Billy Joel has announced the death of an early colleague and bandmate: Jon Small.
The 77-year-old singer-songwriter posted a brief message on Instagram, simply writing: “RIP Jon Small”. He didn’t mention a cause of death.
Who was Jon Small? Well, long before he found solo fame, Joel was a member of a late-60s psychedelic rock group called The Hassles. The band released a couple of albums on United Artists before Joel and Small, Hassles’ drummer, left and formed a hard rock duo, Attila.
Attila lasted just one album, and it wasn’t just a lack of commercial success that caused their split: Joel had begun an affair with Small’s wife.
In the 2025 documentary Billy Joel: And So It Goes, Small and Joel discussed the subject in some detail. “Elizabeth was very important to me, but I think I was not the guy she hoped I would be,” Small said. “I kept seeing that Billy was not the same guy. Something was the matter.”
“And Billy one day came up to me, became a little honest, and said to me, ‘I’m in love with your wife.’ So it was a very devastating thing for me, because these were basically my two best friends.”
Joel, for his part, admitted in the doc that he felt deeply guilty about what happened. “They had a child. I felt like a homewrecker.” In fact, he felt so upset that he attempted suicide by drinking furniture polish. In a scene straight out of a novel, it was Small who saved the piano man’s life and drove him to hospital, an episode Joel depicted on the song Tomorrow Is Today from his 1971 debut album, Cold Spring Harbor.
Small went on to become a renowned video director and incredibly he and Joel patched up their friendship. In fact, the videos for two of Joel’s signature hits, Uptown Girl and Tell Her About It, were both directed by Small and he was later nominated for a Grammy for his work behind the camera on Joel’s Live At Yankee Stadium concert film.
The director also worked on videos by Whitney Houston, Kenny Rogers, Reba McEntire and Garth Brooks, as well as the Run-DMC/ Aerosmith promo for Walk This Way that was one of the defining videos of the 1990s.
In a Facebook tribute that has been posted by a friend, it was noted that “his behind-the-camera impact on popular music goes far beyond just one artist. As one of the first music video directors and producers of the MTV era, Small helped define the format with landmark videos and live concert recordings.”
