A Dream About Lightning Bugs

by Ben Folds

  He introduced himself as Robert Darnell. He’d been in this office at UNC–G, he said, for forty years. His manner was bright and easy, if a little weary. He was the oldest member of the music staff, probably in his upper seventies. He led me straight to the piano.

  “You don’t sight-read very well, do you?” he asked.

  I shook my head.

  “I see. So these silly people placed you in first-semester piano? Of course! Damn shame.” He placed a song by Stephen Foster on the piano music stand. “Do you think you could play any of this for me?”

  I struggled, stopped, and shrugged, a little embarrassed.

  “That’s okay, that’s okay!” he assured me. “Just get through the one-note melody for me. It’s ‘Swanee River’—you’ve heard it. Cheat. Play by ear if you need to. Just play the tune.”

  Easy enough. I could do that.

  “Good! Good! Now play it like you want to. Any way you feel. Take your time. Add new chords, re-harmonization, counterpoint—have at it!”

  I did that too. And then some. I mean, it wasn’t like Oscar Peterson or anything mind-blowing. I just played in my style, the way I heard it.

  The next words out of his mouth were: “How would you like a full scholarship to study piano under me for the rest of the year?”

  I came in for what I assumed would be a spanking and instead was leaving with a full music scholarship? For being an asshole? I was blown away!

  He explained that this was his last year at UNC–G. He’d looked me up that afternoon after class piano, and he noticed that I was a percussion major.

  “With all due respect to the percussion department,” he said, “you might get more out of time spent at the piano.”

  I went straight to my percussion teacher to tell him I was defecting to the piano department and received the tongue-lashing I thought I was going to get from Robert Darnell at 3 P.M. I was a quitter, the percussion teacher said. Obviously, I knew that. Everyone knew that. Or, rather, being called a quitter stung because I was already too tough on myself for feeling I didn’t have the stamina to properly follow through on things—jobs, school, and, of course, songs.

  The outrageous temper I’d displayed when I was little, punching holes in walls when I felt I wasn’t good enough, had found another way out in college. And that way was inward. These lyrics from the bridge of “Boxing”:

  Sometimes I punch myself hard as I can

  Yelling “Nobody cares,” hoping someone will tell me how wrong I am

  I felt desperately behind schedule on my life’s journey at that point, missing semesters, switching schools and majors. I felt I was floating aimlessly. I often thought I’d need to be getting married soon, fast approaching twenty years old. Where did that come from? Sure, the South likes to marry ’em off young, but it’s not like I was born in Victorian times. I think I wanted these stamps of approval, these certificates, so I could justify the perceived frivolity and hedonism of pursuing music. I was a kid who couldn’t bear standing still, silence, being alone, and, most of all, uncertainty. Floating from school to school, major to major, with no plan toward my career, not a girlfriend in sight, was proof I was an absolute loser. A quitter, yes, I knew that. I didn’t need a butt-hurt percussion director reinforcing it.

  It was time for a proper teacher, a mentor, someone who could combine lessons of life experience with music. The year of studying with Robert Darnell was formative, empowering, and inspiring. But we didn’t spend time focused on the piano like I expected. He told stories of his youth as a promising new young American composer. He’d met Aaron Copland, gotten awards and commissions, even taken a boat across the Atlantic to study with the famous Madame Boulanger in Paris. But he said the pressure had gotten to him and he’d suffered a serious nervous breakdown at twenty-three, from which he’d never quite recovered. He often told me I reminded him of a young version of himself and he worried for me, that I might have a nervous breakdown one day too. I suppose my being hard on myself was more obvious than I knew.

