Hi, this is Steve Cohen. I've been shining lights in your eyes at a Billy Joel shows for a long time. You're listening to Glass Houses, a Billy Joel podcast. This is Glass Houses, a Billy Joel podcast. Hey, this is Liberty DeVito. This is John Jackson, director of the Billy Joel archive. This is Russell Javgers. This is Mike DelJudus. This is Richie Connata, and you listen to Glass Houses, a Billy Joel podcast. It's awesome. One, two, one, two, three, four. (music) So it's often old as new again in the Billy world when it comes to reissues, re-releases, things like that. But the latest release is a little different. Billy Joel, the 100th Live at Madison Square Garden, the complete concert, was released on Blu-ray and DVD just last week, May 29th, 2026. Now this is the first time we're getting an officially released full concert. But interestingly, it's not the first time, of course, that a lot of this footage has been released to the public. This is essentially an expanded version of the CBS special of the Madison Square Garden 100th concert that aired last year, just a few weeks after the concert occurred. That was well celebrated. It won some awards. It raised many fans' eyes because so many channels apparently switched off in the middle of piano man and went to the local news, which turned out to be a blessing in disguise, because then the network gave it an encore presentation, which drew in even more than a few weeks later. Even more people, so the ratings looked even better. It was assumed at some point we would see the full release, and now we have it, which is exciting, again, not only because it's a full release, but if you go back and you listen to our episode with Steve Cohen, where he gets into the nuts and bolts of how he put it together, it's fascinating what they put into it. And when you look at this through that lens, you really see just how much care was put into this package, at least in terms of just the aesthetics. Obviously, the music part is in Billy's realm, but just the way it looked, the immersive feel, the cinematic experience, everything behind it really comes for a vision and is really, really apparent when you get to sit down and watch the full concert, especially on Blu-ray. Yeah, it's really a celebration and a culmination of that great residency run. You and I were fortunate to catch the final show in July of 2024, and I was fortunate to catch a few over the years as well. I think we were all discussing over the years that they've got to document this in one way, shape, or form, because this is such an unprecedented thing that they're all doing. When the CBS special came to be, it proved to be the perfect opportunity and with the technology being as such, it afforded the team the opportunity to film the entire concert, which we talked about with Steve last time as well, where when things are done on film and things of that nature, you have more budget constraints where you have to change reels and you don't have unlimited space. Here you're able to get multiple cameras capturing all the moments, the room as a whole and tight on stage. It really feels like the most immersive Billy Joel performance we've ever seen filmed. Remember also when you do find full concerts on YouTube, they're great, but those are usually maybe one static camera that was captured for posterity or it's the feed that was going to the jumbo tron. So it's great, but it was made either just to document the event and or, you know, it was complimentary to the concert as it happened and this was made with the home audience in mind. Unless you think this is just going to be us pontificating about it. We are going to hear from the sources once again this time we have executive producers Steve Cohen and Barry Irman, the team behind bringing this to fruition both on CBS and for the home release. And we're going to hear more about how it was put together what it was like expanding from the limited number of songs that were on the network special versus now. And of course we get into some fun stuff for us we twisted there are we got them to start talking about camera lenses and things like that. So if you're that person pops and popcorn we we got all that coming for you. But before that let's take a look real quick at the at the specs for this. The date of the concert was March 28th 2024. It's the 100th concert in the Madison Square Garden monthly residency that started in 2014. And that gets confusing because just a few months later we were there for Billy's final show of Madison Square Garden, which was what the 150th overall. So no between March and June or so he did not go there four times a week to go from 100 to 50. This commemorates 100 residency shows versus the 150 shows overall he's played at MSG. So if you rewind just before the residency started that's far less than 50 shows that he had from 1978. All the way to 2014 you're talking at a hundred and ten hundred. A hundred and three hundred and five shows of the residency since then so it's pretty wild. Yeah you know it almost doesn't sound like a lap but when you figure you know he's been doing it for less than 50 years. You don't tour every year now granted he would do two or three nights at Madison Square Garden but once you figure you know if he tours for two years in a row like a span or 16 months he's just going to do his one run at MSG. You know it's not like he was there in let's just say 86 and 87 all the time. You have all the off year isn't there of course you have those early 2000s where he wasn't touring that much. And then you also had an entire album cycle where he did not play the garden at all he played. Nassau and he played you know parts surrounding it but for the stormfront tour he didn't come to MSG at all. On the Blu-ray and or DVD you get Miami 2017, My Life, Vienna, the Downeaster Alexa and Innocent Man, the longest time, Turn the Lights Back On, Big Man on Mulberry Street featuring Sting and then the police song every little thing she does is magic also featuring Sting. Moving out our Deep Cut Dark Horse half a mile away the entertainer don't ask me why Alan Town New York State of mind only the good die young river of dreams with River Deep Mountain High sung by Crystal Tally Ferro Nessendorma sung by Mike Del Judas. Scenes from an Italian restaurant piano man we didn't start the fire uptown girl it's still rock and roll to me big shot and you may be right with rock and roll is Mike sing rock and roll rock scenes rock and roll right Mike's rock and roll rock and roll. And we actually have a fun little story about the inclusion of rock and roll during our conversation with. Yeah that's a that's like a great rock and roll story but also not a rock and roll story because involves paperwork but you'll see what we mean. The dad rock and roll story exactly yeah yeah so that leaves the new songs that weren't on the CBS special or Danny Sturlex the longest time every little thing she does is magic half a mile away the entertainer don't ask me why Alan Town Nessendorma we didn't start the fire uptown girl and big shot. So this is a fun one this is a makes a great viewing companion when you guys get a chance to check this out again on DVD or Blu-ray out now and you could also watch it digitally. But for now we're going to get into this great behind the scenes conversation with Steve Cohen and Barry Irman. I was going back over our conversation from last year and we got so many great glipses behind the curtains of how this was put together from from the technical standpoint and left them the dramatic standpoint. And so picking up with the Blu-ray now the big question is how did this come to become a release of the full concert like you know I'm sure this was an option on the table from the beginning but at what point it was the green light given to set the stage for the full release. Barry Irman you know and I very was executive producer we were partners on all of this and you know I think I spoke about this in the first podcast that it was really important for me to make sure that we internally had the maximum amount of control. To be able to capture this event being production manager and producer it was really important for me to make sure that I had a partner in broadcast that number one was aligned with you know the vision I had for capturing this and number two had the ability integrate seamlessly with a with a huge rock and restoring organization and he knew all of the players and one of the great things about you know just to blow some smoke about Barry is that he's a creative producer. He's a nuts and bolts guy incredibly financially responsible builds great budgets gets the best people in the business to do it but you know we we from the very beginning looked at this as we needed to capture every possible second in that venue. Regardless of what the what the first product what what the product was going to be what the license product for broadcast was going to be our plan was that.
