On a June night in 1986, teenagers pressed against car windows outside a shuttered theater in Union City, New Jersey, waiting to be let in to watch Steven Tyler smash through a plywood wall. The wall, the smash, and the collision of rock and rap it staged were Jon Small's idea. Small, the drummer turned music video director who built that set for Run-DMC and Aerosmith's "Walk This Way," died September 4, 2026, in his late 70s.

Long before he stood behind a camera, Small kept time behind a drum kit. He co-founded the Hassles, a Long Island rock and soul band that formed in 1964, and stayed through two albums on United Artists Records, including 1969's Hour of the Wolf, before the group split that same year, according to the Long Island Music and Entertainment Hall of Fame. When the band's keyboardist departed in 1966, Small recruited a teenage Billy Joel away from a rival group. "They thought he was too short. He wore a beret, and it was just very kind of corny; he sang on one knee! But he had 'it' - I saw it. I came from a family of musicians, so I could see past the dust, and I knew he had it, so I asked him to come into Danny's office, and I made him an offer to join the Hassles," Small said during a 2025 induction speech, recalling the first time he watched Joel perform. He sealed the deal, according to MusicRadar, with the promise of a new Hammond B-3 organ.

When the Hassles broke up, Small and Joel stripped down to a two-man hard rock act called Attila, cutting one self-titled album for Epic Records in 1970 before going separate ways in 1971. Small's marriage to Elizabeth Weber ended not long after; she later married Joel, and the friendship between the two men survived the rupture. "We were like a pig in a blanket. He was the pig and I was the blanket. We did everything together," Small said in the 2025 HBO documentary Billy Joel: And So It Goes.

Small's second act began behind the camera. By the early 1980s he had become a sought-after music video director, and he and Joel used the platform deliberately: for Joel's 1983 clip "Tell Her About It," the two made a point of casting Black actors on a network, MTV, that was then notoriously short on them, according to Slate.

Three years later, Profile Records executives looking to reinvent Run-DMC's sound found their director one floor away: Small's office shared a building with the label's, at 1775 Broadway. Working with a budget of about $67,000, he built a two-room set inside an abandoned Union City theater and cast three local musicians from the band Smashed Gladys to stand in for Aerosmith rather than fly the band in. When no crowd showed up outside for the shoot's second half, Small went car to car himself. "They were scared to get out," he recalled. "Rap wasn't big then. It was never on TV. So with a bunch of assistants, I knocked on the windows of the cars and told them to go to the backstage door." Roughly 2,000 teenagers poured in. Aerosmith frontman Steven Tyler later credited Small with the video's defining image: "Small was a genius," Tyler said. "It was his idea to build that set and put the wall up. And he said, 'I'll saw a hole in the wall and you just hit the spot.'"

Small kept working through the decade and beyond. He produced Whitney Houston's 1986 video for "Greatest Love of All," directed Joel's "Uptown Girl," "Keeping the Faith" and the Ray Charles duet "Baby Grand," and earned a Grammy nomination in 1992 for directing Joel's Live at Yankee Stadium concert film, according to AOL. His concert film and video credits eventually extended to Garth Brooks, Reba McEntire, Blake Shelton, Anita Baker and Luther Vandross.

In June 2025, Small returned to Long Island as an inductee, joining his former Hassles bandmates in the Long Island Music and Entertainment Hall of Fame. That same year, HBO's documentary Billy Joel: And So It Goes placed him at the center of Joel's origin story, and Small good-naturedly owned his supporting role in the larger narrative. "It's funny, whenever something is said about Billy, I joke about it, I'm always dragged into it. I can't get away from this guy," he said on the Glass Houses podcast. "He is really a great, great guy."

Small died September 4, 2026, according to a longtime friend's announcement and Joel's own tribute; his funeral was scheduled for September 9 in Great Neck, New York, Stereogum reported. Three days later, Joel posted a photograph of the two of them on Instagram, decades apart, captioned simply "RIP Jon Small."

What persists is visible every time that wall breaks in "Walk This Way": two minutes of staging, built on a shoestring budget in a dead theater, that helped move rap onto MTV and next to rock on the radio dial. It also persists in the run of Joel concert films and videos he shaped across four decades, in the Hassles' induction into the Long Island Music and Entertainment Hall of Fame, and in a friendship with the man with whom he had once shared a rehearsal space and an ex-wife, a friendship that outlasted the very thing that nearly ended it.