A Dream About Lightning Bugs

by Ben Folds

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  The last song written and recorded for Whatever and Ever Amen came from a challenge from my girlfriend, Kate. After we’d been dating a few weeks she told me she was positive that her name could never be used in a song, because it wasn’t a musical name like “Michelle” or “Cecilia.” I disagreed. “Kate” seemed musical to me, in a staccato sort of way. I decided to make the song “Kate” a giddy and nearly exhausting list of wonderful things to say about Kate. Although when you listen carefully some of them aren’t that impressive: “Every day she wears the same thing”—pretty amazing, huh?—and “She hands out the Bhagavad Gita!” Of course, anything she did was impressive to the singer with the crush, and that was the point. The punch line at the end is “And she speaks! And she breathes!” as if just speaking and breathing were glorious accomplishments. Of course, she did cool tricks too, like producing rainbows when she smiled and playing “Wipe Out” on the drums (inspired by Karen Carpenter drum solos I was obsessed with). It turns out writing a song with a one-syllable name wasn’t such a challenge, but writing one with nothing but kind things to say, with no irony or sarcasm, was. Being nice in a song felt like breaking the law somehow in the nineties.

  At around midnight on our last night tracking, I was coming up short on gratuitous compliments that rhymed. I called up Anna, who could always think of nice things to say, and she added a few lines to the lyrics. I sang my parts at around 1 A.M., Robert and Darren sang theirs at around 3 A.M. while I was in the other room throwing clothes and equipment into boxes, and we flew to Nashville as the sun rose, to record some strings before mixing two days later. There was no time to think. If Whatever and Ever Amen is a good record, it’s because it’s an honest, naïve document if nothing else. It’s rare for big-budget records, with so much at stake, to be allowed to be real.

  I WANNA BE…

  KATE AND I NEVER MANAGED to share an address, or even open our wedding gifts, which were still piled in her parents’ basement. Our marriage and divorce happened over the course of the Whatever and Ever Amen release and its promotion. We were both incredibly impulsive, and it all seemed like a great magical thing until the reality hit that we had no idea what we were doing or who the hell we’d each married.

  Toward the end of our brief marriage, Kate met me in New York, so we could actually spend some time together on a rare week off. But I spent every hour arranging for and rehearsing a string quartet we were adding to the band for the H.O.R.D.E. tour, one of the more prestigious traveling rock festivals of the nineties. I was terrible company. At night I’d sleep for a half hour, then get up, flip the light on in our tiny hotel room, and work on the arrangements, while she pulled the pillow over her head in bewilderment. Then I’d sleep another half hour, get up, and arrange some more until the sun came up, before darting off to the rehearsal room all day. While we were out to dinner one evening, she pointed at an old couple at another table. They looked dour and jaded.

  “That’s us,” she said. “The way we are now. Only they’ve been together for forty years.” She was right. I recall her using the word “existential” a few times that night, and her observation made it into a song years later:

  See? We’re damned by the existential moment where

  We saw the couple in the coma

  And it was we who were the cliché

  But we carried on anyway

  —From “You Don’t Know Me,” Way to Normal, 2008

  As “Brick” was becoming a hit, Kate and I met in Los Angeles, where we sat with a cheap lawyer to draw up our divorce papers and divide any belongings. It was mutually respectful and caring. We had lunch and went our separate ways.

  For many years after, when friends would suggest to me that perhaps I should date normally, like everyone else, have the advisable get-to-know-each-other phase, and then maybe consider marriage, the advice fell on deaf ears. By my mid-forties I had had five significant relationships, which is probably average. Four of those ended in marriage—that’s not average, and it’s definitely not so good for the life. Each impulsive act, as exciting as it seemed at the moment, came crashing down, taking more of a toll than the one before. Rather than take stock of my feelings about it, and be honest with myself so that I could correct my mistakes, I just dug in with work.

