As you may have noticed, I grew up in the 90s. That's not exactly true. I grew up in the 80s and 90s. Though, I'm not really sure which decade I'm supposed to have grown up in when it comes to Buzzfeed articles and Microsoft Internet Explorer commercials. I was born in 1979, so I became self-aware in the middle of the 80s, but had reached a certain maturity level in the early 90s when I became a teenager.
But, when it comes to music, I'm all 90s. Obviously, since I write a 90s music blog that like 3 people look at. That takes a special kind of dedication.
The 80s, when it comes to music, kind of sucked. Don't get me wrong, there was great stuff in the 80s. Pixies, The Cure, REM, The Cars and other bands that were mostly on the fringe of the mainstream. And I love the hell out of Hall & Oates and Huey Lewis & The News. Unironically, even. But for the most part, I consider the early-to-mid 80s to be a bunch of synthy bullshit and the late 80s to be homogenized pop. Again, there are a lot of exceptions. But look at what the 80s did to great bands like Chicago and Jefferson Airplane. In the late 60s and early 70s, Chicago was pretty much the greatest thing alive and Jefferson Airplane was not far behind. In the 80s, "Hard to Say I'm Sorry" and "We Built This City." WE BUILT THIS FUCKING CITY. That's what the 80s were - "We Built This City" on endless repeat while yuppies snort coke in Volvos while wearing shoulder padded power suits and watching Dallas.
But the 90s, now that was a special time. I know a lot of people will say, "Ugh the 90s was just grunge marf marf marf." But the mainstreaming of grunge lasted for like 18 months. And, it paved the way for alternative music to become popular, which it still is today: Mumford and Sons. Gotye. Fun. There's even some bands that don't suck.
For those that don't waste time dissecting this, "grunge" is synonymous with both the fashion of wearing beat-up clothes and flannel shirts, and the music. But to those people, "grunge" just means "loud guitars." Everclear and Eve 6 were grunge bands to a lot of people. This is wrong. Grunge was a very specific type of riff-based rock that was mostly popular in the Pacific Northwest. Early Soundgarden, Tad, Mudhoney, etc. It's a lot closer to Black Sabbath than it is to goddamned Everclear.
No, what these people consider to be grunge is actually "alternative rock" or "modern rock" or "alt rock" which is another umbrella term for rock that includes Soundgarden, Nirvana AND Everclear. And if you remove the rock, you just get alternative. Which allows for pretty much anything, including...
BEN FOLDS FIVE
Herein lies the greatness of 90s alternative and the 90s as a whole - you could turn on an alternative station in 1995 and hear Pearl Jam (rock), Beastie Boys (rap), Beck (whatever) and Ben Folds Five - which draws heavily from 70s-era soft rock like Elton John and Steely Dan - all on the same station, in a row. It was like your iPod on shuffle except with shitty commercials every 3 songs. Seriously, radio commercials are the lowest form of art.
But, as a child of the 90s, I hated this band. For years. Well, two years. But when you're a teenager, two years is a significant fraction of your existence.
My introduction to BFF came while watching 120 Minutes (February 4, 1996) and seeing the video for "Underground." My first thought, clear as day:
"WHAT. THE. SHIT."
In the previous hour, I had seen videos from Foo Fighters, Smashing Pumpkins, No Doubt, Spacehog and Radiohead. All guitar-based groups that used a buttload of distortion, which was the litmus test of musical awesomeness in the 90s. It took a lot to appreciate a group that wasn't stepping on a distortion pedal as the chorus starts. I came of age during the height of Nirvana; I was conditioned to hear a wall of distortion and feedback in every other song. And now, there's this twirpy guy banging on a piano in cowboy outfits singing about being cool and "Underground" in a weird falsetto like an adult Varys. This was the stuff of my 16-year-old nightmares. Well, that and Jennifer Bryant giving your friend Brent a handy when you clearly liked her.
But, when it comes to music, I'm all 90s. Obviously, since I write a 90s music blog that like 3 people look at. That takes a special kind of dedication.
