Big Ben

A profile of Ben Kweller

From The New Yorker
April 7, 1997

At eight-forty-five on a Monday night in May, 1996, Chris Luongo arrived at CBGB, the legendary Manhattan rock-and-roll club, and saw that the long, narrow bar was packed with guys from the record business. Dressed in suits, some sporting ponytails, they had come down to the Bowery to hear a new singer-songwriter named Ben Kweller and his Texas-based band, Radish, perform the first of three Manhattan “showcases”–promotional events that a band’s backers arrange in the hope of getting a record contract. Luongo, a thirty-year-old talent scout with Pure Records, got through the crowd and went to the front of the stage, where Ben was setting up. Luongo had been following the band for months, and had already listened to a three-song Radish demo tape, but, he said, “I couldn’t believe that this fourteen-year-old boy was the same person who had made the music I’d heard.” Ben, who looked around twelve, with smooth white skin, blond hair, and braces, was purposefully setting up his equipment, in a way that reminded Luongo of “the introspective child you might see off by himself in a playground.”

But as soon as Ben began to play, Luongo said, “it was clear that he belonged onstage.” Not only could he sing like a grown-up rock star, with a big hoarse voice, but he seemed to know how to move like a grown-up rock star, to execute that simple opera of rock gestures which rivets your eyes to the performer. He mostly played in the slacker-slouching-around-making-a-lot-of-noise, Kurt Cobain style, once in a while throwing in swooping axe chops with the guitar neck, or guitar-as-extension-of-penis thrusts reminiscent of Slash. The music–it sounded as if the Beatles had gone to India and instead of the maharishi had encountered Pearl Jam–brought the guys in suits forward from the bar until they were pressing against the front of the stage. The band swung into “Bedtime,” which started out with Ben sounding like a little boy, singing, “I think it’s past our bedtime, Let’s go to sleep,” in an ethereal Peter Pan voice. Then at the chorus, the rock-and-roll animal came out and roared, “I don’t understand the question!” Whoa! What was the question?

After the show was over, Luongo found Ben backstage, introduced himself, and said, “God, I’d give anything to do what you just did.” Ben seemed to have reverted to his little-kid self again. He was like a boy who had been temporarily possessed by a rock star. In his sincere, adorable way, he said, “Well hey, Chris, maybe you can live vicariously through me, man!”

The next day, Luongo’s boss, Arma Andon, called Dana Millman, who is in A. & R. (artists and repertoire) at Mercury Records, and told her she should catch Radish’s second showcase, which was taking place that night at Coney Island High, a club on St. Marks Place. “I had heard about the age thing,” she told me. “But once Ben started playing he was ageless.” As Millman left the club, she took her cell phone out of her purse and called Mercury’s president, Danny Goldberg–a well-known figure in the rock-and-roll business, who has worked, over the last two decades, with epoch-making bands like Led Zeppelin, Sonic Youth, and Nirvana–at his town house in the Village. “Which I never do,” Millman said later, “because Danny’s a family man. I said, ‘Danny, you have to see this kid play tomorrow night.’ “

Goldberg said, “Dana, I’m putting my kids to sleep!”

 “I said, ‘Danny, just promise me you’ll see this band tomorrow.’ “

So the next night Goldberg, a lanky forty-six-year-old, with modishly wavy hair and Buddy Holly glasses, went to Don Hill’s, which is on Greenwich Street at Spring, where the Canal Bar used to be, for Radish’s final showcase. By now, the buzz about the band had spread to other labels, and the crowd that night contained a substantial proportion of the middle-aged men who control the rock-and-roll industry: Seymour Stein, of Elektra; Chris Blackwell, of Island Records; the producer Don Was. Ben put on his rockingest show yet, performing a move that most rock stars are too old to do these days: a flying, mid-riff leap off the stage, which he capped by playing an electric serenade for a tableful of top music-industry lawyers.

 “You can find songs that rock but don’t have good melodies,” Goldberg told me later. “And you can find songs with good melodies that don’t rock, but it’s rare that you find both. Ben was up there with braces and this angelic face, but the songs were finished adult compositions.” He added, “There was a youthfulness, a joyousness, about Ben that was very exciting.” At the same time, the music didn’t challenge any assumptions about what rock and roll should be. It was safely “alternative,” which is to say mainstream, and would fit easily into preëxisting college-grunge and alternative-radio formats. This was good, because, for all the rebellion that rock music suggests, the rock industry is a remarkably conservative business.

