INTERVIEW: Ben Folds Five
- Lang Whitaker
With his scrawny legs scissored wide open and all of his 130 pounds balanced precariously on a teetering drum stool, Ben Folds bobs up and down while his hands furiously massage the 88 keys stretched before him. His face fixed with an open-mouthed gape, Folds leans back from the piano while bassist Robert Sledge and drummer Darren Jesse show no mercy to their respective instruments. Folds delivers alternating forearm shivers and foot stomps to the ivory, as the crowd starts singing complicated doo-wop harmonies along with Sledge and Jesse.
In the midst of the madness, Folds swivels to his right and gives a goofy, slap-happy grin to the audience, who dutifully erupt in appreciation. This moment of Zen is immediately interupted by Sledge, who has unstrapped his bass and laid it across the closed lid of Folds' baby grand. Unplugging the instrument, Sledge gently touches the live-wire in his hands directly to the cardioid pick-ups on the bass. An ungodly bassified belching noise loud enough to restore Helen Keller's hearing shudders the venue. Pleased, Sledge begins tapping out a funk inflected rhythm that sounds like a Morse Code call for help. A smiling Jesse picks up the beat on the drums and runs with it. Not wanting to be left out, Folds abandons his kung-fu playing style, rips his microphone from the mike stand, and shoves it deep inside the piano's lid. By scraping the mike back and forth across the metal strings of the piano, Folds replicates a record scratching; the D.J. in this junkyard rap band.
Listening to the bombastic sound generated by the three-piece band, you're harkened back to the days when Elton John used to actually sing fast songs. If piano rock has indeed returned, Ben Folds Five is riding shotgun. BF5's bizarre yet melodic mix of show tunes and punk rock blends together surprisingly well, possibly something like George Gershwin would have sounded like if he'd grown up with a Marshall stack. BF5's explosive sound bounced them out of the Chapel Hill, North Carolina scene where they began, on to Caroline, and eventuaally snagged them a major label deal with Sony/550 Music. Their first release with Sony, last year's clevely titled Whatever And Ever Amen , has done very well in the states, and even better in, strangely enough, Japan and England.
During a recent respite from shooting a video for their newest single, "Brick," in Beverly Hills, BF5 bass player Sledge checked in with Consumable while weighing options on an off day in L.A. "I thought about going to Disneyland or the Universal Studios Tour," said Sledge, "but I've got this amazing hotel room, and it's got a stereo in it with auxilliary inputs. That means musicians can totally screw up a stereo at that point. So, I'm doing that today."
After spending the greater part of the last two years on the road, the BF5 live experience has grown tighter than Richard Simmons' perm. According to bassist Sledge, "We're trying to be big, musical, and entertaining, and entertain ourselves. We have this problem where we keep trying to make ourselves more and more aggressive and more and more large the more we play, because we're trying to stay interesting to ourselves. So, people who saw us last year will come back now and see a new show, and they'll be floored. They're like 'Oh my God! You guys are like...devils now!', because we haven't stopped touring. We've kept working on it, and so it's just gotten really out of hand."
The scary part of all of this is that there are still territories uncharted by BF5. Part of this past summer was spent touring with a string section, which Sledge really enjoyed. "It was really, really interesting to have a string section on tour with you. Everything has to be perfect. String players are really high strung," Sledge puns, "and they live in string player world. They try to really relate and they try to do all these things, but at the end of the day, I grew up learning Led Zeppelin songs, and they grew up learning Mozart. But, we did really come together on a lot of things, and it was really gigantic and a lot of fun."
A lot of fun is obviously the driving force behind BF5. No matter where they take their self-proclaimed "Punk rock for sissies", good times and strange situations find them, even in the land down under - Australia.
"We were on this TV show called 'The Mid-Day Show'. When you go to a foreign country, you have no expectations at all- you don't know what it's going to be. So we get (to 'The Mid-Day Show'), we do the soundcheck, and everything's cool. There's a bunch of thirty-something aged people walking around, doing cables, monitors, setting up the lights. Then they drew the curtains for the show and said (fake announcer voice) "Ladies and Gentlemen, Ben Folds Five!!", and everybody in the audience was over 50 years old!"
'So, we get up there and we're doing "One Angry Dwarf (and 200 Solemn Faces)", and we're raising hell. The only way we really know how to play that song is to just go for it. And the way we end that song, is usually Ben picks up the stool that he's sitting on, and the final resolve of the song is him smashing the keys with the stool.'
"Well, Ben picked up the drum stool and tossed it into the piano. We ended the song and felt really happy. The crowd goes wild, because they've never seen anything like that in their life."
"The show goes out live on Australian TV, and so when they cut to a commercial, the Australian band director-guy (Jeff Harvey) comes up and he goes (in Aussie accent) 'You assholes; damn Americans. That's my piano, you know?' He was tearing us a new asshole! You would not believe how upset this guy was! He was just going on and on. Ben just kind of walked away and said 'Cool man...'. And then the guy starts cussin' at me, and I wouldn't listen to him, and he cussed our sound guy, and he wouldn't listen to him.
"And then he gets back from commercial, and he had them replay Ben throwing the stool, and he goes on and on about how 'musical instruments shouldn't be treated that way...there's 40,000 Australian bands who would love to be on...I don't know why we had this band on...there's nothing musical about them'...(starts laughing hysterically)...it was awful!! I mean, it was amazing for us..."
And therein lies the attraction- three guys who call themselves five ("We liked the alliteration of Ben Folds Five," said Ben) and actually enjoy getting cussed out on live TV by Australian band leaders. For those of you under BF5's spell, look towards January, 1998 for a compilation release of B-sides and live tracks (through Caroline), which Sledge says will also include a few covers. Tie down your piano stools, Ben Folds Five is coming on strong.
