A Dream About Lightning Bugs

by Ben Folds

  I would have breathed a sigh of relief had there been a split second to process it all. But there was no intermission after act one. I was shot out of a cannon directly into act two before the audience could even return from the bathroom. Gone were the late nights of writing at a notebook in my bed, surrounded by empty album jackets, pizza boxes, and balled-up pieces of paper. I’d enjoyed going to sleep as the sun rose. I’d enjoyed reaching for my glasses at 2 P.M. and stumbling up to get a burrito and a Coke for breakfast. I’d thought it was funny to be an adult who was constantly reminded by strangers that he should tie his shoes.

  Now it was different. I found myself waking up with the rest of the working world. It started with early mornings to take phone calls from the U.K., remaining tethered to the phone until the West Coast had concluded business hours. Back in this era of the music business, the three months prior to a new-album release were jam-packed with business and promotion for the band and label—if you were so lucky. For the first time in my life I knew what I would be doing the next day, month, and even year. We had plans. Plans to eat up every ounce of day and night we could handle. Every silent space would be filled and I would always be on the move. And I knew I could handle it all, so I said yes to everything. I was given the Script™ and was happy to follow it note for note. It went like this, robotically: “record-tour-record-tour.” Amazing. No need to ruminate on life and my future. This was the future, and it was full of plenty to keep me busy.

  I stay focused on details—it keeps me from feeling the big things

  —From “Still,” Over The Hedge soundtrack, 2006

  The buzz about our soon-to-be-released debut album set off interest from major labels who wanted to buy our yet-to-be-conceived second album. Before our first album had even hit shelves, we found ourselves consumed by the process of major-label courting for the second one. But sleep could wait. In a business like this, I figured, you get one chance if you’re lucky. I was twenty-eight years old and nearly aged out of the rock business. All of this, I figured, was happening just under the wire.

  Some mornings I’d open the front door to discover stacks of massive boxes containing every record Warner, EMI, or Sony had ever made. Each label that was pursuing us had their entire catalog sent to my house. Just that alone was overwhelming. I was used to a normal life of acquiring one album at a time, listening on repeat for weeks until I could afford the next. Now I suddenly owned more than I could ever listen to. Hundreds of CDs spread across my living room floor. I’d play ten seconds of each, tossing them around the room like confetti while opening the plastic wrapping of the next. But record-bingeing wasn’t as satisfying as I would have imagined. I felt like an out-of-control CD junkie, trying to soak up all of recorded music history in spare minutes.

  As the setup period for the first album raged on, the front yard became my office. I’d pace around outside with my old-school chunky wireless landline phone, bullshitting my way through interviews. I spent all day talking about myself. I’m sure my next-door neighbor must have looked across the yard like, what a douche, as I wore a line in the grass, spouting God knows what kind of crap.

  Front-yard office, Chapel Hill, 1994

  Between press calls, I’d get updates from Alan on the major-label bidding war, names of the last five people to say I was great, the daily list of five-star reviews, who would be at what show, and what opportunities couldn’t be missed.

  It was an exciting day when Alan called to tell me we had our first national review—exciting for a few minutes, anyway. It was a glowing review, in Entertainment Weekly, and Alan read the whole thing to me over the phone. They rated the album an A-minus, a rating that, he added, wasn’t given out “like candy.” But it was candy, all right, for my little ego. Alan read all the good bits again for emphasis. It soon occurred to me to ask the obvious: “Was there another review this week with a higher grade?”

  He flipped around the reviews section a bit. “Yes,” he said. “A band called Garbage.”

  “Garbage, huh? So, what’s their grade?” I asked.

  “A-plus.”

  Innocence lost. You learn quickly that no sales number, no review, no award, will ever be good enough.