After the show at Don Hill’s, Roger Greenawalt, the producer who had orchestrated the showcases, led Ben and the boys–John Kent, the sixteen-year-old drummer, and Bryan Blur, twenty-eight, who plays bass–down into the club’s cruddy basement, in an attempt to shelter them a little from the almost tangible waft of greed on the floor. But Mercury sent a scout down there anyway, and they were invited to come to Goldberg’s office the following morning. There, on a high floor in Eighth Avenue’s Worldwide Plaza, with astounding views of Manhattan, Goldberg went into his selling mode.

Within a week, fourteen different labels were participating in a major bidding war for Radish. People in the industry were saying “Don’t you just love Ben?” to others who had met him. And Ben was lovable, in his sweetness and his boyish purity, in the way he said, “I love you, man,” with such openness, in the way he was quick to hug you, and the way he seemed to drink you in. It’s a little weird to have a fourteen-year-old tell you, “Hey, you’re cool, man,” and to feel a thrill, but such is the power that Ben has over aging hipsters. He is like the boy whom the hipster tries to keep alive inside himself, the idealized boy who somehow has to remain alive if you hope to remain in touch with your soul, and also with your market.

For Ben, a shy, unathletic kid who had never been particularly popular in school, all this attention was “pretty surreal,” he told me. “I’d just smile and nod and say, ‘Thank you very much.’ ” The great beast Celebrity, swinging its Cyclops eye across the cultural savanna, had suddenly trained all its attention on him. Ben’s parents, the Kwellers–his father, Howie, is a G.P. at Presbyterian Hospital in Greenville, Texas, and his mother, Dee, has a degree in counseling–were startled to find themselves with a rock star under their roof. The offers that were coming in for their son represented more money than either Howie or Dee would see in one place in their lifetime: two and a half million dollars for a kid no one had heard of, with a band that had played mostly at school dances and coffee shops. (Under the terms of the deal they eventually worked out, Ben, who won’t have full access to his money until he turns eighteen, is said to have got seven hundred and fifty thousand dollars as a signing bonus for the band, and a “three firm” record deal; that is, three records, whether or not the label releases them, plus a very healthy royalty rate, of the kind that top bands like U2 get, and–unheard of for an unproven talent–creative control. In addition, Ben signed a music-publishing contract worth $1.2 million.) Dee told me, “We said to him, ‘Now, Ben, you’re sure you don’t want to finish high school and college before you start this?’ But Ben didn’t want to wait. He feels like he’s been waiting all his life. How can you tell a fourteen-year-old to wait six years? He said it’s his destiny, and I truly believe that. The time is now. The songwriting is there, and it can’t wait anymore.” Yes, there were lots of girls and drugs and alcohol around the rock scene, “but we have tried to give Ben good values about that. Like with Kurt Cobain, who is one of Ben’s heroes. We said, ‘Now, Ben, it’s O.K. to respect Kurt’s music, but you can’t respect what Kurt did with his life.’ And Ben said, ‘I know that.’ “

Ben’s youth, of course, was part of what made him such a desirable commodity. One of the lessons that the men who run the rock industry have learned from the unexpected success of Alanis Morissette, the only rock idol that the business has managed to produce in the last two years (her album “Jagged Little Pill” has now sold more than fifteen million copies), is that the kids who buy records don’t want to hear thirty-year-old rockers singing about their problems; they want stars closer to their own age. Who better to speak to teen-age longings than a rock star who was just about to turn fifteen? Ross Elliot, a scout for Viacom’s Famous Music, which bought the publishing rights to Ben’s music, told me, “All of us in the music business fucked up. We kept throwing alternative bands at these kids, and they couldn’t relate to it and started buying rap instead. But Ben is the audience. What’s coming out of Ben is raw shit. ‘Apparition of Purity’!” Elliot exclaimed, referring to one of Ben’s songs. “That’s not coming from a jaded place.” He made a gesture toward his own chest. “That’s coming from a pure place. Ben is honest. He’s so young he can afford to be honest. All this stuff people write songs about, like why does love have to be so sad–that stuff is happening to Ben right now.”

In June, Roger Greenawalt, Howie, and the band went to L.A. to meet with label people. Madonna invited them to her house for lunch and very nearly persuaded Howie and Ben to sign with her label, Maverick. While they were hanging out, Anthony Kiedis, of the Red Hot Chili Peppers, drove up on his motorcyle. (“He just happened to drop by,” Ben told me.) The following day, a white limousine pulled up in front of the Kwellers’ hotel and took them up the Pacific Coast Highway to Malibu, where they visited Jimmy Iovine, the head of Interscope Records, in his princely villa, which occupies a few acres along the Pacific, right next to Danny Goldberg’s villa. Iovine was having a middleweight-championship fight beamed in by means of some fancy satellite hookup, and he had invited a few friends over to watch it–Axl Rose, Tom Petty, Joe Strummer, and Dr. Dre. For Howie, who is forty-five, it was as if he had died and gone to the Hard Rock Café in Heaven. He grew up in the era when rock stars and their fans were connected only by a few hard-to-find fanzines–when the secret of how Jimmy Page fretted his guitar to make that sound in “Whole Lotta Love” was a kind of occult knowledge, possessed only by the true faithful. But Ben, as a child of modern media, knew exactly how to be cool around rock stars like these.

