Bill and me
Despite his friends’ warnings, I found that Bill took musical direction well. I never felt I needed to sugarcoat anything while working with him. I was blunt as I needed to be, and he only ever snapped at me twice. Once was near the end of the entire Has Been session, when he suddenly barked, “BENNY! You’ve been pecking at me like a chicken!” I had been pushing him hard for weeks to improve the lyrics of the second verse to his song “It Hasn’t Happened Yet.” He’d tried draft after draft and I just wouldn’t give him the thumbs-up. I’d just told him his first verse was about his life and the second verse sounded like the high school play about his life, and he had a very minor but understandable conniption.
* * *
—
The other bark was the question I mentioned. The one over dinner in the studio.
While laying waste to a black-bean burrito (he always had coupons for Baja Fresh, for some reason), Bill, out of nowhere, charged me with overuse of the word “cool.” His distaste for this word had been building for a while.
“BENNY! WHAT IS COOL??” he shouted across the table.
I had used “cool” a good one hundred times during the day’s recording session, he estimated. For instance, he said, if anyone had asked the question “Could we try bongos on this?” or suggested “Maybe it’s time for a break,” I would always respond with “That’s cool.” While listening to a handful of vocal takes, I might proclaim one to be “cooler” than the others. Bill felt that I didn’t even use the word “yes” much anymore and fell back on “cool” for that too. He thought I should expand my vocabulary to be more precise. There’s a big difference between “acceptable” and “transcendent.” How could they both just be lumped in together as “cool”? Simply put, this word was used in more ways than Bill thought necessary.
In an attempt to answer what seemed a rhetorical question about a word that certainly Bill had used himself since the sixties, the best I could do was to give him some examples of things that I thought were cool.
“You know, Bill. Cool. Like when you don’t care what anyone else thinks. Or…cool…like, like, when something’s just right. Or…” But Bill actually wanted a definition.
“No, Benny. Listen to me. What is…cool?” he repeated, now sounding uncannily like William Shatner.
“Okay, I’ll tell you something cool,” I said. “Cool is that story you told just moments ago about you, Larry Hagman, and, as you called him, ‘some guy who drummed in that rock band…Oh, what was his name? Oh, right. Keith. The band was called The Who, I think?’ The three of you on a motorcycle trip across the States in the late sixties? Keith Fucking Moon, Bill…and it makes it double cool that you couldn’t remember his name!”
But that.
Was not.
What he was looking for.
Bill wanted a very specific definition for this word I’d used a hundred times and he was in the middle of playing a lawyer on the popular TV show Boston Legal, and so his cross-examination technique was at its peak, and I found myself crumbling on the witness stand. He was starting to scare me. Here’s a play, or a score, of the conversation. So that you can perform it at home with the help of a friend. You will certainly know someone who thinks they can do Shatner:
DEATH OF THE COOL—A One-Act Play
WILLIAM SHATNER [con appassionato]: “NO, NO, BENNY! You haven’t answered my question!”
[The dropping of a single spoon cuts through the stunned silence. Band and engineers cease any food-chewing. Some pause with lips to cup mid-drink, and the room falls still.]
BEN FOLDS: “Well…” [gulps]
WILLIAM SHATNER: “…What IS cool?? [molto accelerando] How can I be cool or make cooool music if I don’t…even know…WHAT [pausa…wait for it…subito furioso ff]…IT IS!!!”
[Shatner stabs his fork into table with a doinnng! à la a 1970s’ cartoon spear-stick-in-ground foley. His eyes widen, and he sits back, mouthing a silent “aaaah,” and gazes through the tops of our heads. He’s frozen in a masterful thespian quake, hands positioned just above his forehead, as if holding an imaginary volleyball for all to see. Then. He collapses back into his usual shape. The trance has passed. He blinks a few times, subtly shakes his head, and then makes eye contact with everyone around the room to confirm that nobody beyond these walls will ever understand. But us.]
The End.
Obviously, it didn’t quite happen this way. I’m sorry I got carried away. It’s too easy to make things great by just adding Shatner. But as for the question “What is cool?” and his insistence that I answer it? For me, it was helpful, if not profound.
What Professor Shatner was doing, as he spat black beans across the studio table, was pushing back against something that seemed creatively oppressive to him. I think he’s dead-on. It is oppressive—judging music as you create it, on how cool it is? On how every little idea might conform to what we consider some current cultural and probably unachievable ideal? He was right. Let’s make music and be creative. And let’s be specific about our language as we describe what we’re doing. We can worry about that cool shit later, if at all.
By going full Buddha on us, William Shatner was really asking these broader questions:
Shouldn’t we avoid language that invites self-awareness into the process?
Shouldn’t we try and be more precise when talking about music?
Isn’t making good music in and of itself cool enough?
Looking back on my songwriting, I can see that I had a fraught relationship with this idea of being cool. It’s probably because I never felt cool myself. But also because I’ve always suspected nobody else does either. We all want to be cool. We can’t all be cool. And we don’t even really know what it means in the first place.
I was never cool in school
I’m sure you don’t remember me
These are the opening lines from my song “Underground” (Ben Folds Five, 1995). I felt terminally uncool and so I was honest about it.
On Whatever and Ever Amen, I was still grappling with this cool business:
I know it’s not your thing to care