Awsomegang interview
I did an interview a while back with the website Awesomegang.com. You can check it out at this LINK.
I did an interview a while back with the website Awesomegang.com. You can check it out at this LINK.
On June 8, 1996, Ben Folds Five was to play the New Daisy Theater in Memphis, TN. I was working in college radio at the time and our station had been given a supply of free tickets. Unfortunately, I had no car. Fortunately, I had several friends who did, so I proposed we all make a road trip to Memphis to go see the show.
My experience at WMSV (91.1 FM) out of Mississippi State University, from 1994-1997, was a formative one. Not only did it finally allow me the experience of being a DJ (which had been a longstanding dream of mine since being told by multiple people in 1989 that my voice would lend itself to a career in it), but it exposed me to a lot of music I would never have heard otherwise. It helped shape my musical taste to a large degree.
I was already a kid who was more at home with Paul Simon than Poison, but getting force fed a steady diet of Live, Dave Matthews Band (and a few years before the rest of the country had heard of them), Ani DiFranco, Barenaked Ladies, Moxy Fruvous, Sarah McLachlan, Phish, the Eels, Aimee Mann, Joan Osborne, Jason Falkner, Primus, Trout Fishing in America, the Subdudes, Taj Mahal, October Project, Ben Folds, and so many others, helped refine my musical taste and send me off in different directions. Most of these acts seem like no-brainers now, but at the time I’d never heard of most of them, nor, in many cases, had much of the rest of the country.
Now Ben Folds and his band the Ben Folds Five went on to have some top 40 hits in the later 90s, but in 1995, with their debut album, they were new to the national scene. I can even recall the first time I played a song by them, which I believe was their song “Philosophy.” It was a revelation to me because it sounded like the guy who used to do the old Kleenex Says, Bless You jingles from a decade earlier was now writing awesome rock music using primarily piano, bass, and drums. (For the record: not the same guy.) Also the fact that they were called Ben Folds Five and there were only three members in the band was something I found superbly charming. I played the ever-loving-snot out of that CD on the air. In fact, I played songs from it so much that Ben Folds Five began to encroach upon the play numbers of my standard regular overplayed airshift band, They Might Be Giants. “Philosophy” was my favorite song on the album, but “Underground” came a close second, and “Best Imitation of Myself” probably third. Folds and the band had a definite sound that I had heard nowhere else.
So when, in 1996, I heard they were going to be playing at the New Daisy, it seemed a done deal that I would be there to see the show. After all, we’d done a similar road trip with folks from the station–spearheaded by our fearless leader and general manager, Steve Ellis–back in December of `94, to see Milla Jovovich and Toad the Wet Sprocket. (Yes, THAT Milla Jovovich. Check out her album, The Divine Comedy. It’s good stuff.) The only difference was that this road trip wouldn’t be a university sanctioned event, and we’d have to carpool it rather than ride in an official MSU van. It would be awesome! And it was free!
I got no takers.
Nope.
Nary a soul among my crew of nerd herd friends seemed at’tall interested in attending Ben Folds Five in concert.
So we stayed put in Starkpatch, ate pizza, and probably watched old episodes of Red Dwarf instead.
Now, I didn’t know this until this morning, but it turns out that our staying put was probably a good thing. Apparently the concert had to be cancelled. One site I found which reprinted old newsgroup posts noted that someone in the bad had gotten sick and they had to postpone the concert indefinitely. So this puts the resentment I’ve held toward my friends at this missed opportunity in a bit of a different light for me. It would have been awkward to have made that journey only to learn there was no concert at all. We would have been left with no recourse but to consume our weight in barbecue and craft beer. Yeah, that would have been a terrible time.
I kept up with Ben Folds Five after college, as I have many of the college radio bands I became a fan of back then. My favorite album of theirs is probably The Unauthorized Biography of Reinhold Messner, which I hold is a masterpiece, though it was a critical and commercial failure at the time. The band broke up not long after its release and it took a few years before Ben began releasing his amazing solo work, with Rockin’ the Suburbs. I’ve picked up most everything since, though I’ve not yet delved into all of the side projects he’s done, such as The Bens, or quite all of his work with William Shatner.