that we really didn't know an idea of what was going to encompass the broadcast, the material in the broadcast, and we knew with commercials and all that stuff, we had to conform to what would work on a network broadcast. But in my mind and in Barry's mind, eventually the entire show would want to be seen. So we captured it in the way that we captured the whole show. So this blue ray and this release of the entire show was always in the plan. - When we did the CBS broadcast from the date of record when we had a deliver to CBS was eight days. So Steve and I had to scramble to figure out what songs were gonna be in the broadcast. And we really had to just focus on those songs, but all along we were telling our partners, hey, we should be doing this full show. We need to edit and mix every single song. This needs to be a historic document of this concert. And it was a bit of a fight. And I think we ended up going back a couple of months later. It was three, four months later. And I think the CBS broadcast was 14 songs. And we went back and edited the other, 11 songs, put it into concert order, which it wasn't on the CBS broadcast and had a full length ready to go, which is culminating in the DVD and blue ray release. - And the other part about that is, when you talk about the fight, like nobody wants, people just want to pony up with the bare minimum of expense to try and maximize their profit, right? And no matter what happens, there's this mindset of like, well, we'll capture it in one day, one day down the line, you know, you guys can edit and mix it. And Barry was very, very persistent about like, guys, the team in place, these are the, you know, we have the director online, we have his availability, we have the facility, you may want to put it off, but it's going to cost you twice as much to retool all of this stuff, retransfer all of this stuff, re-log all of this stuff, and then put a team together. And the chances of getting that same team together, six months a year, year and a half down the line, you know, becomes less possible as you get further away from the project. So Barry was persistent and we, you know, we did, there was a great deal of arm twisting, you know, in this world, like the record label, turns around to the artist and say, well, if you want to put it out, you know, you pony up. And Bill's relationship with Sony is like, well, I'll do what I need to do, but, you know, we're partners in all of this. So there was some, there was a bit of arm twisting, you know, they have, they have limited budgets or they have specific budgets that they can spend on. But we knew materialized, we knew that this concert was going to be historic and was never ever going to happen again. And, you know, now we're, you know, we're a few years away from this. And it could very well be the last performance, the last television performance that you ever see at Billy. We don't know if he's going to work again. It's becoming more and more precious and much more historic. And the other part about it that's exciting is it was shot at the highest quality and now that people actually still do have Blu-ray players. Right. If you put a Blu-ray on, I mean, I have Yankee Stadium, for example, you know, and I have Shay Stadium on Blu-ray. And comparing those the way those look to what this looks like now is, there is no comparison. It is so amazing. You put that on a Blu-ray with surround sound on a big screen and you are literally in that room. And that was the whole takeaway of how we wanted to do it creatively. So it was, it worked on a flat screen on broadcast. That's what everybody came back and said, "Wow, I'm in the room." Now you're really in the room. One thing that I do have to say is that Sony were wonderful partners. They let us do what we wanted to do. They never hassled me. I had to put in a budget. I had to put in a creative plan. And they never said anything. They never questioned what I was doing. They showed up at the show. They weren't on top of me. They were happy to be inside, you know, inside the arena watching the show, not looking over my shoulder. They really were wonderful partners creatively. They allowed us to use really the finest equipment. You know, we basically had a blank check to do what we needed to do. So I do have to speak well of Sony. They were wonderful partners. - Yeah, I wasn't throwing shade either, but I just, you know, I just, you know, sometimes people are interested in how the sausage is made. It's a big job. But they also had a great deal of confidence. Barry has an incredible resume, you know, they trust me. So, you know, we didn't, it wasn't as bad of an uphill battle as you might think. - Well, you know, when you think about budget as well as a creative, when you know you're shooting for television and also for a blu-ray later down the line, does that have an effect on hardware choices, creative choices, things like what cameras, how many, what sort of angles, what sort of aspect ratios, you know, light saturation, things like that? - The interesting thing about Billy is, you know, we filmed the show with 22 cameras. And, you know, it's a lot of cameras, so Phil, you know, I mean, there's a great band. It's a large band on stage. But it's essentially the star is Billy who sits at the piano most of the night. The trick on Billy is that he's on a rotating piano platform. And he's a wiseass. He controls the pedals with his feet, whether he goes left or right. And if you tell him, okay, don't move during this song, he'll move eight times, you know? So, so, you know, it was a mathematics to filming him and surrounding him and getting him from every angle. But yeah, we want to use the most cinematic cameras, you know, possible. - Mm-hmm. - You know, it's many choices in the camera world, but we knew eventually we wanted this cinematic look. We wanted the beauty of Madison Square Garden, Steve did an incredible job in the light. The, you know, it's so cinema that show. But you also brought in the light at wristbands. So, you know, on the reverse shots, you really just had that