BILLY JOEL RIDES A MOTORCYCLE

Billy Joel is telling Tom Cotter a story about his buddy, fellow hall-of-fame rock-’n’-roller Bruce Springsteen.

“Bruce is always looking for a character bike. He has one of the new Triumph Bonnevilles, which is a great bike. I told him about our shop, so he came down in the middle of winter. It’s freezing—minus five degrees—and he wants to take out my Sacred Cow bobber. I said, ‘Are you crazy?’ It’s so cold, and he had no gear, just a helmet. After a ride, he came back and said, ‘I want you to build me that bike.’ So he gave us the specs, and we’re almost finished with it. It started out as a Kawasaki W650. The frame is black and the tank will be metalflake gold. Man, he’s hard core.”

“Rockin’ Garages,” written by Cotter and Ken Gross and published last year by Motorbooks International, is a beautifully illustrated, 192-page, coffee-table-style book. Focus is on the mostly automobile collections of 20 musicians, among them Keith Urban, Arlo Guthrie, Sammy Hagar, Brian Johnson, John Oates, Nick Mason and J Geils. Joel and Pat Simmons of Doobie Brothers fame are the only subjects fixated by motorcycles.

“In 1977,” described Cotter, “Joel, then 27, bought a Yamaha 400 Special and thought life couldn’t get any better—at least until he traded up to a Yamaha 750 Virago, then to his first Harley-Davidson, an AMF-era Sportster. ‘When I bought the Harley, people thought I had arrived,’ said Joel.

“Joel has never had a Japanese-bike phobia. ‘They are lighter, better, cheaper and their engineering is brilliant,’ he said. ‘And Japanese bikes got more people into motorcycles, which we should all be happy about.’”

A crash in 1982 nearly cost Joel his music career. “The impact pulverized the bone in my left thumb and pulled my right wrist out of its socket,” he told Cotter. “I’m bleeding, my hands didn’t work, and a police officer asks me for my license. So, I told him to pull my wallet out of my pocket. He looks at my license, then yells to the woman, ‘Hey, lady, you just hit Billy Joel!’”

Joel has owned a number of Italian motorcycles, including a Ducati Mike Hailwood replica. “Moto Guzzis are my personal favorites,” he said. “I once rented a V7 Classic in Lake Como in Italy. That would be my all-time favorite bike.”

“Rockin’ Garages” is available for $35 from www.motorbooks.com.

from cycleworld