Ben Folds live at the Warfield Theater, San Francisco, CA - 7/22/11 Jul 24 '11    Write an essay on this topic. Tweet Popular Products in Music The Dirtchamber Sessions, Vol. 1 by The Prodigy From $11 Jersey Boys [Original Broadway Cast Recording] by Original Broadway Cast From $8 The Bottom Line Even with his piano sidelined for part of the show, Ben Folds manages to keep the audience eating right out of his hands. When you go to see any moderate to majorly successful artist in concert, even one who improvises plenty during the show adds items to the setlist on a whim, there's never any doubt that they're in complete control of what's happening up on the stage. With even the most open and gregarious of performers, everything the audience sees is part of a carefully cultivated public persona that they're putting up. It's only when something goes conspicuously wrong that we get to catch a glimpse of who those performers really are. Handled poorly, a show-stopping blunder can be a disaster, but when a genuine showman stumbles onto such a gaffe opens up the opportunity to turn an already great evening's performance into a perfect concert-going experience. Such was the case of Ben Folds final performance of his summer 2011 tour at San Francisco's Warfield Theater. It was about an hour into the show, and things were pretty much on auto-pilot. Even with all the momentary asides for personal anecdotes and background stories, it had been a high energy, hard-rockin' piano stompin' set that had the audience singing along to hits from Lonely Avenue, his recent collaboration with novelist Nick Hornby, as well as all of his solo albums stretching back to 2001's Rockin' the Suburbs, but it was a pretty safe feeling auto-pilot nonetheless. After pulling things back a bit for the slow-burning intensity of Still Fighting It, Folds dismissed the four members of his backing band from the stage and took a moment to talk about the birth of his twins twelve years ago and the songs they had inspired - Still Fighting It for his son and Gracie for his daughter – and he sat back down at the piano to start up the sweet, music-box strains that mark the intro to Gracie. A few notes in, though, he stopped abruptly, call off stage for a moment, and explained that the sustain pedal on his piano had suddenly stopped working and that he wasn't about to play the song if it wouldn't sound right. At that point, he could easily have just put the show on pause for a short time while his technicians work their magic on the pedal, but instead he chose to turn off the auto-pilot setting that the last few performances of a tour develops and soldier on without a net. While the technicians assessed the state of the piano, Folds showed off his affinity for a capella music with a brief continuation of the discussion of his kids that led into a vocals-only performance of the song that he always sang to them to get them to sleep, Randy Newman's Old Man, which it turns out sounds even more depressing when it's being sung to kids. Two minutes later the piano techs were still no closer to a fix. The path of least resistance would have been to just keep telling stories and tossing off a capella filler material, but instead he called his two percussionists over to the two drum sets on the stage, and the three of them tore into an impromptu drum circle (because after all, we were in San Francisco). As the three of them jammed their way through a few different styles of music and some improvised lyrics about the nature of percussion music (there's melody and pitch, but there's no harmony), it became clear that the piano issue was no small matter - the technicians actually had to dismantle and pull out the keyboard to dig around in the instrument's guts. As it was clear that the fix was going to take a while, Folds wandered off for a moment to grab a yellow caution sign from backstage to place on the piano and then to pick up his bass player's bass to add some high energy funk riffs to the percussion jam his bandmates were still bashing their way through. Almost fifteen minutes after Folds ran into his pedal problems, Folds announced that the bands bag of tricks was pretty much used up, just as the technicians finished their work and reassembled the scattered pieces of piano, letting Folds finally take a stab at his solo performance of Gracie and get on with the planned show. Yes, the whole thing was just a big, silly diversion to buy some time for the technicians, but it was truly one of the biggest highlights of the evening. It kept the audience pumped up, provided plenty of goofy levity, and best of all, showed Folds and his band having a hell of a lot of unplanned fun, all making for one of the greatest unplanned concert moments I've ever seen. Granted, there were plenty of other factors that helped to make this an awesome evening of entertainment at the Warfield: - a nice opening set from Kenton Chen, Folds' unofficial protegee from his most recent stint on NBC's The Sing Off featuring some fine a capella work full of loops and samples - all the usual audience sing-along parts, including the background harmonies for Not the Same, the horn section on Army, and Regina Spektor's parts from You Don't Know Me (Folds explained that it just would have been too expensive to bring her along on the tour for one song) - a performance of Effington with some of the most spectacular tambourine playing I've ever seen - a cover of Ke$ha's Sleazy, dripping with irony and snark - a brief invite into a family moment for Folds when he brought out his twins for an audience sing along as it was his son's birthday and the eve of his daughter's - an improvised jam session they called Mean Street's of Marin that thrust Folds' bass player into the spotlight for some slap bass funk - an encore that featured the ever-building intensity of Philosphy that segued at the end into Theme from Dr. Pyser, a vastly underrated instrumental track from his Ben Folds Five days that I figured I never would have gotten the chance to see him play live. Those alone would have been enough to make the evening a great concert experience. Anyone who's seen Folds in concert before can attest to the high energy, loose spontaneity, and top-notch musicianship his shows are known for. But I'll always remember this concert as one where Folds' piano, the instrument that's an integral part of his performance, broke, even if only temporarily, and he managed to turn it to his advantage and make rock the venue even harder.

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