Billy Joel tried to kill himself twice before realizing he could channel his sadness into music

Los Angeles Times

3 days ago

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.