Prologue It's five o'clock on a Monday, and the regular crowd shuffles in . . . to the chilly, unpopulated great hall of Madison Square Garden, where a crew is still slapping down chairs on the big slabs of decking that cover the hockey rink. Toting guitars, drumsticks, horns, and earpieces, Billy Joel's band arrays itself for a sound check, and now up a metal staircase comes the man himself. You could say he's shuffling as well; both hips were re- placed in mid-2010, and now, January 27, 2014, he's fully mended--but not likely to be doing the backflips off the piano that, he'll occasionally speculate, led to that operation. As he perches on his compact stool, checking settings on the hybrid acoustic/synthesized piano he uses, the band looks up expectantly. He's notoriously bored by sound checks, which means there'll be plenty of japes about his age, certain band peccadillos, or the world situation, all delivered with ready wit. But at the same time, all hands had better be "on the one" when he delivers a casual instruction, because the message won't come twice. From time to time, as in an open-air-arena sound check in Perth in December 2008, he'll get a wild hair and lead the band through pretty much an entire classic album. In that case, it was Disraeli Gears by Cream--at least until the constables put a stop to it after a volley of noise complaints from the neighborhood. Billy, warmed by a plain black watch ap and a wool sports coat, plinks out a few exploratory notes as the others tune up around him. He gazes about--"I don't hear the room as well I used to hear it." Tonight will be his forty-seventh show at what's pretty much the most storied concert venue in the world. You get here just the way you get to Carnegie Hall--"Practice"--but it really helps if you sell tens of millions of albums. In his case the figure is 110 million or so, and that's part of the reason he's playing this inaugural gig to kick off an open- ended "residency," a series of monthly Garden dates that will continue, as he said in a recent press conference, "as long as there's demand." A blogger for Forbes computed that, based on rapid sellouts, the strength of the Joel catalog, and what demographers might call his enormous local and worldwide fan base, something approaching forty shows might match that demand. No one's expecting him to do that many, of course, but you never know. Billy's still eyeballing the arena's distant reaches, somewhat obscured by new carpeted catwalks leading to bunker-like luxury suites. He's wondering why the sound waves seem muted: "Either I'm going deaf or the room is different. Is there a big sponge up there?" He waits a beat, as the band, knowing his timing, remains at parade rest--"Ah, I guess it's the hair in my ears." At sixty-four, he's allowed to kvetch a bit. Three hours from now, a few songs into his set, when the packed house has already marched in place to the epic sweep of "Miami 2017," bounced in rhythm (the Garden is on massive, pulsating springs) to "Pressure," crooned along to the enchanting soliloquy that is "Summer, Highland Falls," and ditty- bopped and doo-wopped to "The Longest Time," he pauses: "Good evening, New York City . . ." A roar like a gut punch breaks over the stage. "I have no idea how long this is gonna go." The alert eyes, somehow made more magnetic by the bald pate above, swivel around the room as he takes a sip of water. The guys in the crowd give their dates a knowing look- You think it's really water? "This year is my fiftieth year in show business." A subtle resettling of his spine--as in, we're practicing our trade here. Another beat. "What was I thinking?" Now he turns to peer at the image of his head and torso, many times life-size. "I didn't think I was gonna end up looking like that in 1964." The big banks of speakers are putting out their crisp, almost subliminal exhalations as the crowd noise modulates down--the fans are thinking what fifty years means to Billy, and to them. They're hoping to hear "Movin' Out (Anthony's Song)," "New York State of Mind," and "River of Dreams," which are all but a certainty, as well as "Piano Man," which is a certainty, and the set list sites have hinted they'll be sent out into the night after a four-song encore capped by a tub- thumping, horn-washed take of "Only the Good Die Young." There's time enough for the key anthems, and time, too, for some "deep cuts" like "Where's the Orchestra?" But first Billy's got one more observation about the doo-wop moment: "It sounds better in the men's room," as he and his bandmates demonstrated, bouncing "The Longest Time" off dingy tiles in the song's 1984 video. "We used to sneak out at night and sing it on the street corner--and people would throw shit at us!" Well, clearly that was then. And tonight, when he's sixty-four, they still need him, too, to borrow a phrase from a song. Mike DelGuidice, new utility player in the band, centerpiece of his own Joel tribute band called Big Shot, and maybe the number one fan in the room, will sum it up later in the bar where the band gathers. "He's just the guy. That is the guy. He's more loved than anyone on the planet, musically." Mike has just come down from the hotel room he hurried to after the gig to take a family phone call. When he sat on the bed and started to think about having just played opening night alongside Billy in the Garden, he "wept like a baby for a good five minutes." That Billy's even here in this sacramental spot, soon to be filled with eighteen thousand faithful fans, goes against the steepest of odds. If a harbormaster in Havana hadn't let his father's family disembark to find refuge from the Nazis; if his mom hadn't found that piano teacher; if he hadn't drilled into his own alienation to write his saga as that piano man; and if some label bosses hadn't stuck by him after his first two albums tanked, he might be sitting down to the keys at a very different spot on the map. There's a particular moment in almost every one of his shows when, a song or two in, while listening to that odd sonic tumult of roaring approval, hollered song titles, and proprietary shout-outs of his first name, he leans left and forward on his piano stool and searches the faces of the crowd in his periphery. There's usually a tentative grin, but there's also a jigger of uncertainty--and therefore vulnerability--that stops short of neediness but is still somehow in touch with it. Tonight it will come be- fore "Summer, Highland Falls," with its telling lyric: "And as we stand upon the ledges of our lives / With our respective similarities / It's either sadness or euphoria." On a different day, in a different city, in what his intimates still think of as the bad, sad old days of 2009, he grew reflective on a hotel balcony: "Obviously I have plenty of regrets. Whenever I hurt somebody, whether it was inadvertently or rashly, I still regret that to this day. I've never wanted to ever hurt anybody, and those are regrets I'll take with me to the grave. But I don't think you've lived unless you have regrets. I don't think you've had that experience without them, where you can say honestly, when you're ready to kick, hey, I lived. Good Lord, man, what a life I've lived . "I think I'm going to do that. That may take some of the sting out of dying--to say, I did it all." Excerpted from Billy Joel: The Definitive Biography by Fred Schruers All rights reserved by the original copyright owners. Excerpts are provided for display purposes only and may not be reproduced, reprinted or distributed without the written permission of the publisher.
