Madison Square Garden is New York’s most famous arena, the site of the Ali-Frazier Fight of the Century, the venue for the annual Westminster Dog Show, and the place that the Knicks, the Rangers, and the Piano Man call home. That’s right, Billy Joel has turned the Garden into his own personal Vegas by promising to play one show every month starting in January 2014, going on and on until either he or his fans are exhausted.
The idea of an artist-in-residency program at a stadium as big as the Garden is a spectacular undertaking, but the 64-year-old Joel knows exactly what he’s getting into. He has already played 46 shows at the arena during his career. A banner even hangs from the rafters celebrating his record-setting run of a dozen concerts in a row in 2006: “The longest run of a single artist,” as the banner boasts. Next to it hangs Elton John’s banner for playing the most MSG shows of any artist, although with this new residency Joel would surpass John’s 62-concert record in a little more than a year.
Still, the Garden is a huge venue. And with no new pop album since 1993, it’s easy to question Joel’s ability to draw such a large, self-replenishing crowd to a single location. Then again, his 2002 Broadway show Movin’ Out enjoyed a successful three-year run, and he all but stole the show from Paul McCartney and the Who at the 12-12-12 Sandy Relief concert held, appropriately, at the Garden.
So who knows? Maybe he really can pull it off. All he needs to do is fill a facility with a concert capacity of 19,500. Assuming that many tickets are available for every Billy Joel performance, that works out to:
• 235,000: The total number of people who could theoretically see a once-a-month Billy Joel show at the Garden every year.
• 35.4 years: The time it would take for every resident of New York City to see him once.
• 1 hour, 7 minutes: The amount of time Joel will spend playing Piano Man at MSG every year.
Of course, that’s assuming he plays the hit song at every show. In an interview with Rolling Stone earlier this year, Joel mentioned that he wanted to start playing more obscure songs in concert. “If I was going to play again in places like New York, I would probably feature entire albums. It would give me a chance to do songs we haven’t played,” he said. So if you want to see Billy Joel at Madison Square Garden, just make sure you don’t accidentally buy tickets to the show where he plays nothing but songs from his 2001 piano concerto album.
