by Ben Folds
“Son, you wanna learn how to be a real man?”
“I guess so,” I answered.
“You think you can be a real man?” he drawled as he picked up his drill.
“Yes, sir.” I shifted in the dentist’s chair nervously, sensing I’d just accepted a challenge I wished I hadn’t.
I squirmed, and tears streamed down my face, as he kept drilling into what felt like a bare-naked nerve. It was excruciating, and the sound of the drill matched the sensation a little too perfectly.
* * *
—
But I can’t claim Springsteen-worthy working-class cred no matter how many anecdotes I might offer. Because unlike the legit working-class types I grew up with, I got to peek at the whole class menu. After my parents finished building a nicer house, we’d leave the working-class neighborhood behind and move to a middle-class development across town, where we’d live for a year until selling and starting the cycle all over again. It was hedgerows and foreign cars one year, and stacks of tires and American pickup trucks the next. I never quite got comfortable with the kids in one neighborhood before it was time to move on. And my parents often didn’t get around to learning the names of the neighbors on either side. Papa would give them his own names, like “the Doorslammers” or “that prick across the street.”
It turns out the nice neighborhoods had dog and trash-can disputes just like the redneck ones, but with their own middle-class twist, and minus the guns. A Wake Forest professor neighbor once pulled my father aside to show him a Polaroid. It revealed a blurry shadow of a dog in the night with Satan-like red-eye from the flash and two trash cans on their sides, garbage strewn about. It was definitely our German shepherd, insisted the professor, and he would have no choice but to use his black-belt karate skills on our dog next time this happened. My father laughed aloud at the man, and so Chuck and I joined in. These were the kinds of surreal middle-class suburban scenes that informed so much of my songwriting, and not just on the album entitled Rockin’ the Suburbs.
* * *
—
For me, public schools and desegregation were a great gift. But there are many who grew up in my era in the South, black and white alike, who didn’t have such a positive experience. I recently heard a radio interview with an African American woman around my age who felt the benefit was to the white kids, who got their little taste of diversity at the expense of the black students. For her it wasn’t tourism. She was subject to what she described as a nightmare and felt like a guinea pig. I had never considered that angle, I admit, and it was an eye-opener to hear her speak about it. Just because you’ve blown through like a tourist, who can always go home when it’s no fun anymore, doesn’t mean you’ve experienced the people or the place.
I recall waiting for Papa in a “gun and coin shop” on the outskirts of town, looking at Indian Head pennies, and overhearing actual Klan dudes squinting down barrels and talking about who they’d like to shoot, dropping the N word left and right. But then they’d come over and tell me the history behind the “wheat penny,” give me a piece of candy and even a pat on the head. I was only eight years old—I had no idea how to process this stuff. But at school, while showing my black friend Daryl the rare coin I got at such a shop, I certainly knew better than to tell him where I bought it and what had been said.
I didn’t love every group I encountered. In fact, I’ll be quite happy to never see gun-and-coin dude again. But I learned to stand in other people’s shoes, as much as a child can. It’s hard to view certain people as anything but monsters, yet there’s value in giving it the old college try. By dignifying even the most despicable character as a human being, by offering them what empathy we can manage, we also hold them accountable for their choices. You can’t really convincingly condemn a monster for being a monster. He’s just being the best monster he can be. Sure, it’s easier to make a caricature of someone you don’t want to relate to, but the more lines you can step over, the closer you can get to a subject, the better off you’ll be—and the more complex and effective your songwriting will be. From the filthy rich to the filthy minded, I learned to meet people one at a time. And for that I’m grateful.
* * *
—
Here’s what I take away from facing the folly of class lines, what I learned as a child tourist and later as a songwriter:
Stand in as many pairs of shoes as you can manage, even ones you consider reprehensible or repulsive—even if it’s just for a moment. If you’re going to be a tourist, be a respectful one. Observe, report, imagine, invent, have fun with, but never write “down” to a character or their point of view, because everyone is the most important person in the world—at least to that one person. And if your tourist photographs suck, maybe it’s because you’re too far away from your subjects, seeing them only as props dotting the scenery.
Position yourself upon a bedrock of honesty and self-knowledge, so that your writing comes from your own unique perspective. Know where you stand and what your flaws are. Know thyself. Then you can spin all kinds of shit and all the tall tales you like. It’s art.
Finally, empathy and perspective are everything, and neither should be taken for granted. After all, there’s always someone out there who thinks you’re the monster. Remember that the ground beneath your feet can always shift and that it should always be questioned.
Even the things that seem still
are still changing
—From “Still,” Over The Hedge soundtrack, 2004
HALL PASS
WHEN I THINK OF MOORE Laboratory School, the experimental public school I attended from first to sixth grade, many smells come to mind. Like this overpowering yeasty bread smell that spilled out from the cafeteria. There was always the lingering of old mop water, and the smell of mimeograph paper, which is something I couldn’t quite describe to anyone who didn’t live in the 1970s. Let’s just say it might be easily confused with the faint essence of barf always present at Moore School.