After a semi-bitter 20 year wait, I finally got to see Ben Folds in concert last week when he played at the Clay Center in Charleston, sans the Five. In fact, the tour was called Ben Folds and a Piano.
I got to town a little early because I wanted to check out Lost Legion Games & Comics, the Rifleman, a comic store on the south west side of town. It’s the parent store to the one I used to go to in Princeton, but I’d never visited it. Turned out to be a great shop and very busy for a Thursday night. My plan was to next head back down town to Graziano’s Pizza. Unfortunately, there seemed to be some sort of parade or gathering of marching bands and ROTC kids going on near the comic shop and this had brought traffic to a halt. It didn’t look like anyone was going to clear out any time soon, so I decided to stay. The Happy Days Cafe was next door to Lost Legion and they had an open-faced meatloaf sandwich on special with mashed potatoes and gravy as a side. I asked if they would substitute french fries for the mashed potatoes, but keep the gravy–as gravy fries are one of my all time favs. They were spectacular.
Traffic jam having passed, I headed over to the Clay Center for Ben’s concert, which was also spectacular and nearly everything I could have asked for in a Ben Folds show.
Nearly.
After the first song, Ben talked to the crowd a bit, noting that half of his family comes from West Virginia. He wasn’t sure from where exactly and was awaiting a text reply from his father to find out. But he said that between his relatives from WV and NC his redneck street cred was pretty strong. It made such lyrics as “my redneck past keeps nipping at my heels” from “Army” ring even more true.
The concert was wonderful. Ben talked between most of the songs, telling stories–sometimes song origins and sometimes funny stories that resulted from songs–and being the personable dude I’ve heard in his appearances on podcasts like Nerdist and Adam Carolla. He even enlisted audience participation, such as having us do four part harmony in the bridge to “Bastard.” Then, after an audience member shouted out a request early on, Ben noted that we were welcome to shout out whatever we wanted to, but he was going to stick to the set list on his paper. However, we should stick around, cause at the middle of the show shit was going to get crazy. And he was not wrong.
Just before the last song of the first half of the concert, he explained that during intermission we were all welcome to go into the lobby where we would be given sheets of paper upon which we could write our song requests. We were then welcome to fold those pieces of paper into airplanes and, upon the resumption of the concert, we would be invited to launch them at the stage and Ben would play the rest of the concert based on those suggestions.
Unfortunately, I could not find paper in the lobby. Everyone was walking around with multiple pieces of it, but I couldn’t locate the central paper distribution point. I could have asked someone, sure, but that involves communicating with humans. I figured it would be fine even if I didn’t get paper, since there was no way the song I wanted to request, “The Luckiest,” wasn’t going to be requested by multiple other people. Chances were high it would be sung. Also, my seat was far enough back that there was no way I could engineer a paper airplane that would make the journey to the stage without some added ballast to carry it. (My seat mates caught a glimpse of the mailing tube my recently purchased Ben Folds tour poster came in and thought for sure I had a brought some kind of paper airplane bazooka. In retrospect, I could have used the poster to make the biggest paper airplane in the room, which would have certainly drawn the attention of Mr. Folds. It would also have cost me $30 to do it, but how awesome would that have been?)
