Billy Joel Read online

  Death

  Has come alive within a creature

  With the eyes of burning fire

  There is a tingling in your brain

  You want to run but you remain

  It is the hour of the wolf.

  The title song shared a title (and, by coincidence, a theme of dawning madness) with the Ingmar Bergman movie of a year earlier, and amid its grandiose twelve minutes, featured wolf noises from the band.

  Ultimately the Hassles’ Hour of the Wolf, with an acid-expressionistic cover centered on a wolf’s skull in lurid colors, was released in January 1969 and disappeared immediately.

  Around that point, John Dizek decided he’d had enough. Years later, for the liner notes to a reissue of the band’s work, he groused that the Mazurs were out for their own interests: “They used us to support themselves …[and] kept us at My House during the most crucial time.… We should have been touring to support our album.”

  Billy took over lead vocals. Also left in the band were the untamed Howie Blauvelt and guitar player Richie McKenna, always viewed by Billy as difficult. Howie had been a steady friend of Billy’s for years, from their early days in Hicksville and the Parkway Green gang through their shared discoveries of rock music’s magic. However, Billy eventually grew apart from him, largely due to Howie’s experiments with different intoxicants. (Unexceptionally, if unluckily for the era, Blauvelt had been arrested in January 1966 at age nineteen, charged with possession of marijuana as a felony with eight other minors, in a pot bust at a Hicksville motel; the disposition of the case is unknown.) Another bad sign came when Howie fell off the stage one night, midperformance. Given the kinds of clubs they were playing, where there was barely room for a couple of small risers onstage, it was hazardous enough up there without being in an altered state.

  So Jon and Billy inevitably became a clique of two and would simply leave the Hassles and their only too appropriate moniker behind. (Howie would go on to brief notoriety in the local band Ram Jam, and died in 1993.) To them, the group’s 1960s soul-pop had begun to pale beside a new influence like Led Zeppelin. “We wanted to be a heavy band and decided we were going to get heavy. Somehow.” At that moment in rock, heavy signified intense, stoney, even psychedelic workouts—though soon enough, heavy would be connected with metal and turn away from its blues-influenced roots toward faster, head-banging, Judas Priest–style fare. In any event, Billy—unlike, say, John Lennon—had never actually taken acid.

  It was during this apprenticeship that Billy had a couple one-off gigs that gave him a minor stake in the pop ethos that preceded the hippie 1960s. One was a session gig playing keyboards behind Chubby Checker, he of “The Twist” (a monumental 1960 remake of the Hank Ballard original) and other dance hits in a string that petered out around 1965. Also around then Billy went to a Long Island studio to assist minor legend Shadow Morton in producing some tracks. Whether Billy is heard on the demo or the master recording for producers Ellie Greenwich and Jeff Barry’s “Walking in the Sand” has been discussed in certain obscure pop history circles for years. Billy to this day can’t swear if he is or isn’t in the mix on that great anthem of teenage love and loss.

  After a few more desultory gigs, Jon and Billy split from the Hassles and began their quest for musical heft—in the basement of Jon’s parents’ wallpaper store in Syosset. They were encouraged when they quickly snared a sponsorship deal with an outfit called Plush Amplifiers, whose amp cases were lined in rolled and tucked black vinyl padding but, more crucially, were capable of shoving out torrents of noise. By trial and error—Jon took some painful voltage while holding stripped wire from the organ to contacts on an amplifier—the duo figured out how to wire Billy’s gear for a maximum raunch-rock noise, and it produced an ear-splitting, distorted sound. Now they felt, Billy recalls, “unstoppable.”

  “Although I missed Jimi Hendrix at Woodstock—I went up for one day, realized I didn’t really care for mud, rain, or acid, and hitchhiked home—he was the nexus of what was becoming the fuzz and feedback era,” Billy says. “I got a wah-wah pedal so I could wow-wow-ee-ow like Jimi, and added a distortion pedal, which I figured would double the mangled noise we already were making. Then we just pinned the volume to the wall.”

  The year was 1969, and rock’s insurgent energy was still shrouded under such radio hits as Tommy Roe’s “Dizzy” and the Archies’ “Sugar Sugar” (though Billy’s role models, Rod Argent’s Zombies, had a hit with “Time of the Season” and the Brits made a raucous statement with the Rolling Stones’ “Honky Tonk Women” and the Beatles’ “Get Back”).

