The world lost Ben Tan – age 36 – on May 14, 2026, after a brave battle with cancer. I say ‘the world’ because his impact extends beyond family and friends. I am so incredibly blessed and grateful to call Ben or BBT (as I often called him) a dear friend. I’ve been taking in the outpouring of love and tribute to BBT over the last month, often finding myself at a loss of words to describe how much he meant to me. And words truly do not do BBT justice, because with him it was so individualized. His spirit was, and is, unlike anyone I’ve ever met. So many of Ben’s friends and family have very accurately articulated this sentiment. He lacked ego and any sense of self-consciousness. He was at peace and thriving just being BBT. Though I could not physically be with him as often as I would have liked in his final weeks and days, I regularly kept in touch with my dude via FaceTime and text. I was blessed to visit him in hospice in April. His health was declining, but his spirit and presence remained steady. He wanted to get out of his bed and play music. And that he did – finding the strength to move to the couch, play guitar and keyboard, and sing. I won’t forget how he started playing and singing “Tears on my Pillow,” by Little Anthony and the Imperials – one of the many Little Anthony songs that Ben always took pleasure in encouraging me to sing. He shared so many of these wonderful moments during his final weeks – jamming along with childhood friends and other pals he met through the Boston music scene and beyond. BBT had gone through so much medically in the past few years, but he never lost his spirit and fight.
I’m not sure when I met BBT, exactly. I knew of him far before I really got to know him. I knew he was incredibly smart and a musical genius. But it was in high school that we began bonding. In those days, we both really liked journalism. Ben wrote for the school newspaper, the Wakefield Spin. His movie review column in particular held legendary status. But he did it all and expanded his efforts online – blogging about politics, local news, and music among many other things. I was delighted when Ben was accepted into Emerson College, where he would study broadcast journalism. Our bond grew stronger once he started his studies at Emerson. He was so excited to room with his childhood friend Mikey Riv freshman year. BBT also started DJ’ing at WERS, the nationally acclaimed college radio station that my dad had long played in the car since I was a kid. On the daytime radio shows, Ben was given very little leeway in what he could play, but sometimes he’d spin something that I would call in and request. The music du jour of 2009 was fine; decades later (as in… earlier this year) Ben would send me audio messages of him in his radio voice announcing Grizzly Bear’s “Two Weeks” off of Veckatimest.
During this period and a bit before, Ben started to learn how to play guitar. Before this, Ben was a gifted classical pianist. He started playing as a young child and was active in various school ensembles and later, more casual bands. I remember going over to his house and watching him jam in the basement with his buds. Music came very easy to BBT! Not so much for me. I was starting to dabble in guitar around the same time as Ben. I could hardly form any chords. I often asked Ben for advice – “Where do I put my fingers for a G chord?” And he would laugh and respond right away. He was on another level and very quickly picked up the instrument. I struggled and pretty much gave up on technicality, but through Ben I had a very decent foundation. All that I needed. I look back on these times as highly influential – here was an accomplished musician giving me the time of day to experiment. We would laugh it off, goofing around quite a bit. He graced me with the moniker ‘King of Slop’. I ran with it, that confidence of just being all ‘whatever – I don’t really know what I’m doing, but I’m just going to do it anyway.’ And that was all BBT. He delighted in my amateurism but never wrote it off. Going for it was BBT. Pure BBT. It was just him. He allowed me to not be so self-conscious. Sure, it sounded weird, off key, and tone deaf.
Fast forward to April 2012 – my first time performing live. Solo. Who was right there for it? BBT! Not many people were there, but Ben was. Two performances later, BBT joined me on drums at Club Bohemia, a venue that we both held near and dear. Then a short time later at the defunct Radio Down in Somerville, BBT wasn’t playing with me (he played his own solo set), but as our best bud Chris DeCarlo wrote in a review on KLYAM (our blog that Ben named and was an early contributor), “Ben Tan, who wants to start a riot…yanks my Narragansett out of my hand, chugs it, and flips me the bird. I immediately rip the beer out of his hands, but he’s out of control as he swings some sort of cables around frantically dancing.” Yup, classic BBT. A few shows later Ben joined the first full band lineup of mine on tambourine, pacing around a fully packed Middle East Upstairs – and in the words of Chris, “dancing and intimidating the crowd of puzzled on lookers.” BBT was a consistent force in my (non)musical world – lending his hand through the years additionally on bass, guitar, keyboards (and drums at the same time), as well as backing vocals – most prominently on “The Breeze”. He was always there for a good time, sure, but more importantly he was a supportive friend. He was well aware of the wackiness, weirdness, and amateurism. And who cares? BBT LOVED a good time and is that not the most important thing?
