Billy Joel reflects on career, MSG residency

NEW YORK - Billy Joel sits on a rolling office chair in what is normally the visitors locker room at Madison Square Garden and puts daughter Della Rose on his knee.

Della has a request. She wants him to play "Don't Ask Me Why" in that night's show.

"What will you do when I play that?" Joel asks Della, who will be 3 years old on Aug. 12.

She slides off Joel's knee and does a little dance, much to the delight of Joel, wife Alexis, and the crew gathered in the room. Joel takes creative director Steve Cohen aside and tell him to move "Don't Ask Me Why" up in the set to make sure she can see it.

That night, "Don't Ask Me Why" moved all the way up to the third song in the show. Joel dedicates it to his daughter, telling the crowd, "She's probably going to be falling asleep soon."

As the band starts, Joel sits at the piano and shades his eyes from the spotlight to look over to the seats where Della is already dancing with Alexis. Seeing them happy, Joel starts the countdown to signal the band that he is ready to start singing, "Uno! Dos! Uno, dos, tres, cuatro!"

Billy Joel is most definitely a rock star. His American tour this summer is nothing but stadiums - including Fenway Park in Boston, Wrigley Field in Chicago, Citizens Bank Park in Philadelphia. His greatest hits collection has sold more copies than any other album in history, except Michael Jackson's "Thriller" and the Eagles' greatest hits. He is a member of the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame and the Songwriters Hall of Fame, and he was honored by the Kennedy Center for the Arts and received The Library of Congress Gershwin Prize for Popular Song.

But these days, the Hicksville, N.Y., native's life is increasingly about family - both the one that lives with him on Centre Island and the close-knit work family that has helped him put on shows for decades. On Wednesday, Joel is set to headline Madison Square Garden for the 100th time - nearly 40 years after he made his debut there - marking a milestone so high it was considered unthinkable for years.

"I remember my first show at The Garden, that was a milestone," Joel says. "If someone would have projected that I would do 100 shows there, I would have laughed at them. I'd say you're being ridiculous."

Even Jim Dolan, chairman and CEO of The Madison Square Garden Co., said the record seems unbreakable. "Billy Joel is one of the greatest figures in rock and roll history, and he has now accomplished something that might never be equaled - 100 shows in a single venue," Dolan said in a statement. "This milestone is a testament to the strength of Billy's music and his incredible connection to his fans - many of whom come from Long Island. All of us at The Madison Square Garden Company look forward to his, and his fans, continuing to make The Garden their home well into the future."

Joel jokes that he accomplished the stunning feat simply because he didn't die. ("The secret of success? Just don't die!" he says, laughing. "The secret of longevity? Stay alive!")

When pressed for a serious answer, he laughs again. "I don't have the slightest idea," says Joel, who began playing monthly at The Garden in 2014, the first (and only) arena-sized residency in music history. "The audiences are great. The venue is great. It's a world-class venue. To have a residency there is a dream already. I never imagined that anyone could have a residency at The Garden. We're a franchise. We're like a sports team. The whole thing has just been one crazy, exhilarating night after another."

Unlike many superstar headliners these days, Joel keeps most of his show preparations secret. He doesn't sell VIP concert packages that include access to his sound check. He doesn't offer meet-and-greet sessions before his shows. He doesn't even sell tickets to the front row of seats, for that matter. (Those seats are given to excited fans that Joel's crew finds in the upper-level seats.)

However, Joel granted Newsday access to the backstage preparations of his Madison Square Garden concert on May 23, the 98th Garden show of his career, to see what goes into putting on his show at the arena. More than 1,500 people work at every Joel concert - including everyone from the musicians to the ushers - and most have worked at many, if not all, of the shows in the residency.

Most days start around 8 a.m. with production manager Bobby "Boomer" Thrasher, who handles the setup of the stage and the logistics of putting together everything backstage, meeting with his team. "I wouldn't call it a science," says the Ontario native who started with Joel 36 years ago building stages and quickly moved up the ranks. "It's called a living."

Thrasher, who has also worked on tours with Bruce Springsteen and Elton John and received the 2018 Parnelli Audio Lifetime Achievement Award, says the residency has given a lot of people a stability that is almost unheard-of among music professionals. "It's almost like a cab medallion - once you get it, you don't want to lose it," says Thrasher, who proudly says his sons Ted, the drum tech, and Lucas, who helps build the stage and works the teleprompter, also work for Joel. "This is where you want to be. This is heaven."

Most of Joel's tight-knit crew say the atmosphere comes directly from The Piano Man himself. "With other acts, management handles the hiring and they are often deciding based on the dollar," Thrasher says. "For us, Billy handles it and he decides based on what's best for the show. . He brought all of us here. We're his family. We're his comfort factor and he's our comfort factor."

Joel says he believes the key to keeping his band and crew together is mutual respect. "A lot of these guys have been with me for 40 years or longer," he says. " Brian Ruggles has been with me for 50 years. . I respect what they do. I know how hard they work and I hopefully compensate them accordingly. I acknowledge that everyone is as important as everybody else. I know I'm out front, but I still feel like I'm playing in a band."

