Barely well enough to walk, Frally managed to catch her plane back to Australia the day before her visa expired. I finished the mix and the mastering with the band in New York and headed to Adelaide. The Unauthorized Biography of Reinhold Messner juuuust made the deadline for its release in April 1999.
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Frally and I were married in June, and the twins arrived in July. As the first single, “Army,” was struggling on the radio back in the States, I was eleven thousand miles away, sorting my passport and moving things into a small house in Hyde Park, a quiet suburb of Adelaide. I welcomed this new chapter of my life and took special joy in watching the twins as they learned to crawl, make noises and all kinds of faces, and finally to get the fuck to sleep! Being a new parent does little to help the sleep deprivation of rock touring, but I felt great relief in getting the spotlight off myself. I was happy tending to someone else for a change. Too much “me” had made Ben a dull boy.
The news of the album sales, the airplay numbers, and the reviews weren’t particularly positive. It wasn’t awful, but we weren’t scoring big prizes anymore. And no wonder. It wasn’t a big prize kind of album. It wasn’t really a pop album at all, so what did we expect? I was relatively disconnected to the progress of the record, with baby spew on each shoulder and a VHS of Teletubbies on repeat. I decided to tune it all out until I was called to tour duty again.
Adelaide, Australia, with twins, 1999
We began touring with some scheduled breaks in between gigs so that I could fly back to Australia, finally hitting the big venues we had always been aiming for. But with no real radio buzz to kick it off, we only half-sold most of them. And we had gone big this time, spending oodles on production, with official big-ass lights and a larger crew. I carried two baby grand pianos, one of them with tacks in the hammers for a different sound. I sometimes played both pianos at the same time. Robert had an array of synthesizers, and Darren had timpani and gong in his setup. Musically, it made for an interesting tour. We had grown more confident and could sit inside ballads and the introspective songs without having to make a joke every other moment. But with no radio hit, we had suddenly dipped back into unsustainable territory. The expense, the distance, my parental requirements, began to wear on all of us. The squeeze was immediate.
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There’s an insane video from that era that made the rounds. It’s from a live nationally televised concert in Japan, in a sold-out five-thousand-seat arena. The video was dubbed the “Freaking Out DVD.” Indeed, Ben Folds was Freaking Out, and doing so for a confused Japanese audience. Returning for our encore in official Japanese police uniforms, Robert, Darren, and I broke into faux Rage Against the Machine meets Black Sabbath meets Weird Al as I ran around the stage shouting and rapping like an idiot. That much had become routine, but this one went way over the mountain. Darren took part in the tantrum, beating the living fuck out of a gong as I screamed, “Thank you, sir, may I have another!” repeatedly. I mean, way too many times. It’s damned uncomfortable to watch. I told a lot of very sweet Japanese fans that they were all going to prison to be “fucked up the ass.”
But we love Ben Folds Five! Why would they want to hurt us?
I find it simultaneously funny and alarming. Because it’s a real tantrum. It’s profane, angry, and childish, and it was on mainstream Japanese TV. Our album was tanking. We had been told the only chance to get a video for “Magic” was on this filmed performance, and we’d just bungled that. The first two singles had broken the bank for Sony. Especially “Don’t Change Your Plans,” with its three-hundred-thousand-dollar video directed by the brilliant filmmaker Abel Ferrara. Making a cheap video for “Magic” might have persuaded the label to give that song a chance, because we all thought it was a hit. But that was it for Reinhold’s promotion budget, and the door was shut. I was raising a family and needed this album to succeed more than ever. The arc of my marriage was also following a familiar pattern, in the shape of a spiral pointed downward.
When I’m struggling emotionally or I’m stressed, I act up, especially onstage. I go too far in nearly everything. It’s the same thing I did when I was in school, except that instead of being sent home, I get paid. I throw childish tantrums, which I more or less pass off as humor. Hopefully they have provided someone with entertainment. They’re certainly good for blowing off steam. But I knew something had to give soon, because inwardly I was freaking out. I was spinning way too many plates, and some of them were now hitting the floor.
STOP THE BUS!
THE EUROPEAN TOUR IN SUPPORT of Reinhold was the baseball bat that broke the camel’s back. The record was dead and we knew we were wasting our time.
This tour was particularly dark. It was a version of This Is Spinal Tap without the funny parts. The bus driver was on uppers to stay awake and he drove in a manner that kept the rest of us that way as well. He was morbidly obese and always left his pants unbuttoned while driving. I don’t believe I ever even saw him stand. He certainly never got himself up to empty the bus toilet tank, which overflowed as he took excessively fast turns, wandering from lane to lane across the highway. The funk of forty thousand tours trickled from the toilet, oozing beneath the bunks. Not that it was easy to spot beneath the trash, beer cans, and excessive drug paraphernalia. We weren’t a druggie bunch, but this tour was as close as we got to Mötley Crüe.
The bus driver thought he had a girlfriend, but she turned out to be a prostitute who was using him and the bus for a free ride. She would crawl around and knock on all our bunks during the night, asking, “Do you want me to do your laundry?” I wasn’t quite sure what that meant, but I had a feeling I was better off declining. There was one crew member who I imagine probably did let her do his laundry. Finally the bus driver did what I didn’t think was possible and got a traffic ticket on the Autobahn. I mean, there’s no speed limit on the Autobahn, right? I called Alan and insisted that we get another bus somehow, because I had to survive to be a good father. We fired the bus driver, who sued and won for unfair dismissal. Another pay-to-play tour. For some in my crew, like Leo, who’d been with us since near the beginning, the heaviness of the vibe on that tour, the awful and uncomfortable living conditions, and the toll of the past few years of grind were all too much. He took a break from my touring until well into my solo years and then returned once he’d recovered. He’s still with me these days. In fact, he just showed me which Griswold pan to buy on eBay.
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It was obvious the end was near. Robert, Darren, and I were on such different pages. We sat side by side on the bus, as they read cool biographies of sixties’ Beat poets and On the Road and I sat with my highlighter and a book about child development. I was no fun. And how do you even get together for practice when you live eleven thousand miles away?