Many images come to mind too, which I associate with music on the radio at the time, like 10cc’s “The Things We Do for Love,” which played in my head as I wandered the halls. I see lots of louvered windows through which no breeze would pass and in which no fan would fit. I can see the cinder-block walls, top half painted white, bottom painted sky blue, plastered with kiddie art made of colored construction paper. I don’t see chairs and desks, because there were none, aside from the teacher’s desk, or the ones in the library. Instead, I see the hairless nasty green carpet on which we sat, usually cross-legged—“Indian style,” as it was so crassly called back then. Most of our work was done in dry-erasable books and we made our way through them individually at our own pace, as teachers trolled their beats like geniuses at the Apple Store. We flagged them down when we had a question but were otherwise left alone until we were done, at which time a teacher with bad breath knelt down to check off your work. I usually finished well ahead of time and yearned to get up and move before my ass cheeks got any more numb. I would wander to my cubbyhole where I kept my stuff—my notebooks, pencils, a tube of glue, and tucked away beneath it all my prized stolen yellow laminated hall pass. With this hall pass I could wander with impunity whenever I got bored. I got bored a lot, and I guess I felt entitled to roam where I pleased.
When I first stole my yellow hall pass, the boys’ room seemed like as good a place as any to loiter. Until one day when I shuffled in alone and nearly stepped in a pile of human doo-doo, curiously showcased on a paper towel in the middle of the green tiled floor, definitely on purpose.
Well, now, that’s different, I thought.
Before I could process this odd bathroom art installation, a very weird child leapt from a dark stall and onto my back, screeching like a wild animal. *Cue seventies’ karate-action-movie music.* We struggled from one side of the boys’ room floor to the other. His mission was clearly to put my face in
his fecal art project. There is a lot to avoid while wrestling a pervert in a filthy, tiled grade school bathroom. It was an awkward dance. But fear of eating shit inspires hidden strength, like in those superhuman feats you see in documentaries, where a 90-pound woman bench-presses a car off her sternum to free herself or her trapped child. I sent the pervert crying with a bloody nose and avoided getting brown on mine.
* * *
—
From then on, I would spend my stolen-hall-pass time in the safety of a warm library, manned by a bored adult who didn’t seem to care that I wasn’t in class. The school library had vinyl and headphones in a listening center with stacks of records, even a few rock-and-roll 45s. My favorite was “Ride Captain Ride.” There were also lots of horribly politically incorrect joke books with titles like Nine Hundred and Ninety-Nine Polack Jokes. I shit you not. I wasn’t sure what a Polack was, even though there were kids of Polish descent at our school. These Polacks, whoever they were, sure sounded absurd. There were a good five to ten of those terrible kinds of joke books to choose from. Here’s the only joke I still remember:
“Why did the Polacks bring a bucket of dung to their wedding?”
“To keep the flies off the bride.” Get it?
The seventies…jeez.
And you know what? I’m still a public school advocate. Because I would hate to see what kind of boring bastard I’d be now had I not been exposed to the rich range of absurdity that was Moore Laboratory School in the 1970s. The insensitive joke books in the school library, the nasty hard carpet, the stealth doo-doo attacks in the bathroom, and a system whose cracks I could slip through with yellow laminated stolen permission.
Self-portrait from sixth grade
MEASURE TWICE, CUT ONCE
I WAS IN SECOND GRADE when I realized I wanted to play piano. While waiting for my ride one day after school, I heard some incredible ragtime piano-playing down the hall. Peeking through the auditorium door, I watched with envy as fellow second-grader Anna Goodman (whom I married years later, and who co-wrote a handful of my songs) was laying down some badassed Scott Joplin, “Maple Leaf Rag.”
That, I thought, is what I want to do. Period.
A couple of years later, when I was nine years old, my uncle and my father unloaded a piano from his 1950s beat-up Ford pickup one night and plopped it into the hallway. But it was bedtime, and I’d have to wait until the morning to try this piano out. With a small white transistor FM radio hidden beneath my pillow, I took note of all the songs I’d be playing in the morning—some that I heard on the radio, and some that I’d been making up in my head. It was a long, exciting, sleepless night.
When my parents’ alarm went off the next morning, I ran straight to the hallway and began playing. Well, it wasn’t playing. I just mashed incoherent noise into the keyboard until it was time for the school bus.
But this should be simple! I thought to myself. The low notes on the left, graduating note by note to the high ones on the right. Easy…Right?
