A Dream About Lightning Bugs

by Ben Folds

  * * *

  —

  I’d pulled my best modern Andy Kaufman and gotten audiences to post some tall tales to the internet, including that I’d once floated above my piano. We had many people online convinced that I had actually levitated. At another gig, I instructed the audience to post that Bill Clinton had sat in on saxophone. He hadn’t, of course, but the myth got traction. I also suggested that the audience add on forums that Clinton had snuck away with my wife and that this was easily seen happening just offstage as I played on. Finally, I asked a crowd to start a rumor online that I had been arrested. Each audience did such a creative job and kept it secret, like the Manhattan Project of bad practical jokes.

  The trouble was, I wasn’t Andy Kaufman. He always let it all hang in the air and let people wonder, and that was part of his genius. I couldn’t quite live with that discomfort. Rock promoters from around the world had called my management, concerned that my arrest would mean a cancellation. So I felt the need to explain it afterward and clear the air. While recovering, I joined some fan conversations and explained what I’d done. We had a good laugh, which probably sent me into a severe, painful coughing fit.

  But all of this stuff, the going-too-far jokes, the self-destructive diet, and the physical crashes were all expressions of things I needed to address personally. Some of us aren’t as good at looking at ourselves and taking the time to process, much less sleep. It took my believing I would die from pneumonia to give me appreciation for my health. The warning bells had been sounding for a few years. Back in the last days of Ben Folds Five, I’d shuffled some excessive bleeding and a few other symptoms under the rug until I finally had to take a couple of days from recording Rockin’ the Suburbs for a simple operation. I’d also had panic attacks, which I’d been blowing off for some time. While playing that fateful radio show on 9/11, I’d had a bottle of antidepressants rattling in my pocket. They had been prescribed the day before in the emergency room, after I’d had a hyperventilation fit. And I’d decided not to take them. I figured I’d just move along and not think about it. All of these variations of nervous-system crashes are meant as speed bumps, but I ignored them until I was persuaded of my vincibility. Vincibility 101: a class that some of us have to repeat a few times. Really, it’s best to pass it the first time around. Take the lessons while they’re cheap.

  BENNY! WHAT IS COOL??

  WILLIAM SHATNER PUT A SEEMINGLY simple question to me one night in 2004 over dinner at my studio, during our sessions for his album Has Been. This record, which I produced and co-wrote, is one of my proudest moments. It wasn’t a massive seller, but it’s certainly achieved cult-record status. Nearly fifteen years later, I still find it moving and funny. And it was a lesson in creative courage. Shatner never does a take the same way twice. He commits and puts equal energy into ideas both in and out of his comfort zone. Many a rocker could learn from his fearless attitude.

  William Shatner’s energy seems boundless. I was once staying at his guest house when he knocked at the door, balancing a two-hundred-pound oak table on his back. I glanced up the steep hill from which he’d hauled the damn thing and shook my head. He plopped it on the floor. “There, Benny, you’ll need a table.” This was a man of seventy-two years.

  * * *

  —

  Shatner and I had first met when he guested on my experimental solo album Fear of Pop back in 1997. A few of his friends had pulled me aside to warn me that Bill didn’t take direction easily. “He eats directors for breakfast!” said one. If you’d ever seen Bill at breakfast, this took on a whole new dimension. But we hit it off and I escaped being eaten. He became “Bill” to me, I became “Benny” to him. I should add there’s only one motherfucker for whom I’ll be “Benny,” so don’t even think about it.

  Bill and me

  Despite his friends’ warnings, I found that Bill took musical direction well. I never felt I needed to sugarcoat anything while working with him. I was blunt as I needed to be, and he only ever snapped at me twice. Once was near the end of the entire Has Been session, when he suddenly barked, “BENNY! You’ve been pecking at me like a chicken!” I had been pushing him hard for weeks to improve the lyrics of the second verse to his song “It Hasn’t Happened Yet.” He’d tried draft after draft and I just wouldn’t give him the thumbs-up. I’d just told him his first verse was about his life and the second verse sounded like the high school play about his life, and he had a very minor but understandable conniption.