beauty. But, you know, technically you want to use the best things that are available and that will match the lighting. We did a lot of work in advance, you know, just testing to make sure that that that. - And that's one thing that we've noticed too, you know, especially the last few years is with the camera technology, it really allows you to capture so much more information and the richness of the actual live production. Whereas if you, you know, go years and years back, it was just more about having the room bright so you could see everything. And that's no longer the case. - Well, as we said, probably in the last time we talked, you know, there were three characters in this, in this play. There was, you know, Billy, there was the audience, and there was Madison Square Garden. And each one of them had an equal part in creating this, you know, emotional environment. So, you know, what we tried to do was, you know, make it sort of seamless and make, you know, make all of these players shine so that when you were looking at Billy performing, you were aware of the audience, you were aware of the architecture behind him, which then conveyed that feeling of being in the rooms. And Barry, you know, what production really did was saw the vision and then gave us the best tools to capture that. You know, it wasn't just run and gun, set some cameras up and roll some tape, obviously. - Right. - And we have to mention the director Paul Doug Dell, who's one of the most brilliant cinematic directors on the planet, I believe. And, you know, he flew into his show and scattered the show with us. He just had a vision immediately of what that show should look like and camera angles and our director of photography, Brett Turnbull really worked with Steve Handenhand. They just created such beauty. And Paul's vision on camera placement, along with Steve and myself, it was just perfect. It was just, you know, an exciting show to watch. For somebody, for a guy that sits at a piano the whole night, it was just exciting. - And I'll tell you guys, like you watch this show, it's the one time a television show is actually better than the live experience. I mean, it was better than being there live. There was more detail and more things that you could, you know, feel and all that stuff. And then you lay on top of that, the ultimate, you know, the most resolution you can get in today's, you know, day without sitting in an edit suite. It's quite an experience. And like the fans now get the entire show, you know, we put in all of that stuff that Billy, the interstitial commentary and his jokes and his personality and all of that stuff that you have to cut, you know, for time in a, you know, on a broadcast. This is a gift to the fans more than anything else of, you know, this incredible historic thing. Dennis Arfall always talks about the fact that, you know, Madison Square.
our garden was millions of people in New York, but there were hundreds of millions of people in the country that never got to do it. If we hadn't recorded it and filmed it and put it out, they would have never known it existed. So, we historically recorded this thing for posterity because it was kind of a big deal. In the case of the TV special, so long as we're cut, they were re-sequenced when you were thinking about releasing this as a full concert, you know, whether anything dumb behind the scenes to make the show translate to video without actually changing the nature of the performances. We had theatrical in mind. You know, we did it in that quality as if it would be released in a movie theater and that translates to DVD. You know, you're actually boiling it down a bit. You know, you're reducing the quality for Blu-ray. It looks phenomenal. We didn't cut any corners. We produced it in the highest 4K resolution there was. We didn't even do, you know, many people cheap by doing it in what's called UHD, which is kind of a reduced 4K. And we didn't full 4K. We cut no corners. We just wanted the best quality. And so, we did a phenomenal job mastering it for Blu-ray. It looks beautiful. I mean, it looks better than most. Which is odd for a show that runs so long that it's close to two and a half hours. You usually have to cut down bandwidth for it to fit on a Blu-ray. And they were able to make it work and it's gorgeous. We knew we only had one bite of the apples. So, like Barry said, we knew that there were a few songs that we had to make it in. We had an option of a couple of songs that would be the ones we, if they were really good performances or if they were captured really well, that they would end up being in the performance. We wanted to get an equal balance of hits and personality and deep cuts. All of those things went into the planning of what we were focusing on. But I don't think that there was ever a time where, you know, Duke Dale was sitting there saying, "Oh, we're not going to use this one. So, just kind of go to the bathroom." Like, every single song was captured as if it was going to end up being in the final, in the broadcast and then all the way through it. We had a couple of tussles. We didn't start the fire in there, but we got such a phenomenal performance of still rock and roll to me that we were like, "Well, you know, that's better than we didn't start the fire." So, it made the broadcasts. There were no corners that were cut in any of that stuff. It was basically, "Figure, we're going to see this entire thing at any given point." Which, as Barry says, people cut corners, you know? You know, you need in breaks. Hey, put your hammers down. Go take a pee. You need 15 minutes. Like, you know, we didn't do any of that stuff. There's also going to be a PBS broadcast that I think starts airing on May 29th. It's not the full length. It's another short version, but it's slightly different songs than what was on the CBS broadcast. I don't remember offhand, but it's different than CBS. So, people could also get a taste of that. And they could also buy, you know, the Blu-rays through PBS, which really helps out public broadcasting, who are such fans of music