→ Customize what you receive from Ankler Media. You can keep what you need, skip what you don’t. Billy Joel’s ‘in Great Spirits’: Inside a 50-Year Bond Through Sickness & HealthFew know the Piano Man better than collaborator Steve Cohen: ‘Knowing the way he’s built, all arrows point to him making full recovery’
I write about where music & Hollywood meet. I interviewed F1 producer Jerry Bruckheimer about the hit’s blockbuster soundtrack, spoke to Billy Idol about his wild career, and chatted with The Last of Us composer Gustavo Santaolalla. I’m at rob@theankler.comIt’s the heat of the summer and the calm before the storm (with Emmy nominations dropping Tuesday, if that is your thing). But before all that, slow down, you crazy child. Bust out a bottle of white, a bottle of red, or perhaps a bottle of rosé instead. Ask John at the bar if he’ll get you a drink for free. I was thinking about what makes Billy Joel so damn beloved. Is it the fact that he’s conjured up so many indelible classics — an astonishing 33 Top 40 hits, including “Piano Man,” obviously, Joel’s breakout single in 1973 — with a stunning knack for earworm songwriting with emotion? Or maybe it’s that he seems to lack any ego: Joel has maintained his blue-collar attitude as a performer for decades, often seeming like a fella who clocks in and clocks out of the job as if he’s living in Allentown himself. Joel likes to say that aside from his stadium gigs, he’s “just another schmuck in traffic.” It could be that he’s been around for the longest time: Joel, 76, has been a hallmark in my life since before I was born. My parents’ wedding song was his breakout single “Just The Way You Are” off 1977’s smash-hit album The Stranger — the song was Joel’s first top-10 single on the charts. (My mom, like countless others at the time, was a fan.) I have fond memories of his 1985 double album, Greatest Hits – Volume I & Volume II, during the Columbia House days, which I played on CD in the ’90s ad nauseam. Meanwhile, Gen Z has famously taken up “Vienna,” the B-side to “Just the Way You Are,” as an anthem of their own. Chatting with my editor Christopher Rosen, even his 7-year-old Gen Alpha daughter can sing along to “We Didn’t Start the Fire,” a tongue-twister for most adults. Steve Cohen has had a front-row seat for it all. Born in 1954, Cohen is one of Joel’s closest friends. It was 51 years ago this December when the singer hired Cohen as a 20-year-old fledgling lighting designer. Since then, Cohen’s role has evolved into producer, designer and creative director for Joel’s stage shows. In addition, Cohen has helped mastermind tours for everyone from Elton John (who famously teamed up with Joel several times in the 1990s) to Britney Spears. Heck, the multi-hyphenate has even worked with both Gianni Versace and the Vatican, which we get into later. Cohen was also nominated for two Emmys last year for Joel’s CBS special, Billy Joel: The 100th — Live at Madison Square Garden, which captured the singer’s historic residency at New York’s famed arena. (Proving he’ll always been a lighting designer at heart, Cohen won an Emmy himself for lighting design and lighting direction, one of three awards the special received.) Cohen served as executive producer for Billy Joel: The 100th, and most recently has the same credit on Billy Joel: And So It Goes. That’s the forthcoming two-part, five-hour documentary about Joel that had its world premiere opening the Tribeca Film Festival this spring. Part one debuts on HBO Max on Friday, July 18, with the second part coming a week later, on July 25. Co-directed by Susan Lacy and Jessica Levin, Billy Joel: And So It Goes (which draws its title from a track on Joel’s 1989 album Storm Front) serves as a brutally honest chronicle of the high-highs and low-lows of the superstar’s career — from his origins on Long Island to his mental health struggles to his complicated relationship with his father and multiple marriages. Backstage, Cohen served as a steady hand throughout the long gestation and production process. The doc’s release initially seemed like it would coincide with further celebration of Joel, with his record-breaking Madison Square Garden residency recently in the rearview and the success of the CBS special fresh in people’s minds. But in May, Joel made the stunning announcement that he would have to stop touring for the foreseeable future after being diagnosed with Normal Pressure Hydrocephalus. This rare brain condition affects hearing, vision and balance, and forced Joel to miss his film’s New York premiere. It led Lacy to deliver a message to the crowd that felt perfectly true to its author. “He said, ‘Getting old sucks, but it’s still preferable to getting cremated,’” the filmmaker told the Tribeca crowd, which responded with laughter. That same night, Lacy told the audience Joel would be back on stage before long, so naturally, that led to my first question for Cohen, who, other than the singer’s family, probably knows Joel better than almost anyone else in his orbit. Rob LeDonne: Before we get into the movie and your history with Billy, I have to know: How’s he feeling? Steve Cohen: Well, it’s interesting. I was just having this conversation with a couple of people about this. We’re all very close, and we’ve been living with this for a while, so the announcement of his diagnosis came long after the reality of what was going on. The headline is, he’s great. He’s doing very, very well. But he was diagnosed with something that is often misdiagnosed, so there was a lot of time where it was a mystery of what was going on. He was plowing through these shows and didn't feel well while doing them. After a series of tests and connecting the dots, it was shocking. But at the same time, it answered a lot of questions. The good news is I literally had lunch with him two days ago in Florida. We sat for three hours. He’s doing what he needs to