  Robert Darnell’s disposition was not suited for the life of a composer or a performer, so he had settled for teaching, which he never regretted. But he wanted to give me the tools to go out and do what I was destined to do and not settle for less. Sometimes he had me bring in my own songs and he would help me analyze them, considering alternate compositional, harmonic, and general orchestration options. He didn’t discriminate against my rock leanings. He told me a wonderful story about a man who came to his grade school in Texas to demonstrate one of the first electric guitars. “The whole school was assembled in the gymnasium. We were dead silent as this man plugged a freakishly thin-looking guitar into a box, about ten feet away from him. You know, the way you would plug something into a wall!” Darnell said. “And then! He strummed a chord…and the sound came from the box! Yards away! Not from the guitar! It was a miracle. We were all amazed!”

  Robert Darnell saw music as dynamic, ever changing, and exciting, and he was always curious and interested. He once asked me if I’d heard of a man named Eric Clapton. He was very interested in Mr. Clapton’s playing but also in his singing, which Darnell described as “speaking on pitches.”

  “It’s all he needs to do,” Darnell said. “Tell his story by speaking the notes. No ornamental vibrato, no sustain. Very effective.”

  He asked to hear recordings of music I liked, so he could understand where I was coming from. This informal way of passing on experience, lessons on music and life, exchanging ideas—this accidental mentorship—was as new to him as it was to me. It was his final breaking from tradition before his retirement and a wonderful hand extended to me from another era.

  We looked at scores and talked about how simple some of the most complex-sounding solutions often were. He knew very little about jazz, in the way that I had come to understand jazz, but he could sight-read a full orchestra score by cobbling a piano part together from all the orchestra parts. And he surprised me by playing back a Bill Evans phrase on the piano after hearing the record only once. I’d always thought classical guys didn’t have ears.

  Robert Darnell retired at the end of the year and I began to lose interest in the music department altogether. After experiencing proper mentorship, my music classes began to feel a little shallow and impersonal.

  When I tell people that so much of my success in the music business is luck, I’m not talking about the luck of being discovered playing some club, or appearing on the right TV show at the right time, or running into some music mogul at a party. I’m talking about stuff like this, like meeting Robert Darnell, God rest his awesome soul.

  I used to “photoshop” the same photo of Darnell every day before my lesson, across the street at Kinko’s, using the same Robert Darnell photo, and bring them into my lessons.

  LEDERHOSEN TO PINK BOW TIES

  Death Onstage with Dignity

  IN GREENSBORO IN THE MID-EIGHTIES there seemed to be high demand for electric bassists who could slap and play ridiculous white-man funk. I decided I would be the man to fill this void. If you can play drums and guitar a little, you can pick up funk bass well enough to work in a cover band. So I got myself a shameful Steinberger-copy bass guitar from a pawnshop, for one hundred and fifty dollars. It was a dreadful-looking futuristic black truncated stick with some strings. And within a few weeks I was slapping that bitch like it owed me money. I do realize that doing the electric slide with a cheesy bass hanging high across the breasts and rocking the “white man’s overbite” ain’t exactly the portrait of dignity, but I felt it was an improvement over polkas. If I was going to be found at the bottom of a river somewhere, the victim of a carjacking, at least I wouldn’t be in leather shorts, suspenders, and clogs.

  * * *

  —

  Early on at UNC-G I found work in a lounge/top-40 band at an Italian restaurant called Giovanni’s. The couple whose band it was
fought openly onstage, while the sparse local audience howled and cheered them on. Everyone assumed it was an act. But the band knew better and we looked at our shoes in shame as they argued. Sometimes the couple would even stop mid-song and have it out. The husband would yell at the rest of us too—also a big hit with the audience.

  “I had a smoke-blowin’ show band in Las Vegas, you turkeys! I could have stayed there and wouldn’t have to play with jokers like you!”

  Giovanni, one of the owners—the other owner coincidentally turned out to be my cousin’s stepmother—took me back to his office one night for a talk. With a gin martini in hand, he showed me drawers full of handguns and a special, sentimental place on the floor where he’d had sex with a famous female singer back in the seventies.

  Giovanni told me, in his overly cultivated, gravelly Godfather accent, “One-ah day! One-ah day you gonna be ah-fuckin’ famous, Ben Folezzz!”

