Beautiful fans, BIG NEWS: The Joel Newton Earth-tet with Billy Joel concert at Jones Beach is on, broken femur or no, even though it’s not happening at Jones Beach. As I mentioned, the Jones Beach concert authorities deemed our budding mega jazz-fusion-meets-pop enterprise still a little under-fanned (this might be a good time to start Following us, and to Like our Facebook page – thanks!), so screw ‘em, Billy and I set out to find our own nearby strip of beach for a grass-roots affair of stunning scale and success. That’s when Billy fell out of the helicopter and broke his femur. He’s been in a lot of pain, and is still distressed over the belief that he spotted his seventh ex-wife rolling around in the sand with Joe Pesci as we flew over a nudist beach. Whether or not there’s any connection, Billy said to me from his hospital bed the other day:

“Joel, so we still need to find the strip of bea… [glurk] … call the nurse, I’m gonna throw up from the pain.”

Then he threw up.

The next day, he said to me:

“Joel, so we still need to find the strip of beach for the show … and there was that nudist beach we saw … so, um … maybe the nudist beach is a good strip … nudist … strip … get it”? He then proceeded to laugh and wave his arms around so violently that he fell out of the bed and broke his wrist. He didn’t seem to realize anything was wrong and kept on laughing for a while. It’s great to know his pain-killers are working so well.

So I agreed to perform at the nudist beach, as did Cedric and Janice (our drummer and bassist and ex-MIT research assistants – if you’ll remember back, they left the lab of Dr. Ivana Vakov to pursue their music dreams with me, even though it meant missing the chance to help Dr. Vakov stop global warming with giant colonies of genetically-engineered carbon-sucking jellyfish in combination with an array of balloons and vacuum tubes). Cedric was particularly pleased about the concert location. He had been such an avid student of science his whole life that he had forgotten to ever take a break to gratify himself sexually, or get himself gratified: the thought of being in the company of naked women was both thrilling and terrifying to him.

So yesterday, Billy felt good enough to let me take him to the nudist beach to fine-tune our plan of attack. I wheeled him in one of those ridiculous-looking beach wheelchairs, but his continued use of strong painkillers made it quite enjoyable for him. He kept reaching down, scooping up handfuls of sand and throwing them in the air, singing through a boyish grin, “Honesty … is such a lonely word.”

Cedric, who was ahead of us by 50 yards (no doubt in his jubilance over the prospect of seeing naked women) suddenly waved his arms and pointed to an incoming boat, covered with solar panels and racing at an alarming rate toward the beach and the breaking waves. “Ivana, Ivana!” “You wanna what,” I replied. “No, it’s Dr. Vakov – I emailed her about our plans, and it looks like she decided to drop in.”

So now for the twist. We’re not actually performing on the beach.

Check it out:

Dr. Vakov has not only made an incredible recovery from her dementia using an experimental kale-based drug, but it turns out she’s been one of our biggest fans, following the Earth-tet’s adventures online and even secretly attending our Smart Cafe brunch gig in Nyack (she’s understandably self-conscious, being 96 years old, and only a couple of weeks into cognitive rebirth). Anyway, she’s going ahead with her planet-saving mission, with the help of a fresh set of assistants, all men, all abundantly experienced in sexual gratification and correspondingly uninterested in the nudist beach. But they are interested in creating the world’s biggest jellyfish colony, and the whole team, stepping out of the bobbing vessel and onto shore, invited us to have our concert on top of that very jellyfish colony, on a floating research facility and state of the art concert stage complete with (carbon-free) smoke machines, giant projection screens, ham sandwich stand, and a small circus act, all paid for with NASA grant money.

This has never been done, and it demonstrates our commitment to pushing boundaries and, whenever possible, saving the planet while we add sophisticated jazz stylings to classic pop ditties.

We will float back and forth a hundred yards from the beach while our legions of fans (many of them naked and enjoying complimentary ham sandwiches) watch revolutionary jazz-funk-rock music accompanying revolutionary use of disgusting sea creatures. Most excitingly, the installation of the balloons and vacuum tubes will happen while we are playing, and if all goes well, we will be harnessed and ballooned off the platform to our awaiting limos at the show’s conclusion. And if all goes really well, Billy won’t fall and break his femur again. But, hey, it’s rock ‘n’ roll.

The show is this coming Tuesday, July 28th.

Thanks for checking in and being devoted to us. Get ready for craziness.

Humbly,

Joel