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- [00:09]
A
You're listening to all of it on wnyc. I'm Alison Stewart. The new HBO two part documentary, Billy Joel and so It Goes takes an in depth look at the life and career of the Piano Man. Director Susan Lacey stopped by earlier this year to discuss it and our producer Jordan Loff is here to tell us more about it as part of her Producer Picks show. So, Jordan, you have a confession to make?
- [00:33]
B
I do have a confession, and my confession is that I don't like Billy Joel's music. Or I thought that I didn't, I thought that I didn't. And I. And I made such a big hey. About not liking Billy Joel that the team was really shocked when I both booked and assigned myself this prep. They were like, you don't like Billy Joel. Why on earth do you want to prep this? Are you sabotaging the segment? But no, in fact, I wanted to learn more to see if I could flip my own opinion on it. If I could, if I learned more, would my opinion on Billy Joel change?
- [01:03]
A
And did it?
- [01:04]
B
It did. It totally worked. I thought this was a great documentary. I have a completely new appreciation for his catalog and I really appreciated how much director Susan Lacey drew the line between what was happening in his life and the music. At the time. I didn't realize how autobiographical so many of those songs are and how much they're drawn from his own life and loves and losses. So it gave me a whole new appreciation for the catalog of Billy Joel.
- [01:28]
A
Here's my conversation with director Susan Lacey about the new two part documentary Billy Joel and so It Goes, which you can stream now on hbo. Max, you're a legend in this business for creating American Masters on pbs. So I'll ask you a question I often ask documentary filmmakers was what was your question about Billy Joel? What did you want to find the answer to?
- [01:59]
C
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, I did begin to discover, which I did not know, how incredibly, inextricably connected his life is to his music and his lyrics. It is a, it's a rip from the page, you know, 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. It is literally all documented in the lyrics 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 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 on him.
- [03:13]
A
Was tough, yes.
- [03:15]
C
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.
- [03:38]
A
I want to ask you a 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.
- [03:45]
C
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, yeah, 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 at the piano. He's not comfortable until he's actually at a piano. That's interesting. I knew that, so I thought that was. That was a good thing to do. I did all my interviews with him at the piano. We did about 10, 20 hours worth of interviews.
- [04:30]
A
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?
- [04:36]
C
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 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, he honed his performing skills, you know, in 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. And he found his metier in being part of a group, part of a band, and it gave him solace.
- [05:56]
A
Let's listen to a little bit of the hassles. This is the song. Every step I take.
- [06:04]
D
Everywhere I go Dreams of you will always follow Every step I take Every move I make I'm trying to escape my life without.
- [06:31]
A
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?
- [06:43]
C
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.
- [06:58]
A
I'm talking with Susan Lacey. She is the co director of the new film Billy Joel. And so it goes.
- [07:03]
C
You should watch it.
- [07:04]
A
It's really good. I really love the way that you portrayed Elizabeth Weber 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 his manager, she was responsible. She was the general, I think she called herself in the film.
- [07:34]
C
What do you.
- [07:35]
A
I mean, this is a big picture, but what do you see as her role in Billy Joel? The artist, the early artist.
- [07:44]
C
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.
- [09:40]
A
Well, he wanted to get rid of his band. Billy was like, hey, me or the band? That's right, we come together.
- [09:45]
C
Yeah, love me, love my band. Which is what I was saying earlier. It was, you know, he was very connected to his, 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 for Frank Sinatra and, you know, and Barbra Streisand and Paul Simon and everybody. And, and he saw that the strength in Billy's. That 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, and a 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, and 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. Also loving, Very loving. I mean, she says one day, it was 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 right now.
- [11:52]
A
Billy Joel opens up about his mental health. He talks about taking his own life. He talks about being in a motorcycle accident. He talks about alcohol. What were the rules? Was this an independent production? How did that conversation come up?
- [12:16]
C
Well, it was a totally independent production because that's the hallmark of my films and my company, that 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. There was nothing he wouldn't talk about. We covered all of it. We covered his suicide attempts. We covered 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, etc. And we know that song. And. And he opened up about his music and he opened up about. 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 marriage. Marriages. And that was. Sometimes we left that with a song, the song that he wrote about it. And. But he. And he opened up about his craft. It was. There was nothing, and it was. And he didn't see the film till it was finished.
- [13:37]
A
Oh, wow, really?
- [13:38]
C
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. Wow. Yeah.
- [14:00]
A
That was my conversation with director Susan Lacey about her new documentary Billy Joel. And so it goes. You can stream it now on HBO Max.
- [14:21]
D
But I'm taking a Greyhound on the Hudson river line I'm in a New York state of mind I seen all the movie stars in their fancy See cars and their limousines.
- [14:55]
A
Up next, we end the show with some music from singer songwriter Bristen Maroney.
- [15:09]
E
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- [16:08]
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