  * * *

  —

  The other bark was the question I mentioned. The one over dinner in the studio.

  While laying waste to a black-bean burrito (he always had coupons for Baja Fresh, for some reason), Bill, out of nowhere, charged me with overuse of the word “cool.” His distaste for this word had been building for a while.

  “BENNY! WHAT IS COOL??” he shouted across the table.

  I had used “cool” a good one hundred times during the day’s recording session, he estimated. For instance, he said, if anyone had asked the question “Could we try bongos on this?” or suggested “Maybe it’s time for a break,” I would always respond with “That’s cool.” While listening to a handful of vocal takes, I might proclaim one to be “cooler” than the others. Bill felt that I didn’t even use the word “yes” much anymore and fell back on “cool” for that too. He thought I should expand my vocabulary to be more precise. There’s a big difference between “acceptable” and “transcendent.” How could they both just be lumped in together as “cool”? Simply put, this word was used in more ways than Bill thought necessary.

  In an attempt to answer what seemed a rhetorical question about a word that certainly Bill had used himself since the sixties, the best I could do was to give him some examples of things that I thought were cool.

  “You know, Bill. Cool. Like when you don’t care what anyone else thinks. Or…cool…like, like, when something’s just right. Or…” But Bill actually wanted a definition.

  “No, Benny. Listen to me. What is…cool?” he repeated, now sounding uncannily like William Shatner.

  “Okay, I’ll tell you something cool,” I said. “Cool is that story you told just moments ago about you, Larry Hagman, and, as you called him, ‘some guy who drummed in that rock band…Oh, what was his name? Oh, right. Keith. The band was called The Who, I think?’ The three of you on a motorcycle trip across the States in the late sixties? Keith Fucking Moon, Bill…and it makes it double cool that you couldn’t remember his name!”

  But that.

  Was not.

  What he was looking for.

  Bill wanted a very specific definition for this word I’d used a hundred times and he was in the middle of playing a lawyer on the popular TV show Boston Legal, and so his cross-examination technique was at its peak, and I found myself crumbling on the witness stand. He was starting to scare me. Here’s a play, or a score, of the conversation. So that you can perform it at home with the help of a friend. You will certainly know someone who thinks they can do Shatner:

  DEATH OF THE COOL—A One-Act Play

  WILLIAM SHATNER [con appassionato]: “NO, NO, BENNY! You haven’t answered my question!”

  [The dropping of a single spoon cuts through the stunned silence. Band and engineers cease any food-chewing. Some pause with lips to cup mid-drink, and the room falls still.]

  BEN FOLDS: “Well…” [gulps]

  WILLIAM SHATNER: “…What IS cool?? [molto accelerando] How can I be cool or make cooool music if I don’t…even know…WHAT [pausa…wait for it…subito furioso ff]…IT IS!!!”

  [Shatner stabs his fork into table with a doinnng! à la a 1970s’ cartoon spear-stick-in-ground foley. His eyes widen, and he sits back, mouthing a silent “aaaah,” and gazes through the tops of our heads. He’s frozen in a masterful thespian quake, hands positioned just above his forehead, as if holding an imaginary volley
ball for all to see. Then. He collapses back into his usual shape. The trance has passed. He blinks a few times, subtly shakes his head, and then makes eye contact with everyone around the room to confirm that nobody beyond these walls will ever understand. But us.]

  The End.

  Obviously, it didn’t quite happen this way. I’m sorry I got carried away. It’s too easy to make things great by just adding Shatner. But as for the question “What is cool?” and his insistence that I answer it? For me, it was helpful, if not profound.

  What Professor Shatner was doing, as he spat black beans across the studio table, was pushing back against something that seemed creatively oppressive to him. I think he’s dead-on. It is oppressive—judging music as you create it, on how cool it is? On how every little idea might conform to what we consider some current cultural and probably unachievable ideal? He was right. Let’s make music and be creative. And let’s be specific about our language as we describe what we’re doing. We can worry about that cool shit later, if at all.