and cultural arts, and they need all the support that you can give them. PBS has paid for the rights to re-broadcast the sessions of video, of Billy from 1972, which was his very first television performance. And if you remember from the doc, it's him with a leather jacket and dirty air and the original band. So, they're going to book end this fun drive with the arguably the last concert of Billy Joel and the very first television, which was also a PBS broadcast. So, you know, it fits into this whole legacy piece of how we're exploring Billy's place in the firmament. The other thing about the Barry said about the different running order on the PBS special is there was another thing we had to think about. Well, you know, you got to put the hits in, but you don't want to do the CBS special. So, you got to put some of the songs that no one's ever seen as a, you know, as a preview of what they can get on the DVD. So, you know, we thought long and hard about how to repackage this and reintroduce this to the fans. Actually, also, we expanded because we were limited in time. In the CBS broadcast, we had a few packages. We had history of Madison Square Garden. We had fans. We had, you know, a history of guest stars that performed on the show. We really had to squeeze them down for the CBS broadcast on the full length. They're much longer. History of the garden is a longer piece. We should, you know, everything is longer. So people will be seeing that for the first time as well, expanded versions. And it's different. It's, it's, it really flows nice. It's completely different than the CBS broadcast. To that point, we're talking now about three cuts of the film. Obviously, you mentioned the, the CBS broadcast was a super quick turnaround. So it started there and then you moved on to cutting the full show together. Right. And then the PBS broadcast came from the full show. Yeah, we went back and forth. Steven, I did a few rounds and you know, again, they had a limited, they had limited time as well. So it's, you know, it's, you know, you're playing Tetris a little bit, but we want to give fans something different and something compelling and something new, something, you know, it's a pledge show. So, right. From the original CBS, when you moved on to do the full show, was it taking what you would, like the edits you had done for CBS and then expanded it or were those songs in the original broadcast re, re-edited it as well. The edits from the CBS special are the same edits that you'll see in the extended, you know, in the extended with the caveat that there's heads and tails. You'll see a little bit more of the beginning, a little bit more of the end. We did no music edits on the CBS version. We had a squeeze, yes, we had a cut out audience, you know, it breathes better in the full length, you know, you get more of a sense of the audience and their joy and, and it really works nice. Yeah, going back to the setlist for a second, I was curious about this. The big tree for me at least was having half mile away in there and you know, we know Billy will do usually a deep cut once every show at MSG, but I don't think that one had come up in a long time. What were the discussions like about what deep cuts or what songs that aren't played every time, which one of those were going to go in? You kind of alluded to it before, but I was curious like how, how you guys landed on those. The conversation was, look, we, you know, we brought over the, over the hundred shows, we brought, you know, deep cuts in throughout and we looked at all of the deep cuts that we performed, we sort of had a conversation like we always do, which is the one that worked the best that is the most fun to play and, you know, feels, you know, special. And half a mile away was one of the ones that just raised to the top. You know, it was half a mile away or a room of our own or, you know, a couple of ones that were played more than modern women, a couple of times, you know, so there were, there were a few of them. Half a mile away was, you know, always got a great crowd reaction and it was a, it was kind of a unique, it was a unique thing. So, so that was why that one bubbled to the surface. It was a very short conversation. It was like, you know, sat in the dressing room with the band, say, which one of these deep cuts you think we should put in and like, I think everybody said half a mile away right away. So, you know, Brian was a big, was a big fan of, of that and Billy, Billy doesn't really, you know, Billy didn't like the song until, you know, I think Mike Del Joudus did a poll on his website of deep, deep tracks and half a mile away kept coming up as number one and number two. So we knew it was a fan favorite. So that's how that, that one ended up there. Stubborn away from the show real quick, Barry, I was curious. We were looking at your site and, you know, just looking at the breadth of artists you've worked with. Is there a difference between how you approach something if it's a pop artist, a metal artist, a hard rock artist, something like that or is, or from your end, is it just every show is individual? That sort of thing. Everybody shows individual. I mean, I don't like doing anything that is cookie cutter and, you know, you know, the old, you know, what I call broadcast or, you know, it used to be, okay, you place cameras, you know, it over here, over there, over there, but every artist is different and, and, you know, you want to adjust it to the artist to best present them. You know, so I try not to do any cookie cutter productions. You know, Billy was unique in that, you know, again, rotating camera platform and, you know, he does what he wants, you know, one of the first questions I asked Steve, you know, Steve and I go back over 20 years and I've seen Billy a million times, but when it got down to the production aspect that I'm thinking about it, I'm like, who controls the rotation of his piano and Steve goes, Billy does and he will never listen to you. If you ask him to do something or not to do something, he'll do the complete opposite.
