoir ish in the way he's talking initially. Why did you want to open the film that way?
- [06:47]
Susan Lacey
Well, we don't actually begin with his childhood. We begin. We don't. I waited until you cared about his childhood to bring his childhood in. Yeah, that was interesting. And so, you know, the film actually starts with, you know, he was in a band since he was 14 years old. You know, music has been. And he didn't go. He didn't graduate from high school. And I thought all those early years, I mean, the lost soul souls, the hassles. A lot of people don't know all of that. And the fact that we had, you know, recordings from some of that stuff. And, you know, his first song, you know, Every Step I Take, which was a kind of bad Beatles song, as he calls it. I thought it would be fun for people to know where he came from. But musically, that he was in a band that he started up, he thought he wanted to be Led Zeppelin, wasn't very good at it. And he did this band called Attila, which he says one of the worst bands ever, and it actually wasn't very good. And, you know, and then finding out about his relationship with the woman who became his wife and manager, who had been married to his best friend, and.
- [08:00]
Unknown Interviewer
Let's go back to the hassles. The hassles were kind of hilarious. First of all, what was the rock scene like on Long Island?
- [08:07]
Susan Lacey
Well, there was a club on every corner, I think. You know, I mean, the Long island band scene was, you know, legendary. We couldn't get a lot of images from it. Interestingly enough we really tried and there wasn't a lot. It was, you know, posters from like my house and stuff. But there wasn't a lot of archive to draw on to illustrate the Long island band scene. So we had sort more to talk about it. But I mean, I wasn't there so I can't tell you much more than. And of course that was the training ground for a lot of bands. And that was Billy's training ground. I mean they. He honed his performing skills, you know, and the Long island band scene, part of the Hassles got better and better and better, but. And he became part of a band and I think that was a really important part of his life. He was very loyal to his bands. They were a part of his creative process and he belonged. It was about belonging, you know. Billy was an outsider A lot of his childhood they were very poor. His mother was divorced. Nobody was divorced in Levittown. So they were kind of like, you know, pariahs. And he found his metier in being part of a group, part of a band. And it gave him solace.
- [09:26]
Alison Stewart
Let's listen to a little bit of the Hassles. This is the song. Every step I take.
- [09:34]
Billy Joel
Everywhere I go Dreams of you will always follow Every step I take Every move I make I'm trying to stake my life without you I turn around, I hide I know deep inside a part of me is not dead.
- [10:01]
Alison Stewart
That must sound different to you now that you've been through the entire process of making the film. When you first heard it, you're like, oh, that's kind of cute. But what does it say to you now that you know the whole story?
- [10:13]
Susan Lacey
Well, that he honed his songwriting skills along the way. That's a pretty simple song, but actually I kind of think it's a pretty melody. Melody is Billy's real gift and he started early on. It's a nice melody actually.
- [10:28]
Alison Stewart
I'm talking with Susan Lacey. She is the co director of the new film Billy Joel and so it goes. Part one of the documentary appears tomorrow night at 8pm on HBO and HBO. Max, you should watch it. It's really good. And part two will air on July 25th. Let's take a couple of call. Let's talk to Lori from New Jersey. Hi Laurie, thank you for making the Time to call all of it.
- [10:50]
Susan Lacey
Hi, how are you?
- [10:51]
Lori
So I just wanted to say that Billy Joel has been a huge part of my life musically since I was in, like, sixth grade and we had his eight track on my bus. And then many years later, I became friends with someone in California and only found out that was in the nine early 80s. And I just found out recently that he was Billy Joel's drummer on his first tour, and he is the one that took the photo with his old Pentax that they're using for the promotion with the yellow background for the documentary. And I have heard a lot about Billy over the last few weeks from Reese, his drummer, who was very excited that his picture was chosen and that he was able to participate in this project.
- [11:33]
Alison Stewart
Yeah, thank you so much for calling, Lori. Let's talk to Chris from Yonkers. Hey, Chris, thanks for calling all of it.
- [11:41]
Chris
Hi there.
