One night in Champaign, Illinois, I was in the middle of the song “Not the Same” when I heard what sounded like a professional choir filling the venue. I looked up to see the choir, and it was the audience! They were singing perfect three-part harmony spontaneously. Each night after that, the audiences would sing those parts, unprompted, with varying degrees of success. I began helping that along, showing them the parts and conducting. It never gets old, hearing people sing like that, which is why it’s still a part of my show. I’d never imagined having audience participation as a staple of my act. I’d never been a fan of that overzealous singer shtick: “Sing, people! Come on! I can’t hear you! Sing!” I mean, you’ve paid for a show and now the performer up onstage wants you to do the work? But now I understood what the audience participation bit was all about. People wanted—and needed—to sing together. It was a brief moment in American history when people didn’t need to be reminded of basic kindness and humanity or to be prompted to sing in harmony together. Unfortunately, a little “shock and awe” later and that moment had passed. But I was in small rooms in every town across the land, and I will tell you that the intensity and warmth of people singing together is what I’ll never forget about 9/11.
ROCK THIS BITCH!
AT THE END OF MY shows on the Ben Folds and a Piano tour, half of the audience would often reconvene behind the venue. They knew I’d be there, loading up the van with my soundman or warming up our rental car. We’d all hang, snap a few pictures, and I’d sign stuff before we drove off, waving goodbye. It was a pretty informal affair, especially the signing of burned CDs of Rockin’ the Suburbs. I’d never signed blank CDs before, a technological sign of the times, but what the hell. My audience had always been particularly computer savvy, and I was philosophical (or maybe just lazy), about piracy.
There’s no telling what the impact of the internet was on sales of that album. This was at the very beginning of the whole downloading thing. But this was not my battle. To be honest, aside from feeling badly for my friends who lost jobs in the music business, it seemed to me that the music business was just paying the piper for years of gluttony. Album and video budgets had been bloated for years, and execs had gaudy expense accounts. CD prices were particularly overblown, and kids knew it. Kids with computers. That’s who cut the business down to size.
Anyway, the music business had had a pretty damn good run for a good fifty years. Technological advances had always been our friend before the internet. And the music biz had milked each new format to repackage and sell the same old classic records, over and over. Vinyl LPs, then 8-track tapes, then cassettes, CDs—they even took a swipe at selling it all again on mini-disc. How many formats of Dark Side of the Moon and The Eagles Greatest Hits did we all need? Indeed, the music business had come to believe that new technology = more prizes.
But the newest format was a technological development that wasn’t quite so kind to the music business. Downloading, MP3, the elimination of physical distribution, was the end of the music business as we had known it. In truth, most artists didn’t actually profit directly from physical record sales back in “the music business as we had known it” era. I’m not sure that most of them who went to bat for their labels, lecturing fans about piracy, understood that. That doesn’t make it okay to steal music, but I wasn’t going to stick my neck out for the labels by chastising music fans. Especially when those music fans were spreading excitement about my music and coming to shows. It was a mixed bag.
I don’t want to get too technical about the music industry, but just know that there are plenty of ways to make a buck in this business. Publishing, merchandising, touring, licensing, and, of course, selling your body to the night. But profit for the artist from actual direct record sales? Not so much. It was never the main way the artist made a living. Records cost so much to make and promote, and whether you agreed with label practices or not, it simply wasn’t where the money was, at least not for the artist. The labels were, after all, taking the risk.
I didn’t want to spend time fighting when I could be creating, so I accepted what seemed to be an established fact. I’d just make my living on tour. Me work, me get paid. Liberated of all concerns related to the bottom line of album sales, I could deliver albums to the label that weren’t even in my contract, like EPs, specialty albums, and live albums. No need to fuss over recoupment. I could get on with my dream of littering the planet with my music, starting with a live solo piano record, Ben Folds Live.
My new soundman, Marc Chevalier, captured as many shows as he could in early 2002 for the Ben Folds Live LP. We brought some fantastic tube pre-amps and compressors on tour. All that fancy fragile vintage equipment is not normal for live recording, but we only needed a few channels for a piano and a voice. Audio nerds might be interested to know that the front-of-house sound at these shows actually came through all of this exotic tube gear. We mic’d the audience as well, to document the singing on “Not the Same.” Of course, those mics picked up everything the audience said or did during the whole show.
Ben Folds and a Piano tour, 2002
“Rock this bitch!” someone shouted from the front of the audience as we were recording at the Vic Theatre in Chicago. I told this young man that I didn’t know the song “Rock This Bitch,” and I proceeded to make one up on the spot. The song was good enough to make it onto the album. This excited heckler had unwittingly launched a new tradition, because from that night on, someone always shouted, “Rock this bitch!” at my concerts, a cue for me to improvise a song. The rules developed spontaneously. Each “Rock This Bitch” (RTB) would be completely new, musically and lyrically, as long as somewhere in the song I sang, “Rock this bitch.” I have improvised an RTB at most shows since 2002.
I’ve Rocked This Bitch solo; I’ve Rocked This Bitch with various touring bands and even with symphony orchestras. With orchestras I come up with the bones of a song quickly and then dictate some simple orchestration. It usually takes about ten minutes to get it together, but the process itself is of interest to the audience. They like hearing how the different parts of an orchestra function and how they come together. It also humanizes the symphony orchestra for pop audiences, seeing the players work through this unusual exercise.
Thanks to that random dude who immortalized himself on my live album, I’ve gotten some unique on-the-job lessons in songwriting. Improvising RTBs at my concerts has given me a healthy new perspective on songs and how they are made, and what music is for. Freestyling in groups and making up songs, whether it’s on banjos or bongos, is ancient stuff. Temporary music. A celebration of the moment.
We’re all here now! Yay! We had a day and it was tough, and it was wonderful, and here’s what the day sounds like. An interpretative dance of what now feels like. Our song will evaporate and expire like the day did, and there will be another tomorrow—another song. Let us then jam, motherfuckers!