i thought i'd wait til you got more people to send you this, but i'm afraid i'll forget. so here ya go. stolen from the AP wire at work a few weeks back. :) sorry about the justification. i had to do that to typeset it. i can get you a normal version if you'd prefer, but it'd probably be after the holidays before i remember!
Today's topic: How to move a baby grand piano from here to there, with your hosts, Ben Folds Five.
First thing, take off one or more of the legs. Second thing, tip it up on its side. Roll, don't lift. ``The trick is to not do any lifting. You've got to let the piano do the work, use it as its own leverage,'' Ben Folds says from a pay phone at a truck stop near Seattle.
``It's physics. ... You get these big huge roadie guys who just want to lift it, and I used to be pretty patient with them, but now I'm just like, `Don't touch it. Just get away.' I can push it in one spot and it just goes over on its side. The roadies are like, `Damn, boy, you're strong for a skinny guy.' ''
The baby grand Baldwin, which Folds bought on credit about two years ago, sees the world in a customized Ryder van. Think of pianos in cartoons, snapping their ropes, hurtling toward Mr. Magoo. Folds' piano is banged up and covered with scratches and only occasionally plays in tune. ``That poor thing. It may not even last another year. It's had the crap beaten out of it.''
Early in the life of Ben Folds Five, a Chapel Hill, N.C., trio (three guys, not five, as the band's name weirdly asserts), the Baldwin took a leap from the back of the truck. Piano meets asphalt: ``The worst, most horrible sound. God, just the worst noise I ever heard,'' Folds says, pained. ``And then, for a second, it rolled on its back like a dime.''
Which is, more or less, how the best free CD I ever got in my whole life as a music editor wound up in the mailbox one day this summer. Seriously. I don't know what it is exactly that draws me again and again to the punk-meets-the-I'm-a-Pepper- she's-a-Pepper sound of Ben Folds Five: A piano (Folds), a fuzzed-up bass (Robert Sledge), and drums (Darren Jessee) _ they get it done with nary a grungy guitar, no weenie digital keyboards and no ... well, not even a flute or a horn.
``I've pretty much given up trying to explain our music,'' Folds says in his Carolina drawl. ``We just played this show in Dallas, where people basically didn't get it. We're loading the piano back in the truck and this guy, who has that Billy Ray Cyrus haircut, you know, the big mane of hair in the back? He says, `You guys sound just like Styx.' Now, I might take that as a compliment from someone who gets it, but it was obvious that this was a guy who had only just figured out that Styx wasn't cool anymore. That's what bugged me.''
Critics have also drawn their Ben Folds Five comparisons in a straight line from late-'70s AM radio, only with more love and irony in their hearts: Todd Rundgren divided by Joe Jackson plus Squeeze? Billy Joel with indie-rock ethics?
Folds himself has called it ``punk rock for sissies,'' and claims Jimi Hendrix as the divine intervention here. ``I guess people who come to our shows at small clubs, they expect something, but they don't know what. Some people see there's three guys and a piano, so they think it might be a jazz band. Then they wind up wondering why I keep slamming the piano with my elbows. Then there's people who are in this International Latent Brotherhood and Sisterhood of Ben Folds Five, who completely understand it.''
The songs on Ben Folds Five's self-titled debut (on Passenger/ Caroline records) come from the sweet, vulnerable places in Folds' mind. ``Underground'' is a snide anthem to the tattoo-and-nose ring alternative set. ``Boxing'' is a teary waltz number that imagines a conversation between Howard Cosell and Muhammad Ali. ``Julianne'' is a ``Back in the U.S.S.R''-tempo rocker about a meeting: ``This girl, she looked like Axl Rose/Got drunk and took her home and we slept in our clothes.''
While Darren Jessee plays bouncy drums and Robert Sledge (formerly of Toxic Popsickles) thumbs furry bass lines (and both add supergroovy doo-wah harmony vocals), Folds pounds the keys hard and sings even harder, higher, raw in the throat, occasionally spitting consonants from his front teeth. But his songs run counter to punk's extended middle finger, and he dares to be a dork in a cardigan who sings about love.
``I was writing songs on guitar for the longest time and then I got a piano. It was the piano we had in my house when I was a kid, and moved it over to where I was living,'' Folds, 29, says. ``One day I just decided to play the songs on the piano, just to see what they sounded like. Knocking it out on the piano was just so ... refreshing. I was like, This is nice. ... I play piano like I play guitar, which is what makes it different.''
Folds took his share of piano lessons starting at age 9 (didn't we all, but I'm left back at the ``Star Wars'' and ``Love Story'' themes). He grew up in North Carolina and played in a few bands before striking out for Nashville, where he was a studio session drummer. He lived in New York for a year and played bass in an ``anything goes'' guitar band called Majosha, which put out a couple of indie-label singles and got some college-radio air" play, but, he says, ``I think it was a little cheesy for me. A little too showbiz-oriented.''
He came home to Chapel Hill in early 1994, and started to look for new bandmates. He met Jessee and Sledge through mutual friends and ``the thing just worked right away. Sometimes when things are just simple and easy, they work. You can spend a lot of time and effort on some" thing and it still doesn't work. This just did.''
In the Chapel Hill scheme of things (which spawned Superchunk, Archers of Loaf and Polvo, among other college-radio smasheroos), Ben Folds Five became known for its powerhouse live shows _ and Folds would go home nursing his bleeding, swollen hands. The CD, produced by Caleb Southern, captures the panicked pounding of the group's club performances.
The piano-moving misadventures are presumably far from over. After the Baldwin fell on Folds' younger brother, can it get any worse?
``We get it tuned whenever we can afford it, otherwise I just play it out-of-tune, like a bar piano. ... Oh, man, what's that movie, `The Piano,' with what's her name?'' Folds says.
Holly Hunter?
``Yeah, and Harvey Keitel, where they leave the piano on the beach and then they carry it through the jungle? God, I couldn't even watch that movie. It gave me a stomach ache.''
(Hank Steuver is a reporter at the Albuquerque Tribune.)
- jen
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> > if any of you haven't heard of ben folds five and are interested in some > experimental listening, i highly recommend their self-titled debut CD. > they're a three-piece band - piano, bass and drums - and have put together > some great toe-tapping tunes. you won't be sorry. >
I saw Ben Folds Five several weeks ago and they were great! I first heard them on DMX (digital music over cable), then bought their CD, which is excellent. I, too, highly recommend buying their CD and if they come to your area, definitly see them.
- Mike
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jen, thanks for sending along the review. I cleaned up what was left of the sgml markups and reformatted it for 80-column screens instead of 25-column newspapers.
We are now an international list with the addition of a subscriber from Sweden. Welcome all who have joined! Things are bound to be slow for the next few days but if anything comes in I'll post it.
Merry Christmas to all! -Frank
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