- [11:42]
Unknown Caller
Yeah, no, I heard Billy Joel come up and my alarm bells rang because I. I just grew up. My dad just got me into all sorts of 70s rock from a very young age, and Billy Joel was always one of the standouts for me. My favorite album is, to this day, maybe this is kind of a basic pick. It's not like a deep cut, but the Stranger is such an amazing album, full of all sorts of great tracks. I mean, just the first track alone, Moving out, is probably one of my favorite songs of all time. I just. I think there is just such such a earnestness to Billy Joel's songwriting. Something about the stories he'd tell and everything, you know, and stuff, like moving our scenes from an Italian restaurant that just really made him stand out. And he's just an amazing artist. And I can't wait to watch this documentary because I look forward to probably learning new things about him I never knew.
- [12:32]
Alison Stewart
Thanks for calling. Did you want to add anything to that?
- [12:34]
Susan Lacey
Well, it was fun to interview Rhys, actually. So tell him that you see him. Well, I think the key to Billy's longevity is that he's an everyman in a lot of ways. And he wrote about his experiences, his loves, his losses, his. He wrote about high school buddies who had peaked too soon, as it seems, from an Italian restaurant. He put it all. And I think that in a lot of ways, they're everybody's story. Everybody can find something to relate to. Everybody's had a breakup. Everybody's had a problem in high school. A lot of people have been outsiders. And I think his stories, you know, as Bruce Springsteen says in the film, people want to hear those stories over and over and over again. And which, I mean, that astounded me. I mean, to sell out Madison Square Garden once a month for 10 years, I can't think of another artist who could do that. And multi generational, where you'd have a kid, a mother and a grandmother. And they all knew all the lyrics.
- [13:38]
Unknown Interviewer
I really love the way that you portrayed Elizabeth Webber in the series. It was really a beautiful tribute to them, to them as individuals, to them as a couple. To them creating this early part in his career. She was his wife, she was his muse, she was manager, she was responsible.
- [14:01]
Susan Lacey
She was the general, I think she.
- [14:02]
Unknown Interviewer
Called herself in the film.
- [14:07]
Susan Lacey
What do you.
- [14:07]
Unknown Interviewer
I mean, this is a big picture, but what do you see as her role in Billy Joel? The artist, the early artist?
- [14:16]
Susan Lacey
Well, it's such a. It's a very long and complex story. But what you should know is that when she left him, she didn't speak about Billy for 40 years. She did not mention his name. Her son, who was in Billy's life for the first 16 years of his life, had girlfriends who didn't even know he ever had a relationship with Billy Joel. Oh, wow, that's interesting. That's the degree to which the separation took place. So it was not that easy to convince her to be a part of this film. And it took a while. And the reason I think she finally did is that I assured her that I felt that she had been misrepresented in social media, that her story wasn't known, the degree of her influence and her smarts in guiding Billy's career, that the songs were written for her and about her and that her story was going to be told and that she should be a part of helping to tell it. And that convinced her. And then we did four interviews. Her role is incalculable. You know, she knew that he was something. I don't think Billy had the same ambition. In a certain way, I think he became ambitious, but I don't think. I think at first Billy was really. Because he came from a real hardscrabble background. All he wanted to do was be able to pay the bills. But she saw something in that and she guided that. And she saw what all the other managers, the bad ones, that he had, a series of bad ones. She saw how they were screwing up and she said they were interested more in what Billy could do for them than what they could do for Billy. And Billy said, nobody knows me better than that, so why don't you? You can't do worse than those guys. Why don't you become my manager? Then of course, he turned down a couple of pretty prominent music producers, including George Martin, who was the Beatles genius music producer.
- [16:12]
Unknown Interviewer
Well, he wanted to get rid of his band. Billy was like, hey, me or the band? That's right, we come together.
- [16:17]
Susan Lacey
Yeah, love me, love my band. Which is what I was saying earlier. It was, you know, he was very connected to his, his band. And then he, then Elizabeth said, he's going to do a concert at Carnegie Hall. I'm going to invite Phil Ramone, who at the time was also a music producing legend, who'd been worked with Frank Sinatra and, you know, and Barbra Streisand and Paul Simon and everybody. And he saw that the strength in Billy's was to capture the live feeling, to capture the live performance, the feeling of the live performance on stage, which was electric. And, you know, that was exactly what Billy wanted. But how smart was she to invite Phil Ramone to come to Carnegie hall and hear Billy? Because this was before Billy had really become a big recording artist. I mean, he wasn't a big recording artist at that point. His. He built an audience and a following following, excuse me, through his live performance, because he was such an electric performer. His records weren't selling because he didn't have good distribution. His producers weren't doing the job. So Elizabeth would send people, when they would go to perform someplace, she would send people ahead to the record stores to make sure the albums were in the. She would go to the convention center where Columbia executives were having a meeting when Billy was doing a concert later, practically right next door and say, why aren't you at that concert? And she would pick up and drag him over to the concert. You have an artist here you need to pay attention to. She was amazing. And she was his muse too. I mean, and it's a very emotional and very tragic in a way end, you know, also loving, very loving. I mean, he says, she says one day, so touchy when she told me this, I did all four interviews with her. She said, I told him at the end, she said, you know, they're going to write about us one day and I hope they write about what we did. And he said, I wish they could write that we went all the way. It was very touching. It makes me cry even to think about it.
