What’s been good for the music hasn’t always been so good for the life
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What hasn’t been so good for the life could be good for the music.
We musical artists do, after all, get paid to be a moody bunch. Sometimes that can cause snowballing drama in real life, hopefully cheap lessons rather than tragedies like overdoses, suicides, drowning in a river.
Looking back, I think those rash decisions were attempts to wake myself up and feel alive. I worried I was a robot, a machine. I had a hard time being present. Most of my waking hours were spent locked into a repetitive task or thought, as life went on around me, like when I was a toddler who could watch records spin for eight hours. It felt like people were always knocking on my space helmet, asking if I was having the time of my life. Life? What? Actually, no. I can’t even see out of this thing! Just the tin-can sound of my own breathing and an occasional beep. I wanted to snap out of that. Any thrill that kicked me into feeling had great appeal. Especially a risky thrill.
More again from “Narcolepsy”—it can read a little melodramatic without the music to balance it—it’s actually sung by the background vocals—but it conveys the sentiment:
Dreaming in streams
Flowing between the shores of joy and sadness
I’m drowning
Save me, wake me up
I recall a Frank Lloyd Wright interview where he confessed that he never had the “father feeling” for his children. He said he had that feeling for his work instead. That doesn’t make Frank Lloyd Wright terribly likable, but you have to admire the honesty. If I’m being just as honest, I would have to admit that as badly as I wanted to be married, I didn’t have the husband feeling. I had incredible and brief crushes, but it was my music and my work that I was married to. However, when my children were born a few years later, I found that I had the father feeling for them. Very much so. Turns out I wasn’t a robot after all.
But for the touring that lay ahead upon the release of Whatever and Ever, I was probably better off being an emotionally narcoleptic machine, staying numb and focused. Because that kind of touring leaves little space for a real life, much less coupling with another real life. Rarely more than four-hour sleeps, with no privacy, and no real life outside of work. Constant travel. I was quite happy with that, or as happy as a robot can be.
THROWING STOOLS (AND OTHER MONKEY BUSINESS)
ONE OF THE MANY CHALLENGES of a rock pianist is being tethered to the instrument while everyone else is free to roam the stage.
As the venues got bigger, in order to help assert my front-man-ness, I began to stand while playing the piano, which necessitated a sort of a lunge position in order to reach the keys, use the pedal, and sing into the mic simultaneously. I found I got more force into the piano this way as well. This physicality became a big part of my musicianship. No longer having much use for the stool, I discovered the fun of hurling it at the piano at the end of songs. It became a shtick. As the stool struck the piano, Robert and Darren punctuated it with a noisy bass and drums explosion. It looked violent, but the stool rarely even scratched the piano. The soft padding of the seat was all that actually made contact with the keys. It was for show. It expressed just the right amount of irreverence to justify playing middle-class living room furniture in a rock band on a big stage.
Our first television appearance in Australia to promote Whatever and Ever Amen was on a big morning program called Midday, whose older demographic had absolutely nothing to do with the youth-radio audience that embraced us in the first place. Upon landing in Sydney after twelve hours of Qantas economy-class joy, we downed some caffeine and were wheeled to the Channel Nine set to rock some confused housewives.
The Midday show was pretty typical of the morning-show formats you see around the world. The host at the time was a woman named Kerri-Anne Kennerley. Her sidekick was a pianist named Geoff Harvey, who sported a big gray beard and a drive-through headset. He directed the music as he interacted with Kerri-Anne. After our line check and the compulsory quick powder touch-up, we went straight to live broadcast. Seated at our instruments, we heard an old fashioned “four-three-two…” The curtain rose and we found ourselves face-to-face with what Australians call the “Blue Rinse” set, which refers to a product that maybe takes a little too much yellow out of gray hair. The median age of the audience appeared to be seventy-five.
As I happily sang “shit” and “ass” on daytime TV, and Robert and Darren assaulted a horrified studio audience with booming distorted bass and deafening cymbals, I couldn’t have told you the name of the show. Or the hosts’ names. I got my introduction to Geoff Harvey moments after I broke the stool over what turned out to be his personal piano. I only learned the name of the show later, after we’d been tossed into the street outside the studio.
As the last note of our performance finished reverberating around the studio, about a quarter of the audience clapped tentatively. Soon, Geoff Harvey was making his way across the room, beet-faced and furious, launching a barrage of interesting Australian profanities.
“You fuckin’ ungrateful Yank! I’m gonna rip your head off and shit down your bloody neck! The Midday show gives you exposure, mate! And you think you’ll just ruin my bloody piano as a fucking thank-you!!” he shouted.
The flying stool might have been theater, but Geoff Harvey’s angry march across the studio to kick my ass on commercial break was not. My tour manager and crew all rushed to my side. Harvey’s crew, who he later told me were ex-servicemen, did the same. And Robert, Darren, and I were quickly shoved into an elevator and up to the green room. Over the television in the green room, we could see Geoff Harvey ranting directly to the camera on live TV as his co-host, Kerri-Anne, sympathized. Channel Nine should never have an American act on their stage again, as far as Geoff Harvey was concerned. There were plenty of pianists who lived less than a mile away from the TV studio who were Australian, more deserving of exposure, and had ten times my talent, he said. But the Americans had money and so we came over, broke equipment, got a little publicity, and congratulated ourselves. His rant was accompanied by multiple replays of the piano-stool toss, as it broke into pieces over Geoff’s shiny Yamaha.
Darren took in about thirty seconds of Geoff Harvey’s freak-out before disappearing down the hall to the stairs. We followed to see what he was up to. By this time, Kerri-Anne and Geoff had moved on to interviewing a dog trainer, or maybe discussing recipes for a casserole. Darren all but tripped over himself trying to get his pants down in front of Geoff’s camera so he might grace Australian TV with a few moments of his bare ass. Security grabbed Darren before he got there, and within seconds we were standing out on the sidewalk, our belongings sailing through the door close behind.
The timing of the broadcast and the whole incident turned out to be fortuitous. Universities were on break that week, so thousands of bored Australian students were watching the Midday show for the first time. Our album debuted the next week in the top five in Australia. On the flip side, I lost my endorsement deal with Steinway & Sons, who were supposed to provide us baby grand pianos on tour. The next day at the Prince of Wales, a legendary rock dive in St. Kilda, instead of a Steinway we found a note on the stage that began: “To the management of Ben Folds Five, Due to the behaviour of your artist…” Now without Steinway’s involvement, around which we had planned our tour, we had to convince piano dealers to deliver pianos to the various dives on our schedule. But they’d heard about the show, and each dealer suddenly required a bond for the value of each rental piano. It was an expensive tour.