I'm a guitar guy. I play guitar. I wear a guitar belt buckle. I've spent too many hours arguing who the best guitar players are (Jorma Kaukonen's fingerpicking acoustic style is the one I model myself on, I even auditioned successfully for his master class at the New School only to have it canceled on me when Hot Tuna embarked on short notice on a tour of Japan). I've also spent too many hours arguing guitars vs. keyboards with a friend who favors keyboards and synths, and who recorded a keyboards-only album back in the 80s with a singer from England who stole the tapes and put the record out under his own name.
So how ironic is it that I am now completely hooked on piano-meister Ben Folds and his infectious recordings, often to the exclusion of all else?
Ben Folds first came to my attention when he and his trio, Ben Folds Five (you'll have to uncover your own explanation for how a trio could be a Five), put out their second album, Whatever and Ever Amen. While most radio stations picked up on what remains his biggest "hit" to date, Brick, or the equally popular Song for the Dumped (a novelty song with the refrain, "Give me my money back, you bitch"), the alternative station I was attuned to at the time (the only adequate signal I could get from my office on the 55th floor of the Empire State Building) was playing The Battle of Who Could Care Less, a brilliant break-up song that lent the album its title ("I've got this great idea / Why don't we pitch it to the Franklin fucking Mint / Fine pewter portraits of General Apathy and Major Boredom / singing whatever and ever amen").
I got the album and discovered that just about every other song on it was just as good, and better than the popular Brick and Song for the Dumped. Selfless, Cold and Composed is another break-up song in the same vein as Battle of Who Could Care Less (inspired by the same woman, no doubt), but with a beautiful jazzy accompaniment instead of Battle's uptempo bass-fuzz rock beat. Smoke is yet a third break-up song, a mid-tempo ballad in which Ben adds a harmonium and strums the strings of his piano to mimic the type of string orchestration I usually detest. The lyrics center on a metaphor that is near-genius, of the pages of a book tossed on the fire one by one representing the slow break-down of a relationship leading to its inevitable break-up (Nick Hornby, the fine author of at least three great books, High Fidelity, About a Boy, and Fever Pitch, included Smoke in Songbook, his recent collection of essays on what he thinks are great songs).
Despite the enduring popularity of Brick, a song that Ben has confirmed in interviews and concert introductions is about his firsthand experience with abortion, Selfless and Smoke are far better songs in every respect -- composition, musicianship, lyrics, and singing. Indeed, that is what has struck me about Ben Folds -- he may not be the best in any category, but rarely have I seen one musician excel to such a degree in all four of these interralated elements, composing and playing his compositions on his Baldwin grand, writing lyrics and singing them in a voice that easily slips in and out of falsetto when he needs to hit those high notes and which he takes care to enunciate every word so you don't miss the humor, irony, and metaphor, or the curse words he loves to use and uses with the same ease most of us use in natural conversation.
Similarly, three songs on Whatever and Ever beat Song for the Dumped by a country mile in the same vein of scatological, high tempo humor -- One Angry Dwarf and 200 Solemn Faces ("Kiss my ass goodbye"), the revenge of a picked-on junior high shrimp who made it big after leaving school; Steven's Last Night in Town, the true story of an annoying freeloading houseguest who wouldn't leave; and best of all Kate, an exhuberant testimonial to a girl that may or may not be requited (it doesn't really matter) that was supposed to be the first single off the album but which was somehow mismanaged upon its release.
But as much as I liked this album and listened to it a lot, I kind of lost touch with Ben Folds Five after the release of their next album, The Unauthorized Biography of Rheinhold Messner. I remember hearing the first song released for radio airplay, Army, and thinking it was one of the best compositions ever, musically and lyrically, a biography not of Reinhold Messner but of Mr. Folds himself, from deciding whether to go into the army or to college to hitting it big as an alterna-pop star, all in under three and a half minutes. When I cued up the album (well, not cued up -- it was a CD, not an LP), the first song to come on was Narcolepsy, another complex song well-constructed and well-executed, with simpler but equally interesting lyrics about depression (the song sounds like it was nearly plagiarized from a neo-Beatlesque English outfit called Stackridge, from their Mr. Mick album, but that has to be an impossibility, as Stackridge is completely unknown in the US and no more than a cult oddity in their native UK).
