by Ben Folds
A Dream About Lightning Bugs is a work of nonfiction. Some names and identifying details have been changed.
Copyright © 2019 by Ben Folds
All rights reserved.
Published in the United States by Ballantine Books, an imprint of Random House, a division of Penguin Random House LLC, New York.
BALLANTINE and the HOUSE colophon are registered trademarks of Penguin Random House LLC.
All lyrics by Ben Folds © Free From The Man Songs LLC (BMI). All rights administered by BMG Rights Management (US) LLC. Used by permission. All rights reserved.
Lyrics from “Grown Man Cry” written by Amanda Palmer. Published by Eight Foot Music. Administered by Kobalt Songs Music Publishing. Used by permission.
LIBRARY OF CONGRESS CATALOGING-IN-PUBLICATION DATA
Names: Folds, Ben, author.
Title: A dream about lightning bugs : a life of music and cheap lessons / Ben Folds.
Description: First edition. | New York : Ballantine Books, [2019] | Identifiers: LCCN 2019011730 (print) | LCCN 2019012936 (ebook) | ISBN 9781984817280 (ebook) | ISBN 9781984817273 (hardcover)
Subjects: LCSH: Folds, Ben. | Rock musicians—United States—Biography.
Classification: LCC ML420.F656 (ebook) | LCC ML420.F656 A3 2019 (print) | DDC 782.42166092 [B]—dc23
LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2019011730
Ebook ISBN 9781984817280
randomhousebooks.com
Book design by Susan Turner, adpated for ebook
Cover design and illustration: David G. Stevenson, based on images © Shutterstock
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Contents
Cover
Title Page
Copyright
File Under “Music”
A Dream About Lightning Bugs
Watch Me Eat This Sandwich
Erase and Rewind
A Working-Class Tourist Is Something to Be
Hall Pass
Measure Twice, Cut Once
Big Ears, Thin Walls
A Line and Some Clues
1979. The Summer of Love
But for the Grace of My Music Teachers
Cheap Lessons
Plan A from Outer Space
Dropped at Exams in a Cop Car
Drums in a Lake
Mt. Labor
The Existential Chicken Dance
Of Mace and Men
An Accidental Mentor
Lederhosen to Pink Bow Ties
My Semester Overseas
Creative Visualization or Useful Delusion?
Where Oh Where Is My Voice?
Nashville—The Best (Preferred) Way to Fail
Frozen on a Suitcase
BFF
The First Album—Both of Them
Welcome to the Goddamn Music Business
Hand Me That Piano
Whatever
I Wanna Be…
Throwing Stools (and Other Monkey Business)
Our Turn to Ride the Bull
Reinhold
Stop the Bus!
Rockin’ the Suburbs
Going It Alone
Rock This Bitch!
Follow the Brown
Vincibility
Benny! What Is COOL??
Time to Grow Up…Wait. What? Again?
Way to Normal
The Fake Album
Music for the Mating Age
After the Flood
The Ever-Popular VH1 Behind the Music Artist-Hits-Bottom Act
Following Interest
Photo Credits
Dedication
Acknowledgments
About the Author
FILE UNDER “MUSIC”
MUSIC FEELS LIKE THE FRAME on which I’ve hung nearly every recollection, giving me access to large files of childhood memories. Each song, each note, has a memory attached to it. Just a few bars of the saxophone intro of “The Girl Can’t Help It,” by Little Richard, and out of nowhere I can see the towering leg of my father’s gray sweatpants passing. I can almost feel the crusty scar of the radiator burn on my forearm and smell the creosote of asphalt shingles. The song “Puff, the Magic Dragon” brings back the texture of the dirty linoleum floor, the spinning of the colorful label of the 45-rpm record, and the window-lit specks of dust on their journey around my room. These memories are from when I was two years old. That’s a lot of detail to recall from so far back. Either that or I have a good imagination.
I recently asked my mother if it was accurate to say that I was listening to a couple hours of music a day when I was two years old, and she said no. It was more like eight hours—splayed on the floor at my record player, organizing my records into neat stacks and just listening. And I would become an absolute irate little jackass when interrupted. Eight hours, damn. That’s obsessive, but then, some things never change. It’s also a lot of input and stimulation for such a young brain.
I happen to believe that all the music I listened to in my toddlerhood has served as a memory tool of sorts. Maybe it’s why I can accurately describe the floor plan of our house on Winstead Place in Greensboro, North Carolina. Where all the furniture was placed, where the Christmas tree was, which radiator to avoid ever touching again, the jar of salt I would never ever again mistake for sugar, and the small black-and-white TV playing a rocket launch from Cape Kennedy. We left that house in Greensboro when I was three. In fact, we moved nearly every year of my childhood and I can tell you these sorts of things about each house we lived in.
