The next year, when we were touring Australia again, Geoff Harvey had come around to Ben Folds Five and even had a few nice things to say about us on air. He now understood that throwing stools was just a bit of show business. He and I met at a hotel bar, had a pint of beer, and talked like civilized musicians. He left early to go to the hospital for the birth of his granddaughter. He’s a good bloke.
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The greatest, or should I say most shameful, stool-toss-gone-wrong happened in Porto, Portugal, at a big rock festival. It still makes my soul hurt to think about. We were playing the same stage as Nick Cave and Pulp, and I felt like we needed to make an impression. So I climbed some pretty tall and precarious speaker stacks at the end of our set to deliver the grandest of all stool tosses. This one didn’t go well. It was, of course, another rare case where the piano wasn’t a rental or our own. This time it was the personal property of the local promoter. Or, rather, it was his grandmother’s late-nineteenth-century Hamburg Steinway B. I should have known by looking at it that this wasn’t a rental piano. It was obviously an antique, the only Steinway the kind promoter could source in Porto. He’d been excited to host us and wanted to give us the best Portugal could offer.
Back home, we always made sure to have extra-light stools for throwing. But the Portugal festival had provided a massive stool, which was heavy as hell, and unwieldy. I struggled to the top of the speaker stack with it, took aim from many yards away, and watched in horror as the toss went woefully pear-shaped, the steel side of the legs colliding with the beautiful walnut piano. The Steinway’s ivory keys splintered and sprayed on impact. I felt like a DICK and even worse when I found out it was a family heirloom. Doug, our tour manager, locked me in my trailer to protect me from the promoter, who wanted to do to me what I’d done to his grandmother’s piano.
When I got back home, I purchased an old Steinway with ivory keys. You know, ivory—from elephant tusks. They’re illegal now, have been for years, and they should be. I had the keys extracted and sent them to Portugal. I never communicated with this man, and I hope he was able to restore the damage.
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The stool toss lost its luster for me after that. I did less and less of it and was more careful about it. But years later, in 2005, well into my solo era, I was performing “Landed” on the Late Show with David Letterman and relapsed into my old stool-throwing ways. “Landed,” a mid-tempo song, suddenly felt excruciatingly long and underwhelming for TV. I can appreciate why most acts bring the lights, the moves, even some prerecorded tracks. Anything to keep attention, since the actual content of a song often seems to evaporate on television. My anxiety that I was boring millions of viewers kicked in, and I reflexively hurled the stool at the end of the song, a completely incongruous afterthought, given the introspective music I’d just played.
Mr. Letterman wasn’t the type to make small talk with musical guests on commercial breaks, or really with anyone unless the cameras were on. I’d played Letterman a good five times by this time and had never once spoken to the fellow, so I was surprised when he appeared to be heading directly for me across the studio at the end of the song. He asked me if I was okay. I thanked him and told him I was fine.
“Then why did you throw things at the piano on my show?” he asked.
“Oh, that was just theater. I figured it made better TV,” I answered.
“That doesn’t make sense,” he said. “Have I or anyone else here done something to upset you?”
I didn’t want to argue the point with a hero of mine, but it did make sense. On major-network television, with its extremely valuable advertising time, you get a split second to make a memorable impression. Perhaps chucking a stool at the piano wasn’t the best way to go for the song “Landed,” but the instinct does make sense. It also makes sense that David Letterman, like Geoff Harvey on the Midday show might be confused by such a display. It’s just easier to offend at the piano. Smashing guitars has been an institution for forty years, since Pete Townshend shocked audiences in the sixties. We all get that now. But the last time anyone saw someone rocking the piano, it was probably Elton John, and all he had to do on stage back then to freak people out was wear crazy sunglasses and stand on the lid a few times. In comparison, my stool-tossing didn’t look like show business. It read more like violence against family furniture. It was cussing and throwing things in church—a petulant brat throwing a tantrum. That’s the way it came off to anyone who hadn’t seen our whole show.
If I may flatter myself for a moment with a broad comparison to one of my favorites: Early in his career, Randy Newman was a bit misunderstood. After a few poetic, ironic, beautiful albums with no real hits, Newman broke internationally in the late-1970s with a massive perceived novelty radio hit called “Short People,” which unfortunately defined his career for a while. When I was a kid I saw him play it on Saturday Night Live, and he followed “Short People” with something that he probably felt made better TV than any of his serious and nuanced pieces. He sang “Pants.” A song that repeats “I’m gonna take off my pants” for three and a half minutes. It does make sense that he chose to do that. Because what can a piano player who doesn’t get up and dance, whose songs are too poetic and nuanced for prime time, who isn’t a career love-song crooner, do to be noticed on mainstream TV? Threaten to take off his pants? Throw stools like a monkey?
OUR TURN TO RIDE THE BULL
AS BEN FOLDS FIVE GOT our turn in the music-business rodeo, riding our stylistically schizophrenic album from diminutive shitbox in Chapel Hill to the top of radio charts, we found ourselves with the opposite of the Randy Newman problem. We’d been rocking, snarking, distorting, and ironic-ing our way through the rock dives of America, but we were about to be defined by a painfully introspective and vulnerable song about teenage abortion.
In the summer of 1997, Sony 550 released “Brick” to the same radio format that had given moderate play to our first two rockers from Whatever and Ever Amen, “One Angry Dwarf and 200 Solemn Faces” and “Battle of Who Could Care Less.” Their accompanying rock videos each cost literally one hundred times the budget of our first album. This new format that had embraced us was called “modern rock,” and it specialized in indie rock gone mainstream. It was all-rock, all-grunge, all-day. Modern-rock stations were receptive to playing “Brick,” which would be the format’s first piano ballad, but the listeners weren’t so convinced. It seemed that a wintry-sounding tale of abortion set on the “day after Christmas” wasn’t an appropriate soundtrack for the sun-and-fun of June 1997, and so the song was pulled after a couple weeks of lukewarm reception. Our label blamed themselves for having promoted “Brick” in the wrong season.
Whatever and Ever Amen–era publicity photo