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 Brandee 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. [MUSIC - Billy Joel: Vienna]

Alison Stewart: That is, of course, the Billy Joel classic, Vienna. 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. Of course, the film looks into Joel's music and creative process. The movie is titled, Billy Joel: And So It Goes. Part 1 premieres on HBO and HBO Max tomorrow night at 8:00 PM. Part 2 will air on July 25th. The film is directed by Jessica Levin and Susan Lucey, and Susan, excuse me, Susan Lacy. Susan joins me now in studio. Hi, Susan Lacy, nice to speak to you.

Susan Lacy: That wasn't live, right?

Alison Stewart: That was live.

Susan Lacy: Okay.

[laughter]

Susan Lacy: Susan Lacy here.

Alison Stewart: Susan Lacy right there.

Susan Lacy: Hi, very nice to be here, Alison.

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. 212-433-9692, 212-433-WNYC. Before we get started, Billy Joel has announced to the public that he's had to stop performing due to a brain condition. Have you been able to talk to how recently? How is he doing?

Susan Lacy: Oh, I actually haven't spoken with him in a while, but he is healing. He is recovering from surgery, and we miss him, and we wish him well. I know that he hopes to be able to be back performing soon.

Alison Stewart: You're a legend-

Susan Lacy: I don't know about soon. I shouldn't say that. I really do not know, but I know that he's getting better.

Alison Stewart: We send him all our best. You're a legend in this business.

[laughter]

Alison Stewart: For creating American Masters on PBS. 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?

Susan Lacy: Well, why Billy Joel? Why make a film about Billy Joel? 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. It is literally all documented in the lyrics of his songs.

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 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.

Alison Stewart: Was tough. Yes, he was.

Susan Lacy: His mother was a believer. She made sure he had those piano lessons, she knew Billy was going to become something one day. 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.

Alison Stewart: It was interesting, his sister said that he was an avid reader growing up on Long Island.

Susan Lacy: Really, he's still an avid reader. He really knows history. He would sometimes pretend he was going to school, 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. 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." He could tell you everything about it. He's still an avid reader. When he did We Didn't Start the Fire, he didn't have to do a whole lot of research for it. He actually knew all that stuff. [laughs]

Alison Stewart: 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.

Susan Lacy: Yes, 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. I thought, "Why take up that time?" Besides, I really wanted to explore his craft. 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, "Talk about the influence of Mozart." He'd go, "Okay. Yes, well, Uptown Girl could have been a Mozart piece." He plays it. It was really, really, really good. Also, he's very comfortable at the piano. He's not comfortable until he's actually at a piano.

Alison Stewart: That's interesting.

Susan Lacy: 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.

Alison Stewart: 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 memoirish in the way he's talking, initially. Why did you want to open the film that way?

Susan Lacy: 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. [laughs]

Alison Stewart: Yes, that was interesting.

Susan Lacy: The film actually starts with, he was in a band since he was 14 years old. Music has been-- and he didn't graduate from high school. I thought all those early years, I mean, The Lost Souls, The Hassles, a lot of people don't know all of that. The fact that we had recordings from some of that stuff, and his first song, 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 musically.

That he was in a band that he started up. He thought he wanted to be Led Zeppelin, he wasn't very good at it, and he didn't-- this band called Attila, which he says, one of the worst bands ever. It actually wasn't very good. Then finding out about his relationship with the woman who became his wife and manager, who had been married to his best friend, and--

Alison Stewart: 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?

Susan Lacy: Well, there was a club on every corner, I think. I mean, the Long Island band scene was legendary. We couldn't get a lot of images from it, interestingly enough. We really tried and there wasn't a lot. It was like 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. We had to more talk about it. 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. That was Billy's training ground. He honed his performing skills in the Long Island band scene, part of The Hassles.

Got better and better and better, but-- and he became part of a band. 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. 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 pariahs. He found his métier in being part of a group, part of a band, and it gave him solace.

Alison Stewart: Let's listen to a little bit of The Hassles. This is the song, Every Step I Take.

[MUSIC - The Hassles: Every Step I Take (Every Move I Make)]

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." What does it say to you now that you know the whole story?

