Dan's Papers - May 29, 2009

Billy Joel is back in town after a month out touring America with Elton John. He said he was glad to be home in Sag Harbor. "My favorite town," he called it. The duo had been playing to adoring crowds in stadiums and coliseums in such places as Fargo, St. Louis, Omaha and Indianapolis.

Billy Joel also has a limp.

"How did that happen?" I asked.

"Jumped off a piano," he said. "You know I'm not 19 anymore. But sometimes on stage, I think I'm 19." Made perfect sense.

Billy was walking me around through his motorcycle collection, which is located on the ground floor of his Sag Harbor home in what used to be a three-car garage. Beginning on June 6, his collection of cycles, about 15 from this house and another 15 from elsewhere, is going to be on display at Christy's Building Art Centre on Main Street, Sag Harbor. The display is to be called "The Motorcycle as Art and Icon." The showing will continue through June 20.

These are not ordinary motorcycles. They are sensational in appearance, but they are not antique motorcycles either. By way of explanation, Billy gave me the story of a magnificent chrome and steel affair called a Harley Davidson Soft Tail. It looked like a 50 year old Harley in perfect condition all shined up.

"This Harley was built just one year ago," he said. "It was not built specially for me. It is a stock bike you can buy in any cycle shop. But I had it taken over to a bike shop I work with in Smithtown called Lighthouse Harley Davidson and they modified it to look like a 50-year-old Harley."

He told me the little tricks that they had done to it to make it look like that earlier model. They replaced the dashboard with gauges from 50 years ago. They added exhaust tubes. They covered the shock absorbers with a chrome casing and they installed a replica of the stick shift used in models 50 years earlier. That's how you would shift.

"Today's bikes have the shift in the hand grip," he told me. "We geared this bike up to shift from the floor. My goal is to take this to a bike show and have some old timer come over and say wow, there's an old hard tail! How did you come by that? And I tell them look again. It looks old, but it has all the new engineering."

Billy had to explain to me the difference between a soft tail and a hard tail. I thought he'd had a slip of the tongue when he gave it the name one way and then the other.

"The original Harley had no shock absorbers. The new ones do. We just covered them over with this chrome housing."

I didn't need for him to tell me why they called one soft and the other hard.

Billy has three brand new Royal Enfield messenger bikes. They still make them, almost exactly as they made them during the Second World War. All he had to do with them was put in the old fashioned passenger seat from a half century ago, which is much less comfortable than the ones now. He also had a General Montgomery beret with the military pins on it on one of them and also a World War II Spitfire fighter plane insignia on the side. The other two he left just as they were.

He's got a new Triumph Thruxton from England, and an '07 Harley Road King all decked out with leather and fringes to look like an Elvis bike.

"This is one of my favorites," he told me as he steered me over to a BMW he had tricked out to look like a Nazi Germany Wehrmacht Gespan - an officer's military motorcycle. It came complete with a German soldier helmet from that war and a sidecar, which he said, had been made in the Soviet Union.

"The Russians copied the Germans. People look at me funny driving up US1a in Florida in this thing and I shout at them, 'It's okay, I'm Jewish.'"

He does have really old bikes. He has got Hondas, an old Italian Moto Guzzi from 1976, a DuCotta 750 Sport from 1975 and a 1939 EL Knucklehead Deluxe OHV. As for the new bikes made to look old, he seems just about ready to take orders to build these custom bikes of his own design for others. He's incorporated a company, 20th Century Cycles. He's thinking that if you want one of these Billy Joel originals, you might call Lighthouse Harley Davidson of Smithtown and place an order.

"I think we ought to do this," he said. "But maybe just a few."

"Do you have a favorite motorcycle?" I asked.

He thought about it for a long time, looking them all over. "No," he finally said. "I love all of them."

I pointed out that Billy is doing the exact same thing he did 15 years ago when he went into the boat building business on Shelter Island. At that time, he decided he'd like to build picnic boats of his own design. He drew a design for what one might look like on a napkin at the Candy Kitchen for me back then.

Picnic boats were popular in the 1930s and '40s and were identifiable as slow, gentle creatures about 38 feet long with wooden hulls, small inboard motors, large spacious open cabins and a sleeping cabin below. They were in vogue back then, as crafts to be used to go on picnics. Pack up your family in one of these, take them across a bay to a deserted beach and drop anchor. They'd go 12 knots. There's one company that currently makes replicas of picnic boats. Billy wanted to make them of his own design, and then pack them with twin 300 horsepower engines to take you where you wanted to go at 50 knots. Hang onto your hats.

"Sort of like 'The Little Old Lady from Pasedena,'" I said. Hi there - screech, roar.

He made an arrangement with an old ship building company on Shelter Island called Coecles Harbor Boat Works back then and the plan was that over the next 10 years they might sell five of them. They run about half a million dollars apiece.

"We have sold 52 of them," he said.

Billy and I walked over to the American Hotel for lunch. He's got other things in the fire besides boats and motorcycles and singing. He's writing a book about his life.

"It's sort of a bio-autobiography."

"No. I can write about most of my life. But there's certain stuff that I don't really want to write about myself - too personal really - but the publisher thinks that stuff ought to be in the book and I guess I agree with him. So there is to be a second voice in the book. There will be my voice and then this other voice. Sort of a Greek Chorus. It will go back and forth."

"I hope you have final say on everything," I said.

And there is a movie about him underway. Some filmmakers have gotten the footage of his famous series of last Shea Stadium concerts, at one of which, you will recall, Paul McCartney showed up for a surprise visit. "They started doing it up as a documentary," Billy said. "But it became a movie."

"It's been an amazing life," I said.

"I want to get it all down while I remember all of it," he said.

Walking out of the American Hotel, a couple sitting at a table in the lobby called over to us. The man looked at Billy and said he knew he was Billy Joel and he wanted him to know how much his work had meant to him. "I listen to your songs and they are just so calming and serene. All my cares fall away." He pointed to his wife. "And she's a big fan too." He held out his hand and Billy shook it. "I didn't mean to interrupt," he said. Billy thanked him for saying these nice things.

Walking down Main Street, he limping and me not limping, because I had not jumped off a piano, he said "Calming? Serene? That's an interesting thing to say. I'd have thought maybe just wanting to get up to dance or something."

"At least get a little foot tapping," I chimed in.

Billy Joel and his wife, Katie, will surely be at the opening of the cycle exhibit at Christie's Gallery. After that, I hope he will come to the Have a Heart Ball at Hayground on June 20, where there will be a preview of Dennis Lynch's documentary King of the Hamptons because he is in it (as am I). I invited him anyway. After that, he is back out on the road with Elton for July - Chatanooga, Boise, Cheyenne, Podunk, Duluth, Kalamazoo, Timbuktu - places like that.