  By going full Buddha on us, William Shatner was really asking these broader questions:

  Shouldn’t we avoid language that invites self-awareness into the process?

  Shouldn’t we try and be more precise when talking about music?

  Isn’t making good music in and of itself cool enough?

  Looking back on my songwriting, I can see that I had a fraught relationship with this idea of being cool. It’s probably because I never felt cool myself. But also because I’ve always suspected nobody else does either. We all want to be cool. We can’t all be cool. And we don’t even really know what it means in the first place.

  I was never cool in school

  I’m sure you don’t remember me

  These are the opening lines from my song “Underground” (Ben Folds Five, 1995). I felt terminally uncool and so I was honest about it.

  On Whatever and Ever Amen, I was still grappling with this cool business:

  I know it’s not your thing to care

  I know it’s cool to be so bored

  It sucks me in when you’re aloof

  It sucks me in

  It sucks it works

  I guess it’s cool to be alone

  My character in “Battle of Who Could Care Less” felt oppressed by the culture of apathy. It was, after all, cool to be bored in the nineties. Apathy, like the beautiful feathers of an exotic male bird, is what attracted a mate in that era. Back then, we rockers worshipped the slacker above everyone else, except maybe for the suicidal. (Talking about killing yourself would definitely get you laid in the nineties.) So I imagined a battle between two great forces of don’t-give-a-shit-ness: the characters General Apathy and Major Boredom. And though I poked fun at it, I secretly thought all this apathy business was, well…cool. The last line of “Battle of Who Could Care Less” is, after all:

  You’re my hero I confess.

  But I wasn’t done with the theme. A few years into my solo year, and right before recording William Shatner’s record, I had written a song called “There’s Always Someone Cooler Than You.” It’s on my solo album Supersunnyspeedgraphic, the LP, released in 2006:

  Make me feel tiny if it makes you feel tall

  But there’s always someone cooler than you

  Yeah, you’re the shit but you won’t be it for long

  Oh, there’s always someone cooler than you

  As it happens, after the night Bill asked, “Benny! What is cool?” my songs didn’t revisit the subject. Having just learned a great lesson in vincibility, did I really want to be spending my limited time and energy worrying about stuff like being cool? I was sitting across the table from an incredibly healthy man in his seventies who didn’t seem to think so. Maybe he’d learned a thing or two. That, for me, was the Death of the Cool.

  It’s hard for a man to stay cool

  —From “Silver Street,” first released on Ben Folds Live, 2002, but written in 1991

  TIME TO GROW UP…WAIT. WHAT? AGAIN?

  I’VE NEVER FOUND GROWING UP to be straight and linear. In my case, anyway, it’s been quite a zigzag, fixing one hole and then springing another leak somewhere else. Overcorrecting from the ditch on one side of the road, only to find myself crashed in the opposite. I had dialed back my touring some in 2002 after my pneumonia, but rather than actually slowing down, I had filled my schedule with more work.

  I built a studio from the ground up, and by the end of that year, 2003, I had written and recorded four separate studio EPs—three of my own (all of which debuted at number one on iTunes, before iTunes was a big deal), and one with Ben Lee and Ben Kweller, called The Bens. As the lesson of my vincibility faded, I got cocky again in 2004 and slipped back into my habit of heavy touring, while maintaining the pace of studio work. There was, of course, Has Been with Shatner, which had been a massive undertaking, writing the music, producing the recording, and flying in new guests every day. Before taking a breath, I undertook a complete reimagining of my catalog for the release of Ben Folds and WASO Live in Perth (the West Australian Orchestra). And I still managed to get another full-length studio album, Songs for Silverman, released by 2005. Unwilling to miss out on the twins’ childhood, I found myself manically running back and forth from the studio to home or school. Or I’d take them with me to the studio, or on tour, the way my parents would drag me to the construction sites. Their presence, despite the challenge of fitting parenthood into a rock career, is probably what kept me sane.