Susan Lacy: That he honed his songwriting skills along the way. That's a pretty simple song. 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.

Alison Stewart: Yes. I'm talking with Susan Lacy. She is the co-director of the new film, Billy Joel: And So It Goes. Part 1 of the documentary appears tomorrow night at 8:00 PM on HBO and HBO Max. You should watch it. It's really good. Part 2 will air on July 25th. Let's take a couple of calls. Let's talk to Laurie from New Jersey. Hi, Laurie. Thank you for making the time to call All Of It.

Laurie: Hi, how are you? 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.

[laughter]

Laurie: Then many years later, I became friends with someone in California and only found out-- that was in the early '80s. I just found out recently that he was Billy Joel's drummer on his first tour. 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. I have heard a lot about Billy over the last few weeks from Rhys, his drummer, who was very excited that his picture was chosen and that he was able to participate in his project.

Alison Stewart: Yes, thank you so much for calling, Laurie. Let's talk to Chris from Yonkers. Hey, Chris, thanks for calling All Of It.

Chris: Hi, there. Yes. No, I heard Billy Joel come up and my alarm bells rang, because 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 of his 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, Movin' Out, is probably one of my favorite songs of all time.

I think there is just such a earnestness to Billy Joel's songwriting. Something about the stories he'd tell and everything. Stuff like Movin' Out, Scenes From An Italian Restaurant, that just really made him stand out. He's just an amazing artist. I can't wait to watch this documentary, because I look forward to probably learning new things about him I never knew.

Alison Stewart: Thanks for calling. Did you want to add anything to that?

Susan Lacy: Well, it was fun to interview Rhys, [laughs] actually. So tell him that, you see him. 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. He wrote about the high school buddies who had peaked too soon. That's Scenes From An Italian Restaurant. He put it all into-- 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.

I think his stories, as Bruce Springsteen says in the film, people want to hear those stories over and over and over again. 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. Multigenerational, where you'd have a kid, a mother, and a grandmother, and they all know all the lyrics. [laughs]

Alison Stewart: 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. What do you-- I mean, this is a big picture, but what do you see as her role in Billy Joel, the artist? The early artist.

Susan Lacy: Well, it's such a-- I know 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.

Alison Stewart: Oh, wow, that's an interesting-

Susan Lacy: That's the degree to which the separation took-

Alison Stewart: Wow.

Susan Lacy: -place. It was not that easy to convince her to be a part of this film. It took a while. 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. That convinced her. Then we did four interviews. Her role is-- it's incalculable. 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. She saw something in that, and she guided that. 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. She said they were interested more in what Billy could do for them than what they could do for Billy.

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.

Alison Stewart: Well, he wanted to get rid of his band-

Susan Lacy: Because he didn't want-

Alison Stewart: -Billy was like, "Hey, me or the band."

Susan Lacy: That's right.

Alison Stewart: We come together.

Susan Lacy: Yes, love me, love my band. Which is what I was saying earlier. He was very connected to his band. 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 worked with Frank Sinatra, and Barbra Streisand, and Paul Simon, and everybody. He saw that the strength in Billy's was to capture the live feeling. To capture the feeling of the live performance on stage, which was electric. That was exactly what Billy wanted. 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. He built an audience 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 when Billy was doing a concert later practically right next door and say, "Why aren't you at that concert?"

She would pick up and drag them over to the concert. You have an artist here you need to pay attention to. She was amazing. She was his muse, too. I mean, it's a very emotional and a very tragic, in a way, end of their relationship.

Alison Stewart: Also loving.

Susan Lacy: 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." Said, "They're going to write about us one day, and I hope they write about what we did." 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.

Alison Stewart: We're talking about the film, Billy Joel: And So It Goes, with its co-director Susan Lacy. We'll have more after this quick break. This is All Of It.

[theme music]

Alison Stewart: You're Listening to All Of It on WNYC. I'm Alison Stewart. My guest is Susan Lacy, co-director of the new film, Billy Joel: And So It Goes. Part 1 of the documentary premieres tomorrow night at 8:00 PM on HBO and HBO Max. Part 2 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.