So we had to come up with a creative way to be able to get it. You never know, you know, you want to see him sing. You want a, you know, you want a camera looking at the front of him. You know, we never knew which way he'd be facing. So that was, you know, you know, like other shows, and answer to your question, it's, you have to. You can't do cookie cutter productions. Every artist is different. The cadence of every show is different. And what they perform are they guitar heavy or they dance heavy or they, you know, vocal heavy. And we also want to film this very cinematically. Steve always says, I want this film like if it was 1965 and the camera guy had a hundred pound camera on his shoulder, you know, that you couldn't move much. And that's the beauty of cinematic shoots. It's, it's, yes, you use cinematic cameras, you know, but just because you use the cinema camera and cinema lenses doesn't make something cinematic. It's movement. It's filming things that's right for the artist, right for the venue. It has to all come together creatively. Barry and I sort of had a run up at this with this exact team. We did the John Mellon camp film. Words and music, I think it was at the name of the film. I think it was the name of the actor. So the point, the point is is that, you know, it was Paul Duke Dale, who I had met. I had done a Lenny Krabitz film with him, which is when I had first met him in Europe. So, and this is, you know, many, many years ago. So when the Mellon camp project. I said, Barry, let's see if we can get Paul. Paul came in and did this. And, you know, there's some similarities in style and enlightening. Obviously, same director, same lighting guy, same producer. But it was, it was a proof of concept that I knew that I knew from the beginning that when we were going to do Billy that I wanted it to, I wanted it to be Barry. And I wanted it to be Paul. So we had a couple of bites at the Apple. And that one still stands up. I mean, I looked it at the other day. I mean, John ended up doing a voiceover throughout because he hates live concerts. So he kind of stomped on a lot of the drama of it. But you could, but that in its release, you can turn off his dialogue. It's sort of like director's car. And watch the film. That was a great film. And I worked with Paul previously as well. So when Steve and I were talking melancholy, he mentioned Paul. And I was like, you know, absolutely. You know, and Paul was gracious enough. He was excited. He's a Billy fan as well. And he came across the pond to check out the shows a couple of times. And it just was magical. Magical team. You know, obviously Steve, you've been at every show. Barry, you've seen a bunch of times that the director came out. And I remember Steve, you mentioned that you guys set up the whole rig at Bikki's Black Box and Lidits, Pennsylvania, you know, to test everything out. Even with all that preparation, was there anything different on the night of the performance that was either like a happy accident or something like a challenge that you had to work around in the moment that you couldn't prepare for? It, you know, it's funny. You can do all the prep in the world. And you can be rehearsed and you can have your camera moves rehearsed and you can have all your plan. There's something that happens when the house light goes out where it's almost like an itch a sketch where like it's a blank slate and you don't fucking know anything. And that first couple of songs like you're looking at monitors and you're seeing how everything's reacting in real time. And everybody's adrenaline is going. The speed of which the cameras are moving and the director settling in. So, you know, like it was all a surprise. Like we sort of knew what our box paints were. But, you know, the magic didn't really land on us until we had enough time to like, all right, a couple of songs under our belt. And the audience is good. Up the bands a little nervous, up billies a little nervous, where he's, you know, you're kind of sensing and you're being in the moment. There's this really magical thing that happens when you're doing these things because it, you know, I've always said, you know, a lot of live experiences is femoral, like you leave it's over and you, whatever, whatever record of it that you see is only part of the whole story. And the same thing that night, you know, I think about halfway through I looked over to Mark the photo, you know, my co designer in all of this. And we kind of looked at each other went, is it good? I will. Okay. You know, and you all look at each other and say, everybody doubts. We're like, I don't know. It feels right, but you never, you, you never really know that is where we get to experience the same kind of vibe and feeling that the musicians do because you can be rehearsed till, you know, from today until tomorrow. But once the lights go out, the other thing that's an interesting fact is everything slows down when you, when you started, like you have much more time to make decisions in real time. And you're prepping, you're always thinking one step ahead, two steps ahead, three steps ahead. But when it's happening, you have to be in the moment. So, you know, I think, I think, you know, it's the old Malcolm Gladwell 10,000 hours thing. Like if you, if you've got 10,000 hours under your belt, you've got muscle memory and you know how, you know how to react the best you can. But I don't think any of us knew what we were going to get. We kind of knew, but you, you never know. Yeah, you're nervous. You're there a very long day. You know, you have one chance to get it right. You know, it's a lot of nerves going in. You know, you're worried about cameras dying and you're worrying about audio cutting out. It's one chance to get it right. Everybody, you know, talks about the last waltz as being the, you know, greatest concert film ever. You know, most of it was reshot in the studio a couple of days later, half the show. We had one chance to get it right. He wasn't playing two nights. We weren't going to film the 100th and 101th one show. We had a film film, you know, show 100. That was it. That was the show. And it was being broadcast 12 days after we filmed that, you know. And a lot goes into it, you know, using one of Steve's quotes, the inside baseball. It's kind of funny. Two things happened during the show, you know, right before innocent man, he usually does this little rolling stone start me up gag. And then during you may be right, they go into rock and roll by Led Zeppelin. When you release a show, you have to get publishing sync rights and the rolling stones and Led Zeppelin are notoriously restrictive about the use of their of their music. And we were told that Led Zeppelin never license licenses their music period. That's it. You can ask, but it's not going to happen. So that morning we didn't get clearance. We were waiting. We were waiting. You know, Steve had to go to the bands to say, look, you know, I don't think we could do the you know, it's in rock and roll. Segway and maybe right. The band was upset. They're kind of resigned to it. They would just play the song throughout. And two hours before the show, Jimmy Page granted approval for for sync rights. So we're able to, you know, do that. So that was a little nerve. And Mick Jagger also gave us permission to use start me up, which was both because, you know, they don't they don't allow that to anybody, but it's a billy and I guess everybody likes them. Everybody has a affection for him. But those were two unknowns going. The thing about that with Bill is that, you know, you never ask him to get in the room and do your work for you. But, you know, when it comes down to like him being the only one to do it, it was like, hey, Bill, can we tell Jimmy it's a personal request from you? And he's like, fuck, yeah, I'm a. That's Billy saying Billy, Billy does that the same way when I want to get a reservation in a restaurant and I go and he goes, we'll use my name. I don't care. Pretty generous with that power, especially when it comes to music, he's such a huge music fan and they all know it. But the Jimmy Page one was like running down the hall. It was almost like the McCartney moment. Hey McCartney's coming. Hey, we. Let's get on the. You know, with the past few years, we got the extended versions of reimagined almost of life from Long Island in Yankee Stadium this time around the concert shot 12 days later at airs and about just a year later, we get the full blu-ray was the experience of putting this together in that compressed form, you know, obviously with the 12 days of course, but even just just a year out versus the amount of time that life from Long Island in Yankee Stadium. Had to to germinate with fans and gain their status was at a different experience turning around and releasing the full version of this so quickly. We knew we were capturing history in a world where there's only so many opportunities you're going to get to see Billy in that band live. We also have the memory of not adequately covering previous shows, you know Yankee Stadium was a 26 song.