  Finally, someone sees this! I thought. Thank you!

  Then he finished his thought.

  “Yez! You-ah gonna be a famous…a famous clown!”

  Well, not quite the kind of famous I was thinking of, but it was still recognition, I guess. He showed me pictures of himself as a young man posing with a comic by the name of Red Skelton. I would one day be like Red Skelton, he proclaimed. “Clowwwwwn!”

  He said I was funny, much funnier than the silly couple I worked for, the ones with the domestic quarrel shtick. The Couple-Fighting-Onstage comedy routine had played itself out, he thought. Particularly the gag where the husband threatened to hit his wife onstage and the guitarist walked out. It seemed too real, he said. He preferred the moments when I sang “Rawhide” or moved to the piano for “Great Balls of Fire.”

  “That,” he told me, “is why people come a-back!”

  I respectfully declined his offer to take over the band, because I didn’t want to shit on the couple who’d hired me, even if they were miserable to work for. I played the gig awhile longer before moving on, taking pickup gigs here and there, on piano, bass, or drums, but the extracurricular schedule soon took its toll on my studies. I struggled to make it to 8 A.M. theory classes after late-night gigs, often many miles from town. It was all too much so I decided to take some time from University and just earn money.

  * * *

  —

  I took a gig playing bass and directing a house band at Pinehurst Golf Resort near Fayetteville, North Carolina, and lured a couple talented musician friends away from their studies at UNC–G to be the rhythm section: a drummer named Dave Rich and a guitarist named Millard Powers (who now plays with Counting Crows). This ensemble was pretty large, fronted by six singers. After a few weeks rehearsing volumes of medleys at our new home at Pinehurst, we were ready for opening weekend at their new spiffy nightclub. Opening weekend turned out to be our and the nightclub’s last.

  We were but one of many identical bands at their sister resorts. There was a format and repertoire to follow. One of the format’s shticks involved a female singer flirting with the older golfers and bringing them to the dance floor. On that first night, our best female singer, following the script, approached a well-dressed older gentleman seated at a large table with his wife and friends, and pressured him to dance. A spot followed them to the dance floor as the audience egged them on. Then we all watched in horror as the poor man went into violent spasms, collapsing in front of the bandstand. A few doctors, who happened to be seated at his table, tried desperately to keep him alive before the paramedics showed up, to no avail. He was dead from a massive heart attack before the paramedics arrived.

  At the end of the harrowing evening, in which the deceased was carried away under a blanket, we quietly rolled up cables and put away our equipment. The place had cleared out, except for the band and some remaining staff. The local soundman, sporting a massive mustache and baseball cap, broke the silence with—and these were his exact words—“Well, I hate to say it, but you guys were knockin’ ’em dead tonight,” and exited the restaurant with his case of mics.

  * * *

  —

  That was it for our Pinehurst gig, but the company found us work at one of their other resorts. We took a Greyhound bus to Schuss Mountain, Michigan, where we joined a large show band called the Schussy Cats—a Northern Michigan tradition. Suited up in pink cummerbund and bow tie, I was beginning to get the picture. Nearly all the cover-band gigs were corny. They’d seemed so appealing back when I bagged groceries and it was a pipe dream to put food on the table with music.

  Our audiences at Schuss Mountain weren’t afforded any more dignity than we were. They were called “Fudgies.” “Fudgy” is a not-so-endearing term for tourists from Southern Michigan vacationing in Northern Michigan. The word was coined by Mackinac Island locals who made their living selling their homemade fudge to tourists and then mocking them for buying it.

  That summer rockin’ the Fudgies left me with what the Schussy Cat singers called “transition damage”—what you get from memorizing too many endless medleys with segues every fifteen seconds. I can’t hear four bars of “Gary Indiana” without a mental transition into “Oklahoma,” dovetailing into “Kansas City Blues,” and so forth. If I hear a song with a state’s name, I have to compulsively work my way through them all. It’s a problem, still.

