Pukkelpop Death Toll Drops to Four

Two festival goers wait to leave the storm ravaged Pukkelpop Festival in Belgium.

Mark Renders/Getty Images

The death toll at the Pukkelpop festival, which was struck by a sudden storm on Thursday that knocked down screens, tents and stages, has been cut to four from five, as originally reported.

Officials at the Belgian music festival had no explanation for the erroneously reported death, though Belgian media have suggested that a man who died in a local hospital was counted though he did not attend the concert.

In addition to the four people who were killed at the event, eight more were seriously injured and dozens more were wounded. The three-day event was canceled before any of the headliners – Eminem, Foo Fighters and the Offspring – could perform.

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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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