While everybody was chilling, someone brought out a guitar and passed it to Petty, who made up a song about “Jimmy Iovine and his football fields of green”–an allusion to a regular touch-football game that various rock stars and label guys used to play together in L.A., until their wives made them stop because they were getting too old and were coming home injured. “Then he passes the guitar to Joe Strummer,” Greenawalt told me, “and everybody goes, ‘Joe! Play “London Calling,” Joe!’ And Joe says, ‘Fuck you! I’m not playing “London Calling!” ‘ And then he plays it. And then Joe says, ‘Here, kid, catch!’ and flings the guitar into the air in the direction of Ben, who is sitting like twenty-five feet across the room. The guitar floats in the air over Iovine’s million-dollar glass coffee table and priceless tchotchkes, but Ben stands up and calmly catches it, sits down, and plays a couple of his songs. And when he was done those guys really gave it up for him.”

In the end, Danny Goldberg’s relationship with Kurt Cobain (Goldberg was Nirvana’s manager and Cobain’s friend) was what helped carry the day for Mercury. Goldberg even had Courtney Love give Ben a call. “I pick up the phone and there’s this chick on the other end, who doesn’t say who she is, she just starts talking really fast,” Ben told me. “Like really fast, saying that she heard my songs and really liked them and on and on, until finally I figure out that it’s Courtney Love I’m listening to. Dude, like I don’t even know how she breathes she talks so much. I guess it’s like being a bagpipe player–you got to learn to breathe through your nose.”

Goldberg wanted Radish to build up a local following around Dallas prior to the release of the band’s first album, “Restraining Bolt,” which will appear in record stores on Tuesday, April 22nd. He felt that Radish should be from Texas–from somewhere real, and not just from the music industry, like a nineties version of the Monkees. Ben’s youth, after all, could be a liability if the industry’s interest in it was perceived as a desperate reflex, as another in a recent series of signs that the rock-and-roll business was in trouble: underwhelming sales by established bands like R.E.M. and Hootie and the Blowfish; boring pop music by newer acts like Celine Dion and No Doubt; and no format changes on the horizon to boost sales the way CD technology did. Already, the Dallas Morning News had done a story in which a reporter went to hear Radish in a local club and noticed all the middle-aged men with ponytails and Armani glasses sitting around at the back of the bar.

On a Saturday night in late January, Radish was to play two gigs in the Deep Ellum section of Dallas. Ben told me he was planning to take a nap between gigs, but that didn’t seem likely. He was sitting on his bed in his bedroom. John, the drummer, was lying on the floor with his hands behind his head; Bryan, the bass player, whom the boys call Brain because he went to college and knows so much, was leaning against the wall. Ben’s bedroom was maybe a bit neater than usual; his mother had made him clean it up for my arrival. Ben, who is a “Star Wars” fan (“Restraining Bolt” is an allusion to the scene in which Luke fits R2D2 with a restraining bolt, so that the little droid won’t run away), had all three “Star Wars” posters on his walls, along with a big poster of Kurt and an even bigger poster of the lead singer from Weezer.

I was sitting at Ben’s desk, where he supposedly does his schoolwork. Ben has attention-deficit disorder, which makes him a slow reader. He can barely spell and can’t write, except in the most childish, cartoonlike scrawl, and he also has difficulty conceptualizing in numbers. He has been “home-schooled” by his mother since sixth grade. He had his mouth open a little bit, and his head tilted back, so that he could see out from under his bleached-blond hair, which still showed the effects of some green dye he had put into it when the band was parentless in New York, mixing “Restraining Bolt” at the Sony studios, on West Fifty-fourth Street. (John dyed his hair orange, and Bryan dyed his blue.) Dee had told me earlier that it cost her almost a hundred dollars to get the green dye out when Ben got back to Greenville.

The phone rang, and Ben checked his Caller I.D. device. “Oh, it’s my sister,” he said, referring to his older sister, Heidi, who lives in an apartment in Dallas. He picked up the phone. “Cool. She says we’re on Q102 right now.” He turned on the radio. The early chords of “Dear Aunt Arctica,” his song about church burning and pornography, were heard. Ben crooned “Duuude” softly. (He speaks a little like Tonto: not much variation in the vocabulary but a terrific range of inflections in key words, and no word does more work than “dude.” There’s the expansive, come-with-me-my-comrade-to-the-ramparts “DOODE!”; the bluesy, empathetic “Duuude”; and the bleak, fatalistic “dud.”)

