Billy Crystal speaks onstage during the FireAid Benefit Concert for California Fire Relief at The … [+] Kia Forum on January 30, 2025
Getty Images for FIREAID
Leave it to Billy Crystal to both tug at our heartstrings and give us permission to laugh in the devastating aftermath of the Los Angeles fires.
After an opening set by Green Day that included their strikingly apropos song “Last Night on Earth”—google those lyrics—Crystal took the stage to welcome the audience at the Kia Forum for FireAid, the massive benefit concert organized by super-manager Irving Azoff in conjunction with Live Nation and AEG and airing live from the Forum and Intuit Dome across a number of streamers and YouTube.
After a few riffs, Crystal, who lost his family home in the Pacific Palisades, got down to what he does best – bringing both humanity and humor to tough times.
“These are the clothes I wore when I fled my house with my wife Janice, like so many of us did, on January 7. This was all I had, and I wore them for a week, plus a N95 mask. I looked like an evacuee or someone who just robbed a 7-Eleven,” he said.
“I wanted to be here tonight because a little over 23 years ago, one month after 9-11, I was asked to welcome the audience at the concert for New York at Madison Square Garden. With Ground Zero still smoldering, I walked out to a grieving audience holding up a sign with pictures of their loved ones, asking, ‘Have you seen them?’ It was all I could do to get my first words out. And tonight here I am again talking to all of you in pain. But now I’m also one of the hurting thousands asking, ‘Have you seen my school? Have you seen my church? Have you seen my house? Have you seen my town?’ Have you seen the 29 people who lost their lives? Have you seen them?”
Crystal thanked the fire fighters and first responders, and then shared a poignant when he and his family returned to the ruins of their home, which they had lived in for 46 years. “I stepped onto the ground and I fell to my knees and I wailed. I had not cried like that since I was 15 years old and I was told that my father had just died.”
Just then, Crystal recounted, he heard a scream from his daughter. “And then my girls Jenny and Lindsay brought over this rock from our burned-out garden.” He explained that years ago he’d bought rocks with one word engraved on each to adorn the garden. Welcome. Patience. Dream, “and the one I held in my hands, Laughter.”
In 1963, in the home where the family was sitting shiva for Crystal’s father, he recalled, “I heard big laughs coming from the family in living room and I came down the hall to see my dear uncle, in the midst of his sorrows, telling stories and doing magic tricks and making the entire family laugh and it changed my life. I knew at that moment, even in your worst pain, folks, it’s OK and it’s important to laugh.”
Billie Eilish, Earth, Wind & Fire, Gracie Abrams, Jelly Roll, Katy Perry, Lady Gaga, Lil Baby, Olivia Rodrigo, Peso Pluma, Rod Stewart, Stevie Wonder, Sting, Tate McRae, Alanis Morissette, Anderson. Paak, John Mayer, Dawes, Graham Nash, John Fogerty, Joni Mitchell, No Doubt, P!nk, Red Hot Chili Peppers, Stephen Stills, Stevie Nicks, and The Black Crowes are among those onboard to perform at the benefit, staged both in the Kia Forum and Intuit Dome.
Visit the FireAid site to make donations.