The 80s, when it comes to music, kind of sucked. Don't get me wrong, there was great stuff in the 80s. Pixies, The Cure, REM, The Cars and other bands that were mostly on the fringe of the mainstream. And I love the hell out of Hall & Oates and Huey Lewis & The News. Unironically, even. But for the most part, I consider the early-to-mid 80s to be a bunch of synthy bullshit and the late 80s to be homogenized pop. Again, there are a lot of exceptions. But look at what the 80s did to great bands like Chicago and Jefferson Airplane. In the late 60s and early 70s, Chicago was pretty much the greatest thing alive and Jefferson Airplane was not far behind. In the 80s, "Hard to Say I'm Sorry" and "We Built This City." WE BUILT THIS FUCKING CITY. That's what the 80s were - "We Built This City" on endless repeat while yuppies snort coke in Volvos while wearing shoulder padded power suits and watching Dallas.
But the 90s, now that was a special time. I know a lot of people will say, "Ugh the 90s was just grunge marf marf marf." But the mainstreaming of grunge lasted for like 18 months. And, it paved the way for alternative music to become popular, which it still is today: Mumford and Sons. Gotye. Fun. There's even some bands that don't suck.
For those that don't waste time dissecting this, "grunge" is synonymous with both the fashion of wearing beat-up clothes and flannel shirts, and the music. But to those people, "grunge" just means "loud guitars." Everclear and Eve 6 were grunge bands to a lot of people. This is wrong. Grunge was a very specific type of riff-based rock that was mostly popular in the Pacific Northwest. Early Soundgarden, Tad, Mudhoney, etc. It's a lot closer to Black Sabbath than it is to goddamned Everclear.
No, what these people consider to be grunge is actually "alternative rock" or "modern rock" or "alt rock" which is another umbrella term for rock that includes Soundgarden, Nirvana AND Everclear. And if you remove the rock, you just get alternative. Which allows for pretty much anything, including...
BEN FOLDS FIVE
Herein lies the greatness of 90s alternative and the 90s as a whole - you could turn on an alternative station in 1995 and hear Pearl Jam (rock), Beastie Boys (rap), Beck (whatever) and Ben Folds Five - which draws heavily from 70s-era soft rock like Elton John and Steely Dan - all on the same station, in a row. It was like your iPod on shuffle except with shitty commercials every 3 songs. Seriously, radio commercials are the lowest form of art.
But, as a child of the 90s, I hated this band. For years. Well, two years. But when you're a teenager, two years is a significant fraction of your existence.
My introduction to BFF came while watching 120 Minutes (February 4, 1996) and seeing the video for "Underground." My first thought, clear as day:
"WHAT. THE. SHIT."
In the previous hour, I had seen videos from Foo Fighters, Smashing Pumpkins, No Doubt, Spacehog and Radiohead. All guitar-based groups that used a buttload of distortion, which was the litmus test of musical awesomeness in the 90s. It took a lot to appreciate a group that wasn't stepping on a distortion pedal as the chorus starts. I came of age during the height of Nirvana; I was conditioned to hear a wall of distortion and feedback in every other song. And now, there's this twirpy guy banging on a piano in cowboy outfits singing about being cool and "Underground" in a weird falsetto like an adult Varys. This was the stuff of my 16-year-old nightmares. Well, that and Jennifer Bryant giving your friend Brent a handy when you clearly liked her.
I may have overreacted. After a couple more airings of that video it started to grow on me, but it wasn't until 3 months later when I saw the hilarious video for "Uncle Walter" that I came around and learned to appreciate this band for how great they were.
Fast forward a couple years and "Brick" just explodes. Everyone is singing it and no one can figure out that it's about abortion except me. Is that true? Of course not. Other people figured it out. But no one that I talked to at the time could. And no one had ever heard of this band before. Except me. I was so amazing and special and kind of an asshole for thinking that. Regardless of the newfound popularity, I had both of their albums on near-constant repeat. To me, this was as close as you could get to Weezer (my favorite band at the time), even if the loud guitars were replaced by a guy pounding his piano like it was a keg of Miller Lite at a freshman year frat party.