  The twenties, for anyone with the luxury of time to brood, can be laced with a constant low-grade sadness, always humming beneath it all. Biological clocks, coming-of-age, wondering, Is this it? Have I missed my calling? Why are the hangovers worse? Have I passed the love of my life in a crowd somewhere on lunch break—like two ships in the day? My method of dealing was an emotional fuse that would blow all too quickly, turning my whole system numb anytime my twentysomething low-grade sadness would crescendo and become too much. That’s the feeling I remember the most from these years—being numb. Numb is what you become when something should hurt, but either the brain doesn’t want to know or the nervous system thinks better of it. The word “numb” comes up a few times in my songs in that era. And the fuse-blowing concept is also closely related to another emotional defense mechanism I wrote about in the later Ben Folds Five song “Narcolepsy.” In that song, any emotion, any feeling, good or bad, is just too much stimulation and puts the main character into immediate emotional sleep. I believe many young men are like this.

  I should warn you—I go to sleep…

  I get upset or happy—I go to sleep

  Nothing hurts when I go to sleep

  I considered it a good metaphor for my understanding of depression as well:

  I’m not tired. I just sleep.

  —From “Narcolepsy,” The Unauthorized Biography of Reinhold Messner, 1999

  Some have suggested that maybe my questionable impulses were driven by my need to have something to write about—that perhaps songwriters like to invite some extra heartache from time to time. That’s the “Phone in a Pool” line, only in reverse.

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

  =

  What hasn’t been so good for the life could be good for the music.

  We musical artists do, after all, get paid to be a moody bunch. Sometimes that can cause snowballing drama in real life, hopefully cheap lessons rather than tragedies like overdoses, suicides, drowning in a river.

  Looking back, I think those rash decisions were attempts to wake myself up and feel alive. I worried I was a robot, a machine. I had a hard time being present. Most of my waking hours were spent locked into a repetitive task or thought, as life went on around me, like when I was a toddler who could watch records spin for eight hours. It felt like people were always knocking on my space helmet, asking if I was having the time of my life. Life? What? Actually, no. I can’t even see out of this thing! Just the tin-can sound of my own breathing and an occasional beep. I wanted to snap out of that. Any thrill that kicked me into feeling had great appeal. Especially a risky thrill.

  More again from “Narcolepsy”—it can read a little melodramatic without the music to balance it—it’s actually sung by the background vocals—but it conveys the sentiment:

  Dreaming in streams

  Flowing between the shores of joy and sadness

  I’m drowning

  Save me, wake me up

  I recall a Frank Lloyd Wright interview where he confessed that he never had the “father feeling” for his children. He said he had that feeling for his work instead. That doesn’t make Frank Lloyd Wright terribly likable, but you have to admire the honesty. If I’m being just as honest, I would have to admit that as badly as I wanted to be married, I didn’t have the husband feeling. I had incredible and brief crushes, but it was my music and my work that I was married to. However, when my children were born a few years later, I found that I had the father feeling for them. Very much so. Turns out I wasn’t a robot after
all.

  But for the touring that lay ahead upon the release of Whatever and Ever, I was probably better off being an emotionally narcoleptic machine, staying numb and focused. Because that kind of touring leaves little space for a real life, much less coupling with another real life. Rarely more than four-hour sleeps, with no privacy, and no real life outside of work. Constant travel. I was quite happy with that, or as happy as a robot can be.

  THROWING STOOLS (AND OTHER MONKEY BUSINESS)

  ONE OF THE MANY CHALLENGES of a rock pianist is being tethered to the instrument while everyone else is free to roam the stage.

  As the venues got bigger, in order to help assert my front-man-ness, I began to stand while playing the piano, which necessitated a sort of a lunge position in order to reach the keys, use the pedal, and sing into the mic simultaneously. I found I got more force into the piano this way as well. This physicality became a big part of my musicianship. No longer having much use for the stool, I discovered the fun of hurling it at the piano at the end of songs. It became a shtick. As the stool struck the piano, Robert and Darren punctuated it with a noisy bass and drums explosion. It looked violent, but the stool rarely even scratched the piano. The soft padding of the seat was all that actually made contact with the keys. It was for show. It expressed just the right amount of irreverence to justify playing middle-class living room furniture in a rock band on a big stage.

