It hadn’t dawned on me yet what it would mean to be divorced and officially on my own. It was only a week ago that I had first considered moving back to North Carolina. Before that I didn’t have any particular vision of the future. It had been some vague, unlit horizon. Now it was a blinding white page. We all experience a small handful of these moments in our lives, and as scary as they are, they should also be cherished. Electric stillness. Between chapters, between storms, completely up in the air. That split second between breathing in and breathing out. This is also the headspace I associate with the birth of new songs.
Once the sun came up and I had a morning nap at my parents’ apartment, I learned they too would soon be getting a divorce. During a more stable time in my life, this news might have come as more of a shock. But the ground was shifting beneath my feet. I was also grateful I still had parents, even if they weren’t together anymore. Happiness, health, and following your path suddenly seemed more important than marital status, belongings, title, or home address. I only hoped that this was the best for them as we all lurched into the unknown.
* * *
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Not wanting to wallow in too much feeling, I did what I always do when things get overwhelming: I got busy. There was a band to start and a music business to conquer. I started with the only call that would be necessary, and that was to my brother, Chuck. He knew all the local musicians, and they all knew Chuck. Chuck’s band, Bus Stop, was doing quite well. They had even done a national television contest. When I described to Chuck the kind of bassist I was looking for—a rocker who wouldn’t be afraid of some distortion and shredding, who could sing and looked good—Chuck told me to look no further than Robert Sledge. Robert’s band, Toxic Popsicle, had made quite a splash regionally. They were part metal, almost jam, kind of onslaught-of-percussion rock, and some Perry Farrell on top? I guess. I hate to describe music like that. Look them up—Toxic Popsicle. Or take my word for it. They were good.
I met up with Robert in Greensboro, where he had just moved in temporarily with his parents. His life was also up in the air. We snuck into a practice room at UNC–G to meander through some fairly pointless jamming, which told me very little about his musicianship as we “rocked out” mindlessly with his portable amp and a student piano, on a G7 chord. He had a high tenor voice, which he wasn’t shy to use, and he was ready to start a band. Plus, he had been considering a move to Chapel Hill anyway, so he offered to go in on a rental house. This was good enough for me! I could check that one off. Bassist. Next.
A few days later, I went on a mission to Chapel Hill to find a house for Sledge and me to rent. After exhausting the classifieds, which flapped around in the freezing wind as I tried to pin them down with a Sharpie, I took a break from the pay phone to slip inside a warm little café, and that’s where I ran into Darren Jessee. He was twenty-three. I’d met him before once, in Nashville, but I’d never heard him play. We shot the shit for a while and I decided that he had art in his bones. He said he sang and wrote songs too. He seemed like a rock star to me, and, most important, he was in limbo and available too, just having moved to Chapel Hill. November 1993: Less than a week back in North Carolina and I had my bassist and drummer sorted. Gotta love that creative visualization. Now on to reality. What do we actually sound like together?
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A couple weeks before Christmas Day, the three of us had a little jam together in the house where Darren was living. It was the first Ben Folds Five rehearsal. We didn’t have mics or anything. You really couldn’t hear what was going on. It just sounded like noise, but I didn’t care. I could visualize it all, like Johnny Depp as Ed Wood, shooting scenes in one take and moving on as the crew scratched their heads. Certainly I wanted to vet a band a little more than this? Robert phoned me afterward to recommend a couple other drummers, and Darren also called, with the name of another bassist. Each understandably assumed that we were still in audition mode. But I wasn’t interested in slowing down or looking before leaping. I reported back to Alan that we had a band and would be ready to play gigs soon.
* * *
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Within the first couple weeks of January, Robert and I had found a suitable small brick shitbox on Isley Street, within walking distance of everything. We outfitted it with as much padding and soundproofing as we could manage—blankets, old mattresses from a dump. I even walked around the neighborhood, knocking on doors, explaining we’d be practicing. I gave the whole neighborhood my number and told them the phone sat right next to the piano. All they had to do was just give us a buzz and we’d stop. But, of course, after a few rehearsals, some asshole had already called the cops instead of the number I’d given them.
Seeing the squad car pulling up into the driveway, we toned it down and quickly segued into some cocktail jazz—a spotty, quiet version of “The Girl from Ipanema,” which we let go on a few bars too long after the first knock at the door. The officer apologized for having to bother us. After all, the rest of the town was full of loud rock bands. The policeman said he found our cocktail music refreshing. He didn’t see any reason we couldn’t continue, as long as we kept it down. When his car was out of sight, we cranked it all back up. We’d just spontaneously and seamlessly gone from an early version of “Jackson Cannery” to smooth jazz via a sort of mind meld. We didn’t need to telegraph anything to make sudden musical changes together. It seemed there might actually be something special about this band.
* * *
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Robert’s musical personality, which was an important key to the sound of our band, took a few rehearsals to reveal itself. Having spent years playing heavy distorted music, Robert had turned his interest to jazz. I guess this piano band seemed an opportunity for him to class up his musicianship some. I tried to egg him on to play the way I’d heard him play before, distorted with a guitar pick, but he remained stubborn for a few rehearsals, playing a traditional tone with his fingers. But soon he cut the easy-listening crap, put some Satan back into his playing, and settled into the Sledge™ I associate with our albums. And once unleashed, his sound turned out to be way bigger and crazier than anything I’d imagined. Nobody sounds like Robert. He’s capable of great sensitivity too, but even in a ballad his playing holds a certain tension. It bursts at the seams, often bordering on musical antagonism, as if the bass guitar were strutting around the arrangement thrusting its chest, threatening to beat the other sounds up. That makes things happen! Robert’s bass-playing wakes a song up like I’ve never heard.
Darren brought an organic lyricism that dignified my songs in a way I hadn’t considered. There was Max Roach in there, Charlie Watts. He grooved, but he wasn’t the band timekeeper. None of us were. We slowed and sped, maybe more than any commercial band I’ve ever heard. You could never get away with that these days, in an era where everyone seems to have been born with a Pro Tools grid ticking robotically just inside their sphincter.