- [18:24]
Unknown Interviewer
Right now we're talking about the film Billy Joel. And so it goes with its co director, Susan Lacey. We'll have more after your quick break. This quick break, this is all of it.
- [18:43]
Alison Stewart
You're listening to all of it. On wnyc. I'm Alison Stewart. My guest is Susan Lacey, co director of the new film Billy Joel and so it goes. Part one of the documentary premieres tomorrow night at 8pm on HBO and HBO Max. Part two will air on July 25th. Let's go to Jennifer who is calling us from Watchung, New Jersey. Hi, Jennifer, tell us your Billy Joel story.
- [19:09]
Jennifer
Hi, good afternoon. Well, my name was Jenny Lam at the time. I grew up in Oceanside, Long island, and we went on a ride with my parents one afternoon and my mother's cousin lived down the street from Billy Joel on Long Island. So I happened to have an invitation to my sweet 16 with me and I put it in his mailbox hoping that he'd show up. But about a week or two later, I got a phone call and Billy actually called me on the phone to apologize that he couldn't make it to my sweet 16 but wished me a happy birthday. I was so excited, I couldn't believe it. And unfortunately, nobody was home at the time except for me. So here I am jumping up and down stream and Billy Joel just called me and nobody was home. So no one really believes that I did it. So, Billy, if you're listening, can you please tell everybody that you did call Jenny lamb about her 3:16.
- [20:09]
Susan Lacey
That's a great story, Prince Jennifer, thank.
- [20:12]
Alison Stewart
You so much for calling in. You know, in the documentary, there's so much in the documentary, it's two and a half hours, two different sections. And it's worth every minute. I have to say, I really did. Five hours total, right? Two and a half. Two and a half. Billy Joel opens up about his mental health.
- [20:33]
Unknown Interviewer
He talks about taking his own life. He talks about being in a motorcycle accident. He talks about alcohol. What were the rules?
- [20:46]
Alison Stewart
Was this an independent production? How did that conversation come up?
- [20:52]
Susan Lacey
Well, it was a totally independent production because that's the hallmark of my films and my company that we. We make films about very famous people and they don't have anything to say about what the film is. I did ask Billy at the beginning if there were any sensitivities, not that I would necessarily stay away from them, but I wanted to know what they were. And you know what he said to me? Tell the truth. That's all I ask. Tell the truth, Susan. And he went that distance as well. He told the truth. He was. There was nothing he wouldn't talk about. We covered all of it. We covered, you know, his suicide attempts. We covered, you know, his struggles with alcohol and rehab. We covered the fact that he, you know, played with his own physical being, with, you know, riding motorcycles in the rain, et cetera. And we know that song. And he opened up about his music and he opened up about his love affairs. Not a lot. I think those were probably still the most difficult things for him to talk about, the breakups of his marriages and that sometimes we left that with a song, the song that he wrote about it. And he opened up about his craft. There was nothing. And it was. And he didn't see the film till it was finished.
- [22:13]
Alison Stewart
Oh, wow. Really?
- [22:14]
Susan Lacey
And he wrote me something which is kind of private, but in the end he said, thank you for so masterfully connecting the dots of my life. I now know what I did and why I did it, why I did what I did, which was I was recovering from knee surgery and it practically had me on the floor.
- [22:34]
Alison Stewart
Wow.
- [22:34]
Susan Lacey
Yeah.
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Alison Stewart
Let's talk to Hank. Hank, thank you so much for making time to call all of it.
