A Dream About Lightning Bugs

by Ben Folds

  I was now a twenty-two-year-old married man with no other obvious opportunities, tired of waiting tables, ready to pay his debt down and take on the world. I was not to be detained or slowed down with caution or logic. I packed the old Volvo station wagon. *Cue Beverly Hillbillies theme song.*

  Entering Nashville at the Demonbreun exit ramp, a newcomer like myself got an eyeful of a strip club that boasted 50 BEAUTIFUL WOMEN AND ONE UGLY ONE. A Music City landmark for decades. In the late eighties, Nashville was still sporting a culturally latent, seedy, early-seventies’ mustache. Irony-free. The first night there I stayed in the Shoney’s Inn, across from the Barbara Mandrell Country Museum, with creepy wax figures of the Mandrell Sisters displayed in the foyer. Everything in that neighborhood was surreal. There was a place around the corner called Houndogs. It was a hot dog stand manned by a fellow in a hot dog suit and an Elvis impersonator. In fact, a couple years later my car broke down right at Houndogs and blocked their business for an hour. You haven’t lived until you’ve been screamed at by an Elvis impersonator until AAA shows up. On the next block was a bar with a mechanical bull that clacked through the night. This was a stone’s throw from Al Jolson Enterprises Inc., which copied cassettes in bulk for songwriters making demos. It was owned by the son of the minstrel singer Al Jolson, famous for his blackface rendition of “Mammy.” It’s now Southern Grounds recording studio—I did some overdubs for Kesha there recently.

  The musicianship I found floating around Scott Siman’s demo studio, only a few blocks from the tourist freakshow, was outstanding. And they did music full-time! I kept getting this funny wink-wink treatment from the circle of talent that Scott was supporting, who hung out at the studio. They’d all heard my four-track demo, and they each waited until nobody else was in the room to tell me that they got my music but nobody else did. And they congratulated me on being Scott’s new favorite. It was a little odd, but it was a whole new world of opportunity.

  I slept on the floor of the Scott Siman demo studio/hangout shack. It was on the corner of 19th and Chet Atkins Place. The comers and goers at this little studio included a then-unknown Keith Urban, who was pounding the pavement to be taken seriously as an Australian in country music. It wasn’t going well at that moment. I’m pretty sure Keith also slept on that studio floor, but he doesn’t remember that. I, in turn, don’t remember suggesting he and I write songs together, only to end up making him my “tape op bitch.” I left him running the studio equipment so I could perform everything myself, as Keith recalls. There was the late Will Owsley, later known as simply Owsley, who made a few great records of his own and played on many more. Tommy Sims, who went on to write big songs like “Change the World” by Eric Clapton, would come in and play bass and Moog synth bass. I could keep on with the list. It was exciting.

  What wasn’t exciting were the shitty demos made in that studio, which woke me up at 9 A.M. each morning. How’s a nocturnal rock musician supposed to sleep with some sappy song called “The Winds of Change” playing on repeat in the next room? In my sleeping bag on the floor, I covered my head with my pillow as I got a glimpse of what a musical sweatshop Nashville was. It was like they were making shitty greeting cards with some follow-the-numbers music behind it.

  The Nashville musicians seemed all too happy to treat creativity like a nine-to-five job. By the time a song like “The Winds of Change” might make its way through the bowels of the Nashville system and onto the radio, the original writers probably wouldn’t even remember they’d written it. Songs were a commodity—crank ’em out. Although the structure of my publishing deal resembled the standard old-school Nashville sweatshop deal, Scott assured me that our plan was different. I was writing for my own career, not for others. He didn’t expect me to tailor songs for other artists to get “cuts” on others’ albums. No greeting cards for me.

  My regular monthly royalty advance was about a thousand bucks. After two payments, I could afford an upstairs one-bedroom apartment on 18th Avenue South near Wedgewood, and Anna was able to leave North Carolina and join me. We broke into a fit of joyous laughter in the grocery store when we realized we could afford two boxes of cereal instead of one. Anna took a Kinko’s copy gig and I spent the days writing. I recorded demos in the studio when I was lucky enough to get a slot. Otherwise, I worked at home with my bass guitar and notebook.