Neurologists and music therapists are increasingly convinced of the effect of music on the brain. A music therapist friend of mine likes to say that “Music lights up the brain like a Christmas tree.” She’s referring to the large regions of brain scans that light up when stimulated by music. Other important functions, like speech, activate far smaller areas. In fact, there is an observable physical difference between a musician’s brain and everyone else’s. Here, I googled this for you, so you wouldn’t think I was crazy.
Using a voxel-by-voxel morphometric technique, [neuroscientists have] found gray matter volume differences in motor, auditory, and visual-spatial brain regions when comparing professional musicians…with a matched group of amateur musicians and non-musicians.
—From “Brain Structures Differ between Musicians and Non-Musicians,” Christian Gaser and Gottfried Schlaug, Journal of Neuroscience, October 8, 2003
But neuroscience is not my area of expertise, and this is not a book of science or facts. This is a book about what I know. Or what I think I know. It’s about music and how it has framed and informed my life, and vice versa. About the stumbles, falls, and other brilliant strokes of luck that brought me here.
A DREAM ABOUT LIGHTNING BUGS
HERE’S A DREAM I HAD when I was three years old. It’s the first dream I can remember. It was set in one of those humid Southern dusks I knew as a kid. The kind of night where I’d look forward to the underside of the pillow cooling off, so I could turn it over and get something fresher to rest my head on for a good minute or so. The old folks described this sort of weather as “close.” In my dream, a group of kids and I were playing in the backyard of my family’s home in Greensboro, North Carolina. Fireflies—“lightnin’ bugs,” as
the same old folks called them—lit up in a dazzling succession and sparkled around the backyard. Somehow, I was the only one who could see these lightnin’ bugs, but if I pointed them out, or caught them in a jar, then the others got to see them too. And it made them happy.
This was one of those movie-like dreams and I recall one broad, out-of-body shot panning past a silhouetted herd of children, with me out in front. There was joyous laughter and a burnt sienna sky dotted with flickering insects that no one else could see until I showed them. And I remember another, tighter shot of children’s faces lighting up as I handed them glowing jars with fireflies I’d captured for them. I felt needed and talented at something.
Now, this dream wasn’t any kind of revelation. Hell, I was barely three years old. And although it’s stuck with me all these years, I’ve never taken it to be a message from above that I’m a chosen prophet, or Joseph from Joseph and the Amazing Technicolor Dreamcoat. However, a half century later, it’s obvious to me that the dream reflects the way I see artistry and the role of an artist. At its most basic, making art is about following what’s luminous to you and putting it in a jar, to share with others.
Here you go. A melody. See? I found it. It’s always been right there. That’s why it’s so familiar. Maybe it was in the rhythm of the washing machine, the awkward pause in a conversation, or the random collision of two radio stations blasting from two different cars and how it reminded you of your parents trying to be heard over one another. Remove a note, one flicker, and it’s the sound of the door closing for the last time and her footsteps fading into the first silence in forever. But wait…nope, the silence wasn’t really silence after all. You just weren’t paying attention. There’s always sound beneath the sound you hear. Or something else to see when your eyes adjust. It turns out there was also the sound of children playing outside your window and, below that, the buzz of a ceiling fan. That’s a sound you’d overlooked before, but now it’s all you can hear. We all see different flickers in a busy sky.
That’s where the melodies live. What do you notice that glows beneath the silence? Can that glow be bottled, or framed? From time to time, we all catch a split-second glance of a stranger in a storefront window before realizing it’s our own reflection. A songwriter’s job is to see that guy, not the one posing straight on in the bathroom mirror.
As we speed past moments in a day, we want to give form to what we feel, what was obvious but got lost in the shuffle. We want to know that someone else noticed that shape we suspected was hovering just beyond our periphery. And we want that shape, that flicker of shared life experience, captured in a bottle, playing up on a big screen, gracing our living room wall, or singing to us from a speaker. It reminds us where we have been, what we have felt, who we are, and why we are here.
We all see something blinking in the sky at some point, but it’s a damn lot of work to put it in the bottle. Maybe that’s why only some of us become artists. Because we’re obsessive enough, idealistic enough, disciplined enough, or childish enough to wade through whatever is necessary, dedicating life to the search for these elusive flickers, above all else. Who knows where this drive comes from? Some artists, I suppose, were simply cultivated to be artists. Some crave recognition, while others seek relief from pain or an escape from something unbearable. Many just have a knack for making art. But I’d like to think that most artists have had some kind of dream beneath the drive, whether they remember it or not.
I’m amazed when someone sees the sculpture inside a rock while the rest of us just see a rock. I say “hell yes” to the architects who imagine the spaces we will one day live in. And a round of applause for the stylist who sees what hair to cut to make me look respectable for a couple of weeks. I bow low and fast in the direction of those who paint amazing things on the ceilings of chapels, make life-changing movies, or deliver a stand-up routine that recognizes the humor in the mundane. What all those artists have in common is that they point out things that were always there, always dotting the sky. Now we can take it in and live what we missed.
