INTERVIEW: Ben Folds Five (1996)
- Joe Silva
There's really no way that you can think of the piano as one of pop's truly maligned instruments. Now the bassoon; that's an entirely different matter. When was the last time you heard the grandaddy woodwind coming to the fore of a chart topper? Motown and Christmas 1970 are the only clues I can offer without giving it away entirely. But while there was much keyboard figuring into rock's nascent moments, it's been backhanded and relegated to a second class status ever since. Ergo, all the fuss afforded the Ben Fold's Five since the release of their self titled debut last year. Forget Keith Emerson, forget the former Mr. Christie Brinkley, and for the moment you can put aside Elton as well. So fervent was the noise that the North Carolina trio was eventually asked to offset the power chords reigning over Lolla-Metallica's mainstage this year and give the indie kids something to gawk at on stage B.
While en route to one of those aforementioned gigs, Ben Folds stepped out of the confines of their stylish Ryder rental and phoned in from a truck stop for the following:
Consumable: Where you guys approached for the second stage thing or did you want to be on it in particular?
Ben Folds Five: Well I think probably everybody want to be on it. I'm not sure how it came about, but I think we were asked to do it. Based on our positioning on the second stage where we're basically opening up for the headliner. I don't think this was one of those things that we got bought on to, but you never know.
C: Is it comfortable to do, going from city to city for this type of carnival thing?
BF: It's probably not bad. They just tell you when to show up. They've got the piano to deal with stage wise, so we'll probably have to be there before everyone else.
C: When I saw you play here, it didn't look like a tremendous piano. I mean, you wouldn't think it would be too difficult to cart around between, say three people. Maybe I'm wrong.
BF: It's a thousand pound piano, and that was a big stage with a lot of distance between everybody. I don't know, put that thing in your living room and then check it out (laughs). It's big.
C: Since the record came out back in, what, July last year, has the material started to wear thin a bit?
BF: The rigor of six nights a week and some of the traveling that we've been doing has made it seem like it wears thin sometimes, but I think we're just in time for the new record. It'll be a relief to play those songs in the middle of a set where people don't know the new stuff. We have hit that dirged out, shitty feeling very much. A couple of times. Right now we're learning how to hold the songs back and that may sound stupid, but we're really excited about it. We're not playing too fast all of sudden.
C: You have stuff done up for the next record already?
BF: Yeah, I was just in the back of the Ryder on the couch going through the number of possible songs. It's somewhere around thirty solid, good starts.
C: And you've gen'd all that stuff up while traveling?
BF: A lot of it. I'm a real slow writer. I don't really write that much. You know, I'll have an idea and three or four years later, it's kind of mulled over in my head and turned into something else. In fact one of the songs from the first album, "Video", was for the most part finished when I was in high school. It just kind of got the final touch on it right before we [recorded]. So it's not like I've been slaving over for ten years (laughs)! About half of what I'm walking on now, the seeds are a year or so ago.
C: Are you guys sticking with Caroline Records for the next one?
BF: No, we signed with Epic/550 a few months after the record came out.
C: Was there any reason in particular? Was this a distribution type thing?
BF: Well there was a lot of reasons, but it basically came down to is with the kind of music we're making and the direction we're going, it wasn't going to remain an honest situation to remain with a label whose specialty is another kind of music. For the first album I think it was an interesting thing that we barely lapped over enough into the indie world by the nature of what we were doing - it had some hint of rebellion in there. And for them, they're an indie that goes just enough into the side of pop music to where it worked out. But beyond that, they're a grass roots organization and if we write hit songs, it's hard for them to be hits. I'm sure they would like to do that, but honestly, I think what they're good at is discovering really cool stuff and making it work in a real musical grass roots way. If we had been on a major label, we would have been screwed. Not screwed by the label, but screwed by circumstances. We wouldn't have had to fight up from nothing like we had to and that gives you a lot of stamina.
C: Is it getting to be a bit of a drag having to continually talk about why your playing the piano and not a guitar?
BF: Nah, because I'm happy that they're noticing that and it's setting us apart. We knew that was going to be the case when we started. We could only hope that we would have some kind of distinction. Think of how many bands are out there. I mean we don't want to wear make up to stand out. So the piano is a very dignified way of standing out in the crowd. I don't mind talking about the piano because I play it all the time.
C: I thought it was fun seeing the fair amount of abuse you give it during a performance like lying on your back and launching the stool at the keys.
BF: That was in lieu of diving into it. I had a broken rib and I was wheezing through the gig. And when it was over I was in a funny mood and I wanted to dive into it, which I sometimes do, but I was hurting too bad. C: You broke a rib?
BF: Yeah, I broke it doing the video [for the single "Uncle Walter" ]. I dove off a box onto Darren [Jesse, drummer] and he wasn't ready for me and I landed my full weight on his knee.
C: Are you still doing the "Video Killed the Radio Star" cover? I was amazed at how people just lost their minds over it.
BF: Actually we're sort of getting ready to retire that. We chose that song because there was a compilation album coming out from Elektra of well known bands doing covers of one hit wonders. Elektra just gives you a catalogue to chose from and there's thousands of these one hit wonder songs. You know they're all funny for a second, but then you think "Fuck, this is a terrible song." Because with most one hit wonders, truth is, they're horrible songs. This song was one that once you get below the campy stuff, it really has a cool sentiment to it and a lot of energy. The original's not that energetic, and we put it in people's faces a little more and they realize how much they really like it, because it's a really good song.
C: Have you had any odd reactions from playing a song like "Underground" which seems like a poke in the ribs at indie culture, in front of this mass of alternative fans.
BF: It's like self-deprecation kinda. If you were like a Ray Stevens or something singing about [inserts twangy vocal here] 'them damn kids today..', it obviously comes from an outside point of view. But this is so obviously from within. Besides, people love making fun of themselves anyway. It's kind of like being a hipster, scenester type in a small town and everyone's walking around going 'There's a couple of hipsters, they know what's going on.' But the truth is they're looking at you saying the same thing if your onto the same vibe. It's been cool to be cool for too long now and now it's cool not to be cool.
INTERVIEW: Ben Folds Five (1997)
- 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.
