Ben gave the Armchair a nice shout-out during his show at the Gilmore Piano Festival in Kalamazoo, Mich., Saturday night (April 26) and talked about how the Magical Armchair mailing list was instrumental in charting the course of Ben Folds Five in the early days. They first became aware of the existence of the mailing list at one of their earliest shows when I brought them stacks of printed-out copies of the list messages (since none of them had e-mail or were even on the Internet at the time). Soon thereafter, they did get online, as did their manager, and started subscribing and reading posts from fans. The band members didn’t post, though their road manager at the time did once in a while. Eventually, other methods of fan communication augmented and diminished the importance of the Armchair mailing list, though it is still in service today. Better yet, the archives of the mailing list still exist and can provide a lot of insight into the development and early success of Ben Folds Five.
You can access the first several years of the Magical Armchair at the archive page of the old Ben Folds Five site. These archives run from 1995 through 1999, when the list was migrated to Topica. Topica maintains its own archive, which is only accessible to list members. Note that many of the links and e-mail addresses contained in the archival material have changed or gone offline.