  Billy wrote a bunch of heavy metal songs, which were somewhat indecipherable onstage or on tape, and Irwin Mazur, who continued to manage him and Jon post-Hassles, thought the result was “the worst crap I ever heard in my life, but I got them a deal with Epic Records”—with a fifty-thousand-dollar advance. Some of that money went toward investing in some real rock “threads”: goofy Carnaby Street–style outfits they bought at an East Village store called Granny Takes a Trip.

  Soon afterward Billy and Jon set out to make their self-titled album for Epic under the moniker Attila. The name, which Billy chose, was in tribute to Jack Palance, who had slashed Romans and smooched a princess as Attila the Hun in Douglas Sirk’s 1954 Sign of the Pagan.

  “If you’re going to assault the rock world and crush it under ten Marshall amps, wouldn’t Attila the Hun, who plundered Italy and Gaul and slaughtered quite a few innocents along the way, work as a role model?” thought Billy. “I was nineteen, and at that age, if you’re loving your heavy metal, it’s all about thrash, kill, metal, slash, burn, pillage, repeat.” Unfortunately, the art director at Epic took this inspiration a bit too literally and set up an album cover photo shoot in a meat locker, with Billy and Jon in fur-and-breastplate barbarian getups and surrounded by giant, marbled carcasses of beef.

  It was a moment in Billy’s career when absurdity ruled. A video from the era—a snippet of it appears in the documentary The Last Play at Shea—shows Jon and Billy on the famous Cyclone roller coaster at Coney Island. Back then, the park had a little person from one of the nearby freak shows zapping people with a cattle prod when they got off the ride, which seemed to suit the outré tendencies of the Attila album as it marched to oblivion. For most of the songs on the record, Billy deployed a small keyboard beside his left hand that could supply the bass line, and with his right hand he played his chords and leads—screaming the lyrics at the top of his lungs. Jon played drums feverishly all the way though every song. Ultimately, Billy was relieved that the band wasn’t a success, realizing that he would have had to scream like that every night for years: “I was trying to sing like Robert Plant, and I was no Robert Plant.”

  Inevitably, they didn’t sell many albums and got dropped by their label quickly. Jon didn’t recall much tsuris about it. “Irwin was making all the deals; we were just the dopey musicians in the basement of my parents’ wallpaper store.”

  After all these years, Jon and Billy are still in agreement that Attila “sucked.” As Jon admits, “We sucked in the studio, and in the six or so gigs we ever played live. But the bond that grew between us as we were going through the low points probably equipped us for a friendship that would stand the test of time.”

  Time was far from the only test the friendship would see. The signal challenge for the comradeship would see the two men sharing an ex-wife, Harry Weber’s sister Elizabeth. Jon and Elizabeth had married abruptly not long into their relationship, shortly before Billy joined the Hassles, when she became pregnant with their son Sean. (Sean can be seen, at age nine, on the cover of 1976’s Turnstiles, at Billy’s elbow amid various crowded-in extras.)

  The history of the love triangle emerges straightforwardly, in the present day, from the two male principals. In fact, the two men, insiders say, still compare notes on their shared ex—Did you have to go through this too? But at the time when the partners were changed, and in several tumultuous years afterward,
the relationship would be wrenchingly emotional.

  Jon remembers one crucial twist. “This is the part where it gets a little squirrely for me,” he says. “We were a bunch of hippies. That’s what we really were. And [in 1970] we moved into one house together, in Dix Hills. It was all stone and cement, so we’d end up naming it the Rock House. And it was me, Elizabeth, and Billy.” Prior to that, the trio had been living in the Fairhaven Apartments near Billy’s old street in Hicksville—Jon and Elizabeth in one apartment, with Billy across the hall.

  At the same time, Jon ranged about Long Island’s clubs seeking out gigs, while Billy worked occasional odd jobs. Says Jon: “What happened is real simple—he just fell in love with my wife. That’s it. And when I found out, our friendship was over.” In fact, the bond between Billy and Jon would ultimately survive. But Billy’s fascination with Elizabeth was inescapable, partly based on her indefinability: “She was—different. She wasn’t like a lot of the other girls I knew at that time who had taken home ec and cooking classes. She was a very bright woman, and she wasn’t afraid to show how smart she was. I suppose that made her kind of exotic. Intelligent and not afraid to speak her mind, but could also be seductive. Almost like a European type—not a typical American girl.”

