Billy Joel reveals brain disorder diagnosis, cancels shows
According to information posted on the
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Joel, who's 76, was due to play a series of stadium shows in the US and England between now and July 2026. All of those shows have been canceled. (Joel has performed at
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At the time, Joel issued a statement saying 'while I regret postponing any shows, my health must come first.' But he also sounded optimistic that he would recover from whatever was ailing him.
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'I look forward to getting back on stage and sharing the joy of live music with our amazing fans,' he said. 'Thank you for your understanding.'
Mark Shanahan can be reached at
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Billy Joel's first wife walked out on him in hospital bed after motorcycle crash that nearly killed him
Billy Joel is reliving some of the most painful moments in his life. In the upcoming documentary, "Billy Joel: And So It Goes," the "Piano Man" crooner, 76, recalled the moment his first wife, Elizabeth Weber, walked away from their marriage shortly after his near-fatal motorcycle crash. "I always romanticized motorcycles. There's something about it. I feel like I can be completely disconnected from the world. There's a sense of freedom about that," Joel said in the doc, per People. Billy Joel Cancels All Concerts Due To Brain Disorder Diagnosis Joel said his admiration for motorcycles left Weber "scared all the time." "I on many occasions said to him, you know, 'You can't do this, this is dangerous,'" she said. Read On The Fox News App "Elizabeth had warned me, she said, 'Be careful, be careful, 'cause you're going to have an accident,'" the musician recalled. In 1982, Joel suffered multiple injuries after his bike crashed into a vehicle mid-intersection. "I was amazed I was still alive. I should have died in that accident," he said. "And I laid there in shock for a couple of minutes and I went to the hospital." The accident left him with a broken arm, leg and wrist. While he recovered in the hospital, Weber opted out of the marriage. "I would've stayed, I would've been able — like so many women before me — to make that accommodation for someone you love ,but there was no way that I could stand by and watch him kill himself," said Weber, who recalled placing the house key onto a tray in his hospital room. "I just didn't have that in me. And I felt very strongly that that's what was going." When Weber left the hospital, she recalled telling Joel, "You know, someday they may write about us and I hope that they say that we really did something." According to her, Joel responded with, "I hope they could say we went all the way." She added, "And that was it. That really was the final. That was it." The couple were married from 1973 until 1982. "After 'Glass Houses' came out I was always on the road, working, working, I look back on that guy and I don't even know who he was, he had to be so ambitious to work that hard and work that much," Joel said in the documentary. "So, it must have not been easy to be married to me at the time." "I wasn't asking him to change, but I just did not want to live like that. My response to it was to get a place in New York City where you can enjoy anonymity — so it wasn't so much as we separated, but we started to get a little bit isolated from one another and I also knew that he wasn't in a good place. We were all under a lot of stress," Weber said. "All of us dealt with our stresses in different ways. And so there was a lot, a lot of alcohol use and eventually a lot of drug use." Like What You're Reading? Click Here For More Entertainment News Elsewhere in the documentary, Joel also opened up about what led him to attempt suicide twice and fall into a coma. When the musician was in his early 20s, Joel was part of a band called Attila with his best friend, Jon Small, who was married to Weber at the time. He ended up moving in with Small, Weber, and their son, according to People. "Bill and I spent a lot of time together," Weber confessed in the documentary, per People. She added that their friendship was gradual and a "slow build." Joel eventually told his best friend, "I'm in love with your wife." "I felt very, very guilty about it. They had a child. I felt like a homewrecker," Joel admitted in the documentary, which premiered at the Tribeca Film Festival on Wednesday. "I was just in love with a woman, and I got punched in the nose, which I deserved. Jon was very upset. I was very upset." 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WATCH: BILLY JOEL'S WIFE ALEXIS JOEL SHARES HOW SINGER SUPPORTED HER DURING HER BATTLE WITH ENDOMETRIOSIS "But Billy decided that he was going to take all of them… he was in a coma for days and days and days," she emotionally said. "I went to go see him in the hospital, and he was laying there white as a sheet. I thought that I'd killed him." While Joel acknowledged that he had been "very selfish" during the tumultuous time, he recalled his first thought when he woke up from his coma was that he wanted to attempt suicide again. During Joel's second attempt at suicide, he ingested "lemon Pledge," a furniture polish. Miraculously, he survived both attempts, after Small rushed him to the hospital. "Even though our friendship was blowing up, Jon saved my life," Joel explained in the documentary. Fox News Digital's Stephanie Giang-Paunon contributed to this post. Original article source: Billy Joel's first wife walked out on him in hospital bed after motorcycle crash that nearly killed him
Yahoo
13 hours ago
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Billy Joel tried to kill himself twice before realizing he could channel his sadness into music
