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From Elvis at the International to Adele at Caesars Palace, other artists have staked their claim to Western residency with extended residencies, but no one has become as legendary in the East as Billy Joel with his regular gigs at New York’s Madison Square Garden. And certainly no one has done it in such a large venue, or with such a focus on locals, not just tourists. Since his residency began in January 2014, the beloved Bronx-born pianist has sold out MSG every month—except during pandemic-related hiatuses—in a strange, magical ritual where New Yorkers, mostly, have gathered to hear old familiar songs about their five boroughs and their most colorful characters.
On Thursday night, in his 150th career show at the Garden, that hometown advantage ended when Joel closed his longtime residency with a bang in front of a cheering, often teary-eyed, sold-out crowd eager to see their hero continue his run at the Garden. “I know, I know, we don’t want to go either,” Joel told the devoted crowd. “But it’s time.”
You could almost smell the money on the floor of MSG (the most expensive tickets were $10,000) as monthly attendees of Joel’s residency huddled together like war buddies, well aware that they might never share this experience again. Men holding large cans of Corona in one hand and miniature replicas of the “150” banner erected in Joel’s honor in the MSG attic took selfies with their male friends wearing the same banners and beers. Groups of women laughed as they showed off T-shirts from Joel concerts they had attended before. Even at the entrance, fans crowding Madison Square Garden sang along to every Billy Joel song they could, usually different tunes at once.
Ultimately, Joel’s setlist that night wasn’t nearly as important as the event, though the music was simply crucial to the crowd’s regulars who swapped numbers and screamed the lyrics to “Big Shot” and “Allentown.” It wasn’t as if Joel and his band were going to experiment with free jazz or cover songs from 1971’s “Cold Spring Harbor.” Joel’s greatest achievement at Madison Square Garden was creating a scene—a monthly party for neighbors and friends that he gushed about in the epically jazzy “New York State of Mind,” a song that got the loudest applause when mentioned in local newspapers like the Daily News and Newsday. When you can get a gym crowd excited about a newspaper, you’re (always) on the right track.
Starting in the dark with the swelling brass intro of “The Natural (The End Title)” as the entrance music, Joel and company rolled into a mid-tempo “Miami 2017 (Seen the Lights Go Out on Broadway)”—quoting the Palisades, Harlem, and Brooklyn—before launching into “Pressure,” with Joel hammering away at a grand piano, battling against his familiar stabbing synth line.
Joel welcomed his fans to the final night of the MSG residency by listing his and his band’s live performances. “We were the first band to play Yankee Stadium. We were the last band to play Shea Stadium. We played Berlin the night the Berlin Wall came down. We were the first American band to play in the Soviet Union. And we were the first band to play after Castro came to power, and we played in Cuba. We played in front of the Colosseum in Rome in front of half a million people. And the food was great. But of all of them, this is the best. There’s no place like it.”
As for MSG, Joel mentioned, almost in a whisper, that “we’ll be back,” giving his fans hope for future Garden Parties.
After a handful of deep numbers, including a wild “The Entertainer” (“Nobody bought that album,” he said of 1974’s “Streetlife Serenade”), a zigzagging, Steely Dan-esque “Zanzibar” (“He’s actually a real jazz musician,” Joel said of lead trumpeter Carl Fischer) and a softly sung “Vienna,” Jimmy Fallon came out.
The late-night talk show host shouted out Joel’s MSG credits — “They got the Knicks, the Rangers and Billy Joel” — and called the pianist “a great father, a friend and you’ll always be a woman to me,” before hoisting a banner honoring the 150-show residency. Then, an over-caffeinated Fallon brought out Joel’s two youngest daughters, Della Rose and Remy Anne, who sat on dad’s piano during “My Life,” clapped along to his beat (“On the two and the four, honey”), waved to the crowd and finished the lyrics to the uptempo hit. “I guess this is her life now,” Joel said of Della Rose’s vocal delivery. Shortly after his kids left the stage, Joel performed the romantic ballad “This Is the Time” for his wife, Alexis Roderick.
After tending to his family and doing a quick Mick Jagger impersonation (complete with a brief cover of the Rolling Stones’ “Start Me Up”), Joel welcomed Guns N’ Roses frontman Axl Rose to the stage as a regular guest at his MSG parties. This time, he accompanied the screaming, hard-rocking hero in cheeky versions of Paul McCartney and Wings’ “Live and Let Die” and AC/DC’s “Highway to Hell.” Wearing a black sequined suit jacket, Rose returned for the encore, tackling Joel’s raw “You May Be Right” while adding a brief smattering of Led Zeppelin’s “Rock and Roll” to the mix.
Aside from Fallon, Rose and the kids, this final night at MSG was all about Joel and him alone. The Drifters-inspired falsetto of “An Innocent Man” and the Four Seasons-esque “Uptown Girl,” the joyous, ethnocentric complexity of “Movin’ Out (Anthony’s Song)” and “Scenes from an Italian Restaurant,” and the luscious jazz of “Only the Good Die Young” — all familiar choices gave Joel, 75, a shot at wowing the Garden with his supple vocal prowess, while breaking a few hearts with his goodbye for now.