Billy Joel acknowledged “bad blood” between himself and Elton John in the second installment of his two-part HBO documentary “Billy Joel: And So It Goes,” released Friday. Joel explained the pair’s fallout occurred after John publicly insisted he needed to go to rehab.
“Elton had made a comment that he thought I needed real rehab,” Joel said. “He chalked it up to, ‘Oh, he’s a drunk.’ And that really hurt me.”
“I said wait a minute? Don’t you know me better than that? And there was bad blood for a little while. There was a dovetailing of things that happened during that time,” the “Uptown Girl” singer also explained.
The pair were close friends for years and had just finished up a 2010 co-tour when John told Rolling Stone they’d actually had “so many cancelled tours because of illnesses and various other things, alcoholism.”
“He’s going to hate me for this, but every time he goes to rehab they’ve been light … I love you Billy, and this is tough love,” John also said. Joel had previously entered rehab in 2005.
“I was disillusioned with what I thought it was all supposed to mean,” Joel also explained in the doc. “It was like all the signs were pointing to me: Enough. And I wrote this letter to the band. ‘I don’t want to do this anymore. I’m gonna stop.’”
Joel has not shied away from discussing his past alcoholism, but in a March 2023 interview with the Los Angeles Times the performer revealed he’d stopped.
“I stopped a couple of years ago. It wasn’t a big AA kick. I just got to a point where I’d had enough,” Joel explained. “I didn’t enjoy being completely inebriated, and it probably created more problems in my life than I needed.”
When asked if he ever feels like having a drink after a show, Joel said it’s just not necessary anymore. “I don’t need it now. I used to get offstage and be so wound up and adrenalized that I needed something to calm down to go to sleep. But I realized when you’re drinking yourself to sleep, you’re not really sleeping. You’re just passing out.”