  I wrote songs like “Philosophy” and “The Last Polka”—which would be on the Ben Folds Five album six years later—sitting in a chair in the living room into the wee hours. But Scott wasn’t blown away by my new material. The songs were okay, he said, but the demos were too rough. I would have to learn the fine art of the Nashville slick-assed demo. And he made it clear that I wasn’t to play any live shows in the meantime. It was a small Music City, and the word would get out if I were to play a show that got mixed reviews. An impressive demo would be my calling card to interest labels. Then I’d blow them away with a surprise attack from the shadows in a single showcase! Erg, there’s that “showcase” word again. It made me slightly ill. Why not just call them gigs?

  Nashville demos were like an extreme version of a normal studio recording. Everything a little louder, a little brighter, with more effects. Just push the MORE button to rope ’em in. It’s a little like the way TV screens are sold in Best Buy or Circuit City—they look impressive in the store, over-sharpened and over-saturated, until you get them home and find they’ve made your favorite classic movies look more like cheap wedding videos. That’s how I felt about those Nashville demos. They sounded impressive cranked up loudly in the music exec’s office, but in the real world they sounded cheesy. Then you’d hear the same singer at a bar being himself and it would blow you away. The talent there was outstanding. I just didn’t quite agree with all the methods.

  My demos, on the other hand, sounded the way I thought a demo should sound. Shitty. Why spend your soul on the demo? If you’re going to put all that time into it, why not call it an album and be done? I figured I should try to get on board with this glamour-demo business like I was told, but my demos got worse as they got slicker. And I knew it. Trying to impress was also resulting in some of those old strained vocal aberrations. I was sounding less like me again. I began to write less, and I spent more of my time riding my bike, running long distance, and buying stacks of one-dollar LPs down on Division Street. And as I engaged less and less with my publisher, my publisher became slower to write those advance royalty checks. My time as the new favorite was up.

  Scott had become more interested in my friend Millard, who had just moved to Nashville. Millard and Will Owsley, whom I’d introduced to each other, had started up a project called the Semantics, playing clever power pop on Nashville demo steroids. Scott was rightfully impressed. It was damn good. I was in Scott’s office with a roomful of local music execs one afternoon when he put in a cassette demo of a song I’d written called “Kalamazoo” and sat back to watch their reaction. Tired of all the slick demo business, I’d gone back to my evil four-track cassette ways. “Kalamazoo” was rough, a sort of jazzy and melancholic piece. Not at all commercial. One exec rudely asked Scott to “please take that shit out of the tape player.” With me in the room! Scott quickly ejected mine and put in the Semantics tape.

  “Now, that’s music!” they all concurred, banging their middle-aged heads to the slickest demo Nashville had ever heard. Not that the Semantics didn’t make great music. But ouch, you know.

  Most of what Anna had feared about this Nashville move was coming true. Tension between the two of us was building as I settled into the clichéd Depressive Slack-Ass Musician™ while Anna, with her degree from Duke University, was paddling ferociously just above minimum wage at the copy shop to help make ends meet.

  One day, as we browsed through the one-dollar record section at a store called the Great Escape, I spotted a Kate Bush LP collection I had to have. Anna reminded me that buying it would make us ten dollars’ short on
this month’s rent. But like a naughty schoolboy I took our last ten bucks, plopped it down for the records, hopped on my bike, and left Anna in the dust. Twenty minutes later, with “Wuthering Heights” blasting out of the stereo, I heard Anna marching loudly up the steps to our apartment. When I opened the door she punched me in the jaw. Hard. Black-and-blue bruise and all. I deserved it. If I could go back in time, I’d punch myself. Nursing my jaw, I straightened up and got back to work. I needed to get as many songs as I could done before I was dropped from my publishing deal. I lent my musicianship to various other artists, and I played on some Semantics recordings. They were my friends, and although I didn’t like my new place in their shadow, their music was good and I was happy to drum for them.

