Billy Joel marked the death of Jon Small on Monday with three words posted to Instagram: “RIP Jon Small.” It was a brief goodbye for a friendship that ran close to sixty years and survived something most friendships do not survive at all.
Small was the drummer who sat behind Joel in two of his earliest bands, and who later built a substantial career of his own directing music videos and concert films. He died on Friday, according to a death announcement circulated on social media by a longtime friend and picked up by Stereogum, which reports that his funeral will be held on September 9 in Great Neck, New York. TMZ, which reported the news on Monday, described him as being in his late seventies. No cause of death has been released, and as of Monday evening no statement had come from his family — the news reached the public through a friend’s post and then through Joel’s.
From the Hassles to Attila
Joel and Small met as teenagers in New York and became, by every account of the period, best friends. They first played together in the Hassles, a Long Island psych-rock and soul outfit that released two albums for United Artists in the late 1960s. Joel was the group’s main songwriter and, as Stereogum notes, took over lead vocals from original singer John Dizek for the second record, 1969’s Hour Of The Wolf.
When the Hassles ran out of road, the two of them left to form Attila — a hard rock duo with nothing in it but Joel on keyboards and vocals and Small on drums. Their only album, self-titled, came out on Epic in 1970. It is not the record either man is remembered for, and it did not last: Attila dissolved the following year.
The betrayal
What broke the band was not musical. Joel began a relationship with Elizabeth Weber, who was married to Small at the time. Weber divorced Small and later married Joel.
All three parties revisited it decades later for the 2025 HBO documentary Billy Joel: And So It Goes, where Joel described feeling like a homewrecker. Small confronted him and hit him; per TMZ’s account of the film, Joel’s own view was that he had it coming and deserved the punch.
The part of the story that is harder to categorize came next. Joel’s guilt over what he had done sent him into a severe crisis, and it was Small — the man he had wronged — who found him and drove him to the hospital. Joel has spoken about that period publicly, and it fed directly into “Tomorrow Is Today,” a song on his 1971 solo debut Cold Spring Harbor. Stereogum and TMZ describe the episode in similar terms; the fuller version, told by the people involved rather than about them, is in the documentary.
It would be neat to say they made peace immediately. They did not. But they did make peace, and then they worked together for the rest of Small’s life.
A second career behind the camera
Small’s directing work is where his own name sits, and it is a bigger body of work than his time as a drummer would suggest. He directed the video for Run-DMC and Aerosmith’s “Walk This Way,” one of the most consequential clips of the MTV era. He made multiple videos for Garth Brooks, among them “The Red Strokes” and “Standing Outside The Fire,” and shot clips for Anita Baker and Luther Vandross.
He also kept directing Joel. Small was behind the camera for videos including “Tell Her About It” and “Baby Grand,” Joel’s duet with Ray Charles, and later for a run of Joel concert films — TMZ lists Live From Long Island, Live at Yankee Stadium and Live at Shea Stadium among them. In the later part of his career he moved increasingly toward concert films, working with Reba McEntire, Brad Paisley, Blake Shelton, Rascal Flatts and Van Morrison, as well as Brooks. Several outlets, including Yahoo’s syndication of the People report, credit him with a Grammy nomination for his video work.
That is an unusual shape for a life in music: he was the drummer who did not become the star, in a duo with the man who did, and he built something durable anyway — largely by filming other people’s performances, including a great many of his former bandmate’s.
What the reporting does and does not say
A few things are worth being straight about. Small’s exact age has not been confirmed; TMZ places him in his late seventies and other outlets have avoided a figure entirely. The cause of death is unknown. And the initial confirmation came from a friend’s social media announcement rather than a family statement, which is why the reporting has been careful in its phrasing and why the timeline — died Friday, publicly known Monday — has a three-day gap in it.
What is not in dispute is the friendship. Joel is 77 and has spent this decade revisiting his own history in a documentary that did not spare him. The chapter about Jon Small is the one where he comes off worst, and he told it anyway.
Three words on Monday, then. For a man who punched him, saved him, and then spent fifty years pointing a camera at him.
