April 22, 2004
ben folds
It is Thursday. Today, Jake & his friend Doug & I are going to see Ben Folds in Des Moines.
Doug is a Catholic madman with no respect for your personal space, whom you love & simultaneously hate. Love, because he is so damn excited to be alive. Hate, because he showers you in spit & sweat & makes a total ass of himself in public, ie whenever there are other people around to get attention from. This is a crappy, overgeneralized character sketch but that's not my forte, I'll leave that to Dickens, who I'm sure would stretch his usual 3 page character introduction to like 50 pages in the case of Doug.
At any rate. Here Jake is upon arrival at Doug's place. After some rushing around, we finally get the hell out of Dodge, screaming Queen & Primus at the top of our lungs, pumping air guitars and pelvises up and down in the car.
I couldn't resist throwing this picture in, just to show you what a herd of madmen I've been hanging around with lately.
Stopping for gas in the standard Adair Iowa, Jake & Doug have a moment. Worse sins were committed with an air hose. But you don't get to see those. Those are in my...uh...private collection.
In Des Moines we got screwed over by Doug's "friend." This nerdwad had known we were coming for a week, but didn't want us to go out to dinner with him & his girlfriend. He offered us no help in selling off the extra tickets he bought for us, so we all ate 20 bucks there. Then he didn't even want us to sleep on his floor. No hospitality extended. Whatsoever.
Ben was awesome. For like 15 minutes, after playing a couple songs, he just screwed around telling stories and turning them into songs, e.g. the story of how he peed his pants in a Woolworth's once as a kid. And I thought man if the guy just wanted to do stand up for the rest of the show that'd be fine.
At one point he says "I've got some cool stuff on my computer I want you guys to hear, but it's at my hotel." Then he calls some guy over, throws him the keys to his room and tells him the room number. Five songs later the guy reappears with an iBook and Ben, indeed, sits there and plays some songs he's mixed together for us off his laptop. Only concert I've ever been to where a dude just screws around on his computer for a while.
We made it past security and down onto the floor for the second half of the concert. Doug started dancing wildly in the aisles--Jake & I thought here we go we're gonna get kicked out--but instead this girl out of nowhere starts dancing up to Doug. They pretzel. Jake & I hop up and down for joy when Ben plays all those great freshman year songs.
Ben Folds is awesome in concert primarily because he's so interactive. Between every song people shout stuff and he answers back, he tells stories, and he goes off on little improv tangents when he feels like it. Nothing is out of the box.
Afterwards we met him. He signed Jake's gopher shirt, Doug gave him a speech about why he should come to Lincoln, he drew a monkey face on another guy's jacket. I said, "You know we're just going to sell all this sh*t on ebay Ben." And he goes "Good luck." He's the same funny, self-deprecating dude on and off stage--in person Ben Folds is exactly like you think he'd be.
Anyway with no place to stay we just started back for Lincoln. Here's where the story gets good.
In Council Bluffs, Jake's transmission went out. We rolled the car up a hill into the nearest gas station. It's 3 am. Lucky for us, Jake's friend Harv was awake and came to pick us up. We crashed at Harv's place, then Jake & I got up after very little sleep to ride a bus out to Council Bluffs, where we sold his car for 100 dollars to a mechanic.
We were lugging around a glad trash bag full of his trunk contents and getting hit on by a white trash woman bus rider, who wouldn't stop looking at Jake's crotch, wondering is this rock bottom? because at that point, it sure felt like it.
Posted by Alan at April 22, 2004 11:50 PM