  Our first television appearance in Australia to promote Whatever and Ever Amen was on a big morning program called Midday, whose older demographic had absolutely nothing to do with the youth-radio audience that embraced us in the first place. Upon landing in Sydney after twelve hours of Qantas economy-class joy, we downed some caffeine and were wheeled to the Channel Nine set to rock some confused housewives.

  The Midday show was pretty typical of the morning-show formats you see around the world. The host at the time was a woman named Kerri-Anne Kennerley. Her sidekick was a pianist named Geoff Harvey, who sported a big gray beard and a drive-through headset. He directed the music as he interacted with Kerri-Anne. After our line check and the compulsory quick powder touch-up, we went straight to live broadcast. Seated at our instruments, we heard an old fashioned “four-three-two…” The curtain rose and we found ourselves face-to-face with what Australians call the “Blue Rinse” set, which refers to a product that maybe takes a little too much yellow out of gray hair. The median age of the audience appeared to be seventy-five.

  As I happily sang “shit” and “ass” on daytime TV, and Robert and Darren assaulted a horrified studio audience with booming distorted bass and deafening cymbals, I couldn’t have told you the name of the show. Or the hosts’ names. I got my introduction to Geoff Harvey moments after I broke the stool over what turned out to be his personal piano. I only learned the name of the show later, after we’d been tossed into the street outside the studio.

  As the last note of our performance finished reverberating around the studio, about a quarter of the audience clapped tentatively. Soon, Geoff Harvey was making his way across the room, beet-faced and furious, launching a barrage of interesting Australian profanities.

  “You fuckin’ ungrateful Yank! I’m gonna rip your head off and shit down your bloody neck! The Midday show gives you exposure, mate! And you think you’ll just ruin my bloody piano as a fucking thank-you!!” he shouted.

  The flying stool might have been theater, but Geoff Harvey’s angry march across the studio to kick my ass on commercial break was not. My tour manager and crew all rushed to my side. Harvey’s crew, who he later told me were ex-servicemen, did the same. And Robert, Darren, and I were quickly shoved into an elevator and up to the green room. Over the television in the green room, we could see Geoff Harvey ranting directly to the camera on live TV as his co-host, Kerri-Anne, sympathized. Channel Nine should never have an American act on their stage again, as far as Geoff Harvey was concerned. There were plenty of pianists who lived less than a mile away from the TV studio who were Australian, more deserving of exposure, and had ten times my talent, he said. But the Americans had money and so we came over, broke equipment, got a little publicity, and congratulated ourselves. His rant was accompanied by multiple replays of the piano-stool toss, as it broke into pieces over Geoff’s shiny Yamaha.

  Darren took in about thirty seconds of Geoff Harvey’s freak-out before disappearing down the hall to the stairs. We followed to see what he was up to. By this time, Kerri-Anne and Geoff had moved on to interviewing a dog trainer, or maybe discussing recipes for a casserole. Darren all but tripped over himself trying to get his pants down in front of Geoff’s camera so he might grace Australian TV with a few moments of his bare ass. Security grabbed Darren before he got there, and within seconds we were standing out on the sidewalk, our belongings sailing through the door close behind.

  The timing of the broadcast and the whole incident turned out to be fortuitous. Universities were on break that week, so thousands of bored Australian students were watching the Midday show for the first time. Our album debuted the next week in the top five in Australia. On the flip side, I lost my endorsement deal with Steinway & Sons, who were supposed to provide us baby grand pianos on tour. The next day at the Prince of Wales, a legendary rock dive in St. Kilda, instead of a Steinway we found a note on the stage that began: “To the management of Ben Folds Five, Due to the behaviour of your artist…” Now without Steinway’s involvement, around which we had planned our tour, we had to convince piano dealers to deliver pianos to the various dives on our schedule. But they’d heard about the show, and each dealer suddenly required a bond for the value of each rental piano. It was an expensive tour.

