here’s Billy Joel’s actual account, not just what’s on Wikipedia

In a Weekly Wire preview of last week’s Billy Joel show at KeyArena, Erika Hobart recounted a well-trod story, first reported in The New York Times, of the piano man throwing a total hissy fit onstage in the Soviet Union in 1987, overturning his instrument after bright lights flooded the auditorium, and declaring: “It’s my show!” Our write-up implied that Mr. Joel was upset with audience members and had likened them to characters in an oil painting.

Well, Mr. Joel—lounging, apparently, in his hotel suite with a bowl of green-only M&M’s and a fresh copy of the Weekly, as per his hospitality rider—called our editorial offices last week to contest that version of events. Seriously, he did. Here is his rejoinder, as transcribed by an awe-struck Mike Seely:

“Remember, this was the Soviet Union in 1987, and they’d never had a major rock concert before. There was a film crew filming a documentary, and they turned very bright lights on the audience. The audience was having a good time—until they turned the lights on. They froze; they turned paranoid. There was a lot of anxiety—why are we being looked at? And whenever they turned the lights on, anyone who was overreacting was being pulled out of the audience by a security guard. I wasn’t yelling at the audience—I was yelling at the film crew. So I threw the piano, and that got their attention. Then they stopped lighting the audience, and everybody started rocking out. That was the reason for that action—not because they looked like an oil painting. That was something I said to a reporter after the big shots in the Communist Party, despite our best efforts, sat in the front row at one of the shows. They looked like an oil painting. The regular people in the back were rocking out. Hey, I hate the camera being on me. If you looked like me, you wouldn’t want the camera on you either.”

https://web.archive.org/web/20080117165213/http://www.seattleweekly.com/2007-11-14/news/letters-to-the-editor.php?page=full

anyone who believes this was unusual or would only happen in soviet russia, has never been to a certified rock conert