Ben came back from intermission and gave us the countdown for the launching of the planes. Maybe ten percent actually made it to the stage. Many immediately nose-dived back into the crowd. There followed much relaunching and re-relaunching until more had made it. True to his word, Ben played the rest of the show from the request planes, including a few songs that weren’t even his to begin with. He did a great version of “Tiny Dancer,” a song he had learned for some concerts he’d done with Elton John in Australia. Billy Joel’s “Piano Man” he claimed to know not even a little of, then played a respectable version that he just made up lyrics to as he went. Then Jerry Lee Lewis’s “Great Balls of Fire” was requested, which one of Ben’s crew said he’d played once before. He didn’t know the lyrics, though, so he just sang phonetic gibberish for the whole thing and it sounded perfect. And, of course, someone had to request Ben’s beautifully arranged cover version of Dr. Dre’s rap song “Bitches Ain’t Shit” from his Magnum Opus album The Chronic. With a title like that you can probably guess the Joseph Campbell Heroes Journey it’s going to take you on. If anyone there was shocked at the first verse, they were probably even moreso by the second, which around another third of the audience sang in unison without Ben’s vocal assistance. (He explained that he doesn’t like to sing that verse, probably due to all the racial slurs, so he was going to let us do that. I was not among the “us,” though, because I don’t have it memorized and am pretty sure that’s a good thing.) I imagine there were those present who were shocked by the content of the song, regardless of the beauty of the melody. Some might have even wondered why Ben would have covered it in the first place. I think the Village Voice sums it up nicely: “The greatest way to show up musical misogyny for the absurd bullshit that it is, is to break it down into a ballad and have it gently sung by a charming nerd. Here Ben Folds takes a super-sexist, curse-laden track, flips it on its head and makes Dr. Dre look like an idiotic buffoon. What’s more, taking gangsta speak and enunciating it like a middle-class white guy is always going to be comedy gold…” And comedy gold it was, even if not everyone in the audience was in on the joke.
At one point during the second half, I thought my unlaunched request for “The Luckiest,” was going to be played when Ben picked an airplane featuring a short letter from a girl in the audience. She wrote, and I’m paraphrasing, that she didn’t want to be the typical white girl who requests “the Luckiest” but she was attending the show with her man who wanted her to feel like the luckiest woman there. So Ben used the content of that letter as lyrics for a song he improvised on the spot. I figured that he’d just blend that beautiful and funny tune right into “The Luckiest” afterward. Nope. He’d honored the letter of the request and moved on–probably confident that it would turn up in a future airplane. Sadly, it did not.
It was a great show. And when Ben returned to the stage for the encore, he announced that he’d received a reply from his father and that his family was from Webster county, which is about as hinterlands as hinterlands go in this state. His final song was the aptly chosen “Army.” Once again, his redneck past keeps nipping at his heels.
In last night’s dream state, my recent RV trip to Alaska was replayed as a Wes Anderson movie. My mother-in-law, Susan Holloway, was played by Anjelica Huston. Actress Imogen Poots also had a prominent role, except everyone kept calling her Imogen Poots instead of her character’s name, cause it’s just fun to say Imogen Poots. The RV’s interior dimensions did not always match its exterior, which looked like a hand-crafted toy model of a 1960s era Winnebago. And the title of this little road movie kept changing from scene to scene, yet consistently contained the word “Coterie” (as originally used in the brilliant SNL Anderson parody, “The Midnight Coterie of Sinister Intruders”).
This is what I get for watching The Royal Tenenbaums and eating pizza after 8 p.m.
Wes Anderson – The midnight Coterie of sinister intruders from MisterB on Vimeo.
One of the oldest of my stories in A Consternation of Monsters is “The King’s Last Nacho.” Like “The Wise Ones,” which precedes it in the order of stories, this was one of the stories I first drafted during my college years at Mississippi State University. Unlike “The Wise Ones,” however, it did not begin life in a creative writing class, but started out in a different medium altogether–that of comic books.
I’ve aspired to have many careers in life, from detective to disc jockey (one of which I did for a few years and one of which I may one day achieve), but I can mark the moment in my life when I first wanted to become a comic book writer. It was the day I first read an article in Writers Digest by a man who would one day become one of my all time favorite television writers (though I’d seen some of his work already at that point), J. Michael Straczynski, creator and primary writer for the TV series Babylon 5. And, of course, the article he wrote was about the mechanics of writing scripts for comics.
