“It’s too slow,” Billy Joel says to drummer Chuck Burgi. He and his band are onstage in an empty Madison Square Garden, sound-checking “Baby Grand,” a bluesy, boozy gem from 1987’s “The Bridge.” “Pick it up a bit.”
Wearing a stocking cap and wool coat, Joel is dressed appropriately for both the frigid New York temperature outside and the air inside the arena, where temporary flooring covers hockey ice for the NHL’s Rangers, one of the other franchises that calls the Garden home.
Joel wants to pick up the tempo of “Baby Grand,” and you could say the same for what he’s done with his career as he marks his 50th anniversary as a professional entertainer. After a light schedule for some three years, demand for Joel’s touring has never been higher. In December he was saluted by Barack Obama at the Kennedy Center Honors, and a documentary on his groundbreaking 1987 trip to the former Soviet Union-“Billy Joel: A Matter of Trust — The Bridge to Russia” — debuts Jan. 31 on Showtime.
And then there is tonight’s show. Right now, Joel and his band and crew are running through their paces on a stage where, in just a few hours, they will begin an open-ended residency, a monthly booking at the World’s Most Famous Arena that is unique in the industry. Joel will become a Garden franchise, alongside fellow tenants the Rangers, the NBA’s Knicks and the WNBA’s Liberty. The nine “Billy Joel at the Garden” shows announced so far are sold out, as are the other scattered stadium and arena dates Joel has booked across the country for 2014.
This night, Jan. 27, will mark Joel’s 47th show at the Garden, and he’s still very much on his game, noting that the room “sounds different” following a $1 billion “transformation” of the arena that debuted last fall. Fully invested in the sound check, Joel is more music geek than taskmaster, tweaking tempos, drum strikes and vocal arrangements, and rambling off on a sprightly run through Vince Guaraldi’s theme song for the Peanuts cartoons and a workout of Michael Jackson’s “Billie Jean.” Joel nails the falsetto, if not all the lyrics.
After another seemingly perfect run through “Baby Grand,” Joel pauses, then kills the song from the set list. “We got a million others,” he says simply. He’ll tinker with tonight’s 24-song selection until show time. “I keep changing shit all the time,” he says later backstage.
One thing that doesn’t change is Joel’s professionalism and love of performing. Whether it’s the tedious process of getting the sound right or playing to the rapturous hometown crowd later, he clearly relishes the experience. While Joel may be the franchise, he’s also unabashedly “a band guy,” he says backstage. “When the band sounds good and everybody’s on point and they want to try stuff, I get into it, yeah. Everybody knows their axe. I’m having fun swinging with this band.”
ARTS & CRAFTS
Though he has written and recorded some of the most popular songs of the last 40 years, Joel hasn’t released an album of new studio songs since 1993’s “River of Dreams.” Yet decades after he was a force on pop radio, he’s still selling out stadiums and becoming an arena franchise. A career dedicated to pounding the road has prevented the malaise that struck the record business from having a discernible impact on Joel’s professional life.
Live performance driving the business is the opposite of the era when Joel first became a national act, when album releases defined careers and dictated tour schedules. This shift in dynamics isn’t lost on Joel, who views the current situation as more the natural order of things. “Think about it: Before there was any recording at all, before the technology was even invented, you had performances. That was the state of the art,” he says. “You had people performing classical music, or virtuoso musicians going up on a stage and playing their thing, and people always went for that. Recording made it possible to put that lightning in a bottle, but people were still wanting to see the real deal. And that’s what separates the men from the boys: When you go out onstage, you’ve got to be able to do it. You can’t fake that.”
As a result of the state of the music economy, Joel is sitting pretty as he ramps up his live gigs for the first time since double hip replacement surgery sidelined him in 2010. The Garden shows alone are projected to gross some $24 million, and there are also stadium gigs at Wrigley Field in Chicago; Fenway Park in Boston; Nationals Park in Washington, D.C.; and three sellouts at the Hollywood Bowl in Los Angeles.
Joel, along with other enduring live acts of his era like Bruce Springsteen, not only gets the art but also the craft of showmanship. “Craft has been given short shrift for a couple of years,” Joel says. “It’s like if you knew your craft, you were too studied, there was something clinical about it, or it wasn’t spontaneous or real, which I always thought was bullshit. If you’re going to do something, do it really well, do it 100%. That’s what happened with a lot of what they call ‘classic rock’ acts. They just did it and did it and did it, and learned how to really do it as best as it can be done.”