  * * *

  —

  Alan kept me constantly up to date on all the amazing developments, like how many records had shipped. As long as the figures continued to rise, which they did, I was happy. Offers poured in from everywhere for things I’d never dreamed of doing. I’d grab my calendar as he added shows, turning each month ahead into a black page. It was all good news all the time. Every call-waiting beep was like a bell at the county fair, winning more and more prizes. Yippeeeee!

  It was on an afternoon of such exhaustingly ego-inflating calls that I put one on hold and hit CALL WAITING to receive the next goody. But this wasn’t the standard welcome-to-our-showroom-of-prizes call. It was Dave “Stiff” Johnson, the producer of the abandoned and vaulted version of our album. We hadn’t spoken since the mix.

  “Hello, Ben speaking,” I answered.

  “Well, well, well! Mr. ‘Ben Speaking’! Mr. Ben fucking Folds! Welcome to the goddamn music business!” Dave shouted maniacally, almost as if he were singing. “You’re gonna do just great in this cutthroat business, you fucking asshole!”

  Oh no! It seemed nobody had told Stiff that we had rerecorded the whole album. He hadn’t even received a courtesy call or letter—not from management, the label, or us. Dave Johnson had to find out for himself that not a second of his production was to be found on our release. He had just read about it in a magazine, picked up the phone, and was dealing me an earful. It’s possible my neighbor could hear him through my phone too. But Dave was right. And I needed to hear it.

  It seemed my new place in act two of my life elicited far more intense reactions than I had experienced before, both good and bad. My decisions now affected others. I guess it’s called responsibility—not that special. It’s just that being chewed out for being late to wait tables never quite had the emotional torque I had gotten from Dave Johnson. This wasn’t just Life as Usual + Fun Prizes. It was a mixed bag.

  I’d never been popular before. I’d never been a success at anything or had strangers cling to me in case I had something to offer. What must it have been like for pretty girls back in school? I wondered. Or just for someone who runs a popular local restaurant? Because people who wouldn’t have given me the time of day before were now pulling me aside to talk my ear off, with this wild look in their eyes. More than once I hid in a stairwell at an obligatory New York or Los Angeles music-biz party just to get some quiet—to grab a moment where I wasn’t looking out of a fish-eye lens watching some stranger’s mouth move as I nodded. There was the other side of that coin too, as certain old acquaintances now seemed to subtly exude a whiff of resentment or outward bitterness toward me. I wondered if I was imagining it, and that in itself began to get into my head.

  I’ve never experienced an ass-kissing quite like the one Robert, Darren, and I got on our first record release, when we were a clean slate, all potential, no string of failures—or successes. The new “it” band, the band to watch. We weren’t famous yet, but word in the biz was we might be soon. Get in while you can! I remember needing assistance from a couple of security guys for the first time, pushing fans back just to get to the stage for our third gig at the tiny East Village rock club Brownies.

  Some of that intensity at the beginning stage is due to the fact that an artist is still accessible when they’re the “next big thing.” And those who want to hitch their wagon to you understand this very well. Once you get going and become professional, you don’t look like prey anymore. You adjust, and things normalize. You learn who your friends are, and the sharks disperse to find the next new thing to latch on to.

  This sudden fame, or promise of fame, wasn’t all bad, of course! There was also plenty of earnest excitement and innocent
attention. It was wonderful at times. It’s just hard for someone who’s not used to causing such a fuss to figure out how it all works. But it did get to my head some. Luckily, I was in my late twenties for this and not my late teens. I can’t imagine how those who make it much bigger, much younger, can possibly cope. Hats off! Because there are so many levels to celebrity and ours wasn’t even megastardom—Elvis or Beyoncé style. Ours was on a much smaller scale, even at the height of our career. But our ascent began back in another era, much different from now, when the money was flowing, when video budgets were a quarter of a million dollars, and a band like ours sold forty thousand records a week without blinking. Prior to the internet, a rock band reached audiences through a limited number of outlets like radio, TV, and magazines. And overnight we were pouring out of all of them. So, yeah, it was all quite a big deal, at least to us. I was damn near numb for most of it but kept my balance by remaining centered on the task at hand: the music and loading my own piano into rock clubs. The social part, the immersion in quasi-fame, sent my soul running for the recesses of my skull, where it crouched in hiding for years.