And then the album lost me, even with Army eventually turning up several cuts later. And as a result I lost interest. It must have been me, not Ben and his bandmates, bassist Robert Sledge and drummer Darren Jessee, both of whom add essential back-up vocals. Because when I returned to Rheinhold Messner years later, I listened to it more attentively (I guess I had more of an attention span to devote to it by then) and grew to more than appreciate almost all of it with nearly (but not quite) as high a regard as I originally had for Whatever and Ever Amen.
On first listening (or re-listening, perhaps), mainstream love ballads like Don't Change Your Plans and Magic (which gained some popularity from being used in Dawson's Creek) are the most appealing. Others like Mess, Jane, and Lullabye (the latter about Ben as a child being lulled to sleep on a bumpy airplane ride by James Earl Jones) seem like trifles at first but then overtake you with their subtleties the more you hear them. The remaining tracks seem more like connectors in what is ultimately more of a concept album, an autobiographical one, than a collection of individual songs.
The very ambitiousness of some of the compositions and arrangements (the Burt Bacharach horns in Don't Change Your Plans for example) may have contributed to my initial reaction to Rheinhold Messner. It also contributed to the breakup of the band -- Ben ultimately said that he could not continue writing for the Five from the artistic corner he painted himself into with Rheinhold Messner.
After a two year hiatus, he returned with a solo album that caught my attention again. The title song, Rockin' the Suburbs, got enough airplay to make me take notice and wonder where Ben had been these past few years, and what had happened to my admiration for him, since Whatever and Ever Amen. So I downloaded the song and was listening to it when one of the college students who pick up our girls from school came in. She asked me if I'd heard the whole album, and I confessed that no, I hadn't, but that I wanted to download a few more songs and see if it was worth springing for the whole CD (that's my MP3 strategy for new releases -- when there are too many good songs on one album to download and maintain on computer, I buy the CD).
So I did just that, and quickly reached the point of having to buy the whole CD. I spent all of the summer before last listening to it non-stop -- though we re-locate to our country house for the summer, I still drive back to the city once or twice a week to play hockey, and Rockin' the Suburbs earned a permanent spot in the CD player (every time I tried to flip it out for another CD, I instantly started to miss it and had to put it back in -- my wife got sick of it right quick).
The title track is another novelty song, like Song for the Dumped, but is more enduring (for me, I mean -- Song for the Dumped lives on for other Ben Folds fans as his signature song, always his final encore in concert). Eschewing piano for a guitar-based rock and roll song for the first time (once a session man, Ben plays most of the instruments on the album himself), Ben sends up Eminem, Limp Bizkit, and most specifically Korn ("I'm rockin' the suburbs just like Quiet Riot did / I'm rockin' the suburbs, except that they were talented / I'm rockin' the suburbs, I take the checks and face the facts / that some producer with computers fixes all my shitty tracks").
The way Ben tells the story in concert, he was in an airport and saw a music magazine with Korn on the cover and decided to see what it was about. When he opened to the story, he says, he saw an excerpt of a quote from the band, in large bold typeface, that singled him out for a heavy dose of ridicule. So he went home and got them back as only he could -- with a funny, well-crafted satire that is dead on target (the video is pretty funny too). As my friend Jack, a master of insult, always used to say -- insult them with a smile on your face, that way they have no choice but to laugh along with you.
The rest of the album contains less humor than one would expect given his body of work with Ben Folds Five, as well as Ben's earlier solo work, under the name Fear of Pop, highlighted by the hilarious and accurate In Love ("At puberty I was sworn to secrecy by the international brotherhood of lying fickle males / I can't tell you anything and I can't commit / You're right, I can't commit -- to YOU!"), with William Shatner on vocals doing his spoken-word shtick like he did in the commercials for Priceline.com (which were, in fact, done in collaboration with Ben -- and now Ben is set to produce Shatner's upcoming album). But even with the humor on hold, the album is still lyrically and musically stunning.
Straying from his usual autobiographical romantic capers to third person short story songs, Ben tells the story of a forever stood-up spinster in Annie Waits, of a clairvoyant who foresaw the techno craze in Zak and Sara, of the dilemma of an aging now mainstream former hippy in The Ascent of Stan, of the last day of a retiring reporter in Fred Jones, Pt 2, of an inevitable suicide in the hauntingly beautiful (until it becomes inappropriately jaunty) Carrying Cathy, and (based on a true story) of a guy who freaks on acid, spends the night in a tree, and comes down a born-again Christian in Not the Same. Carrying Cathy is one that I found particularly striking, Ben hitting a zenith lyrically with his poetic imagery.
