Billy Joel will be breaking his own record for consecutive shows in a series with his 13th Billy Joel "franchise" appearance at New York's Madison Square Garden on Jan. 9.
The show will be Joel's 59th appearance at the Garden (five behind the record-holder, Elton John).
How does something like this happen? Joel explained the idea with a long-winded story in Billboard this January.
"I hadn't really done a tour since 2010, I was still working with Elton, and the last gig we did was in March of 2010 in Albany," Joel said. "I was in a horrendous amount of pain, I had hip dysplasia in both hips, I could hardly walk. I just had to get off the road. Finally, I got it diagnosed correctly, something I've had all my life that had been misdiagnosed for years and years. So I had the surgery, which takes quite a bit of time to get over. They gave me the option of doing one hip at a time, agony for three months, then again when you do the other one. I said, 'just hit me, get it over with.' So it took half a year to recover from, learn to walk, do a lot of therapy, get back to being mobile again."
"I thought I needed a little time off to recover, so didn't go back to work for three years. I played Jazzfest in New Orleans in 2012, a one-off in Australia at some bizarre festival in Sydney, I didn't really start thinking about working again until I played at the 12-12-12 concert for Hurricane Sandy Relief at the Garden. Everybody's there, Mick Jagger, Bruce Springsteen, the Who, Paul McCartney, a who's who of classic rock and roll. We went on toward the end of the show and did about four or five songs, walked off, we didn't think we were anything special. But after that, people just kept saying, 'you guys stole the show!' Wha? I've played Garden before, I thought a lot better than that, but then we got a whole lot of inquiries about gigging again."
The Garden soon reached out to set up a residency.
"I heard that and thought, 'hmm, that's kinda cool.' People talk about a residency in Las Vegas or Branson, Mo., but then you gotta live there. I started thinking, 'my gig's at the Garden, all I gotta do is commute.' I guess they looked at the ticket demand once it was announced and thought, 'wait a minute, this guy can keep playing here for the rest of his natural life.' I thought, 'I'm gonna be 65 next year, am I gonna be able to do this?' But once a month isn't bad."
"At the press conference at the Garden to announce this I didn't fully realize what it was until they unrolled this logo which says 'Billy Joel at the Garden.' It's got it's own logo, next to the Knicks, the Rangers, the Liberty women's basketball team, and Billy Joel At The Garden, and all of a sudden it hit me, holy crap, that's a franchise."
Boom. There it is. Tickets for the Jan. 9 show will be available beginning Nov. 10.
