Billy Joel Gets Reveals “Bad Blood” With Elton John “Really Hurt Me”
Billy Joel is finally opening up about the tension that once existed between him and fellow music legend Elton John. According to him, it wasn’t just a minor spat.
In the second part of Billy Joel: And So It Goes, the new HBO documentary, the 76-year-old “Piano Man” gets candid about a painful chapter in his long-standing friendship with Elton. The root of the problem, he said, was a public comment Elton made about Billy needing “real rehab.”
“Elton had made a comment that he thought I needed real rehab,” Billy says in the film, referring to a 2011 Rolling Stone interview. “He chalked it up to, ‘Oh, he’s a drunk.’ And that really hurt me.”
For the singer, it felt personal. “I said, wait a minute? Don’t you know me better than that?” Billy recalls. “And there was bad blood for a little while.”
The two music icons have been linked for decades. They’re not just peers. They were tourmates on their famous Face to Face tour that started in 1994. But Billy says their closeness made Elton’s comments sting even more.
Back in that 2011 interview, Elton didn’t hold back. “He’s going to hate me for this,” he said, “but every time he goes to rehab they’ve been light… I love you, Billy, and this is tough love.” He even blamed the cancellation of tours on what he called “illnesses and various other things, alcoholism.”
Billy, who entered rehab in 2005 at the Betty Ford Center, an ultimatum from his then-wife Katie Lee, said the moment felt like “rock bottom.”
“I was disillusioned with what I thought it was all supposed to mean,” he says 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.’”
Billy ended up stepping back from the spotlight after rehab and took a long break from touring. Though he didn’t go through Alcoholics Anonymous, he says he eventually stopped drinking altogether.
“I stopped a couple of years ago,” he told the Los Angeles Times in 2023. “It wasn’t a big AA kick. I just got to a point where I’d had enough. I didn’t enjoy being completely inebriated, and it probably created more problems in my life than I needed.”
Even though Billy once resented the constant comparisons between him and Elton, he later came to embrace them and the two have made countless memories on stage. Still, the documentary makes it clear that even musical icons have messy, normal human moments.