  The next year, when we were touring Australia again, Geoff Harvey had come around to Ben Folds Five and even had a few nice things to say about us on air. He now understood that throwing stools was just a bit of show business. He and I met at a hotel bar, had a pint of beer, and talked like civilized musicians. He left early to go to the hospital for the birth of his granddaughter. He’s a good bloke.

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  The greatest, or should I say most shameful, stool-toss-gone-wrong happened in Porto, Portugal, at a big rock festival. It still makes my soul hurt to think about. We were playing the same stage as Nick Cave and Pulp, and I felt like we needed to make an impression. So I climbed some pretty tall and precarious speaker stacks at the end of our set to deliver the grandest of all stool tosses. This one didn’t go well. It was, of course, another rare case where the piano wasn’t a rental or our own. This time it was the personal property of the local promoter. Or, rather, it was his grandmother’s late-nineteenth-century Hamburg Steinway B. I should have known by looking at it that this wasn’t a rental piano. It was obviously an antique, the only Steinway the kind promoter could source in Porto. He’d been excited to host us and wanted to give us the best Portugal could offer.

  Back home, we always made sure to have extra-light stools for throwing. But the Portugal festival had provided a massive stool, which was heavy as hell, and unwieldy. I struggled to the top of the speaker stack with it, took aim from many yards away, and watched in horror as the toss went woefully pear-shaped, the steel side of the legs colliding with the beautiful walnut piano. The Steinway’s ivory keys splintered and sprayed on impact. I felt like a DICK and even worse when I found out it was a family heirloom. Doug, our tour manager, locked me in my trailer to protect me from the promoter, who wanted to do to me what I’d done to his grandmother’s piano.

  When I got back home, I purchased an old Steinway with ivory keys. You know, ivory—from elephant tusks. They’re illegal now, have been for years, and they should be. I had the keys extracted and sent them to Portugal. I never communicated with this man, and I hope he was able to restore the damage.

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  —

  The stool toss lost its luster for me after that. I did less and less of it and was more careful abo
ut it. But years later, in 2005, well into my solo era, I was performing “Landed” on the Late Show with David Letterman and relapsed into my old stool-throwing ways. “Landed,” a mid-tempo song, suddenly felt excruciatingly long and underwhelming for TV. I can appreciate why most acts bring the lights, the moves, even some prerecorded tracks. Anything to keep attention, since the actual content of a song often seems to evaporate on television. My anxiety that I was boring millions of viewers kicked in, and I reflexively hurled the stool at the end of the song, a completely incongruous afterthought, given the introspective music I’d just played.

  Mr. Letterman wasn’t the type to make small talk with musical guests on commercial breaks, or really with anyone unless the cameras were on. I’d played Letterman a good five times by this time and had never once spoken to the fellow, so I was surprised when he appeared to be heading directly for me across the studio at the end of the song. He asked me if I was okay. I thanked him and told him I was fine.

  “Then why did you throw things at the piano on my show?” he asked.

  “Oh, that was just theater. I figured it made better TV,” I answered.

  “That doesn’t make sense,” he said. “Have I or anyone else here done something to upset you?”

  I didn’t want to argue the point with a hero of mine, but it did make sense. On major-network television, with its extremely valuable advertising time, you get a split second to make a memorable impression. Perhaps chucking a stool at the piano wasn’t the best way to go for the song “Landed,” but the instinct does make sense. It also makes sense that David Letterman, like Geoff Harvey on the Midday show might be confused by such a display. It’s just easier to offend at the piano. Smashing guitars has been an institution for forty years, since Pete Townshend shocked audiences in the sixties. We all get that now. But the last time anyone saw someone rocking the piano, it was probably Elton John, and all he had to do on stage back then to freak people out was wear crazy sunglasses and stand on the lid a few times. In comparison, my stool-tossing didn’t look like show business. It read more like violence against family furniture. It was cussing and throwing things in church—a petulant brat throwing a tantrum. That’s the way it came off to anyone who hadn’t seen our whole show.