The song rocked. But the ferocity of the sound coming out of the radio contrasted strangely with the frail-seeming boy standing next to it.

 “It’s weird not to have to press ‘play,’ ” Ben said.

John, who doesn’t say much, smiled his dreamy smile.

When the song was over, Ben went downstairs and joined Howie in his study. Howie was surfing the Web, grabbing maps for the band’s upcoming trip to Fayetteville, Arkansas. “What a great Web site! This stuff is dynamite!” he exclaimed. Ben sat in front of the TV and played the new sixty-four-bit Nintendo “Star Wars” game, Shadows of the Empire, which he was very skilled at. After executing a series of death-defying runs along a deep canyon and wasting some imperial guards, he finally got to the jet pack that would take him to Boba Fett, but he missed the takeoff ledge and fell to his death. Howie, without looking away from his screen, said, “When we go on tour, Ben, we’re going to need Nintendo in the bus.”

Howie played drums in a rock band when he was Ben’s age, but his own dreams of  being a rock star were put aside when he went to the University of Maryland and then to medical school at Mount Sinai. He has an unusual professional relationship with his son: he is Radish’s manager, and will be Ben’s legal guardian until Ben is eighteen and can slip his own restraining bolt. Howie managed the band alone for a year, but in the process of gearing up for a national tour, which will follow the release of the album, he was looking to hire some professionals. That night, Warren Entner, who manages Nada Surf and Failure, was coming from L.A. to be vetted by the Kwellers.

A sense of enchantment hovers over the Kweller household–a feeling that, while everyone should try to carry on with life as usual, everyone secretly knows that reality is going to change completely any day now. Howie is planning to scale back his medical practice, and Dee will be going on the road with the band as John and Ben’s tutor. This sense of  life turned topsy-turvy is especially strong in the Kwellers’ living room, which doubles as Radish’s rehearsal space. It is conservatively decorated–standard furniture, a baby grand, Judaica paintings on the walls–except that the boys’ instruments are sitting in the middle of it. Sawdust from John’s wild thrashing of the drums has collected in a small pile on the Persian rug.

A tapping sound drew me into the kitchen–it was Ben’s ten-year-old sister, Abby, madly practicing her steps for tap class. Dee, also in the kitchen, said that Ben’s success had been a little hard on Abby, who, as the baby of the family, was used to getting all the attention. We went into the living room and talked about Ben’s brand-new song, “Panamanian Girl,” which he had just finished the day before. Dee said that it was about Ben’s girlfriend, Emileigh, whose grandmother is from Panama, and who is the first real girlfriend that Ben has had. When, after a few weeks, Emileigh dumped Ben for her old boyfriend, a football player who was seventeen and could drive, “Ben was really upset,” Dee said. She made a sad clown face and drew tear tracks on her cheeks with her fingers. But before long the Panamanian Girl dumped the jock and got back together with Ben. Now, Dee said, Ben was bummed because John was going out with Emileigh’s nineteen-year-old sister. Dee was looking forward to listening to Ben’s new song tonight, and maybe gleaning some more information about the relationship.

Ben, who seemed to be keeping an eye on his mother to make sure she didn’t say anything too embarrassing about him, came into the living room and sat at the drum set. I asked him how he felt about John dating his girlfriend’s sister.

Ben groaned, “Duuude, it’s weird, like I go over to her house and he’s there. No wonder I’m so fucked up.”

 “You’re not fucked up, Ben!” his mother said. “And don’t say ‘fuck.’ ”

Whether Ben is truly a rock savant or just a talented kid who has been thrust into the role of rock star more or less by accident is the subject of some debate among people in the industry who have spent time with him recently. Roger Greenawalt, who was himself a guitar prodigy in the early seventies, told me, “When I met Ben, I said to myself, This is terribly interesting, because he’s the strangest prodigy I’ve ever known. Most musical prodigies obsess about playing. It’s all about you and your relationship with your instrument. Ben is obsessed not with playing but with songwriting, singing, and, above all, acting like a rock star.” But Paul Kolderie, who, with his partner, Sean Slade, remixed “Restraining Bolt,” and spent two weeks with the band in Boston, vigorously rejected the notion that Ben is any kind of prodigy. “He’s just a talented, bright kid who has watched a lot of MTV,” Kolderie said. “When we were kids, you know, if you wanted to be a rock star you could watch ‘Don Kirshner’s Rock Concert’ on Friday night, or ‘In Concert,’ and that was it. Today, rock stars are on TV twenty-four hours a day. There are constant cues on how to look and act like a rock star, and the kid is smart and he picked up on them. To some extent, he’s aping them, but he’s a quick learner.”