do to recover because he really needs time away from the taxing work of traveling, performing and all that stuff. So while he’s in great spirits, he’s not predicting anything in the future. He is just taking it one day at a time. But I will tell you, having been friends with him for going on 51 years — which I hate to say out loud — and knowing the way he’s built, all arrows point to him making full recovery. Whether we see him sit behind a piano in front of 18,000 people again, that’s up to him. I look at this as a temporary pause, because I look at all of the times that we don’t work as a temporary pause, but who knows? It makes perfect sense that you’d want to sit with it before announcing it to the public. I think what also makes people curious is the uniqueness of the disease; normal pressure hydrocephalus is not a common diagnosis. SC: I’ll tell you it’s weird because it’s not a standard thing. God forbid he had cancer, God forbid he had heart disease. However, this is something different, so the problem sometimes lies in trying to explain something that isn’t readily understandable to the masses. In this day and age, in the blogosphere and the social media age, people make shit up and fill in their own stories, so it’s tough to control a narrative. He has been very good throughout his entire career, navigating his public persona by being an honest guy and trying to be as honest as possible. But even when you’re extremely honest, you can still be misunderstood. We’re looking forward to us all getting old together, and that’s all I can say. So I was thinking that you’re probably the only person who has worked with the pope — designing Pope Francis’ mass at Madison Square Garden — and Billy Joel. SC: (Laughs) This nice Jewish boy designing a crucifix for the Pope. Yeah, my job is kind of a broad thing. On my desk is a picture of me and Gianni Versace, when Versace had designed a set for Elton John, and I did the lighting. I’m looking at this picture and I pinch myself. I learned from every experience. I did *NSYNC’s tour when Britney Spears would come to rehearsals. Then I did Britney’s first tour. That was actually one of my first shows ever: seeing Britney Spears. SC: What tour? Oops… I Did It Again! Tour at Saratoga Performing Arts Center on Aug. 30, 2000. SC: That was my design! I have a great story about Mariah Carey, when Tommy Mottola had just married her, and her first record came out. I was sitting in her apartment, going over her set list because I had done the first Mariah Carey live performance, and I ended up with Mariah over the years, through various iterations. I was there at the beginning of a lot of these seminal moments in the industry, in these amazing places. It’s 51 years ago this year that Billy hired you when you were just 20 years old. What was your life like at the time? SC: I was living in California, and I started a lighting company because I never graduated from high school and was working in clubs. You gotta understand that in 1974, the lighting industry didn’t exist. It was a bunch of characters who put together theatrical lighting equipment, stuck it in boxes and took it out on the road. It was a very early time. There were no computers, and no programming was available. You took your theatrical principles and tried to make it work. In those days, a Billboard issue came out once a year, listing all the managers’ numbers. So my buddy and I sat in our living room and called every single manager, trying to get gigs. We got a couple of interviews, and I landed Billy. I basically went to a small rental house and rented a variety of gear, including theatrical instruments and Volkswagen headlights. Do you remember your first time meeting Billy? SC: I showed up at the lot at 20th Century Fox; they were getting ready to tear down these sound stages, but they were renting it out for rehearsal space. Now you have to understand, I liked the Eagles, I liked Jackson Brown. I was very much into Led Zeppelin. When I first heard “Piano Man,” I fucking hated it. I mean, I was like, “What is this?” It did nothing for me, right? But it’s a gig for me. So I set this up. Billy shows up, and he sits down at the piano, and they start playing this song called “The Ballad of Billy The Kid,” and I fucking lost it. It was symphonic, it was dynamic. It had all the things I loved about rock music in this song. It also had these big swells of music, which are great for lighting. I was sold instantly. Fast forward, I do my first gig with him in Kansas City, and he walks off stage, pissed off. The guy who hired me said, “Billy wants to see you.” I’m like, I’m getting fired. He takes me back to the hotel and pours me a drink, and Billy says, “It was the same band, the same set list, the same songs. But something happened tonight that hasn’t happened. People reacted in places where they never reacted before, and by process of elimination, we figured that the only thing that changed was the lighting. So, welcome aboard.” Wow, that’s incredible. It’s interesting because I think what’s lost is that this was not only the dawn of his career and the singer-songwriter movement, but the modern touring industry with lights and sound rigs as well, all happening at the same time. What was it like being on the ground floor of Billy’s success? SC: At that time, he didn’t have any record success. When the second album, The Piano Man, came out in 1973, it bombed. The third record, Streetlife Serenade, came out in 1974, and it bombed at the time, too. But we played every imaginable college and toured relentlessly, and started to develop a fan base. The fan base became a loyal fan base. By the time “Just The Way You Are” came out with The Stranger in 1977, he just exploded. So being part of what I called the big bang of his career at that time was amazing. He was wise beyond his years, and his work ethic was unbelievable, and it infected