It’s been nearly 51 years since Billy Joel recorded the song “Piano Man” — five decades of performing and merchandise for all occasions.
That’s a lot of T-shirts — more than 10 million, in the estimation of Claire Mercuri, a spokeswoman for Mr. Joel — and that’s just the count for licensed wear.
The musician doesn’t have a favorite item — they’re all his “children,” Mr. Joel said, through Ms. Mercuri, which he also says when asked to pick his favorite song.
On Thursday, Mr. Joel, 75, will perform his 150th show at Madison Square Garden, the final performance of his 10-year-residency, and fans are gearing up.
There are Wayfarer-style sunglasses with Mr. Joel’s name on the frame; a beer Koozie; a boxing glove key chain; and a $300 special-edition leather and wool letterman jacket. Collectors, devoted to every wave of memorabilia style, from the blocky graphics of the 1990s to the minimal modern versions, are at the ready.
This week’s show will be Eric Fellen’s 151st time seeing Mr. Joel in concert, and his 100th time seeing him perform during the residency alone.
Mr. Fellen, 52, first saw Mr. Joel at Madison Square Garden in 1984. He was 12 and still has the shirt: a white tee with a piano keyboard flanked by wings, as if it’s flying away. He estimates he has collected at least 200 concert shirts and 30 baseball caps in the years since.
One of Mr. Fellen’s favorite items is a full set of Billy Joel bobblehead dolls from the 2017-18 tour. His planned renovation of his home in Scotch Plains, N.J., will feature a room exclusively for Billy Joel merchandise — a kind of museum, Mr. Fellen said.
Known in fan circles as “the License Plate Guy,” Mr. Fellen attends shows wearing a “JOEL FN” plate on a lanyard around his neck alongside his wife, who wears one that says “UPTNGRL.” That one came from his mother’s car.
“It’s the final accessory that makes me feel like I’m ready to rock,” Mr. Fellen said.
Mr. Joel’s merchandise company opens an online pop-up shop the morning before a concert, with a limited-release merch drop, and removes it days later. The result is hyperspecific concert wear (there are T-shirts for his 147th, 148th and 149th Madison Square Garden performances in a countdown to the 150th show).
But this year, for the first time, there’s another place to shop in celebration of the milestone: an official Billy Joel retail store at the arena, which opened to the public nearly a week before the show.
Mr. Fellen, who went on Friday, bought eight T-shirts, one lanyard, two mugs, one regular issue poster, one numbered limited poster, one key chain, one magnet, one pin, two hats and that letterman jacket.
Another shopper, Jennifer Kalapoutis, 52, browsed on Tuesday while carrying an armful of 150th anniversary T-shirts and a couple of totes. She wanted to visit the official store before the show to avoid long lines, she said. Ms. Kalapoutis first saw Mr. Joel in concert as a child. And in the last decade, she has seen him perform at the Garden five times.
“I’m excited to go, but it’s sad,” she said. “We’re all getting older.”
But Mr. Joel said this month that he wasn’t planning to retire or stop playing shows, which means more merchandise, and nostalgia-tinged resellers, to come.
The residency began in January 2014, with Mr. Joel playing one show every month for 10 years, with a brief pause during the pandemic. Over that time, he has sold out 104 shows and sold more than 1.9 million tickets, Ms. Mercuri, his publicist, said.
This week, tickets for Mr. Joel’s concert start at $550 a seat, running up to more than $5,000 for a single ticket on Thursday night.
Vendors hawking bootleg merchandise also hope to cash in. Outside Madison Square Garden on a recent evening, shouts of “Shirts, guys, shirts!” and “Half the price, cash or Venmo!” boomed at a close distance.
A crop of unlicensed vendors spread out around the stadium, all shouting their offers to attract concertgoers, if only for a passing glance.
“Billy Joel fans buy, they spend money,” one of the sellers, who was looking ahead to the 150th concert, said. “Every time we do a Billy Joel show, it sells out.”
Fans who can’t make it, though, have their memories — and memorabilia. Kerie Stone, a social security disability lawyer based in Smithtown, N.Y., displays a Billy Joel mug in her office and four framed concert posters on a wall alongside her New York State bar license and diplomas. She said she keeps the musician’s merchandise in her office in honor of her fandom but also to put clients at ease.
“When clients are nervously awaiting their court hearings, they want to take their mind off the hearing that we are about to be called into,” she said. “That’s when they often bring up the fact that they noticed that I am a Billy Joel fan, and we speak about Billy Joel.”
Josh Krawczyk, a fan in Seattle, said he had purchased a T-shirt at each of the 15 Mr. Joel shows he had seen, including nine at Madison Square Garden, though he won’t be in attendance on Thursday, citing the “skyrocketed” price of tickets.
“For one brief, shining night of each concert, 20,000 of my closest friends and I have been able to come together with one of America’s greatest songwriter storytellers,” Mr. Krawcyzk, 44, said. “And the merchandise we purchase is our uniform of love and membership into this club.”
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