My dream about lightning bugs still fills me with the same pride and sense of purpose as it did when I was three. It reminds me that my job is to see what’s blinking out of the darkness and to sharpen the skill required to put it in a jar for others to see. Those long hours of practice, the boring scales, the wading through melodies that are dead behind the eyes in search of the ones with heartbeats. And all that demoralizing failure along the way. The criticism from within, and from others, and all the unglamorous stuff that goes along with the mastering of a craft. It’s all for that one moment of seeing a jar light up a face.
And, sure, sometimes someone tells me I’m great or stuffs a dollar into my G-string. I can’t say it’s not about me sometimes too. I’ve done well. But that’s not really what drives me. That’s not what it’s really all about. It’s not about immortality either. I accept that one day, my music will be gone forever. So will the Sistine Chapel, Bruce Lee movies, and all the silly arts and crafts my aunt ever bought. Gone with the wind. Making songs is something I do here and now. Because light captured is just a moment, a flicker. Like any musical performance, it’s not repeatable, but there is always another. As each of my thousands of gigs has let out, the crowds have gone their separate ways. The lid opens, the sun comes up, and the lightning bugs disappear into the light of day. Invisible again. Well after I’m gone, some kid will be chasing the flickering lights through the backyard in his dreams, joy at his heels.
WATCH ME EAT THIS SANDWICH
“Benjamin, how old are you?”
“I’m six! How old are you, Papa?”
“I’m twenty-six. Now, watch me eat this sandwich!”
DEAN FOLDS, MY FATHER, WAS, and is, a chronic smart-ass. A carpenter, contractor, and building inspector a good seventy hours a week, the poor guy just didn’t have time to watch me do every little thing under the sun. And I was a persistent and downright obsessive little shit. Anything I did or set my mind to, I wouldn’t stop, couldn’t stop, and it consumed the entire house. My brother, Chuck, wasn’t like this, luckily for my parents. My relentless nature was a problem that neither reason nor punishment was able to solve. Putting the brakes on my focus or interrupting me would come at the expense of that night’s sleep, for everyone. I was one of children.
Papa discovered I could be neutralized by absurdity, frozen in my tracks by distraction with something out of left field. Absurdity comes naturally to Dean Folds, who has an endless supply of crazy shit up his sleeve for any occasion. Before I could ask him to watch me stand on my toes, he’d hit me with, “Benjamin! Come here! Watch me take the trash out!” or “Mr. Ben! Mr. Ben! Come in here and watch this! Watch me brush my teeth!”
Dean Folds, my father, 1967
Who wants to watch anyone doing all that stuff? What a needy bastard! I thought, and just went somewhere else.
One evening I had cut Papa off at the pass in the hall as he was making his daily beeline from the pickup truck to the bedroom, still in his paint-streaked, muddy work clothes.
“Look at this!” I said, extending a sculpture of a face I’d made with Play-Doh, as far into the heavens toward his six-foot-two-ness as I could manage.
He leaned over to study it for a moment. Then he took my creation into his giant hands and stood back up, far away, close to the ceiling where the air was thinner, and began picking bits of it apart. He reconstructed its innocent smile into an evil one, with sharp jagged teeth and beady eyes. He took our frightening collaboration into my bedroom and placed it on a chair in the middle of the room. Then he turned the light out.
“He comes alive in the dark,” Papa said, and disappeared into the bathroom.
Satanic Play-Doh man stood between me and the bedroom lamp, so I paced outside of my dark bedroom, trying to figure out how I’d ever get the light back on without being eaten.
Chuck came int
o the world when I was two but I don’t remember my brother’s arrival somehow. I was completely lost in my own world, where I remained for most of my childhood. And poor Chuck had no idea what he’d gotten himself into when he joined the family. Our entire youth was marked by my obsessions and my projects, scattered around the house. From my constant loud record-playing to my incessant piano-pounding later in grade school. Oh, and God help them all when I eventually got some drums. Not just because of the noise, but because I also would take them completely apart in our small house, leaving everyone to step over rims, lugs, and drumheads. Sadly, our parents were too busy to come to Chuck’s defense and too tired to deal with me. When Chuck and I shared a room, it wasn’t quite what you’d call “shared space.” Chuck had to hide in a corner or go outside to get some peace.
My grandmother thought spending eight hours at the record player was pretty odd and sprang for a child psychologist when I was three. After the good doctor sat with me for an hour, he confirmed that I was slow and should be kept behind a year or two in school. But when my grandmother asked about the examination, Mama said, “It went great!” She even went a step further and insisted that the doc said I was ahead for my age, which of course left my grandmother scratching her head.
Mama, whose given name is Scotty, decided to ignore the shrink and allowed me to continue my full-time listening. She probably didn’t have a choice anyway—I wasn’t going to be stopped. She and I both remember nights when she would rush me from my room to the sofa in the living room at one in the morning to try and calm me down. I was quite the night screamer. She’d cover my mouth with her hand and rock me on her lap, whispering loudly, “Shhhh, Papa’s been working all day and needs to sleep! Shhhhhh!”