Billy Joel is a NYC staple. And because of that, he has played Madison Square Garden every month since January 2014. However, that is coming to an end in July 2024 with his 150th show at the Manhattan arena.
“I’m kind of flabbergasted that it lasted as long as it did. My team tells me that we could continue to sell tickets, but ten years, 150 shows – all right already!” said Joel. “I do remember the first time we played Madison Square Garden, it was the pinnacle of my career. I thought, ‘My God, I’m headlining Madison Square Garden.’ Everybody in the world knows when you play The Garden, it’s not just New York. To our audience, I want to thank them for coming to our shows for this long. It’s hard to end, even at 150 lifetime shows. I just want to thank everyone for the wonderful thing that’s happened here.”
Joel played his first show at MSG on December 14, 1978. Then 35 years later, he announced his monthly residency.
While the 74-year-old’s time at MSG is coming to an end, his career is not. He will continue to tour, just not at the place he has called home 150 times.
It is the sixth night of Chanukah, so that means it is time for Dave Grohl and Greg Kurstin to release their take on another song by a Jewish artist. Tonight, they gave us something from The Piano Man.
Grohl wrote, “While he claims a secular Long Island upbringing (and has songs full of Catholic and Italian imagery), Billy Joel remains one of the great Jews of musical scripture—here’s his ultimate ode to a true Macher: ‘Big Shot!'”
After watching this performance, I hope that the Foo Fighters add kazoos to their act!
2020 has been one hell of a year, and a lot of sh!tty things have happened around the world, including coronavirus, George Floyd, and Donald Trump’s f*ck ups. You could say, it deserves its own version of We Didn’t Start the Fire. We don’t have to wait for Billy Joel to do it because Kai Steines did it for him.
Now, that I listened to his take more than once, 2021 cannot come soon enough. There is only one problem; we still 178 left in this year, including the election on November 3rd. Let’s hope we get to 2021.
Can we talk about Kai Steines for a second, since that might be all we have left, doesn’t he look like Steve Perry’s long lost son instead of actually being Mark Steines’ baby boy?
If you are like me, then you have only seen a handful of the Marvel Comics movies. Therefore, you want to see Avengers: Endgame, but you know you will have no idea what is going on because you missed so much of the story leading up to it.
Well, Jimmy Fallon and The Tonight Show has people like us covered. He got several of the superheroes to sing a cover of Billy Joel’s We Didn’t Start the Fire to tell the backstory we missed. Now I feel comfortable going to see the film. Once, I can actually find a screening of it that is not sold old.
BTW Watch this video all the way until the end for a very sweet ending that will bring a tear to your eye.
The Goldberg’s creator Adam F Goldberg Tweeted the above photo and said, “Guess what I’m doing an episode about???” If you look at the first few postcards on the board, you can see they correspond with the first line of lyrics (Harry Truman, Doris Day, Red China, Johnnie Ray) to Billy Joel’s We Didn’t Start Fire. Therefore, we can pretty much assume that he is doing an episode about the song that covers 40 (1949-1989) years of history.
Now that we know that this is coming up, I cannot wait to see what they do with it. It is probably going to be brilliant, sweet and hysterical like all of the other episodes from the hit sitcom. On that note, while CBS and NBC are airing repeats against the World Series game (go Dodgers), ABC is not. Thus, you don’t want to miss tonight’s The Goldbergs at 8p.
