Though Jewish, and an atheist, he had, as a boy in a predominantly Catholic part of Hicksville, attended Mass, and even tried confession. To prepare for the flight, he’d put on a necklace of good-luck medallions-pendants of various saints. The back of his head, where hair might be, was freshly shorn, and his features, which in dark or obscure moods can appear mottled and knotted, were at rest, projecting benevolent bemusement. Joel was wearing a black T-shirt tucked into black jeans, black Vans, and an Indian Motorcycle ball cap. He commutes to and from his shows by helicopter. But this schmuck is usually looking down on the highway from an altitude of a thousand feet. And then, a few minutes later, I’m just another schmuck stuck in traffic on the highway.” It’s true: the transition is abrupt, and it has bedevilled rock stars since the advent of the backbeat. He often says that the hardest part isn’t turning it on but turning it off: “One minute, I’m Mussolini, up onstage in front of twenty thousand screaming people. That’s my routine.” Joel has a knack for delivering his own recycled quips and explanations as though they were fresh, a talent related, one would think, to that of singing well-worn hits with sincere-seeming gusto.

Whenever anyone asks him about his pre-show routine, he says, “I walk from the dressing room to the stage. He told a joke that involved Mozart erasing something in a mausoleum the punch line was “I’m decomposing.” He knocked off an ash. “Actually, I composed myself a long time ago,” he said. His next concert, his first in more than a month, was scheduled to begin in five hours, at Madison Square Garden, and he appeared to be composing himself. Weeks of idleness, of puttering around his motorcycle shop and futzing with lobster boats, of books and dogs and meals, were about to give way to a microburst of work. Out on the water, an oyster dredge circled the seeding beds while baymen raked clams in the flats. Beethoven on Sonos, cicadas in the trees, pugs at his feet. It was a brilliant cloudless September afternoon. He had chosen the seating area under a trellis in front of the house, his house, a brick Tudor colossus set on a rise on the southeastern tip of a peninsula called Centre Island, on Long Island’s North Shore. Billy Joel sat smoking a cigarillo on a patio overlooking Oyster Bay.

Early copter crossword