  The thing about “making it” in the music business was best explained to me by my friend John McCrea of Cake, who put it this way (roughly): “Being a rock star is, of course, every fifteen-year-old boy’s dream. You wish for it when you’re young. And just when you’re too mature to be a rock star with a straight face, that’s when the wish is granted and you get the job.” I don’t believe John meant he had wisher’s remorse. But the opportunity to ride the bull for a while in the goddamn music business isn’t something you turn down, especially when you’re otherwise qualified to bag groceries and wait tables. It’s just that as an adult, you question the dreams of your fifteen-year-old self.

  I often thought about what John said, and years later I wrote a song called “Draw a Crowd,” where I likened achieving fame to ordering a package that arrives once you’ve forgotten you ordered it. Haven’t you ever been surprised by an Amazon order that appears on your front porch—something you ordered drunk last week and never thought about again? Whaaat? A book on identifying North American birds…? Oh! Right! I’d totally forgotten….

  I ordered something

  It took a while

  This morning something

  Was on my doorstep

  What’s this I’m holding?

  Time capsule order?

  ’Cause I’m a brand-new man and I don’t think I want it!

  —From “Draw a Crowd,” The Sound of the Life of the Mind, 2012

  I have drawers full of youthful photographs of Robert, Darren, and me from when we were the next big thing, doing our first TV shows, gigs big and small, business meetings, and fancy parties. It was quite a roller-coaster ride. In fact, these old photos remind me of the actual roller-coaster photos they try and sell you for ten bucks as you step off a ride at Six Flags—your very own snapshot of yourself and some strangers captured by automated camera at the most thrilling turn. Around you, twisted, terrified expressions of those hanging on for dear life, as well as the calmer expressions of the more stoic passengers. And, of course, the ecstatic faces of those having the time of their life, frozen in time with two hands in the air and eyes on fire. When I see our old touring photos, I’m not sure which roller-coaster passenger I am. The brave one with hands waving over my head, or the one clutching the safety bar in fear, looking like he might be ill. But this music-business ride was what I’d asked for, even if I’d placed my order as a teenager. And it had now arrived on my front porch along with all those boxes of free CDs. I was in the goddamn music business.

  HAND ME THAT PIANO

  WE’D GOTTEN THE MUSIC-BIZ THUMBS-UP. v of the industry allowed us passage to the next round and we would proceed until apprehended. The hype men and women of the music business were chanting and beating drums, as was the ritual. But even an anticipated debut album is a drop in the ocean of music releases. The mortality rate in the world of new music has always been grim. Those images from biology class of hundreds of thousands of sperm competing to survive come to mind. It was time to earn it or be sent home in shame.

  We loaded the Baldwin baby grand piano into our converted Ryder box van and hit the road with old-school folding road maps. Analog, baby! Of course, cellphones weren’t a thing yet either, so we had to get directions and discuss load-ins with the club owners on the landline before hitting the highway. But it was this hard work, these long drives, the shitty food, the sleeping on the floors of bad hotels, that was my lifesaving counterbalance to all the ego-stroking. It kept us honest, as the old-timers say.

  Our old yellow van was outfitted with a generator, a sofa nailed to the floor, a small TV with a built-in VHS player (with an array of absurd seventies’ kung fu movies and the silent film Metropolis), a mattress over the driver’s cab, and some plywood cubbyholes for our bags. I usually drove, because I was too nervous to let anyone else do it. I kept awake by making myself moderately ill with as much Mountain Dew as it took not to fall asleep at the wheel and die. It was a lot of time in that van, and it was becoming more obvious that we only just met each other a year ago. Our days were now spent in each other’s back pocket, our finances were tied, and we each pondered our changing lives as highway after highway unfolded, eight or twelve hours a day. Darren would put headphones on when he didn’t want anyone talking to him. They were like a sign that read PLEASE DO NOT SPEAK TO ME, OR EVEN LOOK AT ME. Good idea. Soon we all had headphones on all the time, and I suspect they weren’t always connected to music.

