A Dream About Lightning Bugs

by Ben Folds

  However, there were a few moments in rock history that hinted a piano rock trio might work. One was Emerson, Lake & Palmer, a very successful late sixties/early seventies prog-rock trio from the U.K. They sometimes limited themselves to piano, bass, and drums on their records but mostly relied on the distorted B-3 Hammond organ, which probably has more in common with guitar than it does piano. Elton John’s live record 11-17-70 is the best and perhaps only example of a whole album made by a piano rock trio that I knew of before my band, over twenty years later. 11-17-70, captured before a small studio audience for radio, was released later as an afterthought, once Elton had already become a superstar. It’s one of my favorite albums of all time. His bassist, Dee Murray, and drummer, Nigel Olsson, were off the proverbial chain. Elton’s playing is James Booker, Allen Toussaint, Little Richard, Leon Russell, and Jimi Hendrix all rolled into one. Some of the most brilliant rock piano-playing ever recorded. It makes sense that Elton didn’t make his commercial records as a trio—it’s limiting and difficult. I was thankful he left that stone unturned. It left an opening. But 11-17-70 rocked in a sparse and laid-back seventies way, and a full-time guitarless piano rock trio would need to be more of everything if it was going to compete in the nineties.

  Ben Folds Five could have stuck with mid-tempo songs and the ballads. Darren used to joke that if we did that and sold pink T-shirts that said SOFT ROCK in large puffy-cloud font, and then just made the music that matched that, we’d be a bigger hit. Indeed, that would have been a reasonable formula. And easier. Because the ballad is where the piano has always dominated and where it still wins today. Who can walk through a mall or airport without hearing a solo piano ballad like John Legend’s “All of Me” at least once? It’s no surprise that the piano power ballad “Beth” was hard-rock band Kiss’s biggest hit. The power ballad became the radio slam dunk for metal bands during the seventies and eighties, with a piano appearing from nowhere to take center stage. But those bands started out by getting your attention with loud guitars. (It’s of note that Ben Folds Five eventually broke mainstream with “Brick,” which served as our power ballad. This was by design, as Alan, a veteran of record labels and quite the rock historian, had always envisioned releasing two rockers like “One Angry Dwarf and 200 Solemn Faces” and “Battle of Who Could Care Less” first and then delivering “Brick” as our “November Rain.”)

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  “Revolution is exhausting,” Kevin McCloud, the great presenter of the U.K. television show Grand Designs, told me recently through my TV, to which I replied, “Amen!” from my sofa. The unpaved path is damn hard going—it’s as simple as that. And our first hurdle was just booking the gigs. Club owners didn’t want a piano anywhere near their club.

  “Yes, sir,” I’d explain politely over my 1990s’ landline. “No, it’s a real piano, not an electric one….Right…Yes…A baby grand, not an upright, and we move it ourselves….Hello?”

  *Dial tone.*

  The clubs that had their own house pianos onstage were of course more receptive to booking a piano trio. But those gigs seemed to always go pear-shaped for us. Expecting jazz or blues, the audiences were sent running for the exits, holding their middle-aged ears. We stopped booking those early on.

  Some of the rock venues were excited about the novelty of a baby grand piano on their stage, but mostly we were met with complaining, frowny faces, and eye-rolling. And just because we’d booked the gig didn’t mean they were going to let us play when we showed up. There was a house soundman in Atlanta who, after trying in vain to get an “acceptable” sound from us, threw his hands up.

  “This is not up to par. It’s not professional!” he said. “And there’s too much hum coming out of your piano mics! I can’t let you perform tonight! I mean, would you make your record like that?”

  I said that yes, actually, we’d just made our record exactly that way, hum and all, and he begrudgingly let us go ahead. I guess he figured if our brand was “the band that sounds like ass,” he’d push the faders up and hope for the best. The gig went great.

