*Dial tone.*
The clubs that had their own house pianos onstage were of course more receptive to booking a piano trio. But those gigs seemed to always go pear-shaped for us. Expecting jazz or blues, the audiences were sent running for the exits, holding their middle-aged ears. We stopped booking those early on.
Some of the rock venues were excited about the novelty of a baby grand piano on their stage, but mostly we were met with complaining, frowny faces, and eye-rolling. And just because we’d booked the gig didn’t mean they were going to let us play when we showed up. There was a house soundman in Atlanta who, after trying in vain to get an “acceptable” sound from us, threw his hands up.
“This is not up to par. It’s not professional!” he said. “And there’s too much hum coming out of your piano mics! I can’t let you perform tonight! I mean, would you make your record like that?”
I said that yes, actually, we’d just made our record exactly that way, hum and all, and he begrudgingly let us go ahead. I guess he figured if our brand was “the band that sounds like ass,” he’d push the faders up and hope for the best. The gig went great.
Our first real tour was opening for the Smithereens. After the first couple of nights, their crew stacked all their road cases in front of the loading door and parked a van in the way so we couldn’t load in. We couldn’t get the piano by their blockade. I guess they just didn’t want the hassle that night. If I could get my hands on an electric piano, they said, we’d be allowed to perform. They refused to budge, and we sat the night out. When we rolled up to the next day’s gig, it was the same thing. Blocked again. The band’s stage manager was waiting for us with arms crossed and a what-the-fuck-are-you-sissies-gonna-do-about-it grin on his face.
I made a beeline straight to him across the length of the sticky beer-stained rock-club floor. I was sick of being treated this way. Robert, assuming the shit was about to go down and fearing I’d be beaten to death, rushed protectively to my side, the dear man. I stopped a few feet from the stage, looked up straight into the dude’s sunglasses, and spoke earnestly.
“What you did last night was rude. Rude and…selfish. And…and…and it really hurt our feelings.”
Dead silence.
How does a man commence an ass-beating after “it really hurt our feelings”? Not exactly fighting words. I thought I had the tattooed tough man in emotional checkmate. That is, until the tattooed tough man responded.
“Hurt your feelings?” he said, his face suddenly becoming human and vulnerable. “You guys think you’re better than everyone, don’t you? You don’t think we know what you say about us? You think we’re soooo stupid and soooo washed up? Your smug little sense of humor…” He paused and looked around, gaining momentum. “You never say hi! Nothing. You never once on this tour have even acknowledged the opportunity we have given you. The opportunity that the Smithereens have given you. Not once! Not in person, or from the stage.” He took another deep breath and finished. “No fucking respect! That hurts our feelings!”
It turns out he had a name too—Chopper. We had a genuine talk after that, and the road-hard rock guy that was two clicks from kicking both our asses became our bud on that tour. Chopper even helped us load the piano each night thereafter. It turns out tough rock dudes are people too. Who’d have known? Another cheap lesson for us. This one in manners. When you’re opening for an established band, maybe you shouldn’t act like you own the place.
At the same time, something tells me Chopper wouldn’t have had such a problem with us if we’d been a tattooed guitar band that, instead of a piano, had a quarter-ton model dinosaur with red lasers shooting from its eye. I don’t think he would have blocked the load-in for that shit. No, it wasn’t so much the inconvenience of the piano that the local crews had an issue with. It was, as I mentioned before, what the piano stood for. And I looked like a piano teacher at that time, or even an accountant, with my short hair and ordinary clothing. Me and my pain-in-the-ass middle-class living room furniture. We were another tribe—not from Planet Rock and not to be trusted.
But we were, in most ways, just like all the other struggling indie bands, earning it one gig at a time, with all the daily and nightly eight-hour drives. Four dudes sharing a hotel room. The terrible diet, the cheap beer, the constant dick jokes. It was all the usual baby rock-band stuff, just add a baby grand piano, which was the great liability, financially and physically. It added strain to every element of the day.
But by the end of each set, as I took a running body slam into the piano, smiled politely, and flipped off the audience, Robert’s earsplitting distortion lingering a few beats too long, reminding everyone that we were a goddamn rock band, the great piano liability had become an asset. Mission accomplished, we’d have the scratched-up baby grand on its side, navigating the six-hundred-pound beast through the audience, which always got its own applause.
Hand me that piano.
Diving into the keys sometime circa 1997—Ben Folds Five
WHATEVER
FOR TWO YEARS WE CROSSED the U.S.A. as many times as we could in support of our first album. The few breaks we’d originally scheduled were filled with chasing unexpected success in other countries. The first single, “Underground,” cracked the top 40 in the U.K., and so we were off to Europe. Fan mail from Japan—a territory where the album hadn’t even been released—tipped us off that our record was becoming a hit there on import sales alone. In a few months we found ourselves in Tokyo, signing autographs in front of a two-story-tall Christmas tree (I’m not sure it was even Christmas, but anything goes in Japan!) decorated with our CDs. And one early morning around 4 A.M., when I happened to be home off tour, my phone rang with an on-air call from Triple J national youth radio in Australia. “Underground” had landed at number 3 on their yearly top 100. I wasn’t sure if it was a prank call, so I went back to sleep, but as it turned out, it was legit. We soon followed the good news to Australia as well.
Press was constant during the touring, done from pay phones in clubs, bathrooms, and on the side of the highway. I once got stuck in a sandstorm doing phone press in the middle of the desert. The van had dropped me off and was going to find food. I had to leave the phone dangling by its cord, make a break for it, and find a trash can to hide behind. That shit stings!
One morning, a limo with a journalist and photographer met us at our motel outside Phoenix and handed us each legitimate NASA space suits and helmets to don for a photo shoot. We took turns poking our heads out of the limousine sunroof in our space helmets, like three little boys. On location somewhere in the Sonoran Desert, the photographer explained that the photograph would look best if we walked in step. Running backward with four cameras clacking around his neck, he snapped away, shouting, “Left-right-left-right!” while we marched around the 110-degree noon desert in space suits. The resulting piece in Spin magazine likened the arrival of our indie-rock piano trio to exploration on the surface of Mars, and the accompanying photos were well worth the near heatstroke. I thought they captured the feeling of the era pretty well.