Music Preview: A Pasadena Pops tribute to the ‘Piano Man’
The first time Michael Cavanaugh met pop-hit-maker Billy Joel was in a Las Vegas piano bar. It was 2001, and Cavanaugh was a young singer-pianist playing a gig at the New York, New York Hotel and Casino when the man behind songs like “She’s Got a Way,” “Uptown Girl” and “New York State of Mind” unexpectedly walked into the club.
Famous faces aren’t a rare sighting in Vegas, where “every night is Saturday night,” says Cavanaugh knowingly, but this was different. Joel had been his favorite singer-songwriter since the third grade, and the elder piano man seemed to sense a connection.
“By the end of my first set he was at the piano across from me. We were jamming on the first night I ever met him, which was incredible,” says Cavanaugh, now 44. “We were playing Beatles, we were playing Elvis, and we were trading off verses, singing harmonies and trading off piano solos.
“He requested some Jerry Lee Lewis, and I totally hammed it up — I was playing with my feet, I was stomping on the piano, I was on top of the piano. Billy was loving it, pumping his fists.”
It was the beginning of a musical friendship that ultimately led to Cavanaugh starring in the 2002 premiere Broadway production of “Movin’ Out,” a Tony-winning musical created around Joel’s three decades of hits. Cavanaugh has been performing Joel’s music ever since, and delivers them again in a concert with the Pasadena Pops on Saturday, July 9, at the L.A. County Arboretum.
During that same week they first met in Vegas, Joel invited Cavanaugh to hang out backstage at a couple of concerts, where they talked music in detail. “He was giving me tips on songwriting after one of his shows,” says Cavanaugh. “I was like, ‘Is this really happening to me?’”
Joel, a multiplatinum-selling artist beginning with his 1973 album “Piano Man,” didn’t forget about the Vegas musician, and one day Cavanaugh was summoned to New York to meet with famed stage director-choreographer Twyla Tharp. She had conceived a musical around Joel’s music and the songwriter recommended Cavanaugh.
“Twyla was really taking the reins. Billy at that point was, ‘Twyla, this is your baby.’ If Twyla didn’t like me,” Cavanaugh recalls, “that would have been the end of it.”
He got the lead role and stayed with the Broadway production until it closed three years later. Along the way, he spent a lot of quality time with the singer he first discovered as a Cleveland 7-year-old, while his three older brothers leaned toward the hard rock of Led Zeppelin and Kiss.
Cavanaugh remembers sitting with Joel at an outdoor café in New York City, discussing possible songs and changes in the show, when the hit-maker began singing “Half a Mile Away,” a deep cut from 1978’s “52nd Street” album. There was also a day of rehearsals when Joel invited the younger singer to join him for a drive to his hometown of Hicksville, New York.
“He showed me all over his hometown,” says Cavanaugh. “He points to this ground level apartment in this building and says, ‘Right there is where I wrote ‘Captain Jack.”’ How cool is this? He shared stuff with me, so I got to know him.”
Cavanaugh chose not to lead the touring company for “Movin’ Out,” and moved back to Henderson, Nev., just outside Las Vegas city limits. He’d been on Broadway for three years, singing every song six nights a week, and he was ready for a break.
In 2006, his agent was approached by the Indianapolis Symphony about doing a show of Joel’s music. Cavanaugh has been performing the songs with orchestras ever since, traveling the country to collaborate with the Boston Pops and other ensembles. The music is often by Billy Joel, sometimes by Elton John.
“The music of the ‘70s was always very big for me. It was so real and organic,” Cavanaugh says. “We’ve been doing it now for eight years and it’s not getting old at all.”
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What: “The Pasadena POPS presents the Music of Billy Joel,” with soloist Michael Cavanaugh; Larry Blank, resident Pops conductor
When: Saturday, July 9, 7:30 p.m.
Where: The L.A. County Arboretum, 301 N. Baldwin Ave., Arcadia.
Tickets: Starting at $25.
More info: (626) 793-7172, pasadenasymphony-pops.org
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Steve Appleford, steve.appleford@latimes.com
Twitter: @SteveAppleford