Just to force myself to listen to something different once in awhile, I pulled out Rheinhold Messner and grew to appreciate it, and I also got the eponymous Ben Folds Five debut album, released prior to Whatever and Ever Amen. I again employed my new download philosophy and got some of the most popular downloads off the album first -- Underground, a pre-cursor to the song Rockin' the Suburbs that is a send-up of punk rockers (this one an affectionate satire), is the song that first brought BFF to the attention of the alt-rock crowd; Philosophy, a catchy tune that used to feature a lengthy Gershwin-based coda and now segues instead into Misirlou, has, I believe, been misinterpreted as a song about an architect defending his work (a la The Fountainhead) but sounds to me like it is really sung from the point of view of the Statue of Liberty; Boxing, a solo waltz that is one of Ben's self-professed personal favorites (and has been covered by Bette Midler), is sung in Muhammad Ali's voice to Howard Cosell; Best Imitation of Myself is the first but not the last time Ben uses his redneck roots in North Carolina as a metaphor for himself; and Where's Summer B?
I have to start a whole new paragraph for Where's Summer B? because it has emerged as, by far, my favorite Ben Folds song, one I can listen to (and have listened to) over and over again without tiring of it. On a record that generally tries to rock, even though no guitar was allowed to mar its sound (other than Robert's bass guitar), Where's Summer B? is a jazzy ditty about relationships ending as summer comes to a close -- relationships with locales as much as with people. Upbeat despite being wistful and nostalgic, the song easily conjures up my own memories of summer places and summer loves, long since gone so hazy that I could just as easily as Ben give them the proper name Summer as remember their actual names.
The rest of the album initially turned me off, even the opening track, Jackson Cannery, which was the trio's first single. But they've all grown on me, even the initially obnoxious Julianne and the initially sickly sweet (now more bittersweet) Alice Childress. Julianne is instructive, because it could just as easily, after its raucous opening verse ("I met this girl, she looked like Axl Rose / Got drunk and took her home and we slept in our clothes"), been more of a straightforward peppy love song than it is. But Ben and his bandmates were clearly trying to pass themselves off as a piano-based punk band in order to establish themselves as a bona fide alternative band. Their early live concerts (I've only seen snippets on video) bear that out, with Ben banging his piano with forearm shivers and the soles of his shoes, jumping up and down on it and beside it like a maniac, screeching in a mock heavy metal falsetto that parodies AC/DC, and generally trying really hard, but not always successfully, to make his piano sound like Johnny Ramone's guitar.
Why I never thought of seeing Ben Folds Five live when I had the chance is beyond me. The only thing I can say is that a) I'd gotten to the age where seeing anyone in concert had become too much of a chore, especially for the price they now ask for admission (the only exceptions I make are for all too rare appearances by Hot Tuna and Leonard Cohen), and b) my long-confirmed belief that recent artists usually sounded no better, or often worse, than the recordings they tried too hard to reproduce note for note in concert. I learned eventually that Ben Folds did not fall into the latter category, so he soon became the third entry in the exceptions to the former.
It was that same college student who once again got me thinking. She came in with the girls another day, after the Rockin' the Suburbs exchange, and told me she'd seen Ben perform solo at the Bowery Ballroom -- just him and his piano, no band. And it got me to thinking that I should try to see him in concert too. His next area show was in Princeton University, so I got a pair of tickets and dragged my wife. We had maybe the worst seats in the house, but there were only about 800 seats total, so they were perfectly fine. And the show was a revelation.
Ben starts out mellow -- often, as in this case, with Boxing -- and then ratchets up the energy level as the show goes on, eventually doing all the usual banging of his elbows on the piano and jumping around. The amount of energy generated by one little guy and his big piano, with no other support, is truly remarkable. Then too, there is his interaction with the crowd. He tells funny stories introducing his songs, as do many other artists. But Ben seems to be so genuine, and seems to be so genuinely enjoying himself, that his good humor (taking humor in all senses of the word) becomes contagious. I've never heard him tell the same story the same way twice, and I've never seen a performer handle heckling with such aplomb (there's a live version of Underground on which, after the opening lines, "I was never cool in school / I'm sure you don't remember me," someone in the audience calls out, "Who the fuck are you!" and everyone just cracks up).
