Billy Joel is reflecting on a 1982 motorcycle accident that left him with a broken leg, arm, and wrist, and also recalling the moment his first wife, Elizabeth Weber, ended their marriage while he was in a hospital bed, recovering from the near-fatal motorcycle crash.

Joel and Weber were married from 1973 until 1982. In the documentary Billy Joel: And So It Goes, Joel, 76, said that he was "amazed I was still alive. I should have died in that accident."

Elizabeth Weber Ended the Marriage

Weber, meanwhile, said that she didn't want to live in the public eye and that being "firmly planted in the public eye is the antithesis of what I wanted."

"I wasn't asking him to change, but I just did not want to live like that. My response to it was to get a place in New York City where you can enjoy anonymity — so it wasn't so much as we separated, but we started to get a little bit isolated from one another and I also knew that he wasn't in a good place. We were all under a lot of stress," she added.

The couple's marriage ended when Weber told Joel that she wasn't going back with him after he recovered from the accident. She put the key from their house onto a tray in the hospital room.

The Motorcycle Accident

Joel was passionate about motorcycles, despite both the record and the insurance company's discouragement. "I always romanticized motorcycles. There's something about it. I feel like I can be completely disconnected from the world. There's a sense of freedom about that," Joel recalled.

The accident left Joel with a broken arm, leg, and wrist. He was wearing a helmet at the time and smashed into a car and dislocated his wrist, crushed his thumb, and flipped over the car, landing on his back.

Joel said that he wrote the opening track for Glass Houses, "You May Be Right," which was inspired by an incident when he came home from the bar in the rain on his motorcycle with no headlights, no streetlights. He was wearing a suit, and Joel said he "should have been splattered all over the road."

Elizabeth had warned him, she said, 'Be careful, be careful, 'cause you're going to have an accident,'" the musician recalled. One motorcycle ride in 1982 almost killed him.

Weber still has "room in my heart" and "always will" love Joel. "I love the memories of the family life that he and [her son] Sean and I shared and so those memories are personal and they belong to me and to Sean and to Bill but what doesn't belong to us is the achievement that we had working together."

Billy Joel: And So It Goes premiered at Tribeca Festival on Wednesday, June 4.

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