- [22:42]
Chris
Oh, this is a great segment. I grew up in Hicksville, very close to Billy. We went to, well, different schools, but the same high school. I'm much younger than him, but my brother's much older. And once Billy's band, the very brand new Fender fuzzwa pedal took a long time to get back. That was a whole other story. But what I told your screener was that growing up in that area, having a best friend in Oyster Bay Cove, it was kind of like living in Billy's world. You know, everywhere you went, there was something from a Billy song. Like our Italian restaurant, which was Cristiano's, and say, Osset by the train station. And I grew up right around the corner from the Village Green where the old Curiosity Shop was. And Billy, well, that's where the Piano man took place. It really was, you know, he wasn't a rock star to us. He was a local guy. And I'm listening to your filmmaker talk about him as more of a classical musician who just happened to have incredible hit songs. But he wasn't really a rock star. You know, it seems like his life wasn't the life of a rock star. And we used to see him all the time, riding his Harley, riding his moped, seeing him at the bike shop in Oyster Bay, you know, he was. He was really a local guy. And if you ever saw the musical moving out, the first scene, the backdrop is the backside of the local market where my mother shop called Bohack and Packer.
- [24:13]
Alison Stewart
I'm going to dive in there. Thank you so much for sharing your story with us. You know, so Much of this is. It comes back to that. Billy Joel is a New York guy, spent a good deal of time in la, had tough times in la, but he came back east to New York.
- [24:29]
Susan Lacey
That's where he found his voice. He found his voice in New York. He was a New Yorker. But I just want to say that I don't think Billy ever had ambitions to be a rock star. Many always say I don't look like a rock star, I look like the guy who makes pizza. But I think that. And I also think that, you know, the fact that he didn't have all these rock and rolly elements, as Bruce Springsteen says in the film, created a problem for him with the critics because they did not know what to do with Billy. I mean, there were aspects of jazz, aspects of classical, aspects of the American songbook. He was incorporating all these musical genres into his music and they couldn't pigeonhole him. And so, you know, he was accused of being derivative and not original for quite a long time. I mean, Rolling Stowe wouldn't give him a good review and he used to tear up the reviews on stage because it would really piss him off. And. But I think. I'm sorry, I'm allowed to say that.
- [25:23]
Alison Stewart
Yeah, it was close.
- [25:25]
Susan Lacey
But I think he came around to recognizing that he was baiting the press a lot. And he said once you don't pick fights with people who buy ink by the barrel. So. Yeah, but I can't remember what the original question was. Oh, I don't think being a rock star was his aim. I think he's a true full blooded musician and that's what he cared about. And he wrote music all the time. It came to him fairly easily. What didn't come to him easily were lyrics. He struggled over lyrics and I think it might be one of the reasons he stopped writing pop songs. He just. He was. The tyranny of the rhyme had gotten to him. And I think he felt that the song cycle had kind of run its course and that's when he turned exclusively to classical music.
- [26:17]
Unknown Interviewer
Before we end, there's a really interesting part of the documentary, and I don't expect you to go all the way into it, but it really gets into his ancestors and the Joel family that was from Nuremberg, Germany. And about his father. How did learning his history. People will learn about it when they watch the documentary. How did it help him understand himself a little better?
- [26:45]
Susan Lacey
Well, I think a lot of it came as a surprise to him. He didn't find most of this out until he went to find his father who had left him when he was 7. He never heard a word from me. He didn't know if he was dead or alive. He went to find him and he found him in Vienna. And I think the. I use the Vienna had variations made of the melody to sound very Jewish, very Viennese to tell that story. And it's so connected to his father that I think the search for his father, I took him a long time to be able to admit that Vienna probably was about his father. But Howard Stern, I interviewed him and I didn't even. I kind of knew in my heart that the abandonment of his father was a really big thing that he hadn't kind of faced. And Howard Stern, without even being prompt, and he said, I think Billy's story is way deeper psychologically than Billy wants to know. And he said, I really think that Billy's drive has been trying to connect with his father through music. And so I don't know that answered your question, but I think it's a huge part of Billy's being.
- [27:56]
Unknown Interviewer
The name of the film is Billy Joel and so it goes. Part one of the documentary premieres tomorrow night at 8pm on HBO and HBO. Max. Part two will air on July 25th. My guest has been Susan Lacey, co director of the film. Thank you for coming in. We really appreciate it.
- [28:14]
Susan Lacey
Thank you. I enjoyed being here.
- [28:16]
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