State Champ Radio msg
Billy Joel‘s epic, decade-long residency at New York’s Madison Square Garden had to end someday. And on Thursday (June 1) the 74-year-old piano man was joined by New York Mayor Eric Adams for a press conference announcing the beginning of that end.
After kicking off the run in January 2014, after nearly 150 shows and more than 1.6 million tickets sold, the final 10-show spree will kick-off on Oct. 20. “There’s only one thing that’s more New York than Billy Joel — and that’s a Billy Joel concert at MSG,” Mayor Adams said in a written statement before a gathering that also featured MSG CEO James Dolan. “For more than 50 years, Billy’s music has defined our city and brought us together. On behalf of 8.5 million New Yorkers, congratulations, Billy, on a historic run of sold-out shows at MSG, and thank you for a lifetime of bringing joy to us all.”
Dolan praised Joel for making MSG, and music industry history with the decade-long series of capacity shows. “150 sold out lifetime shows is a remarkable achievement, and speaks to Billy’s extraordinary talent, beloved catalog, and dedicated fanbase,” said Dolan in a statement. “Billy always has a home here at MSG even though the residency is coming to an end with his 150th lifetime performance.”
“If you google Billy Joel’s house, they showed Madison Square Garden, which is kind of cool,” Joel quipped during a press conference on Thursday. “I never found my bedroom though.” Dolan added that the residency “exceeded even our wildest dreams” and that a run of shows like Joel’s was “never gonna happen again.”
Joel’s residency was announced nearly a decade ago, in December 2013. After the first performance, in January 2014, the singer went on to set Madison Square Garden records: Most Lifetime Performances By Any Artist (136 shows) and Most Consecutive Performances (90 shows). Joel hasn’t released an album of fresh pop songs since 1993, but in 2018, he told The New York Times that his touring business “is bigger now than it was at the height of my recording career.”
In 2006 he set the venue record for most consecutive performances by an artist with 12 gigs in a row, which was celebrated with a Joel-12 banner getting raised to the building’s rafters. He began the residency in Jan. 2014 by playing one how a month as long as fans kept showing up. And they did, with Joel breaking his own 12-show record within a year, then hitting his 100th lifetime gig in July 2018, prompting then-Gov. Andrew Cuomo to dub July 18, 2018 “Billy Joel Day.”
The idea for Joel’s residency was born after he was recovering from hip surgery. “I hadn’t really done a tour since 2010,” the singer told Billboard in 2014. “I played Jazzfest in New Orleans in 2012, a one-off in Australia at some bizarre festival in Sydney, I didn’t really start thinking about working again until I played at the 12-12-12 concert for Hurricane Sandy Relief at the Garden.”
Following that performance, Joel continued, “the Garden contacted my agent Dennis Arfa and said we’d like to do a series of shows with Billy Joel at the Garden. They didn’t refer to it as a franchise at first, it was a residency. I heard that and thought, ‘hmm, that’s kinda cool… all I gotta do is commute.’”
Fans were quick to snap up tickets. “I guess they looked at the ticket demand once it was announced and thought, ‘wait a minute, this guy can keep playing here for the rest of his natural life,’” Joel joked.
After the 100th performance in 2018, he told The New York Times he didn’t think he would keep the residency going long enough to play 200 shows. “I’m still exhausted from the other night, which didn’t used to happen,” Joel said. “I don’t think I’ll have the physical wherewithal to do it five years from now.”
“If I can’t do it as well I want to, I’ll take myself out of the lineup,” he added. “I love the game too much to not play it well.”
Tickets for the final MSG shows will go on sale to the general public beginning at 10 a.m. ET on June 9 through Ticketmaster and at the MSG box office the following day; click here for more information.
HipHopWired Featured Video
Source: Rich Graessle / Getty
For more than a decade, James Dolan has been one of the most loathed men in New York City for the manner in which he’s run the New York Knicks amongst other things. But his most recent douche move, allegedly, puts him in a whole new villainous light.
The New York Post is reporting that Long Island attorney Alexis Majano was booted from a Knicks game after James Dolan’s team used facial recognition technology to identify him in the crowd in Madison Square Garden. The news comes days after it was revealed that Dolan used the same technology to kick another lawyer, Kelly Conlon, from a Rockettes Radio City Christmas Spectacular just last month.
Majano is part of law firm that has a pending lawsuit against Madison Square Garden Entertainment and apparently James Dolan was well aware of that fact. Because of Majano’s association with the firm, he was denied a fun night at MSG on Nov. 5 when the Knicks took on the Boston Celtics.
“A gentleman in a suit stopped me and said, “Are you Alexis Majano? The manager wants to speak with you,” he said. “I noticed security had blocked off the exit.”
One of the workers, who was decked out with a body cam, informed him that the conversation “was being recorded” — then began to grill him, he said.
Majano said the employee asked if he works for the law firm Sahn Ward Braff Koblenz — which recently filed a lawsuit on behalf of a fan who fell from a Skybox at Madison Square Garden during a Billy Joel concert.
James Dolan lowkey acting real Trumpish as Majano revealed that the worker had a list of lawyers who were banned from Dolan’s playground, and it was more than a handful.
“He handed me a list of 20 to 30 pages of random names and firms. He asked me … ’Do you work for Sahn Ward? Are you an attorney?’ I said yes,” Majano said.
“They explained very briefly: Any firms with litigation against MSG are banned,” he continued. “I was shocked.”
When Majano asked the worker how the venue had identified him, “He said, ‘We caught you on facial recognition.’”
Majano was then forced to leave the premises.
Dolan is using next level technology to punish anyone he feels is wronging him, basically. Because of these unusual business tactics, both Majano and Kelly Conlon are considering legal action against James Dolan and even with that looming threat, MSG Entertainment told the NY Post that the policy still stands.
What do y’all think of the situation? Is James Dolan being OD petty with his businesses or does he have the right to punish anyone he wants using facial recognition technology? Let us know in the comments section below.
-
Pages
