Billy Joel Announces 70th Birthday Madison Square Garden Concert

MacKenzie Brockman – Billy Joel
plays the friendly confines of Wrigley Field in Chicago

Billy Joel announced another extension of his long-running Madison Square Garden monthly residency on Thursday — and this date coincides with a day of personal significance.

The Piano Man’s latest announced gig will take place May 9, 2019, his 70th birthday, and will be his 64th consecutive monthly show at the iconic New York arena. Joel’s impressive run began in January 2014, a month after he became Madison Square Garden’s first-ever music franchise.

The May 9 gig will also be Joel’s 110th Madison Square Garden show of his career. Notably, tomorrow marks the 40th anniversary of Joel’s first-ever concert at the Garden.

Through it all, Joel’s longtime agent Dennis Arfa, CEO and founder of Artist Group International, has accompanied him. “The shows were three nights of euphoria,” Arfa told Pollstar in a July cover story, when recounting Joel’s December 1978 debut at the Garden.

Joel’s Madison Square Garden residency is just one aspect of a touring career that has proven consistently lucrative in recent years. From 2014 to 2017, Joel placed between 14th and 18th on Pollstar‘s Year End Top 100 Worldwide Tours chart, grossing $301 million over that period. Halfway through 2018, he had already grossed $34.2 million worldwide.

Though Madison Square Garden is Joel’s home base, he has bolstered his numbers with a formidable run of stadium shows. Since summer 2014, he has performed 30 such gigs, taking the stage at venues from Chicago’s Wrigley Field to Boston’s Fenway Park to Green Bay’s Lambeau Field. And he famously played the last concert at Queens’ Shea Stadium before its 2008 demolition.

“The first question I get every year at the Cubs Convention, a gathering of fans, is ‘When’s Billy Joel coming back?'” Carl Rice, Wrigley Field’s VP of Restoration & Expansion, told Pollstar last month.

“I’m having a lot of fun,” Joel told Pollstar in July. “This is what I do. As long as there’s a ticket demand and I can physically do it and I think we’re doing it as well as I want to, yeah, why not? What else am I gonna do, sit around and watch TV?”

After presales for Citi cardmembers and Ticketmaster Verified Fans, tickets for Joel’s May 9 Madison Square Garden performance on sale to the general public on Dec. 21 at 10 a.m. ET.