From IA to LA: The Hillbilly Takes Hollywood: Ben Lee, You Don't Suck.

"I never met someone so jaded. Your music's really overrated.
Nothing but a lot of pretentious noise...
...I wrote this song to tell you that your 15 minutes of fame are almost up.
Yeah, one more thing: Ben Lee, you suck."
- The Ataris, "Ben Lee"

If you're one of my readers who tends to skip over the opening lyrical snippets that I use to lead in to each post, you may want to reconsider that pattern for this post. The above-mentioned lyrics are from a "diss" song about one of my favorite troubadours, Ben Lee. In it, they describe all of the reasons that he sucks, both personally and professionally. So, let's say that you were in Ben Lee's shoes. You hear this song that was sent to you by one of your close friends that was passed onto them by one of their friends and...etc...etc...you're listening to your reputation being dragged through the mud in a very brash manner. What do you do?

Well, if you really were Ben Lee, you would cover that very song at each and every one of your concerts from that point on.

Thursday night, I saw Ben perform at the aptly named Troubadour venue in West Hollywood and was treated with a fair number of surprises. Firstly, the opening band Low Vs. Diamond--who seemed to be genuine d-bags from the moment they stepped on stage--grew on me with every song they played. By the end of their set, I was honestly thinking of buying their album. (Or at the very least downloading it for free off of Elbo.ws) Also, I was shocked and floored to hear the words "Ben Lee, you suck" come from Ben Lee's throat. Too cool, Mr. Lee. Too cool.

But aside from the aforementioned embrace of his own hate song, Ben surprised me with how genuinely excited he seemed to be about playing with a truly proficient back-up band (being the rhythm section of Low Vs. Diamond). He was constantly giving them a thumbs up and giant kid-like smile as if to say "this is totally cool." Yeah, the smile said "totally." That's how dorkishly cool Ben Lee was.

So to all of the naysayers who call him "pompous," or "deluded", or even "a giant, smarmy bag of taint" I say to you: buzz off! He's a fine musician, a wonderfully entertaining stage performer, and a sincerely nice guy.