  Our first real tour was opening for the Smithereens. After the first couple of nights, their crew stacked all their road cases in front of the loading door and parked a van in the way so we couldn’t load in. We couldn’t get the piano by their blockade. I guess they just didn’t want the hassle that night. If I could get my hands on an electric piano, they said, we’d be allowed to perform. They refused to budge, and we sat the night out. When we rolled up to the next day’s gig, it was the same thing. Blocked again. The band’s stage manager was waiting for us with arms crossed and a what-the-fuck-are-you-sissies-gonna-do-about-it grin on his face.

  I made a beeline straight to him across the length of the sticky beer-stained rock-club floor. I was sick of being treated this way. Robert, assuming the shit was about to go down and fearing I’d be beaten to death, rushed protectively to my side, the dear man. I stopped a few feet from the stage, looked up straight into the dude’s sunglasses, and spoke earnestly.

  “What you did last night was rude. Rude and…selfish. And…and…and it really hurt our feelings.”

  Dead silence.

  How does a man commence an ass-beating after “it really hurt our feelings”? Not exactly fighting words. I thought I had the tattooed tough man in emotional checkmate. That is, until the tattooed tough man responded.

  “Hurt your feelings?” he said, his face suddenly becoming human and vulnerable. “You guys think you’re better than everyone, don’t you? You don’t think we know what you say about us? You think we’re soooo stupid and soooo washed up? Your smug little sense of humor…” He paused and looked around, gaining momentum. “You never say hi! Nothing. You never once on this tour have even acknowledged the opportunity we have given you. The opportunity that the Smithereens have given you. Not once! Not in person, or from the stage.” He took another deep breath and finished. “No fucking respect! That hurts our feelings!”

  It turns out he had a name too—Chopper. We had a genuine talk after that, and the road-hard rock guy that was two clicks from kicking both our asses became our bud on that tour. Chopper even helped us load the piano each night thereafter. It turns out tough rock dudes are people too. Who’d have known? Another cheap lesson for us. This one in manners. When you’re opening for an established band, maybe you shouldn’t act like you own the place.

  At the same time, something tells me Chopper wouldn’t have had such a problem with us if we’d been a tattooed guitar band that, instead of a piano, had a quarter-ton model dinosaur with red lasers shooting from its eye. I don’t think he would have blocked the load-in for that shit. No, it wasn’t so much the inconvenience of the piano that the local crews had an issue with. It was, as I mentioned before, what the piano stood for. And I looked like a piano teacher at that time, or even an accountant, with my short hair and ordinary clothing. Me and my pain-in-the-ass middle-class living room furniture. We were another tribe—not from Planet Rock and not to be trusted.

  But we were, in most ways, just like all the other struggling indie bands, earning it one gig at a time, with all the daily and nightly eight-hour drives. Four dudes sharing a hotel room. The terrible diet, the cheap beer, the constant dick jokes. It was all the usual baby rock-band stuff, just add a baby grand piano, which was the great liability, financially and physically. It added strain to every element of the day.

  But by the end of each set, as I took a running body slam into the piano, smiled politely, and flipped off the audience, Robert’s earsplitting distortion lingering a few beats too long, reminding everyone that we were a goddamn rock band, the great piano liability had become an asset. Mission accomplished, we’d have the scratched-up baby grand on its side, navigating the six-hundred-pound beast through the audience, which always got its own applause.

  Hand me that piano.

  Diving into the keys sometime circ
a 1997—Ben Folds Five

  WHATEVER

  FOR TWO YEARS WE CROSSED the U.S.A. as many times as we could in support of our first album. The few breaks we’d originally scheduled were filled with chasing unexpected success in other countries. The first single, “Underground,” cracked the top 40 in the U.K., and so we were off to Europe. Fan mail from Japan—a territory where the album hadn’t even been released—tipped us off that our record was becoming a hit there on import sales alone. In a few months we found ourselves in Tokyo, signing autographs in front of a two-story-tall Christmas tree (I’m not sure it was even Christmas, but anything goes in Japan!) decorated with our CDs. And one early morning around 4 A.M., when I happened to be home off tour, my phone rang with an on-air call from Triple J national youth radio in Australia. “Underground” had landed at number 3 on their yearly top 100. I wasn’t sure if it was a prank call, so I went back to sleep, but as it turned out, it was legit. We soon followed the good news to Australia as well.