We only shot 11, 12 songs. We didn't shoot the whole show. And in fact, what we went to recut it, John Small was like, "I think I shot the whole show." And then we went in and re-transfered all the film. But it was like, "No." In fact, in Yankee Stadium, Uptown Girl is kind of cobbled together. Like, it's, we only have part of Uptown Girl. We had to Frankenstein that particular song a little bit because we didn't have a full coverage with all the cameras. So, I knew that I didn't want to make that mistake this time. And very, and I knew that we got the cameras here. We've got everybody here. We've got the team here. Our eye was always on the prize of getting all of it. You know, that was actually standard practice in the old broadcast days of live broadcasts where, you know, when they went to commercial, everybody put down their cameras. They stopped directing. And then, you know, you go back into the archives. I experienced it a few times on old farm-age shows. I was involved with the archive. We went back to look at the footage and also everybody just put their camera down. And, you know, and when they went to commercial, it's so frustrating. So, we wanted to capture every minute of this show. And, you know, and everything was the same loving care. And also, it should be noted that, unlike many shows, there's something you do. Many people do what's called the line cut. You're calling cameras live. And that's what people use. That's released. We didn't do what's called the line cut. No cameras were called or, you know, we didn't record and edit live. We went back and meticulously edited every song from scratch, which was just a huge project to get it done in eight days. Then, with coloring and probably with editors and assistant editors, we probably had a team of about 20 people working on this. And then, again, we returned. And I don't know if it was three months, four months, six months later to do the rest of the songs in that same loving fashion. When a director is concentrated on doing a line cut, he's directing his cameras to get him in and out of certain places to get coverage so that he can take that particular shot at a particular time that's generally listed in a shot list where an assistant director is saying, you know, you have four seconds before the guitar solo and 12 seconds before the drum fill and that kind of stuff. So what it does, directorially, is it forces you to make the cameras hit their marks at particular times. What Paul Doodale said was, "I don't want to do this. I want each cameraman to look at their shots as continuous shots. I don't want positions. I want to go from one place to another with intention. It ends up putting you in a situation where the camera is your eye." So if you're looking at a guitar solo, your head is going to pan over to the drums and back to the vocal when the vocal starts singing. So the camera acts as your eye. When you're having to do a line cut, you are interrupting that entire shot. So always adamant about it. But producers, the people who are paying for it want to walk away with something. So what we did was we had an assistant director who basically banged together an edit without knowing where the cameras were going to go, without knowing what he was going to cover just to give a flavor of those shots. That particular line cut was something that we could then hand to Sony and say, "Proof of concept." "Hey, we got it. We got a show." But pay no attention to it. So I was like, "I don't want anything to do with that." I don't even think we digitized it in the edit suite. I think we just gave them the raw tape. Then it got put in a burn bag. You've both mentioned how you wanted it to be cinematic. On a technical level, what does that mean? Is that just the quality of camera? Is it also the lenses along with the angles you're thinking of? What does that mean in terms of the equipment and the strategies that you put together for this? I think you want to use what's best for the circumstance. There are many types of cinematic cameras. There are many types of lenses. It's the environment that you're in and how we want to dishoot it dictates what cameras you use, what lenses you want to use. And that changes for every show. You asked me before, "I do a lot of different genres of music. I've produced a lot of different types of artists." In this instance, we chose airy cameras. We chose certain cinematic lenses to capture the lighting properly and the capture where the cameras were. It's really a long discussions and a lot of charting and saying, "Okay, we're going to put a camera here. Our Bret Turnball or D.P. did CAD strongs and showed us an advanced what the camera would look like, what the angle would look like in advance." Everything is just made it properly. That's a lot of work in itself. Len's selection is really important when you talk about the cinema aspect of it because when you're doing a multi-camera live shoot, most of your lenses need to be more general. In other words, you want focal lengths where you can get in close and when you can get wide. So you end up sacrificing a certain amount of quality by not using what they call prime lenses, which means that it's a fixed aspect ratio. It's a fixed size and generally prime lenses. The glass is a little bit better because the lens doesn't have to do multiple things. But when you're charting something like that, you have a D.P. who says, "Well, this shot is really what we want this shot to do. If we put a prime lens in this position, we're going to get the best quality of that shot. But we know that the camera operator has to frame it." That's where the math and the algebra or the geometry plays into something like that. So when you're talking cinema playback, the reason they look that good blown up on a big screen is because you're using the best glass for that particular shot, which A, it's more expensive, B, it means that you need more cameras. The other thing is that you got a guy who doesn't want to have camera operators up there. So now with robotics, you have to go in and you have the opportunity to have a lot more flexibility on the camera without an operator holding it on his shoulder. And that's a whole other set of like, "Well, that camera's got to be able to do this. What's the best for that application?" Steve, when you're speaking about lenses, what really struck me this time was how well-defined the lighting was. You could just see almost the borders on every beam. There were those shots where you could see like a prism of lights around the stage. And I imagine that's the difference between like if you're listening to your band being shot on a video camera versus being in the studio and hearing it on the best mics. What's that like seeing your lighting designs shot with those prime lenses? Is it more of what you envision? Do you see it in a way you've never seen before? Because