What he does even better is get the crowd to back him up during songs as if the crowd itself was the back-up band -- there are moments in his songs where his voice and his piano cannot live up to the original arrangements, so he gets the audience to fill the void. Lacking the marching band that is essential to the climax of Army, he gets half the crowd to do the trumpet part, the other half to be trombones. Lacking back-up singers, the audience fills in on Not the Same, Ben climbing on his piano to conduct. When he does the inevitable encore of Song for the Dumped, whether in its original major key or in the parody of himself he does these days by transposing it to a minor key, he doesn't have to yell out the line "Fuck you too!" -- the audience does (even when he does the verses in Japanese). And even when he doesn't ask for help, the audience invariably fills in -- there are always more than enough fans familiar with the songs to do so.
This chemistry with the audience during this "Ben Folds and a Piano" tour prompted Ben and his label to issue the otherwise gratuitous Ben Folds Live album. With only a handful of new songs ("new" including the first official recording of the Ben Folds Five song Silver Street along with a cover of Elton John's Tiny Dancer that is so good he makes it sound more like a Ben Folds song than an Elton John song), the album is best when it puts Ben's interaction with the audience front and center. This phenomenon is better illustrated in the short DVD that accompanied some copies of the CD.
In preparing my wife for the Princeton concert, I got the DVD Complete Sessions at West 54th, recorded for the PBS show by Ben Folds Five at the time of their release of Whatever and Ever Amen, and consequently heavy on songs from that album. I'm not sure which 30 minutes ended up on the actual show (Beck was the other artist featured on that episode), but this complete concert is superb. Light on the banter and devoid of audience interaction, the band just goes from one song to the next. For me, it was an introduction to many of the earlier songs that I hadn't yet heard, the best being a James Bond-like instrumental, Theme From Dr. Peyser. (The DVD also contains a copy of Spare Reels, an anthology recording originally included in VHS as part of the Rheinhold Messner CD package, and which features some of that early concert footage that shows BFF rocking.)
During a subsequent concert, Ben brought out Joe Jackson to do a few songs together. Jackson is one of his less obvious and more personal influences (most people look more to the obvious similarities to Elton John and Billy Joel, though Ben would tell you those are coincidental to his use of a piano, as well as Todd Rundgren and Randy Newman). Jackson sang the back-up vocal to Ben's Fred Jones, Pt 2, Ben played drums and added harmonies to It's Different for Girls and a new Jackson song.
Thanks to MP3 downloads, I've discovered an additional goldmine of Ben Folds Five and Ben Folds songs. I couldn't possibly cover them all, but some of the highlights are covers done for movie soundtracks (the Beatles' Golden Slumbers, Steely Dan's Barrytown, the Flaming Lips' She Don't Use Jelly, Jackson Browne's Doctor My Eyes, Burt Bacharach's Raindrops Keep Falling on My Head -- and this doesn't include myriad covers he does in concert) and originals done for movie soundtracks or to fulfill his Sony Music publishing contract (Lonely Christmas Eve for The Grinch, Air for Godzilla, Karaoke Supernova, The Secret Life of Morgan Davis, Make Me Mommy, Bizarre Christmas Incident, and the uncanny boy band parody that holds up well on its own, Girl).
Ben Folds Five has also put out a compilation of B-sides, rarities, live tracks, etc., accurately titled Naked Baby Photos, which is essential if for no other reason than for Ben's concert perennial, Eddie Walker, and for one of the more rollicking songs that appears here in a live recording but doesn't appear anywhere else (except on the original rarity it was culled from), Tom and Mary.
Ben is preparing for his next solo album by self-releasing a series of three five-song EPs. Two have appeared already -- Speed Graphic first, with new versions of two old jazzy BFF songs that never appeared on albums, an excellent cover of the The Cure's In Between Days, and a pair of classic Ben Folds-style love ballads. Sunny 16 is more routinely uptempo, with four new original songs (All U Can Eat, a liberal social-political satire, has already become a concert favorite thanks to its scatological refrain, "They give no fuck") and a cover of a song by Neil Hannon of the Divine Comedy, better known in the UK than in the US (The Divine Comedy has toured with Ben as opening act and Hannon has backed up him in concert on occasion on vocals and guitar).
I don't know much about the personal life of Ben Folds, other than what has appeared in his songs, in his stage banter, and on various web sites, but the one thing that interests me, having visited there, is that after the break-up of BFF, Ben relocated to Adelaide, Australia, where his wife Frally hails from (there is a great recorded telephone conversation between the two of them during the coda to the Speed Graphic version of Dog). But I don't need to know much about the personal life of Ben Folds -- his music does it all for me.
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