me. But Steve, most marriages don’t last 50 years, let alone creative partnerships. Throw in fame and money, and things get complicated quickly. How did you two persevere? SC: Early on, he gave me my marching orders about things that I still do to this day, which is: show up, do the best you can and admit when you fuck up. Don’t try to bullshit your way through anything. Do the best you can and leave the results up to the universe. That's been his mantra, if you want to call it that, for his whole life. So it has been mine as well. And there are a few of us in this group, in this family, who are still around. You know the proverb that there’s a lid for every pot? I don’t know what it is with us. But we got along, and while we had our bumps in the road, I think the testament to our relationship is that we understood our lanes. Billy is only concerned about singing, playing and writing. He stopped worrying about anything that happened from the front of the stage to the audience. With Billy, you’d never go back after a show and say, “Hey, Billy, you were great!” He’d say, “Fuck you.” Even if you told him he had a great show, his first reaction is to say, “Great audience.” He’ll never take credit. It’s not false humility; it’s this mystical belief that if we try to figure out too much about how it all works, the magic will disappear. Billy has played shows at Yankee Stadium; he closed Shea Stadium in Queens. He’s been all around the world, to quote a lyric from “The Entertainer.” What has been the most challenging project to work on? SC: When you mount a tour in Russia, which we did in 1987 with The Bridge Tour, there’s nothing more challenging. Billy’s last show at Shea Stadium was also difficult. But I did Global Citizens in Central Park for four years, and there’s nothing more difficult than trying to navigate 75 egos. Tell me about the documentary. I know this has been a labor of love for a while. SC: Billy had been approached multiple times over the years about doing a documentary. The last time we were approached to do something serious, we were right in the middle of our Madison Square Garden residency, which ended this month last year with our 150th show at the venue. Billy was thinking about it, but at the time, there was no real end to the story. Then, I got a call from filmmaker Susan Lacy, who I knew directed American Masters installments about Paul Simon and Lena Horne. She had an overall deal with HBO and wanted to do a Billy doc. We sat for three hours. She loves classical music. She loves ballet, dance and she’s very much in Billy’s world in that those are his influences and those are the things that he likes. Separately, producer Todd Milliner and Sean Hayes, the actor and producer, have long wanted to do something with Billy. About a week later, Todd calls me up and says, “Um, would you be interested if Tom Hanks and Gary Goetzman got involved and produced this with me through Playtone, their company?” So I get on the phone with Gary, and he says, “We really want to do this, but we have a director we want you to use.” And it was Susan Lacy! So I called up Susan and said, “The gods are conspiring for us to work together!” I understand that your team had to cede control of the cut. Was that difficult? SC: Susan had said, “I’ll do this, but it has gotta be an independent film.” I went back to Bill and I said, “Look, I think this feels like the right match, but understand we have no say in this. We have no say in the narrative; it won’t be like taking out a five-hour infomercial about your material and your life. It’s gotta be honest.” And he said okay. She got Billy to open up and talk about shit that he hadn’t talked about to anybody. What was that like for you as his friend, to hear Billy talk about these sometimes dark subjects, like his depression and attempts at suicide in his early 20s and his challenging relationship with his father? SC: I knew how difficult some of the things that have happened in his life were because I was there when they happened, so I was not surprised. However, what surprised me the most was how readily he was able to discuss them directly. I saw a guy coming to peace with a lot of the demons in his life through this process. What was it like when you and he watched the whole thing for the first time? SC: You know, it’s interesting, Rob. He kept saying to me, “When you’re ready to show it to me, let me know.” I agonized. I have my opinions about what I was watching; there were moments that I bumped up against, but I only bumped up against those parts because of the veracity and honesty. Maybe certain things that Susan assumed I knew were assumptions based on the evidence, but weren’t really what was going on. So what I ended up doing was giving her more information and more things to uncover so that she could tell a rounded story. But it was painful, and I kept thinking about how Billy watching this stuff would react. So when the picture was locked, he came over to my house. It was just him and me. I said, “Alright, you ready?” And he said, “Yes.” And we sat down for five hours. I’m trying not to look at him to see the reactions, but I see him leaning into the screen during these heavy moments, not knowing what his reaction was gonna be. When the movie was over, he looked at me and he said, “Take myself out of it, but that’s a really good film.” How big of a sigh of relief did you let out? SC: Come on. Are you kidding? Because I just kind of sat there waiting for the shoe to drop, for his wife to call me and say he’s throwing shit around the house. But then he wrote an email to Susan and said, “Susan, I learned some things about my life that I never even knew.” To me, there is no greater compliment for a filmmaker. Got a tip or story pitch? Email tips@theankler.com. ICYMI from The AnklerSPECIAL: Inside ‘New Paramount’ and What’s Next
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