Madonna's Sticky & Sweet Tour By The Numbers

With Madonna's Sticky & Sweet Tour set to kick off this Saturday in Cardiff, Wales, a statement from the Material Girl's publicist explains just how mammoth an undertaking each Madonna concert is. For instance, the tour will travel with 250 personnel members, 3,500 individual wardrobe elements, 69 guitars (ten for Madonna), 16 caterers, five people to help Madonna do costume changes, three "Romanian gypsy musicians" and 180 Q-Tips. The whole intricate list can be viewed here. It reads like a backstage rider, but it's more of an onstage rider. Additional numbers of interest: Madonna and her band rehearsed for roughly 653 hours to get ready for the tour, and Madonna will have only a minute and a half to make her shortest costume change. Details about the concert itself have also emerged, with the show being divided into four sections. The "Pimp" portion is "a mashed up homage to 1920's deco and modern day gangsta pimp." That's followed by Old School — which pays homage to 1980s NYC — and "Gypsy," where you can probably expect to see those three Romanians. It all wraps up with the dance-heavy "Rave" section. Madonna stays in Europe through September 27, then takes some time off before kicking off the North American leg of the trek on October 4 in East Rutherford, New Jersey.

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Song Stories

“Piano Man”

Billy Joel | 1973

Billy Joel’s first hit, “Piano Man,” was – ironically – an autobiographical lament about how his first album wasn’t a hit. When Cold Spring Harbor didn’t take off, Joel briefly became a lounge pianist in Los Angeles, and this song, about that experience, expressed his frustrations and fears at the time: “And they sit at the bar and put bread in my jar/And say, ‘Man, what are you doing here?’” “It was all right,” Joel said later, about the gig. “I got free drinks and union scale, which was the first steady money I’d made in a long time.”

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