Ross Elliot, of Famous Music, says he thinks that Ben, who can’t read music very well, is an intuitive musical genius, and to illustrate this he told me the story of having Ben over to his house in Manhattan with six or seven older musicians. “These were serious musicians, right, guys in their twenties and thirties, and we were up on my roof trying to figure out Beatles songs,” Elliot said. “Ben would say, ‘Oh yeah, here it is, you invert that, and that’s a G-sharp diminished fifth’–not taking the easy way out, you know, but getting the chord progressions exactly right, the passing chords and everything. And doing it all by ear! These other musicians were just staring at him, going, Who is this kid?” Elliot added that Ben displayed precocious gifts in another area that’s important for a rock star: attracting good-looking women. One night, Elliot took Ben and a band of adult guys to Freak Night at Don Hill’s, where there was the usual complement of beautiful twenty-five-year-olds. “Those other guys didn’t stand a chance,” Elliot said. “This one girl came up to me and said, ‘So, what’s going on with Ben later?’ By the end of the evening, it was just Ben sitting at the table with these six beautiful chicks, who were all totally into him.”

Ben is certainly a gifted songwriter. He has been writing songs for as long as he can remember. “I’d write songs with ‘I love you’ and with a girl in them,” he told me. “I had no idea what love was. I just knew, from listening to the Beatles and Beach Boys songs my parents were always playing, that songs were supposed to have love and a girl in them.” Among his earliest rock-and-roll memories is the time, in 1985, when Bruce Springsteen came to Dallas on the “Born in the U.S.A.” tour and played in the Cotton Bowl. Ben was four. The Boss’s then guitarist, Nils Lofgren, who was an old friend of Howie’s from Bethesda (Lofgren had once played the accordion in a band that Howie started), got the Kwellers tickets and backstage passes. They met the Boss, who was so charmed by Ben that he let him stay on the stage during the concert. Ben bounced around to the music for a while, then climbed up onto one of the huge speakers that the vocals were blasting out of and fell asleep. “The vibration was sort of soothing,” he told me. “It was like being in the car.”

After the concert, Ben started to imitate Bruce and Nils. Dee said, “He would jump around the house the way Nils did when he was playing rock and roll, saying, ‘I’m Nils! Hey, I’m Nils!’ ” Like many children with attention-deficit disorder, Ben was an uncanny and relentless mimic. He would see the mailman; then he would be the mailman. “He could never role-play without acting out the whole part,” Dee said. Ben told me, “I would be like ten different people in a day, like a different person every hour. I had all these costumes in my room, and I’d change my clothes constantly.” When he was ten, Nirvana’s album “Nevermind” appeared, and he saw Kurt Cobain for the first time, in the video of  “Smells Like Teen Spirit.” Suddenly, the Beatles made sense to him. “When Nirvana came out, it was like, Yes! This is the Beatles except with the guitars turned up.” Ben started to look like Kurt–like the too-sweet-for-this-world little boy Kurt once was.

He began taking piano lessons when he was six; his teachers criticized him for changing the chords around in songs like “Heart and Soul” and “Let It Snow,” until finally one of them realized that this was actually a sign of creativity, not of disobedience, and informed the Kwellers that their son had some sort of unique talent. He started playing his dad’s guitar when he was twelve, taught a neighbor kid to play the drums, and briefly formed a band called Green Eggs and Ham. Later, Ben hooked up with a bass player, and in January, 1994, John joined as drummer. A few months after that, Ben got his own guitar, and in June the group débuted at Ben’s bar mitzvah. They called themselves Radish. The boys had looked among the gnarly-sounding diseases in Howie’s medical dictionary for another band name, but in the end “Radish” came from a kid named Arosh, whom Ben met at a party. “He was like an Indian or something,” Ben told me. “I said ‘Whoa, DOODE! Your name is Arosh? Hey, man, do you mind if  I call you Radish?’ He said, ‘No, man, that’s cool.’ ” Howie and David Kent, John’s father, thought the band sounded pretty good. They made a tape, and Howie sent it to Lofgren, who saw to it that it got into the hands of his producer, Roger Greenawalt.

Greenawalt had once been the best fourteen-year-old rock-guitar player in his county, and he, too, wanted to be a rock star. He came close during the New Wave early eighties, when he had an Eno/Bowie-style band called the Dark, in Boston, and was recording and performing music with Ric Ocasek, of the Cars. But ultimately, he told me, “I failed.” He wound up as a session guitarist and is now mostly a producer. Insofar as it’s possible to be precise about what someone like Greenawalt does in the rock business, which is a tangled web of connections involving promoters, producers, scouts, managers, and A. & R. people, you could say that he looks for new talent, works with it, and then tries to sell it to a label for a finder’s fee and an “override,” or what is known in the movie business as points.

