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 me. 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.
However, there were a few moments in rock history that hinted a piano rock trio might work. One was Emerson, Lake & Palmer, a very successful late sixties/early seventies prog-rock trio from the U.K. They sometimes limited themselves to piano, bass, and drums on their records but mostly relied on the distorted B-3 Hammond organ, which probably has more in common with guitar than it does piano. Elton John’s live record 11-17-70 is the best and perhaps only example of a whole album made by a piano rock trio that I knew of before my band, over twenty years later. 11-17-70, captured before a small studio audience for radio, was released later as an afterthought, once Elton had already become a superstar. It’s one of my favorite albums of all time. His bassist, Dee Murray, and drummer, Nigel Olsson, were off the proverbial chain. Elton’s playing is James Booker, Allen Toussaint, Little Richard, Leon Russell, and Jimi Hendrix all rolled into one. Some of the most brilliant rock piano-playing ever recorded. It makes sense that Elton didn’t make his commercial records as a trio—it’s limiting and difficult. I was thankful he left that stone unturned. It left an opening. But 11-17-70 rocked in a sparse and laid-back seventies way, and a full-time guitarless piano rock trio would need to be more of everything if it was going to compete in the nineties.
Ben Folds Five could have stuck with mid-tempo songs and the ballads. Darren used to joke that if we did that and sold pink T-shirts that said SOFT ROCK in large puffy-cloud font, and then just made the music that matched that, we’d be a bigger hit. Indeed, that would have been a reasonable formula. And easier. Because the ballad is where the piano has always dominated and where it still wins today. Who can walk through a mall or airport without hearing a solo piano ballad like John Legend’s “All of Me” at least once? It’s no surprise that the piano power ballad “Beth” was hard-rock band Kiss’s biggest hit. The power ballad became the radio slam dunk for metal bands during the seventies and eighties, with a piano appearing from nowhere to take center stage. But those bands started out by getting your attention with loud guitars. (It’s of note that Ben Folds Five eventually broke mainstream with “Brick,” which served as our power ballad. This was by design, as Alan, a veteran of record labels and quite the rock historian, had always envisioned releasing two rockers like “One Angry Dwarf and 200 Solemn Faces” and “Battle of Who Could Care Less” first and then delivering “Brick” as our “November Rain.”)
* * *
—
“Revolution is exhausting,” Kevin McCloud, the great presenter of the U.K. television show Grand Designs, told me recently through my TV, to which I replied, “Amen!” from my sofa. The unpaved path is damn hard going—it’s as simple as that. And our first hurdle was just booking the gigs. Club owners didn’t want a piano anywhere near their club.
“Yes, sir,” I’d explain politely over my 1990s’ landline. “No, it’s a real piano, not an electric one….Right…Yes…A baby grand, not an upright, and we move it ourselves….Hello?”