March 29, 1975 Interview: Billy Joel

 

I’m not sure why The News didn’t review Billy Joel on this pass through Buffalo – he played Kleinhans Music Hall on March 1 – but at least I got to talk to him in that haven for visiting rock ‘n rollers, the Holiday Inn on Delaware Avenue. See if you can spot the germination of a song he hadn’t written yet. 

March 29, 1975 

Staying Loose 

          “My name’s Bill,” Billy Joel tells the Holiday Inn telephone. “I’m with the Billy Joel group.”

          The 25-year-old pianist, singer and songwriter has a simple answer to the star trap. He turns into a non-star. He schlumps around in a green tour T-shirt and jeans. Just one of the boys.

          He knows about the tentacles of stardom. He laid them bare in “The Entertainer,” the frenzied follow-up to his hit, “Piano Man,” and a veritable catalogue of the nightmare insecurity that comes with trying to stay at the top.

          “No, that song’s not really me,” he explains in his fifth-floor room, playing with the butt of a cigar and sipping Chianti in advance of a Kleinhans Music Hall date in which he would get three encores. “I’m just cynical, that’s all.”

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NEVERTHELESS, stardom crimps his style. He won’t hit the local bars like he used to because people recognize him. And he’s decided to move away from the high-flying music scene in Los Angeles, where he’s lived the past three years.

          “I hate to think I’ve got a masochistic streak,” he says, “but I’ve been getting vibes from the East this time. A New York State of mind.”

          He figures to move back East. Not to the north shore of Long Island, where he grew up, but someplace cozy and funky. Maybe Newburgh.

          “I didn’t leave because I was turned off on it,” he explains. “When I first went to L.A., it was kind of a musical mecca. But now it’s overdone, that Southern California impressionism. And there’s no street scene there. It’s all flash.”

          He gets his ideas from the street, he says. From hanging out, not from flashing, not from touring.

          “You don’t have any normal thing happen on tour,” he asserts. “You’re compartmentalized. It’s very unnatural. After six weeks, you start to get fuzzy around the edges.”

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STOPPING IN Buffalo does one normal thing for him. He gets his synthesizer fixed. One of the crew calls the Moog plant in Williamsville and runs it out for repairs.

          “The synthesizer is the instrument of the future,” he says. “The ads are right. If Mozart was alive today, he’d be playing an Arp 2000. It’s an innocent way of making music. Nobody’s really explored all that it can do.”

          It fits with Billy Joel’s picture of himself as a musical adventurer, not a formula hitmaker. His “Streetlife Serenade” album, which he describes as California impressionistic, was an attempt to break out of the strict song form of “Piano Man.”

          He feels that popular music has been evolving like that all along.

          “In the ‘50s, it was rock ‘n roll,” he says. “In the ‘60s and early ‘70s, it was rock. Now it’s not rock any more. When you think about what people like Yes and Jackson Browne are doing, the name rock doesn’t do it justice.

          “Whatever it is, it’s becoming an art form. Whether people like it or not, bringing back the ‘50s is bull. That’s a reactionary attitude.

          “I didn’t like rock until the Beatles. I liked them because they were creative. I think it’s your obligation to yourself to evolve and progress. I don’t want to be doing the same thing 10 years from now.”

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IN THE PHOTO: A promo pic of Billy Joel from 1975. It’s the one that accompanied this article.

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FOOTNOTE: Wikipedia says Billy Joel wrote “New York State of Mind” after returning to the East Coast and it was included on his third album, “Turnstiles,” in 1976. He already was playing it in concert not long after this interview, though. It appears on his “Live at the Great American Music Hall 1975” disc, which was recorded in June.