Though I’ve been a life long fan of comics, I had only vaguely wondered at that point what the process of writing a comic book was like. I had long known that they were frequently a different person from the artist, and I was already a big fan of a handful of comic book writers, such as Keith Giffen, John Ostrander, Mark Evanier, Larry Hama, John Byrne, etc. I had even begun a budding fascination with the work of Alan Moore, but I’d had few aspirations in the comic writing arena myself. The Writers Digest issue, though, in which JMS explained his own learning process in writing his first ever comic book, issue #13 of Teen Titan’s Spotlight from 1987, was fascinating to me. The article featured examples of his script pages as they compared to the finished comic book pages, showing how the description of the action was written panel by panel, with dialogue added beneath that to show how many dialogue balloons would be in a given panel, etc. It was an article that I devoured and re-read dozens of times. It was really then that it dawned on me that there were folks in the world who wrote comic books for a living and I could possibly be one of them. I shortly set out to try and come up with ideas for comics.
I was initially inspired by books like Giffen’s Justice League International, which told oftentimes serious stories, but the humorous take on the characters provided by Giffen, J.M. DeMatteis, and artist Kevin Maguire. Since DC and Marvel would pay the most, I tried to think of stories for existing DC Comics characters. (The one I remember of these was a grim & gritty version of DC’s The Inferior Five, which begins years after they broke up; Merryman has been institutionalized, Dumb Bunny turned out to be a scientific genius who had been chemically suppressing her intellect, and the Blimp went missing after floating into the Bermuda Triangle.) Later on, once I’d read such works as Watchmen, V for Vendetta, The Sandman, and had Grant Morrison forcibly expand my horizons in his run on Doom Patrol, I began to think a bit more broadly than deconstructionist parody.
Now, I’d been making up my own comic book style characters for years, so I had original properties to my name. One of these characters was a guy called The Kindred Spirit. He was inspired by such mysterious trench-coaty types as The Phantom Stranger, but with the twist that he was just this slobby, cigar-chomping fat guy, whose trench coat was stained and whose hat was burnt. It’s what would happen if the Phantom Stranger were played by the guy who played Ekhardt in Tim Burton’s Batman, and with a little Columbo thrown in for good measure. In my initial conception of him, he was either an angel or the closest thing to one, and was an agent of a cosmic/possibly heavenly organization called The Higher Power, though he would occasionally freelance. Mostly, he was a down to earth guy who knew the secrets of the universe, but wasn’t an asshole about it. He traversed the cosmos through the use of a bottle of dimension fluid, which, when poured upon the ground in a circle, could open portals to other realms, or span vast distances. I imagined that he knew all the other big enlightened and ascended master types in the universe, but none of them really liked him much. Not that he cared. They were too stuffy for him. He was more interested in smoking, drinking and having adventures.
Some time in the mid 1990s, Gun Dog Comics, the formerly existing comic shop in Starkville, MS, decided to get into the publishing business. They next announced that they were putting together an anthology book with different writers and artists. Rob Snell, co-owner of Gun Dog, asked me if I’d be interested in submitting something. I think I suggested the name of the only comic artist I knew, Eric Yonge, a guy I went to high school whose work was fantastic and who I’d wanted to work with since first seeing his spot-on cartoon sketches of our math teacher, Mr. Murphy, which he’d drawn on Mr. Murphy’s overhead projector. Turns out, they already knew Eric and had recruited him way before me.
I decided Kindred Spirit was the character to use for my comic submission. And my story idea was to have Kin take a freelance bounty-hunting gig to recapture the very much alive Elvis Presley, who had escaped back to Earth. (Remember, this was only a few years after a major wave of the whole Elvis faked his death theories were in the news.) And, for reasons I’m not entirely clear on now, I decided to set this faceoff at a professional wrestling match in Memphis. I started writing.