  The situation reached its breaking point one day when Billy and Jon were doing one of the rare gigs they played as Attila—two shows, both sold out, at a club in Amityville. “So we played the first set,” remembers Jon, and “and we went over great.

  “Billy never perspired, but when I’d go in the dressing room, I’d be soaking wet. I used to use an Electrolux vacuum cleaner to blow-dry my hair, because there were no blow dryers back then. So I had this big vacuum cleaner going, holding it up. I’m looking out the window, and there are Elizabeth and Billy talking.

  “The next thing I see is that Billy’s getting in the car with her and leaving. But we still have another show to do. I get dressed as fast as I can, jump in my car, and I know they’re going back to the Rock House … and there they were.”

  Whether Jon’s anger was purely a late wave of jealousy and resentment, or partly derived from his bandmate skipping out on a gig Jon had set up, he reacted blindly: “Billy was sitting playing piano, Elizabeth was there, and her sister was there.

  “I walked in, I was in a rage. I threw her younger sister, Josephine, through the screen door; she went right through the screen and broke the glass. And then Elizabeth ran out, and I punched Billy.”

  Billy describes the turn of events as unexpected: “I remember that I was turning toward Jon—and I got hit. There was blood coming out of my nose. I was just kind of startled, even though I had been punched many times when I used to box. This was just a punch I hadn’t seen coming. But let’s face it, I deserved it.”

  Before that night, Billy believed that Elizabeth had already talked to Jon about them; in his mind, the long-alienated married couple were already separated—at least emotionally—and headed for a clean break. Making matters worse, the two men hadn’t discussed the couple’s issues—or the budding romance between Elizabeth and Billy that was becoming obvious from body language, muted exchanges, and not-quite-stolen glances. Billy attributes the silence to a typically male mix of sensitivity and yet also not wanting to overly share. (Long Island guys with a foot still in the working class simply don’t share on most subjects deeper than the Mets.)

  “Up until that moment when Jon clocked me, I don’t remember feeling particularly guilty, because I thought it was all out in the open, what was going on,” says Billy. “But Jon didn’t know [the whole truth] about Elizabeth and me. When I realized that Jon didn’t know, I was filled with crippling guilt.”

  After that scene and the realization that he’d been deeply deceiving Jon, Billy felt like everything was crumbling at once. Attila had been a failure. He didn’t have any bank account to speak of. And now he felt that he was causing his best friend’s divorce. Then, to top it all off, rather than divorcing Jon to be with Billy, Elizabeth disappeared. “That’s when I started feeling suicidal,” says Billy.

  “Billy called me up at one in the morning—he’s got to talk to me. And I meet him at the Jericho Diner,” recalls Irwin Mazur. “He tells me he’s having an affair with Elizabeth. And he doesn’t know what to do.”

  For a few months leading up to the blowup, Billy had been keeping a small apartment in the Fairhaven—where he slept under an American flag—even as Jon anchored the Rock House and Elizabeth increasingly spent time in the Weber family home in Syosset. But with Elizabeth absenting herself from both men for a time and Jon in a kind of exile, Billy was adrift, lacking the money for rent, without a car or license, and occasionally crashing at Irwin Mazur’s home.

  “So Billy’s staying in our apartment one night,” Irwin says, “and I get up in the morning, and I go in the dining room, and there’s a loose-leaf page Billy left there with what are obviously lyrics to a song. And I read it, and the title of the song is ‘Tomorrow Is Today.’ I think his state of mind would be pretty well summed up in his song. It was a suicide note.”

  I’ve been livin’ for the moment

  But I just can’t have my way

  And I’m afraid to go to sleep

  ’Cause tomorrow is today …

  I don’t care to know the hour

  ’Cause it’s passing anyway

  I don’t have to see tomorrow

  ’Cause I saw it yesterday …

  Oh, my, I’m goin’ to the river

  Gonna take a ride and the Lord will deliver me

  Make my bed, now I’m gonna lie in it

  If you don’t come, I’m sure gonna die in it

  Too late, too much givin’

  I’ve seen a lot of life and I’m damn sick of livin’ it

  I keep hopin’ that you will pass my way.