Greenawalt liked the tape of Radish “within thirty seconds,” he told me. “You could tell the kid was good at music. I called Howie, and he was very excited, very solicitous–he and Dee treated me like a rock star. So I flew down there to see if they had the capacity to do the work at the professional level I would require.” He ended up staying with the Kwellers off and on for two months, working with Ben and John for eight to ten hours a day on their music. (Bryan wasn’t hired by the band until later, just before the New York showcases.) “We took apart every song, every lyric, every chorus, and I made Ben justify its existence,” Greenawalt said. He tried to make Ben more aware of his body, because “rock is as much visual as auditory. People take in a lot of it with their eyes. A rock star has to play with his whole body.”

He also taught Ben that for the rock star nothing exists outside the moment. Every aspect of his performance–how he plays, how he sings, how he stands–must communicate the feeling that this moment is a totally satisfying experience. “I would say, ‘Ben, what’s your favorite meal? O.K., let’s have it right now. What’s your favorite color? O.K., let’s paint it right now. What is the chord you’re playing–why are you playing it? Does it feel good to lift your arms over your head?” Greenawalt jumped up, bowed his head, closed his eyes, and slowly raised his arms–expertly transforming himself into Roger Daltrey or Peter Frampton onstage with the light streaming past him.

We were talking in Greenawalt’s apartment, which is on the ground floor of a building on West Eighty-third Street. It was a cold winter night, the lights were low, candles were burning, music was playing, and Greenawalt’s girlfriend, Jill, whose face and posture announced “I’m a model,” was sitting next to him on the couch. Apparently, Greenawalt spent a lot of time on his couch; books were stacked high in front of it. He told me several times how happy he was, living what he called “the life”–the rock-and-roll life. He is one of a breed of grownups whose success seems to rest on their ability to stay loose, listen to music all day, and make you feel that the night could go on forever. “The perfect career is like the perfect crime,” Greenawalt said. “I’ve got the beautiful girl on the couch next to me while I sit here sip-ping Macallan Scotch and telling my story to you, and that’s fine.”

I could easily imagine Howie and Dee sharing moments of parental concern over just exactly what this slightly voluptuous, vaguely licentious-seeming character was doing in their house, with his cigarettes and his black jeans, having what Greenawalt described to me as a “platonic love affair” with their son, and instructing him in the spirit of rock and roll, which Greenawalt traces back beyond Jagger and Chuck Berry–to Oscar Wilde, composers like Mahler and Liszt, and the Romantic poets. But Howie realized that Greenawalt had both the musical skills and the connections to make something happen for Radish. “Roger took us there,” Howie told me.

 “I taught Ben that he was not Kurt Cobain,” Greenawalt went on. “I said, ‘Look, Kurt was a miracle. An absolute miracle. And this is not about being a child star, either. It’s not a David Cassidy vibe, it’s a Jodie Foster vibe. The culture may pay attention to us because we’re young, O.K., fine, but we can’t be young. We have to compete with this’ “–he gestured with his cigarette toward the stereo, which was playing U2’s “Achtung Baby”–” ‘and with Beck and Pavement.’ ” He took a drag on the cigarette and looked off into the visionary middle distance.  “I don’t know. Maybe Ben will be Shirley Temple.” He focussed on me again. “And that’s cool. Shirley Temple is a good vibe.”

Jill said she needed to get ready for her poetry class at the New School, but would we like cheeseburgers before she went? As she was fixing the food in the kitchen, Greenawalt said to me, “Live large, but be small. The small reality–that was Ben’s and my motto.”

He got up from the couch and hit “replay” on the CD controls, and we listened again to Bono, one of the great rock stars, singing “One”:
Is it getting better?
Or do you feel the same?

The electric guitar seemed to be showing a possible escape from the blues in the music, pointing the way toward a place where there was “One love, One life . . .One need in the night. . . .” While lots of people can play at being rock stars, very few have the genius to work within the rigid conventions of contemporary rock and yet manage to transcend them and actually say something. This was a song you had to listen to again if you heard it once. Compared to this, Ben was just writing about homework and crushes. Maybe some fifteen-year-olds would relate to it, but there wasn’t much of a message that anyone older than fifteen could take from his songs. Indeed, the lust for Radish is one way of measuring how far the rock industry has moved from caring about whether songs have any message at all. If Ben were left alone to develop his talent for eight more years, maybe play around local clubs and release a CD with a small label, his music might develop into something great. If he really is a genius, it may anyway, but being coöpted by the industry so early in his career sets the bar that much higher. “The best thing that could happen to Ben,” one industry insider told me, “is that the album doesn’t sell and he gets all embittered, and then, when he’s eighteen, he can really write something good.”