This attention to performance craft is no small factor in an era of synthesized pop stars, prerecorded vocals and production-heavy concerts. “There are all kinds of gimmicks and technical stuff you can use to correct what you don’t do right, but if you rely on things and then they don’t work, what are you going do?” Joel asks. “You’re screwed. People pay a lot of money to go see shows now. They don’t want to know about your technical problems, or if you’re not feeling good; they don’t want to know we have a glitch. It’s like, it’s their night — you better do something to earn that money.”
GARDEN PARTY
It’s that workman’s dedication that has endeared Joel to his fans, particularly those in New York, who consider him a hometown hero. Joel has made plenty of noise at the Garden already (his record 12 sellouts there in 2006 grossed $19,215,942 and drew 226,038 fans, according to Billboard Boxscore), and his Last Play at Shea (which shuttered the venerable baseball stadium in 2008) took in nearly $13 million from two sellouts. More recently, he rocked Barclays Center in Brooklyn on New Year’s Eve to the tune of $2.7 million.
But for the conceivable future, Joel is the Garden’s party in New York. Though a few artists have made a run at it — Prince played 21 shows at London’s O2 Arena in 2007 — residencies are rare at the arena level. And a franchise? Previously unheard of. So how does an artist move from residency to franchise status? Madison Square Garden Entertainment president Melissa Ormond offers a definition: “someone who has the ability to be part of the Garden calendar and the fabric of the Garden for a long period of time — more than a year,” she says.
Like the Knicks and Rangers, “Billy Joel at the Garden” is a Garden property and MSGE is the promoter of the shows, with AEG Live involved from a marketing standpoint. Garden-specific Joel merchandise can be found in Garden stores around the building, while MSG Network is working on a special and a “very robust” microsite can be found at BillyJoelMSG.com. “We’re finding that people are going on [the site], they’re staying on longer than the average, and they’re buying tickets when they get through the site,” Ormond says.
Also adding marketing muscle to the franchise is Joel’s sponsorship agreement with Citi, as the financial partner not only handles presales for the artist’s shows at the Garden, but also, in Citi’s move toward more “offstage” involvement with artists, includes nightly meet-and-greets and the Citi VIP Lounge, where Citi can integrate both client- and consumer-facing engagement. All involved declined to comment on Joel’s fee for the partnership, but industry estimates put it in the low seven figures, and Citi’s full-page ads in the New York Times, at bus stops and on billboards add significantly more value. The deal, brokered by MAC Presents on behalf of Citi, is a testament to Joel’s clout — he’s bringing in his own financial partner, although Chase is a major sponsor at the Garden, and American Express generally handles presales for AEG.
Citi sees Joel as the perfect partner for its “everyman” card members, according to senior VP of entertainment marketing Jennifer Breithaupt, speaking to Billboard at the bustling VIP Lounge preshow on Jan. 27. “Citi is a New York-headquartered company, and our biggest U.S. customer base is in the New York tri-state area,” she says. “And everybody loves Billy Joel. What is exciting to me is how many consumers are coming back to multiple shows. Our customers have responded so well, obviously through the ticket [sales], but also to this [VIP] lounge, which gives us the ability to do things [at] each show after they’re sold out.” The monthly nature of the franchise “gives us the opportunity to think of different ways we can [implement it] each month. We can activate a bunch of different ways and make it authentic for them, too.”
The first contract in the franchise between Joel and the Garden runs through the entire year, and clearly MSGE sees this as an event with staying power. “We’re not seeing any ebb in demand at this stage-it’s only increasing,” Ormond says. “It has been a phenomenal process to watch.”
Joel, a Long Island, N.Y., native who still makes his home in the area, says he was first approached about an extended stay at the Garden following his fiery set at the 12-12-12 Hurricane Sandy benefit at the Garden, and the opportunity piqued his interest. “People talk about a residency in Las Vegas or Branson, Mo., but then you got to live there,” he says. “I started thinking, ‘My gig’s at the Garden. All I got to do is commute.’ They didn’t refer to it as a franchise at first — it was a residency. I guess they looked at the ticket demand once it was announced and thought, ‘This guy can keep playing here for the rest of his natural life.’ I thought, ‘Wait a minute, I’m going to be 65 next year — am I going to be able to do this?’ But once a month isn’t bad.”