  Press was constant during the touring, done from pay phones in clubs, bathrooms, and on the side of the highway. I once got stuck in a sandstorm doing phone press in the middle of the desert. The van had dropped me off and was going to find food. I had to leave the phone dangling by its cord, make a break for it, and find a trash can to hide behind. That shit stings!

  One morning, a limo with a journalist and photographer met us at our motel outside Phoenix and handed us each legitimate NASA space suits and helmets to don for a photo shoot. We took turns poking our heads out of the limousine sunroof in our space helmets, like three little boys. On location somewhere in the Sonoran Desert, the photographer explained that the photograph would look best if we walked in step. Running backward with four cameras clacking around his neck, he snapped away, shouting, “Left-right-left-right!” while we marched around the 110-degree noon desert in space suits. The resulting piece in Spin magazine likened the arrival of our indie-rock piano trio to exploration on the surface of Mars, and the accompanying photos were well worth the near heatstroke. I thought they captured the feeling of the era pretty well.

  But all that talking about ourselves to rock journalists got old. So we got grumpier, and more sarcastic. We became a PR nightmare, with many journalists saying they’d never interview us again. It’s just that so many of the interviews seemed impersonal and inane after a while. On our first trip to London for press, I had a glance at the massive British weekly music magazine with whom we were about to speak. It was geared for fashionable fancy English fans. It was a little intimidating for three Southern fellows on their first U.K. tour. I noticed that the magazine’s most recent interview, with the English rock band Oasis, featured a quote set in massive bold colors, taking up a quarter page: IF YOU DON’T LIKE OASIS, WELL, THEN YOU’RE SHIT! So when I couldn’t think what to say in the middle of our otherwise-normal interview with this magazine, I blurted, “If you don’t like Ben Folds Five, well, then you’re shit!” And what do you know? That quote got the same bold quarter-page treatment. The other weekly U.K. magazine had us pose with wax figures at a London wax museum, which was unique until the next album, when the same publication had us do the same shoot with a different photographer. I guess they’d forgotten.

  Another constant on the tours supporting our first album was the presence of label execs who flew in to various shows across the United States, interested in signing us up for our second album. We met the famous producer and head of Interscope Records, Jimmy Iovine. He’d flown in on a private jet in time for the end of the show. Our meeting was brief: “Hi, wish we could have seen the show. I’m Jimmy Iovine. Do the right thing!” He dealt a punishing handshake and, poof, he was gone! Seymour Stein with Sire Records, equally legendary, took us out to dinner somewhere along the way. You weren’t a real band until you had dinner with Seymour. Belle and Sebastian even had a song about their Seymour dinner, appropriately named “Seymour Stein.” I think we met most of the big record-label names on this tour.

  We eventually decided on Sony 550, a relatively new major label. And I’m not sure whether 550 realized it or not, but we really didn’t know what we were doing when we insisted on absolute creative control. Record execs were known to intervene in record production, which is understandable when investing millions in a band of nearly no experience. But many labels went way too far and got up in the artists’ proverbial creative grill, which is what we feared, so we asked that they stay out. Of course, there’s a middle ground, but we were becoming wary of compromises. The extremes were working for us. The late (very great and missed) Polly Anthony, who was the head of 550, and Ben Goldman, our A&R man, honored our extremism and didn’t involve themselves musically.

  We were given free rein over our budget, which we spent purchasing or renting recording equipment and soundproofing my seven-hundred-square-foot Isley Street shitbox. The record company was even okay with Caleb Southern as our producer, even though he had very few recording credits to his name. I’m sure no other big record company would have allowed any of this. In fact, the competing labels had told us as much. They’d have insisted on a “proper” studio with a seasoned producer checking on our progress regularly.

  Caleb Southern in the kitchen (control room) in Isley Street shitbox. Recording Whatever and Ever Amen, early summer, 1997.

