A Dream About Lightning Bugs
November 25, 2019
In this memoir, Ben Folds never throws anyone under the bus. He never criticises anyone without pointing the ultimate blame at himself. If someone was upset with him, they were always “understandably upset,” for example. I aspire to that level of self-reflection and regard for others and their perspectives.
He describes pop music as mating music – most appropriate for 20-somethings. It is intentional, to some degree, that this music would not appeal to an older crowd. They are in a different stage of life, and pop music is no long for them. At the height of Ben Folds Five, an older couple would sometimes come to one of their shows and complain afterwards about the distorted bass. They had come for some seventies piano jams, and this wasn’t cutting it. He said he was sorry they were disappointed but also, this music wasn’t for them.
I have had the thought recently that the new pop music I hear is for kids. It seems like a Crotchety Old Man Thought that I should avoid, but Ben Folds writes basically the same thing:
I, for one, don't feel the need to try and relate to younger music that's not for me anymore. I appreciate it, but I don't try to like it or relate to it. Why should I? I view pop music the way I do a children's television show, with its cartoons and bright colors -- it's for kids. I'm no more riveted by a grumpy puppet who lives in a garbage can than I am by a horny auto-tuned journal entry edited over a lonesome computer loop.
This was refreshing to read. I’ve been struggling with my own relationship with music for years now. It was once so important to me, and now I only care about music from the 90’s, which can’t possibly be the best music ever created (Ben Folds Five notwithstanding). He goes on:
If I'm being really honest? Really feeling my age and unafraid to admit it? Here we go: I'm actually repulsed by overly computerized music, which dominates pop music now. It makes me feel ill. Canned bass drum that dry-humps my eardrums four-on-the-floor in the back seat of an Uber while an overly gymnastic auto-tuned vocal holds me down... It just isn't my cup of tea. There's something sad about a singer pouring his heart out over a quantized machine. That heartless machine would keep playing out for days in an empty room, long after the singer keeled over. Hey, kid! That loop doesn't love you!
I feel the same way, to some extent. I sometimes like music with an electronic component, but it can also seem lazy, and the Crotchety Old Man in me wants to yell, “Learn an instrument, Junior!”
He also offers this advice to musicians, which I can appreciate:
When you're about to reach for whatever musical tools you use, virtual or real, guitar or computer, ask yourself if you're doing so to save time or because you don't feel like straining your brain. Or, more important, ask yourself if you have anything to say yet. If not, keep working (or playing) upstairs, in your brain.
A couple of funny stories:
My roommate, Doug, had a visit from the police. This was my fault. At the end of my semester, I'd noticed a sign -- STOLEN AUDIO EQUIPMENT! CALL IF YOU HAVE INFORMATION! -- with a list of the missing equipment, posted in the music engineering department. I thought it would be funny if right next to it I posted AUDIO EQUIPMENT FOR SALE! MUST SELL QUICK! -- CALL DOUG GROBER, with the same stolen equipment list at suspiciously low prices.
At one point (p. 116), he got a gig playing bass at a resport in North Carolina. On the first night doing this, a female singer flirted with an older man in the audience and brought him out to dance with her. Suddently, he went into spasms – he had a heart attack and died before the paramedics arrived. “At the end of the harrowing evening, in which the deceased was carried away under a blanket, we quietly rolled up cables and put away our equipment… The local soundman, sporting a massive mustache and baseball cap, broke the silence with – and these were his exact words – “Well, I have to say it, but you guys were knockin’ ’em dead tonight.”
A quote about the BFF drummer:
He [Darren Jesse] grooved, but he wasn't the band timekeeper. None of us were. We slowed and sped, maybe more than any commercial band I've ever heard. You could never get away with that these days, in an era where everyone seems to have been born with a Pro Tools grid ticking robotically just inside their sphincter.
This quote parallels my relationship with Spotify:
Some mornings I'd open the front door to discover stacks of massive boxes containing every record Warner, EMI, or Sony had ever made. Each label that was pursuing us had their entire catalog sent to my house. Just that alone was overwhelming. I was used to a normal life of acquiring one album at a time, listening on repeat for weeks until I could afford the next. Now I suddenly owned more than I could ever listen to. Hundreds of CDs spread across my living room floor. I'd play ten seconds of each, tossing them around the room like confetti while opening the plastic wrapping of the next. But record bingeing wasn't as satisfying as I would have imagined. I felt like an out-of-control CD junkie, trying to soak up all of recorded music history in spare minutes.
Finally, the story of BFF recording their first album was interesting. They began recording with a producer named Dave “Stiff” Johnson, who “worked hard to rein in some of the insanity of our arrangements.” He got them to keep a steadier tempo, to mic the instruments more carefully, got Ben to sing “more earnestly,” kept the bass from buzzing, and generally made the recordings sound a lot more professional. The band sometimes questioned this but generally trusted his experience in the studio and followed his lead.
Then a lady named Kerry McCarthy stopped by to listen to the album in progress. She went into the back room after hearing a couple of songs, and Ben found her crying. He thought she’s just been through a breakup or something, and he asked her what was wrong. “The whole thing,” she sobbed. “It doesn’t sound like you at all. It sounds like three old men. It’s awful.”
As they listened to the studio mixes a few days later, the band tried to convince themselves she as wrong. Then they popped in a tape of a recent live recording, and even though it was a bad recording, they were on fire. It highlighted for them that Kerry was right.
Kerry managed to get them three thousand more dollars, which they stretched into five more days in the studio. The label (Caroline Records) told them to stay focussed and only do a couple of songs, but when the label guys left, they re-recorded the entire album. “The more we broke the law, the better it sounded when it came back through the speakers.” In the end, this is the album they released, and the Stiff Johnson recordings went in the vault.
I remember the first time I heard the song Brick on the radio. That same week, I went to Hastings in Lake Jackson and looked for the CD, but they didn’t have it. I bought the band’s first CD instead, and I listened to it a lot that year. It has some of my favorite Ben Folds songs (Underground, Best Imitation of Myself, Video, and Philosophy – especially the intro).