  You nodded off in my arms watching T.V.

  I won’t move you an inch even though my arm’s asleep

  —From “Gracie,” Songs for Silverman, 2005

  To add to the mix—just because—I spent an average morning from 5 A.M. to noon in a darkroom, making countless prints, before my late nights in the studio. This is all doable if you just cut sleep in half. The pace continued through 2007, as I unsurprisingly found myself headed for another divorce and hopping on the tour bus that summer to support John Mayer.

  I was supposed to be the adult on the John Mayer tour. In terms of years, at least, I was the elder statesman. But as I stretched myself thin with work, my life outside of work paid the price and my typical symptoms once again surfaced. The childish what-the-fuck-is-he-doing-now onstage antics, along with the physical and nervous-system breakdowns. A quick Google search, like I’ve just done at the time of this writing, turns up articles about the Continuum Tour 2007 that pretty well paint the picture: “Folds was profane”; “Folds told tall tales”; he “outraged parents”; he “dropped his pants and flipped off the audience.” Yup, that’s how I remember it too.

  I’d first met John in the late nineties, when he was just some kid at Berklee College of Music who was bootlegging Ben Folds Five concerts and selling them online. My manager, Alan, had noticed he was selling these recordings of our shows online and wanted to bust his ass for profiting off our music. Alan often warned of the peril ahead in the new frontier of digital music distribution, and he was ready to make an example of someone. But I told Alan to call off the dogs and leave the kid alone. I didn’t see anything wrong with someone being excited about our music and sharing it with others.

  I didn’t think about this John Mayer for a couple years, until he popped up backstage at a solo show in Athens, Georgia, in 2000. Soon after, as Weird Al Yankovic and I filmed the video for the song “Rockin’ the Suburbs,” there was young John Mayer again. Just hanging around, I guess, to see how it was done. Seven years, millions of records, a handful of Grammys, and countless tabloid covers later, he had pretty well figured out how it was done. It turns out this kid was an absolutely brilliant guitarist and songwriter. And so now we were touring together, a newly world-famous John Mayer taking out the old dude he looked up to when he was younger.

  John’s tour was much more of a mainstream a
ffair than I was accustomed to, and I was definitely causing problems. But the biggest problem was one particular song, which was becoming a very successful single for me. I don’t mean “Landed,” from the album Songs for Silverman, the single that had been released and highly promoted by Sony. I mean its B side, “Bitches Ain’t Shit,” which had spread by word of mouth and was now doubling my audiences. Its title is the cleanest part of the song. You may know the Dr. Dre original from “The Chronic.” I just added pretty chords and one of my best melodies to it and it became a thing.

  Since I was in college I had always wanted to make a melody to “Can’t Do Nuttin’ for Ya Man” by Public Enemy. I loved that song and wanted to hear it on the piano. But when I actually sat down to work on it, I found it too symmetrical for a good melody. It had too much of a Cat in the Hat vibe to sound serious with sad chords. Needing a B side at that moment, I searched my record collection in the studio for another spoken or rapped song that might be less iambic-pentameter driven—so I could experiment with music that might highlight a different side of a lyric. And there, glowing out of my stack of records, was Dr. Dre’s classic.

  I’d always thought the lyrics of “Bitches Ain’t Shit” painted a sad picture. Or, rather, the part that I chose to excerpt skewed sad. I actually didn’t use the entirety of the lyric. I decided to concentrate on the parts where the main character is released from prison and is excited to see his girlfriend, only to discover her having sex with his cousin on the floor. It’s like a sad Johnny Cash song with a lot more vulgarity. Slowing these words down from their gangsta-rap presentation and adding melody creates an absurd effect, both sad and funny. Sung this way, the misogyny in the original lyrics, no matter how wrong, could be explained by how badly the narrator was hurt. I consider the melody for “Bitches Ain’t Shit” to be as good as any melody I’ve written. It’s no throwaway. It was a joke only to the extent that the comedy I loved from the seventies was a joke: It was based on something real.