Way back in 1982, when cable television was new, the Home Box Office network ran the Billy Joel concert special Live From Long Island. Now, HBO is back in the Billy Joel business, in a very different way. Earlier this year, HBO Max -- that's what it's once again calling itself -- announced plans for a two-part Billy Joel documentary called And So It Goes. (Since then, Joel canceled all of his planned concerts because of a brain condition, though he assures Howard Stern that he's "not dying.") The first part of the doc debuted at the Tribeca Film Festival last week, and it'll stream next week. It reportedly gets into some very gnarly moments in Joel's history.
After the Tribeca premiere of And So It Goes, People reported about one of the documentary's big revelations: Early in his career, Joel attempted suicide twice, and one of those attempts left him in a coma for some time. In 1970, Joel was in a band called Attila, and he was living with his bandmate Jon Small and Small's wife Elizabeth Weber Small. Joel and Elizabeth had an affair, which led to the end of Atila and Joel's friendship with Jon. Elizabeth later became Joel's first wife; they married in 1973 and divorced in 1982. In the documentary, Joel's sister Judy Molinari reportedly says that he intentionally overdosed on sleeping pills during that period. She was working as a medical assistant at the time, and she gave Joel those pills to help him sleep: "Billy decided that he was going to take all of them... He was in a coma for days and days and days."
You don't really get any of those details in the new trailer for And So It Goes. Instead, the documentary, which was directed by American Masters creator Susan Lacy, looks more like a standard epic music doc. Joel makes multiple appearances, and he makes at least one self-aggrandizing, ridiculous claim: "'Uptown Girl,' it could've been a Mozart piece." It's also got talking-head appearances from fellow stars like Paul McCartney, Pink, and Bruce Springsteen, who says, "Billy's melodies are better than mine." Check it out below.
The two parts of And So It Goes will stream 7/18 and 7/25 on HBO Max.