Joel has his own dressing room at Madison Square Garden, of course. Actually, it's a well-appointed suite of rooms. But he prefers to be in the main production room, at the end of Thrasher's table, not too far from the pizza boxes and chicken wings set up for the band and crew.

That's usually where the VIP's come in to meet him before the show. It's where they'll gather to sing "Happy Birthday" to Joel's agent Dennis Arfa and saxophonist Mark Rivera before they take the stage. It's where creative director Cohen likes to arrive around 10 a.m. on show days, hours before he really needs to be there.

"They're all my family and we only get to see each other once a month so this is where you want to be on a workday," Cohen says. "It's not like other tours where you wait until catering is all set up."

The musical plans for the day start with Cohen, who comes up with a rough draft of the night's set list. "That's usually based on looking at what we've done in the past and what we've been talking about that might be fun to add," says Cohen, who proudly says he is one of only four people in the organization, including Joel, to be at all 100 shows at The Garden, along with sound engineer Ruggles and agent Arfa. "Billy likes to not sing certain songs back to back. Some guys like to play certain songs. I filter all that stuff."

Around 4 p.m., the closing half of "Movin' Out (Anthony's Song)" floats into the production room from sound check, as Cohen talks. The band - keyboardist/musical director Dave Rosenthal, guitarists Tommy Byrnes and Mike DelGuidice, the horn section of Mark Rivera, Crystal Taliefero and Carl Fischer, bassist Andy Cichon and drummer Chuck Burgi - has started without Joel, who is caught in the traffic caused by President Donald Trump's visit to Long Island.

Cohen says the residency has succeeded because it is "like the perfect storm." "You have Billy, who is like the hood ornament for the city of New York; Madison Square Garden, which is the most famous arena in the world; and Billy playing 'New York State of Mind'," he says. "Every single night, I get goose bumps. I think I remember the electricity of seeing Frank Sinatra walk on the stage in Las Vegas. That's the only kind of thing I can equate this to. .The sum is greater than the parts."

While the band runs through some other songs, most of the people in the production room continue their work. But when the band moves into something unfamiliar, everyone looks up. "What are they playing?" asks deputy production manager Liz Mahon, before several people go to find out.

It turns out the band is rehearsing "Half a Mile Away," a song from Joel's 1978 album "52nd Street" that he has never played in concert before.

"We dabbled with it and thought, 'Let's give it a shot,'" Rosenthal says later. "He has so many great songs to choose from. We like to mix it up a little bit."

Rosenthal says that every sound check with Joel is different. On this one, the band wanted to warm up a bit since it had been a while since they had all played together.

When Joel arrives, they try "Half a Mile Away" again, then Joel leads them into a bit of the Gloria Gaynor disco classic "I Will Survive," adopting a falsetto until Taliefero takes over in full voice.

"We're not faking it," Rosenthal says afterward. "We're really having a good time."

It was a fun moment, the kind that sticks out in Joel's memory. His favorite moments at Madison Square Garden are the ones that involve special guests. "John Mayer is such a good musician, it's great working with him," he says. "The night we had Paul Simon and Miley Cyrus, that was fun. . Kevin James did some wild stuff with us."

Though Joel's political statements are few and very far between, he says he does appreciate how his residency offers him a monthly outlet to communicate with his audience. "There is a little bit of the town crier in it," he says. "I'm a New Yorker. I kind of sense what other New Yorkers are feeling. I think it would be remiss of me not to remark on something happening at the moment. It depends on what it is, though."

Joel has concerts scheduled through the end of this year and expects to continue next year, when he turns 70. When the residency began, he famously said that the shows would continue for as long as fans wanted to see him, but now it has become clear that may not come any time soon.

Joel says he may call an end to his residency when his body can't handle it any more. "There is definitely a physicality to the job and the older I get, the more apparent it becomes to me," he says. "If I can't do it well, or as well as I want to, I'm going to stop. I admire the athletes who took themselves out of the game, the Joe DiMaggios, the people who walked away before they lost it. That's an honorable thing and I'd like to be able to do that. I did it with recording and songwriting and I'll probably do it with performing as well."

For years, he has dropped hints about retirement. But after replacing both hips and working out some issues with allergies, Joel now moves and sounds better than he has in decades. And he clearly lights up when his family comes into a room.

Joel is clearly not interested in doing massive tours any more - the long, tedious ones that he says make him feel like Willy Loman from "Death of a Salesman." But he likes his current pace of work and wonders if stopping completely would be a mistake.

"Maybe when you stop doing it is when you stop being alive," he says. "What did Dylan say, 'He not busy being born is busy dying'? There's probably something to that. If you do not continually invent yourself, if you don't do what your life force is telling you to do, you begin to die."

For Joel, he'll know it's time to retire the way some people define art. He'll know it when he sees it, or feels it.

"One night, I'll know right then and there and I'll say, 'That's it. Don't put any more tickets on sale,' " Joel says. "One thing I know, I'm not going to do a farewell tour. If I'm going to stop, I'm just going to stop. I'm going to take myself out of the lineup like DiMaggio."

Until then, Joel plans to rock on.