A Dream about Lightning Bugs: A Life of Music and Cheap Lessons

by Ben Folds

Once, when we were playing in subzero weather in Minnesota, the hammers were so frozen that the piano sounded like a harpsichord for the first half of the show. Steam bellowed out of the instrument like smoke. When the hammers thawed out, they were soaking wet and the piano became incredibly dull. During that same cold spell, on a day when it was forty degrees below zero, we got the piano down the ramp into the middle of a snowy street, panicked from the unfathomable cold, and just left it there in the road, watching downtown Minneapolis traffic avoid a baby grand piano. Not something you see every day. The piano’s place in rock and roll has always been interesting to me. Its associations with being middle-class living room furniture, church-choir accompaniment, a classical or jazz instrument, make the instrument nearly antithetical to rock and roll itself. The music and culture that the piano symbolized was the very thing that the rockers were rocking against. Anyone who’s ever rocked the piano has had to be somewhat irreverent and even violent toward their instrument in order to be accepted in the world of rock and roll. You must sacrifice your piano to prove your rock-ness.