Fast forward a couple more years and we get to "Army" and The Unauthorized Biography of Reinhold Messner, the band's third album, and once again, I'm on the outside with BFF. Gone were the melodies and humor and fuzzy bass that was their first self-titled album and Whatever and Ever Amen. Messner was something else entirely, and I wasn't buying in. Until I gave it a year or so and re-listened and realized this was their best work. Hell, this was some of the best music of the whole decade.
Sadly, many others had the same initial reaction to Messner that I did. Music was changing; pop and boy bands and hip-hop and shitty Limp Bizkit buttrock were taking over and an album that could have been the Sgt. Pepper's to OK Computer's Pet Sounds had it just came out 4 years earlier was lost in the shuffle.
And then the band broke up, taking my chances to see them live with them.
I'd missed seeing a lot of bands in the 90s, but Ben Folds Five was with Buffalo Tom and that dog. at the top of the regrets list. So, when it was announced in August of 2011, a tour only seemed inevitable.
Which brings us to January 26, 2013 at the Wiltern Theater in Los Angeles' Koreatown neighborhood.
In past 90s Live Now entries, I've written about fevered crowds, but I've not seen anything like tonight. This band was beloved, and every single (white) person in the greater LA area was there, singing along with every song.
Seriously, everyone was white. It was like being at the Republican National Convention.
More seriously, the crowd was manic. During "Army", Ben turned the mike to the crowd, and we sang back the horn parts, even breaking them up into their distinct parts without any direction. It was one of those special moments that happens once in a never. Like the time Raine Maida of Our Lady Peace started crying when the crowd sang "4am" louder than he was and completely unprompted.
Last fall, the band released their fourth studio album, The Sound of the Life of the Mind. And unlike Buffalo Tom's Skins, this is an album I found myself listening to over and over and over again. While not quite as exuberant as their first 2 records, nor as melancholy and experimental as their 3rd, Sound has great songs for a band that hadn't even played together in 13 years. So, when they opened with "Michael Praytor, Five Years Later", the second track off of their newest album, there was none of the backlash that you would expect from a crowd who paid a lot of money (seriously, these tickets were expensive) to see one of their favorite bands reunited but they insist on playing the new shit no one knows. Point is, the new shit is good so no one cared.
Also helping - this is a tight band. Even during songs they just sort of made up on the spot, drummer Darren Jesse and bassist Robert Sledge expertly kept up with Ben Folds and his magical piano, making it seem like these little improvs were fully formed ideas that the band had rehearsed for weeks. It was like a little window into their creative process, furthered by Ben Folds' story about how the new song "Do It Anyway" was inspired by an event that occurred the last time he had played the Wiltern (short version, Ben said he couldn't dance on top of his piano to whatever song they were playing, a fan yelled "Do It Anyway" and he wrote 75% of it right there and then).
Another very cool thing about tonight's show: Ben Folds said that the band broke up 13 years ago and his kids are now 13 years old and tonight was the first time they had met Darren or Jesse and the first time they've seen BF5 perform live. What a spectacular first time to see them - in a packed auditorium, with thousands of people singing along with their dad's songs. They must've been beaming with pride. Hell, I was for them.
So, bottom line, amazing show. Like Buffalo Tom two years ago, this is a great live band, made better by the fact that I waited a decade and a half to see them live.
Here's the setlist:
Michael Praytor, Five Years Later
Jackson Cannery
Hold That Thought
Selfless, Cold and Composed
Erase Me
Landed
Sky High
Missing the War
Battle of Who Could Care Less
Draw a Crowd
Thank You For Breaking My Heart
Brick
Theme From Dr. Pyser
Army
Do It Anyway
Alice Childress
Tonight the Bottle Let me Down (Merle Haggard cover)
Song For The Dumped
ENCORE:
Chopsticks (Liz Phair cover)
Magic
Underground
How fitting that they should end with the song that had first turned me against them before I learned to love them. It was a perfect way for the cosmos to rub my early stupidity in my face.
Whatever (And Ever. Amen.).
Underground
How fitting that they should end with the song that had first turned me against them before I learned to love them. It was a perfect way for the cosmos to rub my early stupidity in my face.
Whatever (And Ever. Amen.).
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