Jennifer: Hi. Good afternoon. Well, my name was Jenny Lamb at the time. I grew up in Oceanside, Long Island. 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. I happen to have an invitation to my sweet 16 with me, and I put it in his mailbox, hoping that he'd show up. 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.

Unfortunately, nobody was home at the time except for me, so here I am jumping up and down screaming, "Billy Joel just called me." 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 sweet 16? [laughs]

Alison Stewart: That's a great story. Jennifer, thank you so much for calling in. 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.

Susan Lacy: Five hours total.

Alison Stewart: Five hours total, right? Two and a half, two and a half. 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?

Susan Lacy: 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. You know what he said to me? "Tell the truth. That's all I ask. Tell the truth, Susan." 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 played with his own physical being with riding motorcycles in the rain, et cetera. We know that song. 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. Sometimes we left that with a song, the song that he wrote about it. He opened up about his craft. There was nothing-- he didn't see the film till it was finished.

Alison Stewart: Oh, wow. Really?

Susan Lacy: Yes. 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.

Alison Stewart: Wow.

Susan Lacy: Yes.

Alison Stewart: Let's talk to Hank. Hank, thank you so much for making time to call All Of It.

Hank: 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. Once Billy's band, the very brand new Fender Fuzz Wah pedal took a long time to get back. That was a whole 'nother story. 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. Everywhere you went, there was something from a Billy song. Like our Italian restaurant, which was Christiano's in Syosset, by the train station.

I grew up right around the corner from the Village Green where the Old Curiosity Shop was. 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. 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. It seems like his life wasn't the life of a rock star. We used to see him all the time, riding his Harley, riding his moped, seeing him at the bike shop in Oyster Bay.

He was really a local guy. If you ever saw the musical Movin' Out, the first scene, the backdrop is the backside of the local market where my mother's shop called Bohack and Packer. When I--

Alison Stewart: I'm going to dive in there. Thank you so much for sharing your story with us. So much of this is, it comes back to that Billy Joel is a New York guy. Spent a good deal of time in L.A, had tough times in L.A, but he came back east to New York.

Susan Lacy: That's where he found his voice. He found his voice in New York. He was a New Yorker. I just want to say that I don't think Billy ever had ambitions to be a rock star. He always said, "I don't look like a rock star, I look like the guy who makes pizza." I also think that 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. 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. So, he was accused of being derivative and not original for quite a long time. Rolling Stone wouldn't give him a good review. He used to tear up the reviews on stage, because it would really piss him off. I think, I'm sorry, am I allowed to say that?

Alison Stewart: Yes, it's close.

Susan Lacy: [laughs] I think he came around to recognizing that he was baiting the press a lot. He said once, you don't pick fights with people who buy ink by the barrel. [laughs] Yes, so he-- 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. That's what he cared about. 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.

I think it might be one of the reasons he stopped writing pop songs. The tyranny of the rhyme had gotten to him. I think he felt that the song cycle had kind of run its course. That's when he turned exclusively to classical music.

Alison Stewart: 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. 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?

Susan Lacy: 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 seven. He never heard a word from him. He didn't know if he was dead or alive. He went to find him, and he found him in Vienna. I think I used Vienna, had variations made of the melody to sound very Jewish or very Viennese to tell that story. It's so connected to his father, that I think the search for his father, it took him a long time to be able to admit that Vienna probably was about his father.

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. Howard Stern, without even being prompt, and he said, "I think Billy's story is way deeper psychologically than Billy wants to know." He said, "I really think that Billy's drive has been trying to connect with his father through music." I don't know that answered your question,-

Alison Stewart: No, that's it. That's perfect.

Susan Lacy: -but I think it's a huge part of Billy's being.

Alison Stewart: The name of the film is, Billy Joel: And So It Goes. Part 1 of the documentary premieres tomorrow night at 8:00 PM on HBO and HBO Max. Part 2 will air on July 25th. My guest has been Susan Lacy, co-director of the film. Thank you for coming in. We really appreciate it.

Susan Lacy: Thank you. I enjoyed being here.

 

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