  Meanwhile, a local rock duo called Fleming and John was making waves. Their gigs were incredibly inspiring. They often had a string quartet in tow, and once they brought along an African dance troupe, just for kicks. John Painter, who later arranged strings for the Ben Folds Five albums, was the most talented arranger I’d ever met, and Fleming McWilliams had one of the biggest rock-star presences I’d seen up close. She’s still one of my favorite singers in the world. I will always file those shows under “legendary.” Re-energized, I realized how badly I missed the old-fashioned grassroots approach that Fleming and John were taking. They were actually doing it, while I was held prisoner in a demo studio. I needed to play gigs.

  After a year of abstaining from public performances in Nashville, as my publisher had insisted, I put together a piano, bass, and drums rock trio called Jody’s Power Bill. It didn’t seem natural not to be playing my songs in public, so I enlisted my friend Tom Spagnardi on bass and Morgan Davis on drums and we started rehearsing a set. You might recognize the name Morgan Davis from an extremely filthy song I wrote years later, called “The Secret Life of Morgan Davis.” I want to formally apologize to Morgan about this song, which had absolutely nothing to do with him. His namesake in the song was an entirely fictional character who sneaks out each night on his wife and acts out all his disgusting fantasies until sunrise, when he “wipes the coke and lipstick off his fat hairy chest” and “crawls in bed with his sleeping wife.” Apologies to his wife too, and to his family and friends, while I’m at it. Actually, let’s just make it an apology to anyone who’s ever heard the song. It’s truly gross. And it’s one of my favorites.

  Still in financial debt from the Majosha days, I decided to borrow more money, for a small baby grand Baldwin piano. I figured I’d just carry it to gigs. Anna, ever the manager, booked Jody’s Power Bill into a place called 12th and Porter. We built a small following with our guitar-less rock, and I got good practice moving the piano.

  At this point, Scott Siman probably didn’t really know what to do with me. I kept writing wordy, uncommercial songs and was probably ruining his plans by playing shows. He sold my publishing contract to the legendary country-music producer and executive Paul Worley at Sony/Tree Publishing. Paul had stopped by 12th and Porter one night and caught me pounding “Purple Haze,” in no shirt, no shoes, and with ridiculous fake tattoos drawn all over me. I don’t think Paul stayed to hear any of my original songs that night, but he was sold on the audacity of my Jimi Hendrix piano performance and gave me the keys to Sony/Tree’s full twenty-four-track studio facility, with free rein from midnight to 9 A.M. He didn’t claim to understand my music—he sensed it was good, and he was probably doing a solid for Scott Siman.

  The first song I delivered to my new publisher was the now completed waltz “Boxing.” I had made a piano-and-eight-piece-choir version of the song, singing all the vocal parts in the stairwell for extra reverb. I proudly marched into Paul Worley’s office to play the recording. He listened with interest, and some confusion. This wasn’t the “Purple Haze”–style piano mania he’d expected. And…how on earth did I manage to make this state-of-the-art studio sound as bad as my messy four-track demos? I hadn’t noticed, but for each of those eight harmonies, along with their doubles, I’d managed to record the air-conditioning unit in the stairwell sixteen times. It was a very noisy recording.

  I spent the next year as a Sony/Tree songwriter, learning the studio from the ground up, nearly every midnight to eight in the morning. I learned how to align, demagnetize, and edit on the twenty-four-track analog tape machine, which I would put into record mode in the control room, then run as fast as I could out to the piano, bass, or drums. Often, John Painter would come add extra stuff. He also showed me the beauty of the Big Muff pedal for distorting the bass guitar. That seemed to help make up for the lack of electric guitars in my songs. I splurged on a string section from time to time, which either John or I would arrange. In that studio I wrote “Underground,” “Uncle Walter,” and “Missing the War,” and a whole bunch I’ve forgotten.

  Even though it was 1991, the music world was still solidly stuck in the aesthetic of the eighties, and seemed like it would stay that way forever. If you ever come across some of Nirvana’s first early-nineties TV appearances, you’ll notice their grungy style is totally out of sync with the slick colorful TV studio sets they’re awkwardly performing on. In the eighties, rock bands might have to perform in front of fake brick walls with bad graffiti or with big-hair dancing chicks from workout videos ornamenting the shots. In pre–Kurt Cobain Nashville, a nerdy, cussing, and pounding pianist with no vibrato didn’t seem ready for that kind of prime-time scene. The pop-music world was still too slick.