For the Garden’s part, when asked about the luxury of an arena having 12 guaranteed sellouts in a given calendar year, Ormond just laughs. “It makes perfect sense,” she says, “but that doesn’t change the fact that we’re honored that he’s here.”
‘IT’S HIS TIME’
Amid a backstage area flush with excitement as the franchise launches, Dennis Arfa, Joel’s agent since 1976, is exuberant. “We have our champion back, and our champion is performing at the highest level that is really attained in this business,” Arfa says. “Even when he wasn’t doing public performances, his music still resonated, and now that he’s made a return to the stage and performing publicly, there’s a pent-up demand to see him.”
Obviously, Joel isn’t just a Big Apple phenomenon. Including his wildly successful co-headlining tours with Elton John, he has grossed more than $442 million from 4.3 million tickets sold to 251 shows-in this millennium alone. “I picked a good job, that’s for sure,” Joel jokes.
Still, the money isn’t Joel’s measure of success at this stage in his career, but rather “the mutual respect other musicians have,” he says, adding that the same goes for his band and crew. “We go in and we do the job, and afterward, you’re proud of the job you did. Look, the money’s great. I’ve had other jobs and this pays better than any other job I’ve ever had. But it’s more about the respect and the pride that comes with having done a good job, and the audience walking out of there really happy with what they heard, making a lot of noise.”
Joel himself has been making noise for decades. He’s racked 42 singles on the Billboard Hot 100 and 24 entries on the Billboard 200, and is certified by the RIAA as having sold 81.5 million units in the United States. So his canon has clearly met the artist’s self-stated goal of writing songs that “meant something during the time in which I lived…and transcended that time.” Not only are these songs staples of heritage rock radio, they’re ingrained in the heads of fans attending concerts, and reaching new audiences through Broadway’s “Movin’ Out,” covers on TV singing competitions and even being featured on an episode of “Glee” last November.
Joel seems proud that his creations of a generation ago are finding new life. “Those songs are out there now making their own money. They don’t need Dad anymore,” he says. “Which I kind of like. I’m proud of my kids. They’re not living in the basement anymore.”
Which, given his lack of recent output in this area, begs the question of when Joel will spawn more kids, and he seems unfazed when asked about that. “I never stopped writing music,” he says. “I just stopped writing songs. I’ve been writing music continually ever since the last album of original tunes, ‘River of Dreams,’ in ’93.”
There was the album of his classical compositions, “Fantasies & Delusions,” in 2001, and “since then I’ve been writing instrumental music, thematic music,” he says. “Some of them could become songs, some could become movie scores, some could be symphonic pieces, some of them could be piano pieces — it’s all over the place. I’ve written a bunch of stuff that no one’s ever heard, and I don’t know if they ever will. I’m just doing it for my own edification.”
For now, though, the renewed attention on Joel is all about his existing body of work. “It’s his time,” Arfa says, and there certainly does seem to be a new appreciation for the artist a half-century into his career. In December, Joel received the 36th annual Kennedy Center Honor, one of the United States’ top cultural awards. At the ceremony, Don Henley, Garth Brooks, Rufus Wainwright and Panic! at the Disco’s Brendon Urie performed Joel’s songs, and Tony Bennett introduced the tribute.
“That was a really moving experience,” Joel says, though he seems a bit bemused by the whole affair. “The State Department gives you the award. You meet the president and first lady — they’re saying all these nice, effusive words about you. People come up shaking your hand. I didn’t have to do a speech — I didn’t have to do nothing. So it was an easy job. All I had to do was sit there.”
Doing anything but “just sitting there” are those in the packed-to-the-rafters crowd at the Garden as Joel christens his franchise status. The enraptured audience sings and cheers wildly throughout as Joel expertly delivers the goods yet again, with his sterling eight-piece band firing on all cylinders.
Fifty years into his career, it’s these moments onstage, with a swinging band and a packed house, that are most rewarding. “I’ve always said about 50% of what happens at a concert has to do with the audience,” Joel says. “If you play for a dead audience, you’re going to stink. It’s kind of like sex: If they don’t make noise, you ain’t doing it right.”