The Snells were shooting for an anthology of 8-page comic stories. I tried to cram as much of mine into those 8 pages as possible, but there’s a lot of conversation that just couldn’t fit. Rob, an artist himself, pointed out that I was going to have to leave some room in the comic panels for actual art at some point, so I was going to have to do some serious editing of my dialogue. I turned in a few drafts which were kicked back to me for more editing. I begged for more pages, but wisely they refused. If I couldn’t tell the story in 8 pages then it wasn’t a story they wanted. Eventually I managed to turn in a draft that Rob said was getting closer to workable, but still had a ways to go. (Somewhere, I’m sure I have a 3.5″ floppy that contains this gem of a story. Or, possibly even a 5.25″ diskette, as I think I was still writing on a Kaypro 4 back then. What I don’t seem to have is a paper script I can lay hands on.)
At some point, the Snells decided to put the idea of a comic anthology on the back burner. I suspect they realized that if they had an artist as talented as Eric Yonge on hand, what they needed to be doing was publishing more of his work. He’d already done some small press comics for them about a secret agent character he’d created called Gunner. Gun Dog bumped this up to a full size comic, published it, distributed it through Diamond and made a nationally released book of it. Ultimately, they published a few issues of Gunner, all of which I bought. The anthology comic, though, remained on the back burner of their creative stove. And then the stove itself was eventually sold and Gun Dog closed its doors in the early 2000s. (Fun fact: Gun Dog also published the first mini-series of Larry Young’s Astronauts in Trouble: Live from the Moon in 1999, which eventually was republished under it’s creator’s own publishing company, AIT/Planet Lar.)
Having the basic idea for this story that refused to fit into 8 pages, though, I decided to let it stretch its legs a bit as a prose story. I took my original draft, with all the sprawling dialogue, and wrote around it even more sprawling prose description. I threw everything against the wall, every commentary on human nature I possessed in my wee, college junior, 21-year-old mind, as well as jokes about Elvis movies that I hadn’t even seen at that point, some of which turned out to be wildly inaccurate. (There ARE clams seen in Clambake, for instance. Somewhere along the way, I heard that there were not and thought the irony funny. Irony only works well, though, when it is shown against the context of reality.) There were more nacho jokes, too, with an extended sequence in which Kindred Spirit craves Elvis’s last nacho in a bad way and Elvis holds it to his mouth, threatening to consume it for most of a page before crushing the fat man’s hopes by eating it. That got toned down later. The wrestling match, which had been generic in the original comic script, became another layer in the storytelling with the addition of real life wrestler Jerry “The King” Lawler. (Cedric Hinds is an echo of a no-name mid-`90s wrestler named Edric Hines, about whom I can no longer find references online–meaning he’s REALLY no name now.) In the end, it was essentially the same story as my comic script idea, but the method of achieving it is a little different. Probably my favorite change from the original version to the prose story is the title. I don’t recall my original title for the comic story, if it even had one, but “The King’s Last Nacho” landed and stuck hard.
I’ve revised the story a number of times over the years since then, going back to Rob Snell’s advice to edit, edit and reedit. It was reduced from an indulgent 25 pages, down to 21 pages, and then down to 18 while doing final edits for the collection. The major decision I had, though, was whether or not to include it in the collection at all. Those of you who’ve read it might be under the impression the my dilemma was due to the story containing no monsters; just Elvis, a fat cosmic guy, a couple of wrestlers and an arena full of spectators. There is, I assure you, a very big monster present, though. It may not seem as obvious as some of the others in the collection, but it’s huge, has tremendous fangs and claws, is incredibly destructive to humanity, and has been around for centuries. You may still have to squint to see it. Regardless, I just wasn’t sure if the story fit thematically with the other stories. It doesn’t have the same creepy factor that the others tend to, so it felt a little out of place. I even had other stories that had big obvious monsters in them that I declined to include in this collection in favor of Nacho. In the end, it’s just one of my favorite of my stories and I wanted it in there regardless of the monster squint factor.
I have not recorded a podcast version of this story, and likely won’t. But I might get around to posting an audio sample of it from the forthcoming audio book version of A Consternation of Monsters, (which I am even as I type this avoiding some audio-editing for). It’s nearly half way there.