The Piano Man is defending his fame.
Within the newly launched second a part of the HBO documentary “Billy Joel: And So It Goes,” the 76-year-old music icon responded to the longstanding rumor that he’s gotten a number of DUIs over time.
“You know, along with fame comes a lot of gossip, rumors. I didn’t like the tabloid kind of press,” Joel stated within the doc. “For example, there’s this rumor that I have all these DUIs. That never happened, but people keep repeating the myth: ‘Oh, he’s got so many DUIs.””
“I never had a DUI,” he added, “so f–k you.”
Joel was first accused of ingesting behind the wheel when he crashed a Mercedes-Benz in East Hampton, New York in June 2002. Lower than a yr later, he drove right into a tree in Sag Harbor and needed to be airlifted to a hospital.
The “Uptown Girl” singer suffered one other accident in April 2004 when he crashed right into a home in Lengthy Island.
The rumors about Joel led to “Saturday Night Live” referencing his alleged drunk driving in a 2004 sketch that featured Horatio Sanz, who performed the singer, chugging a bottle of pineapple schnapps and crashing into a number of partitions and mailboxes whereas driving a gaggle of women to a celebration.
Nevertheless, Joel has repeatedly denied that he’s ever gotten a DUI.
“I had gone through a breakup and was really broken up about it, and I decided, ‘I’m drinking too much. I should go to rehab,’” Joel informed The New York Occasions Journal in 2013. “But people made a connection, like, ‘Oh, he went there because he was in a car accident from drinking.’ No.”
“I never had a DUI in my life,” he acknowledged. “That’s another fallacy. Look at the police records.”
In his documentary, Joel referred to as the press “mean” and admitted that he doesn’t at all times get pleasure from being within the highlight.
“Having that much attention paid to you is not easy,” he stated.
In 2005, Joel entered rehab following what he referred to as an “ultimatum” from his then-wife, Katie Lee.
He entered the Betty Ford Middle for a stint, then quickly stopped touring as soon as his time on the middle was over.
The “Honesty” singer has been sober for a number of years now.
“I stopped [drinking] a couple of years ago,” Joel informed the Los Angeles Occasions 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,” he added.
Each components of “Billy Joel: And So It Goes” at the moment are streaming on HBO Max.
