Total coverage with Ben Folds Five

Geoff Carter

Wednesday, June 9, 1999 | 3:06 a.m.

This article first appeared on May 15, 1998.

Ben Folds Five are my heroes. The superlatively talented Chapel Hill, North Carolina trio - on a killer double-bill with power-pop contemporaries Superdrag - knocked the collective socks off a standing-room crowd at the Hard Rock Joint May 8. I've been dying to see these cats live since my friend Marianne came back from Georgia with a tape of "Underground," saying "You'll love this."

And I'm not alone. I still feel somewhat odd when I hear "Brick" on the radio; I developed a rare sense of attachment to BFF's personal narratives. That was me extracting cold revenge on the members of my graduating class in "One Angry Dwarf and 200 Solemn Faces." I knew the girl who "looked like Axl Rose" in "Julianne." But the gut-wrenching, poetic "Brick" -- a veiled account of a girl getting an abortion, related by a boyfriend sitting uneasily outside the clinic -- is too strong a statement to be denied, a powerful ballad whose maudlin subject matter is expressed with genuine emotion.

Which makes it all the more odd when I hear the track at Albertson's, sandwiched between Cat Stevens and James Taylor, the morning I speak to BFF bassist Robert Sledge.

"Awesome!" he says, laughing. "We're winning! You shopped to our song! You buy records! Grocery stores are hip!"

BFF's music is obviously based deeply in pre-corporate radio pop. "Ben (Folds, the keyboardist and vocalist) likes Neil Sedaka and Earth Wind & Fire," says Sledge. "I like Cream and Stevie Wonder. Darren (Jessee, the drummer) loves the Replacements and Ray Charles."

The band's love of popular music seems boundless. They took on a cover of Burt Bacharach's "Raindrops Keep Fallin' On My Head" -- recorded for a television special -- with the same panache they gave a cover of Built to Spill's "Twin Falls."

"Covers are fun," Sledge admits, "as long as you've got the crowd with you. We were playing a show in Japan, we were supposed to do 'Underground' and Darren gets up and starts singing a Flock of Seagulls song! It's the most f--d up thing I've ever witnessed on stage. He starts singing 'Aaaand I raaaaan, I ran so faaaar a-waaaaay...' We didn't even know how to play it."

I tell him Flock of Seagulls was the first live band I ever saw, at an ice-skating rink in 1982.

"I sneaked in," I say. "They were awful."

"Hmm, cool. I think I saw Flock of Seagulls with The Cars, or Wang Chung, maybe."

"Should we look for 'Everybody Wang Chung Tonight' in your repertoire?" I ask.

"That's a cool song," he says, utterly sincere. "I love the bridge of that one. That might make it."

You gotta love 'em anyway.