For people who read this blog regularly, the criteria for an A+ show should be pretty clear. For newcomers, here’s the criteria: it breaks the rules. It upends convention in a way that leaves you dazed afterwards. It makes for a long, silent trip back to the car as you consider how completely you’ve been proven wrong. All that happened again at the 9:30 Club last Friday.
FIRST LAW: The first law broken at the concert was the Law of Diminishing Returns. That is, after you see a band in concert, every subsequent show will be less special. The newness will be lost; bitter feelings toward casual fans will develop; your overall enthusiasm will fade.
There was a strong possibility all that could happen at my third Ben Folds concert considering the first one at DAR Constitution Hall had earned a “B” and the second one at the Kennedy Center had earned a “C-.” The problem at DAR had been Folds’ arrogance: 18 of the 21 songs he played had never been released. (He essentially told audience how privileged they were to hear such material; the audience did not feel privileged.) The problem at the Kennedy Center had been Folds’ presence: he came in, played for less than 90 minutes, and slipped out without an encore.
Fortunately, the Diminishing Returns rules was not followed. He maintained a perfect balance of old and new material (“Annie Waits” before “Effington,” “Emaline” before “Hope is a Bastard”) and played for more than two hours, stretching past midnight for the encore.
SECOND LAW: The second major law broken at the concert was the Law of Friday Failure. As I described in my Coldplay review, I do not do Friday nights. Every time I try to eat, drink, see a show, or watch a movie after ten on Friday, I doze off. Considering the show didn’t start till ten, there was no way I’d last long. Three songs in, though, “Annie Waits” jolted me out of my only real nap. Folds followed that with the supersonic “Zac and Sara,” so I was good to go the rest of the night. :)
THIRD LAW: The third major law broken at the concert was the Law of Guitar Supremacy. At virtually every concert I’d ever been to, guitars were what musicians used to rock. Other instruments had their place but were used to express less aggressive emotions: the soothing recorder in Dispatch’s “Walk with You,” the funky spinner in Cake’s “Frank Sinatra,” the hypnotic organ in Death Cab’s “Transatlanticism.”
At this concert, though, Folds came out and ROCKED on the piano. On songs like “Army,” “Annie Waits,” “Effington,” and “Hiroshima,” he literally pounded on the keys, generating a sound as loud and powerful as a White Stripes bass riff. He pulled back a bit on midtempo songs like “The Ascent of Stan” and “Jesusland” – which made sense. They would naturally be slower, but he still got out of his seat multiple times and played with the same sense of urgency.
LAST LAW: The final major law broken at the concert was the Law of Indie Detachment. All too often at small clubs, indie bands act like any interaction with your audience is selling out. They seem to think that the second they start to talk with fans, they’ll become so much less cool. What are they, in seventh grade? Clever conversation with a few people in the crowd is not the same as insisting the entire crowd is “the best crowd ever.” Sharing an amusing/insightful anecdote is not the same as launching free t-shirts into the mezzanine! TV on the Radio, The Shins, Spoon, The New Rockers, Jack Johnson, and Arctic Monkeys had trouble grasping these differences.
Fortunately, Ben Folds had no trouble, establishing a singer-crowd connection I haven’t seen since…Bruce Springsteen! Obviously he couldn’t match Bruce (who could?), but he definitely connected. He shared his past history at the 9:30 Club (“I could probably recognize the sound of each type of bottle breaking behind the bar”), he took several direct song requests, he gently mocked people who shouted too often / too loud, and he shared meaningful backstories on several key songs.
Unquestionably the best backstory was “Hiroshima”’s. Before the song, he told this incredible story of a performance in Japan in which he fell off the stage face first! He told how he got up, head cracked, blood on the keyboard, and performed the rest of the set! He didn’t know if he was fueled by pure adrenaline or embarrassment, but he did finish the set.
The best crowd moment and the best moment of the night overall was the last one. Initially, I was somewhat disappointed because he hadn’t performed “Fred Jones Part 2,” “The Luckiest,” or “Rockin’ the Suburbs” (even though that would build anticipation for the next show). I was more disappointed that it would end on an unprintable Dr. Dre cover, which would expose Folds’ biggest weakness, an overreliance on profanity. As it turned out, though, the song was AMAZING because halfway through it, he invited this pasty, gangly white guy up on stage for an earnest hip hop duet! (No, it was not me – some other pasty, gangly white guy…) The song was successful mostly because it was awkwardly funny, but there were various points in the song where you thought, “This guy is actually a decent singer. He seems to have come in with genuine charisma.” If he had not come in with it, he at least know whose lead to follow…
Grade: A+
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