it definitely has such a more enhanced effect. There's a dance. You know, lights and cameras. There's a dance, an exposure, in focus, in color selection. The lenses are much more capable of capturing more. They can capture more dynamic. The shadows are clearer and cleaner. What I did was assume having had some experience doing television lighting that there are certain tricks of the trade that you utilize to maximize the depth of field and the cameras and the intensity of the lights. If I was to give you an overall note, a lot of cases you dim down the intensity of the lights when you're shooting on camera so as to create more work for the lens. The lens has to kind of grab onto that light to be able to get the proper exposure. So it's a little bit of a constant dance, especially with moving lights and with dichroic filters, where certain things react to your eye away a certain way and they don't react as well on camera as they do to your eyes. It's a true collaboration between me and the director of photography and Mark and me and the director of photography to get the maximum approach. The other thing is you get a live show. So you don't want to lose the cues. You don't want to lose the energy of what the lighting brings to that. And in fact, I have a tendency to be a little bit more conservative and Barry was on me on this. It's like, no, you got to do those cues. I get a nerd to it. It's like, yeah, they're lighting cues. I've seen them a million times. But someone observes him says, no, no, no, no, no. You got to do all of that dynamic stuff because that's part of the excitement that leads to the audience's experience. So it's a dance. We're very fortunate. I have, Fafonos got years and years of time shooting on camera. I mean, he had just come off of shooting the whole Star Trek series in Canada. And that's some cutting-edge shit that he was doing. We brought all of that knowledge and experience to bear. And once again, you never really know until you get there. Like the smoke changes, like the smoke runs.
So you got smoke that comes in front of the camera that affects the exposure. So, you know, there's a few things that are that can be controlled but not completely controlled. And you got to be able to, you know, make those in-flight changes when you see something happening on them on it. Yeah, and you know, in the old days, they used to light up rooms like game shows. You know, very bright, bright rooms. You know, and with cinema, you want to dim down the lights more. But the dance is that you want to make it darker using these cinema cameras. They really give it that cinematic look. But also there are 20,000 people in the room. So everything has to be well lit for them. You know, what looks good on camera might look differently in the room. So that's really the dance that Steve has to live, that we all have to live. And being able to make it really good for cinema, but also so look good in the room. And some of those cues are important. Like to me, Miami 2017, which is what opens the show, it's that first lighting bat, you know, a thing that you do Steve. It just sets the tone for the rest of the night when the room just explodes in lights. You know, you can't get rid of those cues that are so important. And I think the beauty of this show also is that as Steve said, there were three actors in this show. Is that I really think we achieved making it the audience, the fewer at home, keeping their attachment to Billy, giving that intimacy of many of our shots, but also showing the grandeur of Madison Square Garden with some of the wide shots. You know, they really show the lighting and hey, this is Madison Square Garden. So I think we achieved the good segue between those two worlds. At the end of the day, we got recognition from the most important people because we got an Emmy for the lighting. And you know, that is voted on by fellow members in that category. So, you know, it isn't the general public saying, oh, it was lit good. The awards we got were for from our contemporaries, mark in our contemporaries, people that we've worked with, people that we know, that all had dogs in the fight and said, these guys did the best job this year. So that was gratification that I didn't, I didn't look, you know, I've been doing this for five decades. So to get that little notch in the belt was, you know, beyond incredible. Generally, when I go into shoot a show, it's because the artist wants it, their manager wants it, and I walk in, and I'm the enemy to production. I'm the pain in the butt. You know, they all have to work a little harder. I've never experienced a team that never said no. You know, we came up with an idea, hey, you know, we, we, we had them move the front, you know, their monitor world and guitar world. So we could fit platforms on the side of the stage for moving cameras to make sure we capture Billy. It was just nobody ever said no. And that's Steve and that's the whole Billy Joel team. Everybody wanted to make this great. And I've never had a better experience as a producer because there was never a no. A Madison score guard and the same thing. They, they let us bring in a spider cam, which they never allow, which is, you know, cables going across the ceiling with, you know, a heavy camera flying over an audience. Like what they do on the NFL, but the NFL, they just use a small HD camera. This is a big heavy camera. They even approved this using a drone. It's going anywhere we want to go with it. In the building, we ended up not, I felt I was a little too dangerous with spider cam cables going across. But Madison's score guard allowed us to do whatever we wanted to do. I didn't get a single, you can't do that. This is the entire process. And that's why it's so good. You know, the reason we got all of that cooperation is because, you know, it all comes from Billy. Billy is a collaborative, non temperamental primadana who makes no demands. He just wants everybody to show up and do the best they possibly can. And that vibe gets translated all the way through the organization. Madison Square Garden had, you know, a walk in the park once a month. It was a huge revenue stream for them. It established the brand of Madison Square Garden along with a franchise with a musician. It was mutually beneficial for everybody. No one had an agenda. Like everybody wanted to do the best they could. You know, there were conversations obviously, but, you know, and there was money. You had to pay people, but even that was part of a negotiation that was not oppressive. We made fair deals and they made fair deals. You know, there's this whole theory about how New York always has its hand out, you know, and wants. Sure. And it's punitive. There was none of that. It's the hype. I spread, but it was not, you know, it was not prohibitive for us to do our job. And Madison Square Garden got one of the most visually powerful