  Transition damage and all, I’m very grateful for what I learned playing with these various cover band gigs. You learn a lot about songs by experiencing what works about each in front of many audiences. Seeing when they get up to dance, where they sing along or point to their best friend while mouthing a phrase that means something special to their friendship. I put in my time as a musical mercenary—playing radio hits, cocktail jazz, dance music, and requests on piano, bass, and drums. I believe, as undignified as it often felt, it was invaluable life (and death) experience. I highly recommend a couple of years of it, no matter how cool you think you are. The things you will learn.

  Slapping my way through a wedding-band gig, 1989

  * * *

  —

  I made a pact with myself upon returning to UNC–G to not take another paycheck playing music that wasn’t my own. I had witnessed far too many middle-aged musicians who still carried their “originals” in their back pocket, harboring false hope that their own songs could ever see the light of day. Sticking around too long in cover-band world was a slippery slope, so I decided to take a considerable pay cut to wait tables at lunchtime instead, leaving my evenings open for starting my own band with original songs.

  This was a leaner lifestyle. Gone were the days of eating out and buying new LPs, but working a day job seemed more dignified. Music could retain its sanctity for me this way, as I would never take money to play a note I didn’t want to. Cover-band work had been a good run, but I gave a bag full of cheesy show shirts, ties, and various sparkled suits to Goodwill, and I never looked back.

  MY SEMESTER OVERSEAS

  RETURNING TO UNC–G, NOW WAITING tables, I was starting to focus on a broader plan. I would get a band started while finishing up my degree in English Lit, seal a record deal, tour and record—the end. Something like that.

  But my studies at UNC–G were interrupted by an opportunity that came via my childhood friend Anna Goodman, who was now attending Duke and playing French horn in the wind ensemble. You may recall my mention of a little girl named Anna who had inspired me to play piano back in second grade? That’s the same Anna. Duke University needed a percussionist for their semester in Vienna, so instead of spending my birthday blowing out candles in Greensboro with my family, as I’d expected, I found myself with a roomful of strangers playing a student concert in Budapest, Hungary.

  During my surprise semester overseas, I lived with a host family, studied German, and toured Eastern Europe (before the fall of the Berlin Wall) with the wind ensemble. I spent that wonderful semester walking the streets of old Vienna each day, passing the homes
of Mozart, Beethoven, Schoenberg, and so many others, with my headphones playing XTC and Peter Gabriel. I regularly attended the opera, braving clouds of BO with cheap standing-place tickets, and on weekends hopped on the school tour bus to perform in cities around Eastern Europe. Bitten by the touring bug, I now wanted to travel more. I liked being surprised by what the next day might bring.

  Fuck it, I thought. In a few days, when this semester is over, I’ll just go live in London and make my mark there! I had an electric bass, a backpack with a couple changes of clothes, and about five hundred dollars in cash. I didn’t know a soul in England. What the hell? Who needs a plan?

  Here’s a line from my song “Phone in a Pool.” It kind of felt like a throwaway line at the time, but it now strikes a profound chord for me:

  What’s been good for the music hasn’t always been so good for the life.

  It’s one thing to take risks playing music, where unpredictability is often rewarded, and another to take them in everyday life, where consequences are real. People often ask me if it’s scary to make up a song onstage, dictating parts, on the fly, to a full orchestra. Well, no. It doesn’t occur to me to worry about that. I have a jazz musician’s view of mistakes. If you play a wrong note, you can always make the same mistake again on purpose and make it sound right. Insistence on the mistake can be quite musical. Indeed, “once is a mistake, twice is jazz,” a quote often attributed to Miles Davis.

  In life, however, this improvisational outlook, repeating mistakes to make them seem intentional, doesn’t work quite as well. Being hit by a car, for instance, or getting married and divorced, are mistakes that don’t improve with repetition. The fearlessness and cavalier outlook that allows me to just go for it in my music has caused me no small amount of grief in my life. I’ve had, perhaps, a few too many cheap lessons.