But no. It would be work to learn this damn instrument. Fine. I guess I knew that. I had poked around on these pianos before. I supposed I’d just gotten carried away and dreamed a little too big. Oh well. If I had to figure this instrument out one note at a time, that’s what I would do. It would suit my obsessive streak anyway. I knew that when I concentrated on something, I clung to it like a pit bull. I could work all day on something that held my interest.
* * *
—
From then on, I would space out through much of the school day, imagining music I wanted to play. Somehow I never went through the stage of learning to play my favorite radio music by ear. I didn’t really have the building blocks for that anyway. Playing by ear is about building a vocabulary and connecting dots in a way I was never taught. I just learned through trial and error. When I was finally back at home at the piano, I would hack around in the harmonic darkness, rewarded with just enough discovery to inspire the imagination and more than enough frustration to propel me to improve. It was a cycle of imagining and practicing. The harder I worked at music, the more it sparked the imagination, and the more I imagined, the harder I had to work to keep up with my head. But the frustration of not being able to actually play what I heard in my mind led to terrible tantrums, which continued through high school. In fact, each time our family moved to another house, my main chore was always patching the holes in the walls of my bedroom, where I’d punched, kicked, or thrown things around the room like an idiot. I once punched drywall expecting to put a satisfying hole in it, but I hit a stud instead and broke my hand.
* * *
—
After a year of playing piano, I had written a good thirty complete instrumental songs, recorded them on a portable cassette recorder, and even placed them on staff paper. I had also learned a few silly songs for my first recital, like “Spinning Song” in my John Thompson book, a few other standard student piano hits of the time, and of course “Maple Leaf Rag” by Scott Joplin. But I only bothered with those because I hoped they would shed some light on how I might find my own ideas on the keyboard. I also knew these were pieces that the babysitter, who was my first teacher, struggled to play. Competition proved to be another motivator.
* * *
—
Much of my time in the summers and the afternoons after school was spent waiting around construction sites as my parents worked. Chuck was someone you could trust with a power tool at a young age, but I was not. Not at any age. Papa would remind me, “Benjamin, measure twice, cut once!” because I would often cut something the wrong length, having measured it too hastily. Realizing my mind wasn’t in it, Papa might rethink the whole situation. “Ah. Fuck it, you’re going to kill somebody with that goddamn saw, Benjamin! Give me that. Here’s a few bucks. Go to the 7-Eleven and get me a damn Pop-Tart or something.” Sure, I was given tools sometimes—a broom, or maybe a rag—just not the kind that would put me or anyone else in danger, in case my mind wandered. And free to roam, my mind did wander. I spent those hours on construction sites making up songs in my head.
* * *
—
One of the fancy new houses my parents built. A muddy lot in which to imagine songs.
Of course, I also did kid stuff like everyone else. I liked to play sometimes. I wasn’t a total weirdo. I might make a ramp out of plywood and rocks and try some Evel Knievel shit on my bike or find a kid to toss a baseball with. But mostly I walked around in the mud alone, imagining music: naïve, unfettered, unrestrained, and unedited music. When you’re making music in your mind, it’s okay if it’s technically unplayable. It’s even okay to hear instruments that don’t exist. There’s a time and a place for the tools, and the first tool is imagination.
* * *
—
I often think about how grade school art classes are taught. We start out by painting and drawing from our imagination, not by copying a Rembrandt. That comes later. Our earliest artwork is truly original expression, shitty as it may be. We imagine first. We often draw something we want to communicate, consciously or subconsciously. Play therapists use art as a safe way to let children explain what’s going on in their lives and how they feel, because we understand that art is a means of communication.
But in music, for some reason, we begin by copying, by following, by learning to play existing music. That’s certainly a good way to learn technique, but in the process it’s easy to forget that music is a form of creative expression. In time, we come to believe that music is something that can only be composed by mystical figures we never meet, usually dead ones. But if you’ve really got something to say, and all of us do, you will want to learn the vocabulary. You will be frustrated and motivated to learn the technique. So why not teach and encourage a little of both, copying and creating?
Just laying here in the bed, half-awake, half-asleep
Thinking about you
I was wondering if you were looking after your most valuable possession—
Your mind!
That’s from a song called “Your Most Valuable Possession” on the Ben Folds Five album The Unauthorized Biography of Reinhold Messner. The lyrics are just some ramblings that my father, the same Dean Folds who urged me to measure twice, left on my answering machine as we were recording that album. He was on a lot of cough medicine, he says.
* * *
—
I continued my habit of pacing around and daydreaming about music well into adulthood. In my twenties I paced the front yard with a cereal bowl all morning, wearing only my boxer shorts, for all to see, imagining songs and arrangements.
I still work this way, minus the cereal bowl and boxers in the front yard. Sometimes I find it’s best to sit and stare into space, or take a walk, or drop my hands to sit in silence at the piano. And wait.