  Delivering my songs to Paul Worley was nearly as deflating as delivering them to my old publisher, Scott. I admired Paul personally and professionally, but he was so distracted by things like piano-pedal squeaks and the air-conditioner noise on the stairwell vocals. He rarely offered feedback on the actual songs. In retrospect I can see that he had the instinct to know I was onto something, but as a country musician, he didn’t feel qualified to comment on my brand of music. It was a whole other style with a lot more chords and notes. He did, however, feel qualified to comment on the production.

  “What’s that distortion on the bass? Where are the guitars? Wanna put a little ’verb on those vocals?” he asked politely.

  Meanwhile, Paul had signed my friends the Semantics to a publishing deal and he had a proposition. I could join the Semantics as their drummer, add a few of my songs, and Sony/Tree wouldn’t drop me. My music was proving utterly uncommercial, but perhaps it would add just the right touch to the Semantics. Plus, I’d get a fat record advance, because the Semantics were going to be signed to Geffen Records for a fuck-ton of money.

  Anna was working two jobs and I was about to lose my income. If I agreed to Paul’s offer, I’d get a nice check, keep my publishing deal, and land some of my songs on a major-label release. If I declined, it was back to square one, waiting tables. Against every fiber of my being, I joined the Semantics in L.A. for rounds of meetings with their prospective producers.

  I was out there for a couple of weeks and I didn’t like it. I didn’t like it one bit. I didn’t like the big name-dropping label guy we met at the Palm Restaurant, sitting at a table under his own portrait. I didn’t like all the producers’ sales pitches or their compulsory black turtlenecks tucked into blue jeans. I didn’t like the Semantics arguing over whose song had been the one to get the record deal, or who would sit “gun” in the limo. But this was the L.A. rock business, I guess, and I was beginning to wonder if they were all wearing diapers under those jeans. In truth, I was being a total sourpuss and I was looking for things I didn’t like—because it wasn’t my gig. I soon bowed out and the Semantics got a new drummer, Ringo Starr’s son Zak Starkey.

  I was now twenty-four years old, with increasingly concerned shrugging parents, added debt on a baby grand piano, a tenuous publishing deal, some great studio experience, and, of course, that high school diploma. And I was soon to be a divorced man. Anna had been working multiple jobs, all of which she was overqualified for, in support of my failing music career. Prospects
of a record deal were going backward, not forward. I was becoming a Debbie Downer.

  During my time in Nashville, I found myself increasingly sluggish all through the day. I wondered sometimes if I had some kind of disease. I just couldn’t stay awake. I had no appetite. I’d often stay in bed well past noon, as there was no schedule to conform to. Now I was thinking about leaving Nashville altogether, but Anna wanted to stay. The strain of it all, and the obvious imminent diversion of paths, was becoming all too clear. We would be separating.

  While in L.A. with the Semantics, I’d been told there was someone who actually liked my music, up in the Sony Publishing offices in New York. Her name was Kerry McCarthy. Feeling uncertain about my future, I gave her a call. She actually approved of my sloppy demos and she told me she wasn’t the only fan of mine in New York. She’d been passing my tapes around the city for a while. Had nobody told me this, she asked? She suggested I come up, meet some people and play some shows, and was confident that Sony New York would assume my publishing contract if Nashville didn’t want it.

  Maybe New York was more my speed? I put a few things into the old Volvo station wagon and had awkward goodbyes with Anna. As I turned onto the highway at Broadway downtown, a familiar sound came over the speakers.

  What is this? I know I’ve heard this somewhere!

  Then I recognized that damn song. It was “The Winds of Change”! The country greeting card that had ruined my sleep way back when I’d first arrived in Nashville and was bedding on the studio floor! It was squeaking through the old Volvo radio just the way I remembered it! It was one of those moments that make you think life is but a dream.

  That shitty song and I had spent time sharing a sleeping bag, and now I guessed we were traveling buds. We’d both made it through the bowels of Nashville, and as I was being shat out of Music City by way of I-40 East, I cranked it up and shook my head, choking back a few tears every hundred miles or so.