Ben Folds One

The incessant ticking of my blinker was starting to grind.

I was waiting to park my car (and had been for 1.5 radio songs), in the hope of catching the beginnings of one of Ben Folds’ last gigs at the Opera house.

However before that, I was faced with a 30-something dunce of boggling ineptitude in a Lexus 4WD, and the dawning realisation that she had no idea how to operate a motor vehicle.

It was awful… watching this woman dumb her way around that torrid tank of a truck, like watching Arnie Grape operate a Mac Truck.

Finally her husband arrived and thankfully brought his ability to turn a key with him. After a heated exchange of foreign blurting, he banished his incompetent wife to the passenger seat and got the fuck out of my new parking spot.

God it was a good parking spot… It was as though Jesus himself had laid the asphalt, marking the white lines around it with the ground bones of unicorns… looking at the Opera house through my windscreen – I almost wept.

Having secured this fantastic square of tarmac so close and so cheap, I waltzed into Utzon’s Opera House.

…

On stage was a simple layout consisting of a grand piano, some suspended light bulbs and an empty fish bowl on a small table.

There had been talk of a ‘request box’ for this gig, a simple premise as explained by the sign: “Write down the song you would like Ben to play on a slip of paper, and he will draw the songs out of a hat”
As show time approached and the room was filled with excited chatter, a lady walked out on stage with a black bag, and as the crowd hushed, she up-ended the bag and out fell at least a thousand pieces of paper. So many that they covered the fishbowl, the table the floor surrounding the table.

Ben walked out on stage wearing a simple sport coat, shirt and jeans. He kicked the pile back a bit, picked up a piece of paper, said: “This one is called ‘the Luckiest’ and the show was underway.

The crowd was almost completely silent during the songs, occasionally he’d forget the lyrics, stop mid-chord & mutter: “Fuck, I cant remember what comes next…”

The crowd would chuckle and someone in the audience would quietly prompt the balding soloist. The show gained a strange rhythm with his slap-dash set list, but all the old favourites and solo stuff turned up eventually.

Then, as the luck of the draw would have it, he played an acoustic version of the Postal Service’s “Such great heights” which was fucking incredible to say the least. He followed this with a cover of Elton John’s “Tiny Dancer” and a lovely, melodic rendition of Dr. Dre’s feminist anthem: “Bitches Aint Shit.”

Ben absolutely captivated the whole crowd, but in such a personal on-the-level way that I’ve never experienced anything like it. I think there was no reference to the audience as a whole, there was no “Thanks everyone”, it was just “Thanks” not the usual “You’ve been great Sydney,” just “thanks for coming.”

Did I mention the parking spot?

Jack