  “It was 1970. I’d reached the age of twenty-one and still had no money,” says Billy. “I had no place to live. I was out of the Rock House, crashing at my mom’s place again, which is abject failure, when you have to go back to your parents’ house. To avoid that, I’d been roaming about like a homeless person—crashing on friends’ couches, sometimes in a car I’d find unlocked, in the warmth of a Laundromat, back and forth in the subways in Queens, even in the woods.”

  Jon Small remembers one day—as communication between himself and Billy slowly resumed, with Elizabeth’s reclusiveness easing the state of détente—saying to Billy, “ ‘Come on, we’re going to go out and go hang out at the bar, bring some girls or whatever, we’ll figure it out.’ And he was just lying there, couldn’t even talk. And he said to me, ‘I think I’m going to commit suicide or something.’ And I said to him, ‘Well, go ahead. Go ahead. Kill yourself. Get it over with. Because this is not doing you any good.’ So I left him there and I went out. And when I came back, he was on the floor.”

  “I was still feeling so down,” Billy says. “A well-intentioned friend of mine had gotten me some pills—Nembutal—to try to help me to cope with this terrible guilt and anxiety I was having. I was at my mom’s house in Hicksville, and I thought to myself, Well, I’ve got these pills, I might as well take them.”

  The way Billy’s sister, Judy, tells the story, Billy called up Jon to apologize for the transgressions that, despite the seeming reconciliation, still left him feeling remorseful, and Jon came and found Billy passed out. Jon and Billy’s mother called the ambulance, and Billy was taken to the hospital. “The next thing I remember, I woke up in the hospital and learned that they had pumped my stomach,” says Billy. “I thought to myself, Oh, great, I couldn’t even do this right. It was just another failure.”

  Billy was released, but he’d be back in a hospital within a few weeks.

  “I was still having all these feelings of guilt and despair and hopelessness, and in the closet at home I saw there were two bottles that bore a skull and crossbones warning,” remembers Billy. “The bleach didn’t look too palatable. So I drank the Old English Scratch Cover [Not, as o
ften has been cited, Lemon Pledge].

  “After I drank it, I remember sitting in a chair waiting to die. I thought, I’ll sit in this chair, and I’ll die here. I ended up sitting there, polishing my mother’s furniture by farting a lot. Judy’s husband, Frank Molinari, got the job of taking me off to the hospital. Even as we were traveling there, I was saying to myself, This is stupid. This is ridiculous. I need help. I was coherent enough to check myself in to an observation ward at what was then called Meadowbrook Hospital.”

  Billy would remain in the hospital three weeks. He later remembered the hospital as being just like the one in One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest: “You go to the nurses’ station, they give you your little cup of pills, and they look at your chart. I remember going up to the nurses at the station and saying, ‘Hey, I’m okay. They’re crazy. But I’m okay.’ And the nurses would just look at me, with my long hair and moustache looking like Louis the Fourteenth, and say, ‘Yes, Mr. Joel. Here are your pills.’

  “I just couldn’t wait to get out of there. We all slept in one big community room, on cots, right next to one another. The next guy over would be moaning all night, and another guy would be screaming. It was like Bedlam, a very scary place.” At the end of three weeks, after Billy had talked to a battery of doctors and they were satisfied that they could release him, Billy was free to leave.

  “I walked out. I remember this, because they had an electric door with bars on it, and it made a big noise—schlank!—like a prison door. And I remember walking down Carmen Avenue, where the Nassau County Jail was, right down the street, and thinking, Don’t look back. I hitched a ride to my mom’s house.”

  Billy’s time in the hospital proved to be a lesson in reality and a lifelong guard against self-pity: “To be in that observation ward with all those profoundly disturbed patients—I realized that my situation was nothing compared to that of the others.

  “For the most part, the people I was locked up with were never going to be able to overcome their problems, whereas mine were all self-made. I can fix this, I thought. All things considered, it was probably one of the best things I’ve ever done, because I learned not to get so hung up on self-pity that I couldn’t think straight. I’d like to think I shed the rock star skin at that point.”