advertisements for that room. I watch it today and I look at Bill at he's 76, off the week. You know, he was what's 74 when we did the show. I look at this guy at this point in his career where eight too many people on the planet that could have pulled that off. I mean, his contemporary Bruce is doing it now. But that there aren't too many out there that have that command and also have that kind of quality, you know, that still remains. His voice was great and you know, the band was great. This is one of those, one of those documents that is at the highest level celebrating like history. So I think we, I think we, we've done good. 150 lifetime shows and in one venue is just will never be repeated again. Venues that size. It's an amazing accomplishment and it's forever. Gonna be available. Smithsonian, I say. Yes. What are some of your favorite moments from the final both in terms of like the musical performances and also just sequences that you think just came out? Exceptionally well. My two favorites are Big Madam Albury Street with sting without a doubt and every little thing she does is magic with sting. I think those two things are just so great and so neat. You know, his, I think the performance of in his band and the performance of still rock and roll to me are the best there is. I will tell you, I've heard scenes from Italian restaurant thousands and thousands of homes and I put the damn thing on and I get teary eyed and my heart rate goes up every frickin time I see it. So I've heard that I want to have gotten written so like it's remarkable to me how it still resonates with me so strongly. And I also think the other, the other two songs that I think are the most beautiful examples of those performances are New York state of mind and Vienna. I think those two moments are as good as, as any of that stuff gets. So those are my four. I was going to say the same thing New York state and Vienna they were just cinematic masterpieces. In fact, if you look at pretty much all of the artwork that was done in promotional artwork, they come from those two songs, you know, just belly with the lights in the background and the lit wristbands. And there are those songs are just cinematic masterpieces and then just the big moments, you know, you go on the downbeats and lighting cues when you go to those wide shots, it just show Madison Square Garden. And it's the most famous arena in the world. You really see it in all its glory. The sound mix was brilliant Brian Rogals who has been with Philly was, you know, little longer than Steve did a great job. We also did the mix out in Los Angeles. And same thing we mix the first 14 songs and then came back and did the other 11. He did a mashable job. The audio is fantastic. Is there anything that I'm in hindsight that would have been something interesting to try that you didn't. I would have loved to have had the stranger. In this I would have loved it for them to perform that song. I would have loved to have stiletto. I would have loved to have had until the night. I think those are the three, the three things that I I miss a lot anyway, but I think those three songs as part of the legacy, maybe not stiletto so much, but certainly until the night and the stranger. I think we're, we're two songs that that I would have I would have loved to have been performed as a producer. There's a financial aspect of this, you know, you're giving, giving a certain amount of money and, you know, I'm always worried about being, you know, staying there and not going over budget. So, you know, my regrets are like, damn, I was under budget.
I could have got another camera in there. Or I could have got a different toy. You know, those are my favorite. Sure. And there's some great little bits in the long form, the end credit roll with the few people in the crew making their comments about the experience that wasn't in the broadcaster really great. There's some good personality. You get to meet part of this team that's been with him for so many decades. So you get a little flavor of the family and how important the garden was to all of us. [Music] Barry, Steve, thanks so much, fellas, for joining us. We always appreciate you all taking the time and it's always great when we can get the folks involved willing us to take us behind the curtain and show us some of the nuts and bolts with how some of these things come together. So thanks again for allowing us to do that with you. I also personally want to thank Steve and Barry for their patience. If my video looked a little different and if I looked like I was a hostage at the beginning of that is because I have three computers. None of them were working. And so while everybody was sitting chatting politely at the assigned time to get in there, I'm running through all these computers and then just gave up and did it holding my phone up to me. So I'm all "wall-eyed" looking and freaked out. But they were great. They just hung around. Because I was going to be bummed out though Michael was going to have to do it on his own without me. But they stuck around. They waited for me. We made it work and it was another great conversation. Now we turn it back to you folks. Let us know what you think. Anything that surprised you about the production of this film in concert movie. Was there anything that caught your eye? Anything you loved particularly about it? Let us know. And also anything you learned today from Steve and Barry that you didn't know. Reach out to us.
[email protected]. We're all over the socials, Facebook, and Instagram. And I don't know. We've been debating TikTok. If I could wrap my head around short-form video, we'll get on there I guess. We'll get there about a year and a half after it's in. Yeah, after whatever else is like, they're like, "No, you got to go back to Snapchat again." Dorks. Find us on MySpace and Friends, too. Joe, we should just do MySpace. Just add a "spite", add a pure "fricking" "spite". That's right. Yeah, exactly. Anyway, find us there or on our Discord. It's our little Reddit/AOL chatroom style. Well, most of you is not discord by now. You can find a link to it in the show notes. And we'll see you there or in the email. Oh, and if you liked this episode or other episodes, please remember to give us a 5 star rating and/or positive review on the podcast platform of your choice. Every 5 star rating and/or positive review tells you all my de algorithms that we are a podcast of merit and they should serve us up to other people. And while you're at it, I know I'm behind on getting stuff up on YouTube. But find us there anyway and, you know, smash the buttons, like and subscribe. Do all the things. Do all the things. And we will see you next time. We'll see you guys soon. Appreciate it. When will you realize? Being always with you. But don't you realize? [BLANK_AUDIO]
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