Keys to the Kingdom : Ben Folds Figures the Rock Road Is Wide Open for His Witty, Piano-Driven Power Pop

By Ben Folds’ reckoning, there was no need to shoot the piano player. The instrument’s bulky inconvenience--at least in its traditional, acoustic form--was enough to turn the rock keyboard hero into a dying breed.

“It’s just not logistically feasible. They go out of tune; you can’t move ‘em. They’re impossible. It’s a very rockin’ instrument, but you can’t sit on a street corner and sing with a piano. That’s as close as I can come to a theory.”

Folds is entitled to have a theory. At the moment, this wry, piano-pounding singer-songwriter and bandleader from Chapel Hill, N.C., is the brightest--perhaps the only--hope for renewing the glorious but largely discontinued tradition of rock stars who sit at their instruments instead of strapping them on.

For the past three years, the Ben Folds Five--a nicely alliterative, if misleading, name for a rock trio composed of Folds’ rollicking baby grand, Darren Jessee’s drums and Robert Sledge’s booming, fuzz-distorted bass--has defied logistic infeasibility while trying to make headway in a modern-rock scene dominated by guitars and sampling machines.

“We’re really stubborn,” Folds explained.

Defying the logistics doesn’t mean overcoming them. As Folds spoke on the phone Wednesday from a truck-stop diner somewhere on the road between Seattle and Portland, he contemplated the latest headaches associated with tying up his career in piano wire.

Various hammers and strings were missing after the beating Folds had given his instrument the night before, the first gig in a brief tour opening for Counting Crows that brings the Ben Folds Five to Irvine Meadows tonight.

That’s typical damage, Folds said. What he didn’t expect was to find that the piano tuner who tends to his baby grand back in North Carolina had for some reason shortened its legs before sending it on the road.

“It’s like a midget piano now. I can’t fit my knees under it,” Folds said lightly. “I don’t know why [the piano tuner did that], but I’m going to find out today.”

Folds could save himself a lot of trouble by switching to a smaller, more portable, less accident-prone electric or digital piano model. But he isn’t ready to sacrifice a part of his musical soul on the altar of convenience--as such piano greats as Jerry Lee Lewis and Little Richard have in recent live performances.

“That’s all wienied out. That sounds like crap,” Folds said. “It’s not the same instrument. I’m trying to get the most I can out of a piano, and it’s not possible at all for us to make a musical impression with that other instrument”--”other instrument” being his dismissive term for keyboards that aren’t acoustic.

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Ben Folds Five plays pianistic power-pop that frequently recalls the more vigorous flights of such precursors as Joe Jackson and Todd Rundgren. A 1995 debut album on the independent Passenger/Caroline label won the band critical acclaim and a cult following.

It has moved up to a major label, 550 Music, with the just-released “Whatever and Ever Amen” album. It’s a strong, catchy, unpretentiously literate piece of work, alternating between raucous glee, satiric bite and plaintive balladry. Folds sings in a piercing tenor that follows Jackson and Rundgren in its ability to sound jaundiced and mocking, or to caress with sad gentleness and warmth.

Folds, 30, figures that he and his band have cleared the first hurdle, disbelief in the music business that a piano-driven band could make a dent with a modern-rock mass audience accustomed to having its ears pinned back with punky, grungy guitar distortion.

Now, he says, “it’s terribly exciting, because it’s wide open” for the band to make an impact with piano rock. “Whether we do anything [commercially] with it is another thing, but there’s a lot of possibilities.” Thus far in the ‘90s, Tori Amos, more of an art-folk figure than a full-on rocker, has been the only fresh addition to the pianistic division of the pop-star guild.

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An era without fresh piano stars is an anomaly for rock. In the ‘50s, Little Richard, Lewis, Fats Domino, Ray Charles and Chuck Berry’s right hand man, Johnnie Johnson, gave the piano as prominent a role as the electric guitar in getting rock ‘n’ roll off the ground.

The good times kept rolling for the ivories in the ‘60s and ‘70s as the likes of Nicky Hopkins (on sessions with the Who, the Kinks and the Rolling Stones), Steve Winwood, Lennon-McCartney, Aretha Franklin, Stevie Wonder, Leon Russell, Carole King, Elton John and Billy Joel generated hits driven by acoustic piano.

The ‘80s was not such a grand decade for the rock ‘n’ roll piano (only Jackson and Bruce Hornsby come to mind as arrivals in that decade), and the ‘90s have been even leaner.

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Folds played drums and bass in previous bands and spent his musical life until 1994 hopping from short-lived music studies at the University of Miami, to a songwriting contract that took him to Nashville (although not into its country-music orbit), then on to New York City, where he mainly played in the pit band for musicals.

He had been writing songs all along and returned to North Carolina, which has had a fertile alt-rock scene since the early ‘80s, to form Ben Folds Five. Schlepping that unwieldy piano to gigs in the grass-roots rock dives paid off when some Caroline Records staffers caught the trio in New York.

Besides using an old-school instrument, Folds has taken an old-school songwriting approach by ditching modern-rock’s phobia for anything more lyrically complex than simple declarations. His songs work as stories or character sketches, appealing to the imagination as they introduce a listener to actual people doing actual things in actual places. The band hits hard, but its lyrical approach is more often subtle than blatant.

Folds enjoys writing about life’s little oddities as well as its major devastation. His albums have their share of songs about rising from painfully shattered relationships, but they also have humorous vignettes about such character types as the egotistical windbag who won’t shut up (“Uncle Walter”) and the unwanted guest who won’t leave (“Steven’s Last Night in Town”).

“I like that, because it makes it all the more like life breaking into song,” Folds said. “You can do that about any small subject.”

He also tackles the rather obsessively common subject of the post-pubescent blahs--blahs that Folds maintains are common to each generation seeking to find its footing, not just to the current cohort of purported slackers. His current single, “Battle of Who Could Care Less,” mocks the notion that alienation and anomie can work as a plan of living.

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“It’s so in style not to care,” he said. “It should stay in the arena of style, and not permeate your life. If that’s all your hearing all the time, it’ll have an impact on your life.”

Folds doesn’t have any qualms about going over ground broken by the likes of Rundgren, Joe Jackson or the Beach Boys. Some of the similarities are more a matter of coincidence than design, he said, and it doesn’t frustrate him to hear that certain moments on his new album might bear a resemblance to the Beach Boys’ ballad “Surf’s Up” or to the Rundgren song “Cold Morning Light”--neither of which rang a bell with him.

“You can come to the same conclusion” as another artist without intending it, Folds said. “If it’s effective, and it comes from the right place, there you have it.”

* Ben Folds Five opens for Counting Crows tonight at Irvine Meadows Amphitheatre, 8800 Irvine Center Drive. 8 p.m. $21.55-$32.05. (714) 855-6111 (venue’s taped message) or (714) 740-2000 (Ticketmaster).