Now on to Johnnie and the Foodmasters. To be historically accurate, the band, the OG lineup of BBT on guitar, Brian on drums, and me on guitar, had our first jam on February 13, 2013. We certainly didn’t intend to form a new band during that session and I’m not 100% that we had the name Johnnie and the Foodmasters figured out (though knowing BBT and his brilliant history of naming things…maybe?). At any rate, we made it a thing on July 4, 2015, our first show. I look back on this day with fondness and appreciation. We were the ‘opening ceremonies’ of the Allston Speed Trials, a DIY festival featuring the day’s local garage/punk bands, such as Nice Guys, Miami Doritos, Black Beach, and many more. We were on first on this cloudy, humid Lower Allston day. Outside under a tent. I remember being a little worried that we were late – BBT picked me up and I think Brian met us there. We were greeted to a nice backline so we just rolled up, plugged in, and played. It was a quick set – I don’t think we had a set list – but the spirit and performance were unlike anything I’d been a part of. For BBT, I believe it was significant because he was stepping into what would be his role for the decade-plus of the band’s existence: steady frontman and backbone of the chaos. He knew how to play the songs and he knew the words. I ran around, rolled in the grass, and played whatever notes or words spoke to me – a real time reaction of the vibe. And Brian, behind the kit, was something to behold. He fell somewhere in between the order of BBT and my chaos. He was a longtime jazz drummer who had been playing with Ben for nearly ten years, including in the oldies loving Revivalists, which included C-Solid, who’d join Foodmasters a short time later. Brian would pound the shit out of the kit, perhaps (definitely) with an intensity above and beyond the standard Malt Shop era covers band. We made for an interesting trio, for sure. Ben was well aware that this was not your ordinary group. But looking over at him laughing and smiling and not caring. That was gold. It never got old, up through our final show with BBT at the Midway in December 2025. He leaned into all aspects of the band, creating such a comfortable environment for us all (Brian, Chris D, C-Solid, Lindie, and me) – to be ourselves. We weren’t playing roles and I’ll always hesitate to say we ‘practiced’. But we jammed. We really jammed. First in Ben’s basement. I’d bring my tiny amp and guitar, and we’d just call out song after song and play for hours. And BBT would record it all.
Ben pioneered a recording technique that I hadn’t heard of or seen. It was very much Foodmasters specific. He recorded every jam and show with his iPhone, but in his basement and later Sum Studios, was where he would put his audio engineer/producer hat on and stack instrumental and vocal overdubs over the band’s live recordings. There was a method to all this as the iPhone recording usually was dominated by abrasive guitar and Brian’s hard charging drums. I rarely if ever saw BBT in action in this specific studio element, but he would always share his product with the band! The result was a cleaned-up version of Foodmasters – think Brian Wilson or Phil Spector – but if you really listened you could hear the tinny live experience in the background. These recordings were one of Ben’s obsessions and we all know that he had many! His commitment was simply impressive, and we all know that for Ben, commitment was such a fundamental aspect of his larger-than-life personality.
To detour from music a bit and expand on this – things came full circle with Ben far more than anyone I’ve ever met. Ben and I established some traditions like meeting up at Legal Sea Foods and Empire Garden in Chinatown. I was beyond thrilled to bring my future wife Ginny to meet us for lunch when we were first dating. A few years later the Foodmasters settled into Sum Studios in Malden; our post pandemic practice space. Ben brought the group to his family’s stomping grounds – Sun Kong restaurant. He joyfully ordered beef and broccoli lo mein, chicken half (“that’s some good bird”) and, of course, the Fried Flounder. To hang out with Ben was special, every time. He was down for just about anything. There are too many moments to share and over time I am sure I will jot down some more, but I’ll leave you with the King Tan and GGG show.
It was August 2025, shortly before Ginny and I moved to NYC. I had two weeks off from work to prepare for the move and enjoy some moments around town. The Foodmasters 10th anniversary show was coming up at Deep Cuts in Medford – in fact this might have been the day before the show. A month prior, Ben received the truly horrific news that the cancer came back. I hit up Ben asking if he would like to hang out. We both expressed that we do not do well without routine. I told BBT that I was playing golf every day on my vacation and I needed to do something different. I suggested we do something that we had done before – go to Prince Pizza in Saugus, then the Salvation Army nearby, and then to a place I found where we could buy props for our big show. But BBT first suggested that we meet at Sum Studios and jam a bit. I was working on a song that I hoped Ben would be able to lend some kind of accompaniment on or flesh out in some way before recording. I tried playing it for him, but he wasn’t having any of it. Lol. So, we moved into something else. Ben handed me a twelve-string acoustic guitar and grabbed one for himself. He positioned a microphone in between us. We journeyed back in time to 2015 when Ben and I went to the former Johnnie’s Foodmaster location in Melrose and played an impromptu acoustic set in front of the now Whole Foods. I’m sure I asked Ben if he was down to make another spur of the moment trip to our beloved storefront. No such luck. But little did I know that – of course – Ben was recording this on his phone. He was calling the shots, unpredictably launching into whatever he desired. That was all fine by me! I’d look at Ben and he was smiling widely the entire time, laughing as he inserted Krees and Schlees wherever there was supposed to be a ‘Me’. Just going for it, really. BBT had a blast, whenever he was in that room. Our spontaneous session is online. Shortly before Ben passed, I asked him if I could publish these recordings (which he sent to me via email later that August day). His response? “I don’t give a fuck!” Of course. And so, I did. But anyway, we jammed and then our day continued. As I mentioned, Prince Pizza, Salvation Army, and then… we drove separately to a random business park/industrial center in Danvers. The goal was to buy props for our show. We arrived in the hot parking lot and were both terribly confused. Where was the place? We came upon what we thought was the entrance to a big garage. And there would be props galore to choose from. No luck. There was no store. Maybe the office or warehouse, but certainly no store. And our day wrapped up there. We laughed out loud and headed home. I’m blessed I had that moment with Ben. I miss you a lot, BBT. Your reactions to everything. Who else responds to most texts with voice memos? Nothing was off the table for BBT and he had the greatest mix of old reliable and unpredictable. I’m tearing up as I write this, recalling the ease of FaceTiming or texting Ben. I’m thinking how blessed we all are to have had Ben in our lives. Miss you, my friend. As Ben’s bud Andrew said at Ben’s Memorial, let’s all try our hardest every day to be the most Ben Tan that we can be. Love you BBT.
Benjamin J. Tan Scholarship for the Performing Arts
Ben Tan’s Bandcamp
Kids Like You & Me (KLYAM) 