From Elvis at the International to Adele at Caesars Palace, other artists have staked their claim to a single spot out with lengthy residencies out west, but no one’s become as legendary for doing it back east as Billy Joel with his regularly scheduled shows at New York City’s Madison Square Garden. And, certainly, no one’s done it in a venue this big, or with so much of a concentration on locals, not just attracting a tourist trade. Since the residency began January 2014, the beloved, Bronx-born piano man has packed MSG every month – save for pandemic breaks – in a strange, magical ritual where fellow New Yorkers, primarily, flocked together to hear old, familiar songs about their five boroughs and its most colorful characters.
Thursday night, at his 150th career show at the arena, that hometown advantage came to end as Joel closed out his longtime residency with a bang to a boisterously gleeful, often-teary-eyed, sold-out crowd hungry for their hero to continue this run at the Garden. “I know, I know, we don’t wanna go either,” said Joel to the devoted. “But it’s time.”
You could almost smell money on the floor of MSG (the priciest tickets topped off at $10,000) as monthly attendees of Joel’s residency huddled around each other like war buddies, well aware of the fact that they might never share this experience again. Men holding tall cans of Corona in one hand and miniature replicas of the “150” banner erected in Joel’s honor in the MSG rafters took selfies with their guy friends carrying the same banners and beers. Groups of women laughed as they showed off T-shirts from previously attended Joel concerts. Even upon entry, the fans filing into Madison Square Garden sang any and every Billy Joel song they could, usually different tunes at one time.
Ultimately, Joel’s setlist on this night wasn’t as important as the event, even though the music is cnothing less than crucial to the regulars in the crowd swapping attendance numbers and screaming aloud the lyrics of “Big Shot” or “Allentown.” It wasn’t like Joel and his band were going to experiment with free jazz or hit on deep cuts from 1971’s “Cold Spring Harbor.” Joel’s greatest accomplishment at Madison Square Garden was that he created a scene — a once-a-month party for the neighbors and friends about whom he rhapsodized in the epically jazzy “New York State of Mind,” a song that got the loudest applause at the mention of local papers such as the Daily News and Newsday. When you can get an arena audience excited about newsprint, you’re (still) really onto something.
Starting in darkness with the swelling brass intro from “The Natural (The End Title)” as his entrance music, Joel and company rolled into a mid-tempo “Miami 2017 (Seen the Lights Go Out on Broadway)” – name-checking the Palisades, Harlem and Brooklyn – before ripping into “Pressure,” with Joel hammering a baby grand, dueling against its familiar stabbing synth line.
Joel welcomed his following to the last night of the MSG residency with a list of his and his band’s live accomplishments. “We were the first group to play at Yankee Stadium. We were the last band to play at Shea Stadium. We played Berlin the night that the Berlin Wall came down. We were the first American full-fledged performance in the Soviet Union. And we were the first band to play after Castro came to power, and played Cuba. We played in front of the Coliseum in Rome for a half million people. And the food was great. But out of all of them, this is the best. There’s no place like this.”
In further regard to MSG, Joel mentioned, almost under his breath, that “we’ll come back,” therefore giving his fans hope for future Garden parties.
After a handful of deep cuts that included a rollicking “The Entertainer” (“No one bought that album,” he said of 1974’s “Streetlife Serenade”), a zig-zagging, Steely Dan-like “Zanzibar” (“He’s actually a real jazz musician” Joel said of soloing trumpeter Carl Fischer) and a sweetly delivered “Vienna,” out popped Jimmy Fallon.
The late-night talk-show host shouted out Joel’s MSG credits — “They have the Knicks, the Rangers and Billy Joel” — and called the pianist “a great father, friend and you’ll always be a woman to me,” before raising a banner in tribute to the 150-show residency. Then, an over-caffeinated Fallon brought out Joel’s two youngest daughters, Della Rose and Remy Anne, who sat atop dad’s piano during “My Life,” clapped to its rhythm (“On the two and the four, honey”), waved at the crowd and finished the lyrics to the up-tempo hit. “I guess it’s her life now,” said Joel of Della Rose’s vocal feature. Not so long after his kids left the stage, Joel performed the romantic ballad “This Is the Time” for his wife, Alexis Roderick.
After family was taken care of, and a quick impersonation of Mick Jagger (with a brief cover of the Rolling Stones’ “Start Me Up”) was dispensed with, Joel welcomed Guns N’ Roses frontman Axl Rose to the stage in his MSG nights’ usual guest slot – this time banging along with the howling, hard -ock hero through brash versions of Paul McCartney and Wings’ “Live and Let Die” and AC/DC’s “Highway to Hell.” Decked out in a black sequined suit jacket, a snazzy Rose returned for the encore, tackling Joel’s rawking “You May Be Right,” while adding a brief chunk of Led Zeppelin’s “Rock and Roll” to the mix.
Fallon, Rose and children aside, this last night at MSG was Joel’s and Joel’s alone. The Drifters-inspired falsetto of “An Innocent Man” and the Four Seasons-like “Uptown Girl,” the ethnocentric cheerful complexity of “Movin’ Out (Anthony’s Song)” and “Scenes from an Italian Restaurant,” and the flighty jazz of “Only the Good Die Young” — all of these familiar choices allowed Joel, age 75, a parting shot at impressing the Garden with his supple vocal prowess, while breaking some hearts with his goodbye-for-now.