After a month of work, Greenawalt took the band to a studio in Baltimore and recorded a three-song demo tape. “I had already been feeding smart bombs to people in the industry, so the anticipation was high,” he told me. A well-known music-industry lawyer, Jonathan Ehrlich, of Grubman, Indursky & Schindler, put his own network of connections at Ben’s service in return for a piece of the action. In April, Greenawalt booked the showcases and brought Radish to New York. Ben and John crashed here in his apartment. Ehrlich represented the band in the record deal, for which he received a percentage. Howie, as the band’s manager, got a flat fee, as did John. Greenawalt got sixty thousand dollars for his work with the band, and points on “Restraining Bolt,” which he recorded in July and mixed in August.

But when Ben listened to the album he didn’t like the way it sounded. It had the finished, shiny, instrumental, studio-produced sound that was popular in the early eighties. (It was not unlike the album that Greenawalt never quite got around to making himself.)

“When we heard it, we were like, dud, that’s New Wave,” Ben told me. “I said, ‘My friends are going to eat me up for this.’ ” He tried to discuss his reservations about the album with Greenawalt, but Greenawalt acted like “an egomaniac,” Ben said. “We would suggest something, and Roger would say, ‘How many records have you made? You’re just a kid.’ He  treated me like a kid.”

Ben shared his misgivings with Danny Goldberg, and Goldberg agreed with him. “I thought it was two-thirds of a great album,” Goldberg told me. The album was taken away from Greenawalt and given to Kolderie and Slade, who recorded three new songs, rerecorded one, and remixed the others, adding the crushing guitar sound that is the alternative signature. In the process, Ben and Roger stopped speaking to each other, and they haven’t spoken since.

I asked Greenawalt if he thought that Ben manipulated grownups into helping him realize his ambitions–if his sweet-little-boy persona was really just a con to get jaded hipsters to fall in love with him. Greenawalt answered, somewhat cryptically, “You never know when you’re going to meet the smartest person you’ve ever met, and you never know how old he’s going to be.” I asked him how he felt about Ben’s taking the album away from him, and he said, “I think it’s charming that Ben rebelled against me. Charming. He was my best student ever, and so of course his final act as my student had to be to rebel against me.” He took another sip of Scotch. “I taught him well,” he added.

Greenawalt hunted around among the books at the base of the couch and came up with a large black folder. He said, “This is something from Tacitus, which I wrote in my commonplace book yesterday: ‘It is so much easier to repay injury than to reward kindness, for gratitude is regarded as a burden, revenge as a gain.’ “

On the way to the gig in Dallas, John drove the sixty miles from Greenville very fast. The roadies–at this stage still mainly Howie and John’s father, David–tried to follow in David’s Suburban, which was pulling a U-Haul trailer carrying the instruments and the sound equipment.

A woman from Mercury was in the car with us, and Ben asked her what new alternative-rock acts were out there. She said, “Well, there’s Morphine.”

 “Cool! Morphine,” Ben said. “We love them, man.”

 “No, dude, that’s Codeine we love,” said Brain.

 “Duuude, you’re right.”

John said, “This car back here is bugging me,” and I saw a shard of his handsome face in the rearview mirror, looking backward.

Ben: “Give ’em the finger, dude.”

John, bored: “I don’t have the energy.” But his eyes lit up as an old Bad Company song came on–a song I was listening to on the radio with the same enthusiasm when I was seventeen, in 1976. For the first time in the history of rock and roll, parents and children are into the same music. The rock industry believes this is evidence that its music will go on forever, but it could just as easily be taken as a sign that the whole enterprise is decadent and is due to be swept away soon by a genuinely youth-based sound. Fred Goodman, in “The Mansion on the Hill,” his new book about the rock industry, dates the birth of rock music as we know it today–which he sees as a synthesis of the electric-pop sound of the Beatles and the acoustic, message-based tradition of folk music–to Bob Dylan’s performing “Like a Rolling Stone” with an electric guitar at the Newport Folk Festival in 1965. Although rock has since evolved through metal, punk, New Wave, and alternative rock, and is now tentatively commingling with hip-hop, in bands like the Fugees, there hasn’t been a revolution quite as all-transforming as the one caused by Dylan at Newport in ’65. In footage of that famous day, you can see the crowd going wild: the folkies booing, because Dylan was selling out to the commercial, mainstream interests of rock; the incipient rockers cheering madly, for here, finally, was a way of taking the sensual pleasure of electric-guitar music and marrying it to a message. The kind of rock and roll that Radish would be playing tonight was basically the nineteenth iteration of that sound.