  The result of letting us run wild was an album that wasn’t exactly stylistically cohesive. That may or may not have been a strength, but it certainly made Whatever and Ever Amen unique. Profanity-laden songs like “Song for the Dumped,” with its chorus, “Give me my money back, you bitch…and don’t forget to give me back my black T-shirt,” sat side by side with “Brick,” my story of high school abortion. The new more-serious approach took a moment to get used to for our fans.

  I remember one night, as we were recording Whatever, some neighbors had gathered at the back door of the house/studio, eager to hear what we were up to. They were perplexed by what they felt was an overly whiny, plodding piano ballad. “She’s a brick and I’m drowning slowly” droned through the speakers in the kitchen, which was Caleb’s makeshift control room. To our neighbors, this was proof of selling out. Where was the fuzz bass? The pounding piano? They didn’t think this was any fun at all, and they didn’t mind telling me so on my back porch.

  I didn’t quite understand what they were talking about. This wasn’t insipid. It was new and dangerous. “Brick” was a song about teenage abortion. It was true and raw. Anyway, it didn’t sound like a radio hit to me at all. It was recorded in a few live passes on an out-of-tune upright piano, while Robert made his first attempt at double bass and bow, all on about six audio tracks live in a small bedroom of the house.

  But the two extremes—loud joke songs and dead-serious ballads—sitting on the same album presented a sequencing challenge. It was unusual. Can you take a band seriously right after they’ve been shouting “kiss my ass” over and over? Normally an album has some in-between material for glue, but we had two opposite gears. So do you make Side A funny and raucous and Side B serious and introspective? We decided to mash them right up together, one extreme next to the other, no apologies. It was an honest snapshot of where we were.

  Half the album represented our time on tour, slogging it out in drunken rock clubs. The other half, the ballads, was new. It came from introspection inspired by travel and changes in life. We found, returning home to record after nearly two years away, the Piano-Band-That-Rocks routine was wearing thin. It didn’t seem natural to us anymore, all that excessive bashing. We felt like windup monkeys on speed. The crowds dug it, but certainly there was more to music, more to life, than that. And we’d just spent two years with beautiful, melancholy music, like Elliott Smith and Sebadoh, streaming into our don’t fuckin’ talk to me conversation-blocking headphones. Music that seemed to speak to what a young man feels when life is changing all around.

  We had over a month to record Whatever and Ever Amen, but it ended up fe
eling rushed because so much of it was written in the studio. The pace at which we worked gave me less time to second-guess the new, more personal material. I reached for whatever was on my mind that day. “Selfless, Cold and Composed” was inspired by an honest and scathing handwritten letter I’d just gotten from Anna. I had her letter on one side of the piano lid as I scratched the lyrics out quickly next to it.

  It’s easy to be easy and free when it doesn’t mean anything

  You remain selfless, cold and composed

  She was saying my affable, happy-go-lucky approach to our split wasn’t because I was able to be magnanimous. It was because I didn’t care. I wasn’t affected by it. If I’d actually given a damn, she said, I’d have been moved to raise my voice, or say something mean. Just once. I’d never considered that, and it hit home for me. “Selfless, Cold and Composed” was a song to myself, as if from Anna’s point of view.

  Come on baby now throw me a right to the chin

  Just one sign that would show me that you give a shit

  I was a little timid about these quieter and more serious tunes, but Darren was particularly encouraging of them. Much of his songwriting was very introspective. The chorus of “Brick” was one of the unfinished songs Darren had told me about when we met for the first time at the coffee shop. Back when I sensed he had “art in his bones.” Everyone was too busy to pay attention to my lyrics while we tracked, so I felt safe. But by the time we were mixing, I found myself sinking into my chair and blushing—was anyone noticing these lyrics? Too late. It was headed out the chute to millions of listeners. It was like a doctor giving you a shot by surprise in the middle of his explaining how he’s going to give you the shot. It’s done—it wasn’t that bad, huh?