Previously untold details of Billy Joel's life are revealed in the two-part documentary "Billy Joel: And So It Goes," which premiered last week and hits HBO in July. (Evan Agostini / Invision / Associated Press) Billy Joel's life is awash in revelations these days — some bad, some worse. Last month, the "Only the Good Die Young" singer-songwriter canceled all his upcoming concerts, revealing he was struggling with a brain disorder that causes a potentially reversible kind of dementia. Then last week, he divulged that he attempted suicide twice in his 20s after falling in love with his bandmate's wife and causing the downfall of the band itself. Advertisement Read more: Billy Joel cancels all of his upcoming shows after revealing brain disorder diagnosis "I felt very, very guilty about it. They had a child. I felt like a homewrecker,' Joel says (via People) in the first half of the two-part documentary "Billy Joel: And So It Goes," which premiered last Wednesday and hits HBO Max in July. 'I was just in love with a woman and I got punched in the nose, which I deserved." Joel said both he and his friend and Attila bandmate, Jon Small, were upset by what happened while Joel was living with Small and Small's then-wife, Elizabeth Weber. So upset that Attila — a Led Zeppelin-inspired metal band, according to the New York Times — broke up and Joel started boozing, which sent him into a tailspin. 'I had no place to live," Joel says in the documentary. "I was sleeping in laundromats, and I was depressed, I think to the point of almost being psychotic. So I figured, 'That's it. I don't want to live anymore.'" Advertisement He tried twice to end his life in the early 1970s, according to the documentary. First, he took the entire lot of sleeping pills that his sister, then a medical assistant, had given him to help him sleep. That put him in the hospital. Read more: Christie Brinkley details turbulent marriage with Billy Joel: 'I hesitated to put that scene in the book' "He was in a coma for days and days and days," Judy Molinari says in the program. She thought she had killed her brother. Joel says in the doc that he woke up in the hospital still suicidal, hoping to do it "right" the next time. His sister said he wound up drinking "lemon Pledge" furniture polish. That time, an unlikely person took him to the hospital: Small, his then-estranged best friend. Advertisement "Eventually," Small says in the documentary, "I forgave him." As for those impulses to harm himself, they wound up paying off for Joel after he checked out of a facility he had checked himself into after the second suicide attempt. Read more: 'We apologize': CBS vows to air Billy Joel milestone concert again after ending is cut off "I got out of the observation ward and I thought to myself, you can utilize all those emotions to channel that stuff into music." Joel reconnected with Weber about a year after that, wrote about her in the 1973 song "Piano Man," and married her from then until 1982. Marriages to Christie Brinkley, Katie Lee and current wife Alexis Roderick would follow. Advertisement The first part of the documentary covers Joel's childhood and runs through his 1982 motorcycle accident, according to the New York Times. He doesn't meet his "Uptown Girl," Brinkley, until Part 2. Get notified when the biggest stories in Hollywood, culture and entertainment go live. Sign up for L.A. Times entertainment alerts. This story originally appeared in Los Angeles Times.
Los Angeles Times
13 hours ago
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Billy Joel tried to kill himself twice before realizing he could channel his sadness into music
Billy Joel's life is awash in revelations these days — some bad, some worse. Last month, the 'Only the Good Die Young' singer-songwriter canceled all his upcoming concerts, revealing he was struggling with a brain disorder that causes a potentially reversible kind of dementia. Then last week, he divulged that he attempted suicide twice in his 20s after falling in love with his bandmate's wife and causing the downfall of the band itself. 'I felt very, very guilty about it. They had a child. I felt like a homewrecker,' Joel says (via People) in the first half of the two-part documentary 'Billy Joel: And So It Goes,' which premiered last Wednesday and hits HBO Max in July. 'I was just in love with a woman and I got punched in the nose, which I deserved.' Joel said both he and his friend and Attila bandmate, Jon Small, were upset by what happened while Joel was living with Small and Small's then-wife, Elizabeth Weber. So upset that Attila — a Led Zeppelin-inspired metal band, according to the New York Times — broke up and Joel started boozing, which sent him into a tailspin. 'I had no place to live,' Joel says in the documentary. 'I was sleeping in laundromats, and I was depressed, I think to the point of almost being psychotic. So I figured, 'That's it. I don't want to live anymore.'' He tried twice to end his life in the early 1970s, according to the documentary. First, he took the entire lot of sleeping pills that his sister, then a medical assistant, had given him to help him sleep. That put him in the hospital. 'He was in a coma for days and days and days,' Judy Molinari says in the program. She thought she had killed her brother. Joel says in the doc that he woke up in the hospital still suicidal, hoping to do it 'right' the next time. His sister said he wound up drinking 'lemon Pledge' furniture polish. That time, an unlikely person took him to the hospital: Small, his then-estranged best friend. 'Eventually,' Small says in the documentary, 'I forgave him.' As for those impulses to harm himself, they wound up paying off for Joel after he checked out of a facility he had checked himself into after the second suicide attempt. 'I got out of the observation ward and I thought to myself, you can utilize all those emotions to channel that stuff into music.' Joel reconnected with Weber about a year after that, wrote about her in the 1973 song 'Piano Man,' and married her from then until 1982. Marriages to Christie Brinkley, Katie Lee and current wife Alexis Roderick would follow. The first part of the documentary covers Joel's childhood and runs through his 1982 motorcycle accident, according to the New York Times. He doesn't meet his 'Uptown Girl,' Brinkley, until Part 2.