Other bands on the radio: the Cardigans, Bush, Stone Temple Pilots. All are exemplars of the basic problem with the rock business, which is that innovative musicians, like the grunge bands that emerged in the early nineties, are sucked up into the commercial mainstream and imitated at ever greater speeds, to feed the Jabba the Hutt-like appetite of the Entertainment State–the megalopoly of entertainment products which is growing around the globe, coöpting everyone. (One of the few musicians who could resist the suction was Kurt Cobain, and he did it by killing himself.) The rock business is about selling the edge, but edge, by definition, has to lie slightly outside the mainstream. And the same mechanism that hoovers the hip into the mainstream also makes the kids especially sensitive to the fake hip, and that, in turn, creates the peculiar anxiety of the rock-and-roll businessman. Like the Puritans, who had to worry about being found not to possess grace, the rock businessman has to worry about being shown to lack hip.

John, who was station-surfing, stopped on Nirvana’s “Come As You Are”:
I don’t have a gun.
No I don’t have a gun.

I said that it was weird how many of Kurt’s songs have guns in them. Ben said, “I think he was always planning to kill himself, and he was thinking about it, and trying to tell people, but no one around him stopped him.”

I said, “Danny Goldberg was around him.”

“Yeah, Danny was Kurt’s manager,” said Ben, nodding, thinking about it.

As we approached the lights of  Dallas, Ben said, “I think we should close with ‘Panamanian Girl.’ “

“O.K., if you want to,” Brain said.

“It’s a good closer.”

Tonight was all-ages night at the Galaxy Club. The act before Radish, a hard-core punk band, was making a great deal of noise; parents were sitting in the back of the club, as far away from the appalling sound as possible, while their kids moshed up front. The tattooed, buzz-cut front man finished a song, then screamed at the kids, “What the fuck? Go ahead, say ‘Fuck you!’ You’re allowed to say ‘fuck,’ aren’t you?”

When they finished, Radish took the stage. Ben tried a little rapport with the audience before starting. “How many people here have seen the movie ‘Beavis and Butt-head Do America’?” he asked. A couple of kids raised their hands. He started to say something else, then stopped. Later, when I asked him why, he said, “It’s hard for me to talk to the audience. I always feel sort of like someone’s going to say, ‘Hey, shut up, kid, we don’t want to listen to you, you’re just a kid.’ “

The band started with “Simple Sincerity”:
Take my simplicity
Take your sincerity
Take my simplicity
Away from me.

Considering what is about to happen to Ben, those words seemed remarkably knowing for a fifteen-year-old. How much did Ben really know?

The second song was “Little Pink Stars,” which Mercury has just released on radio as the lead track from “Restraining Bolt.” The audience got into it. The boys were rockin’! Dee, who was sitting with John’s father, shouted, “You know, I wish those boys would play acoustic in their shows! They sound like angels together!”

“What?” shouted David, wincing as another riff from Ben’s guitar shivered his eardrums.

During “Dear Aunt Arctica,” the third song, Ben’s vocal mike, which Howie had recently bought, shorted out, and Howie rushed forward to the stage. (At the gig the night before, when one of the bass amps blew, Dee had practically throttled the young slacker bartender, yelling, “My son’s amp blew! Do something!”) Ben remained calm; he simply walked back from the mike and let John finish the song. It was as though they had rehearsed it. Warren Entner, their prospective manager, who was standing beside me just out of range of a small but potentially hazardous mosh pit that was skirmishing in front of us, shouted, “His composure is amazing!”

The band played “Apparition of Purity,” which featured Ben angrily screaming “Purity! Purity!” at the audience. Ben’s little sister, Abby, went flying by, moshing with a nine-year-old friend of hers who writes Ben fan letters that say, “Dear Radish. Check here if you love me. Check here if you like me. I love your musik.”

As planned, they closed with “Panamanian Girl.” The Panamanian Girl herself, a sweet-looking sixteen-year-old, wearing hot-pink leggings under a modest skirt, was right there in front of the stage, looking up at Ben, who had his head bent over his instrument, and his legs akimbo, and was shaking the sound out of it. The girl stretched out her arms. The boy wailed on his guitar. It was the real thing, the moment that Danny Goldberg would soon be selling to the world in shrink-wrapped jewel cases–and once you sell something that’s truly part of yourself, you run the risk of losing it forever. It becomes an illusion, a gesture (perhaps ironic) that a girl makes in the video of your song. But Ben probably knew that, too. And at least for now it was a moment so innocent and joyous that Warren Entner and I looked at each other with big grins on our faces, though whether we were smiling out of pleasure or from some subtler understanding of how easy this stuff was to sell I wasn’t sure.

Copyright © John Seabrook 2003. All rights reserved