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During my 2002 piano tour, whenever I had a week off, I flew back home to Australia to be with my kids. It was usually a twenty-hour plane trip each way. When that proved impossible to maintain, I decided to move the whole family to Nashville, where I also took on a major studio business I had stumbled upon while mixing the Ben Folds Live album. I assumed the lease at the historic RCA Studio—it had been sitting empty for quite a while. Large studio spaces were less in demand as home recording and plug-ins, which simulated big rooms, became common. Moving a family from one country to another and taking over a new business put a few more boulders in my backpack. But it was all exciting stuff.
I might have made it through this incredibly jam-packed year if only I hadn’t put myself on a rigid cleanse diet early in the fall of 2002, just as we were moving to the new place in Nashville. I thought maybe I’d purify myself, like all the cool kids were doing, and I went all in —as I do. The peak of the cleanse was a one-week fast of water, carrot juice, and raw almonds. That’s it. I was down to 120 pounds. Upon returning to tour, with its shared van drives of hundreds of miles a night, I stubbornly stuck to only raw vegan food. And if I couldn’t find that while traveling, I just had water or a piece of fruit and got on with it. Now, recovering in Nashville after my dramatic made-for-television movie collapse in Chicago, I lay in bed with a dangerously high fever and reflected on the idiocy of dietary extremism.
For my first few days in bed, I felt like an otherwise healthy person dealing with an annoying infection. That’s the way sickness had always felt to me before—like something in the way. But this became something else, something I’d never felt before. I was struck with total lack of confidence that I would ever recover on my own. And at that point I submitted to a visit to the doctor, who confirmed that I had advanced pneumonia.
It turns out there are some things that just can’t be outrun or buried beneath work. Cheap lessons weren’t sinking in, so the cost was rising. I bent over for shots of antibiotics fit for a horse and followed doctor’s orders. And I actually stopped everything I was doing. I surrendered. Something I hadn’t done before. But now I had to. I was now officially Vincible.
Oddly, I file this month in bed under “pleasant times.” It was probably the first quiet time I’d had since that month spent on Australian cliffs with a notebook in 1998. The doctor warned of seizures that might occur because of the sustained high fever, but luckily that didn’t happen. However, fevered and weak, I did find myself a bit emotionally vulnerable. I’m ashamed to say I shed tears at a fucking life-insurance commercial, there alone in my room. I also cried at two points during a Ronald Reagan biography. Especially when the horse trainer had to tell the Gipper his horse-riding days were over. I should have just had the seizure. It would have been more dignified.
I had time to read while I lay helplessly in bed waiting for good antibiotics to prevail over evil biotics. I had time to stare at the ceiling and shudder as I reflected on a couple of times we damn near died in that touring van, driving through snow in the mountains too many late nights. I had time to write letters and call family and friends. I even had a moment to clear up some confusion I’d caused over a practical joke I staged earlier in the tour.
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I’d pulled my best modern Andy Kaufman and gotten audiences to post some tall tales to the internet, including that I’d once floated above my piano. We had many people online convinced that I had actually levitated. At another gig, I instructed the audience to post that Bill Clinton had sat in on saxophone. He hadn’t, of course, but the myth got traction. I also suggested that the audience add on forums that Clinton had snuck away with my wife and that this was easily seen happening just offstage as I played on. Finally, I asked a crowd to start a rumor online that I had been arrested. Each audience did such a creative job and kept it secret, like the Manhattan Project of bad practical jokes.
The trouble was, I wasn’t Andy Kaufman. He always let it all hang in the air and let people wonder, and that was part of his genius. I couldn’t quite live with that discomfort. Rock promoters from around the world had called my management, concerned that my arrest would mean a cancellation. So I felt the need to explain it afterward and clear the air. While recovering, I joined some fan conversations and explained what I’d done. We had a good laugh, which probably sent me into a severe, painful coughing fit.
But all of this stuff, the going-too-far jokes, the self-destructive diet, and the physical crashes were all expressions of things I needed to address personally. Some of us aren’t as good at looking at ourselves and taking the time to process, much less sleep. It took my believing I would die from pneumonia to give me appreciation for my health. The warning bells had been sounding for a few years. Back in the last days of Ben Folds Five, I’d shuffled some excessive bleeding and a few other symptoms under the rug until I finally had to take a couple of days from recording Rockin’ the Suburbs for a simple operation. I’d also had panic attacks, which I’d been blowing off for some time. While playing that fateful radio show on 9/11, I’d had a bottle of antidepressants rattling in my pocket. They had been prescribed the day before in the emergency room, after I’d had a hyperventilation fit. And I’d decided not to take them. I figured I’d just move along and not think about it. All of these variations of nervous-system crashes are meant as speed bumps, but I ignored them until I was persuaded of my vincibility. Vincibility 101: a class that some of us have to repeat a few times. Really, it’s best to pass it the first time around. Take the lessons while they’re cheap.
BENNY! WHAT IS COOL??
WILLIAM SHATNER PUT A SEEMINGLY simple question to me one night in 2004 over dinner at my studio, during our sessions for his album Has Been. This record, which I produced and co-wrote, is one of my proudest moments. It wasn’t a massive seller, but it’s certainly achieved cult-record status. Nearly fifteen years later, I still find it moving and funny. And it was a lesson in creative courage. Shatner never does a take the same way twice. He commits and puts equal energy into ideas both in and out of his comfort zone. Many a rocker could learn from his fearless attitude.
William Shatner’s energy seems boundless. I was once staying at his guest house when he knocked at the door, balancing a two-hundred-pound oak table on his back. I glanced up the steep hill from which he’d hauled the damn thing and shook my head. He plopped it on the floor. “There, Benny, you’ll need a table.” This was a man of seventy-two years.
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Shatner and I had first met when he guested on my experimental solo album Fear of Pop back in 1997. A few of his friends had pulled me aside to warn me that Bill didn’t take direction easily. “He eats directors for breakfast!” said one. If you’d ever seen Bill at breakfast, this took on a whole new dimension. But we hit it off and I escaped being eaten. He became “Bill” to me, I became “Benny” to him. I should add there’s only one motherfucker for whom I’ll be “Benny,” so don’t even think about it.