11/10/2020
...And a few facts about the other signer of our beautiful piano... BILLY JOEL!
He was a pretty good boxer.
After bullies knocked the books out of his arms when Joel was walking to his piano lessons, he took up boxing as a teenager and even won a few amateur fights in the Golden Gloves competition.
In one of his last bouts, he got his nose broken.
Joel's song ‘Vienna’ is about a trip to see his father.
He barely knew his German father, Helmuth, later known as Howard, a classical pianist who fled Germany during the Holocaust and made his way to The Bronx, where Billy was born.
When Joel was in his 20s and in Europe, he hadn’t seen the old man in over a decade but heard his father was in Vienna, where the two had a visit.
He left Woodstock because of foul toilets.
Joel spent a day and a half at the 1969 music festival in upstate New York because he wanted to see Jimi Hendrix, but the bathrooms were so disgusting that he left.
He was born to non-observant Jews, but attended Mass as a boy.
Growing up in Hicksville, Long Island, Billy had a lot of Italian-American and Polish-American Catholic friends, so he went to church with them on Sundays. He even went to confession. Now he is atheist.
He graduated high school at age 43.
He left Hicksville High without having completed his work, but in 1992 he turned in some missing essays and got his diploma.
He thinks he’s funny-looking.
“I don’t look like a rock-and-roll star,” he said . “I look like the guy who delivers the pizza.”
He has outsold Michael Jackson.
As of 2014, Joel’s US album sales stand at 81.5 million units, 6 million ahead of MJ. That puts him sixth all-time, behind only the Beatles, Elvis, Garth Brooks, Led Zeppelin and the Eagles.
