Billy Joel messed up the lyrics to "We Didn't Start The Fire" during Toronto encore

During Billy Joel’s March 9th encore at Toronto’s Air Canada Centre, he just so happened to mess up the lyrics to "We Didn’t Start The Fire,” a song ‘The Piano Man’ just can’t escape and has played thousands of times before.

When he was approaching the lyrics “Rosenberg’s H-Bomb, Sugar Ray, Panmunjom,” he lost his place and the performance unraveled. He abruptly stopped the band and continued to say “That ain't right. All you gotta do is fuck up one word in that song and it's a train wreck," according to Idolator..

Joel isn’t a stranger to his feelings about the song and even made sure it hasn’t appeared in numerous set lists in order to avoid it. Seconds after the mess up he cued the band to move to the next song but the audience disapproved, as reported by Rolling Stone..

"It's the same thing verse after verse," he said to the crowd. "Just the words change. It's one of the worst melodies I ever wrote," he said.

Joel and the band regrouped and started the song back up with the” Joseph Stalin, Malenkov” verse. Even with the missed verse, he let out a chuckle about it and nobody could hold it against Joel.

"That'll be all over YouTube tomorrow," he said. "It's okay. It was an authentic rock and roll fuck up. We're not on tape. You don't see much of that anymore. Ok, let's hope we get through this one."

A quick mistake by Joel is pretty rare, but anyone would slip up after playing monthly concerts and Madison Square Garden and well-known arenas. He’ll keep playing as long as the venues sell out—who knows how long that can go on for.

Watch the fast mess-up here:

Photo Courtesy of >Wikimedia Commons

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