  The audiences grew as we pedaled west. The buzz of our piano rock band spread through word of mouth, college radio, and press. I’d never seen most of the country before we crossed it on tour that first time. It was exciting to watch the familiar East Coast landscape give way to the flat West Kansas plains for what seemed like an eternity, until mesas began to spring up around Utah. We were glued to the windows. This was Wile E. Coyote shit we’d only seen on TV! I don’t believe any of us had ever been west of Tennessee.

  We could afford one hotel room a night for the three of us and our new tour manager, Trey Hamilton. His three important qualifications were that he lived in the house behind mine, was a great guy, and was exceptionally unemployed. He got on-the-job training on our first time out. He and I tackled most of the loading and the unloading of the baby grand piano, recruiting Robert and Darren for those moments where it took four bodies to get it up a ramp.

  Here are words that no one has ever said before:

  “Please saw my legs off” and “Hand me that piano!”

  —George Carlin

  There are some good reasons there haven’t been many successful piano rock bands in mainstream rock and roll. If nothing else, grand pianos are not exactly portable and they’re damn near impossible to amplify. But we were learning that if something didn’t make sense, it might be worth exploring, because it meant nobody else was doing it.

  We could afford one tuning a month when we started touring regularly. I’d carry a tuning hammer and do my best to get unisons close to in tune. I regularly broke bass strings, which would fly out of the piano and straight at Robert or Darren during the set. I learned how to “splice” these broken strings back into the piano with a special knot and some treble string. Once, when we were playing in subzero weather in Minnesota, the hammers were so frozen that the piano sounded like a harpsichord for the first half of the show. Steam bellowed out of the instrument like smoke. When the hammers thawed out, they were soaking wet and the piano became incredibly dull. During that same cold spell, on a day when it was forty degrees below zero, we got the piano down the ramp into the middle of a snowy street, panicked from the unfathomable cold, and just left it there in the road, watching downtown Minneapolis traffic avoid a baby grand piano. Not something you see every day.

  The piano’s place in rock and roll has always been interesting to m
e. Its associations with being middle-class living room furniture, church-choir accompaniment, a classical or jazz instrument, make the instrument nearly antithetical to rock and roll itself. The music and culture that the piano symbolized was the very thing that the rockers were rocking against. Anyone who’s ever rocked the piano has had to be somewhat irreverent and even violent toward their instrument in order to be accepted in the world of rock and roll. You must sacrifice your piano to prove your rock-ness.

  Each decade there seems to be room for one or two irreverent piano rockers. I’m not talking about career balladeers, like Barry Manilow or Neil Sedaka, whom I love. Or even artists like Tori Amos, who definitely kept the instrument alive when few others could. I’m talking about straight-up rock-and-roll pianists. Across rock history, you can still boil it down to Jerry Lee Lewis (who was willing to light fire to his instrument just to prove he rocked), Little Richard, Elton John, and Billy Joel. You could add Leon Russell, Dr. John, and Billy Preston, but you’re headed to blues and jazz territory, where piano is more welcome.

  Of all those just named, none had often rocked sans guitar. Most of those piano rock songs were actually dominated by guitars. The piano was usually sprinkled over the top while the rest of the band did the real rocking. If you deleted the guitars on Elton John’s “Saturday Night’s Alright for Fighting” or Billy Joel’s “Only the Good Die Young,” for instance, they wouldn’t rock so much anymore. The piano in these songs is brilliant, but it’s not what’s driving the track. I knew of no precedent for a full-time guitar-less Piano Rock Trio in the mainstream when Ben Folds Five began.