by John Popper
Copyright © 2016 by John Popper
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ISBN: 978-0-306-82405-0 (e-book)
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All photos are courtesy of John Popper, except for the following: 10 is from Patrick Stevens; 23, 25, and 32 are from AJ Genovesi; 13, 15, and 17 are from Andrew Schuman.
10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1
For Eloise, Welcome! This is only the beginning; the Afterword is all about you. I’ll see you there . . .
Jordan, I love you . . .
CONTENTS
1Applying Myself
2Blinding Them with Science
3Whiplashed
4Too Many Notes
5Bucking the Establishment
6The Dark Art of Harmonies
7Slow Change
8Sweatglands
9The Graham Dynasty
10A&M Blues
11“Divided Sky” for “Christmas”
12Fellow Travelers
13Save My Soul
14H.O.R.D.E. to Handle
15The Race to 430
16Ode to the Late-Night Sponge
17We Will Break You
18Dropping Some MSG
19Intimacy with Strangers in the Dark
20Johnny Appleharp
21Banner Years (or Tootie Goes Shootie)
22Four Play
23Pretty Angry
24I Want to Be Brave
25The Bridge
26Howard’s Turn
27The Prince Inside the Michelin Man
28Showing My Range
29Troubadours and Moon Shots
30Corpies, Steroids, and Cons
31Don Pardo and the Trolls
32Safety Patrol
33Shriverians and Libertarians
34Hooks
Afterword: To My Darling Daughter, Eloise, on the Eve of Her Birth
Acknowledgments
Index
1
APPLYING MYSELF
As I sat in the dean’s office, my moment of sweet vindication was at hand.
The New School for Jazz and Contemporary Music was going to open its doors in the fall of 1986, and I was angling to be among its first students.
The problem was that after five years of high school (that’s right, five—I delivered an encore performance of my junior year), my grades were mostly F’s, with a few D’s sprinkled in.
Around eighth grade I had made a vow not to do any homework. It just seemed pointless to me. After-school time was me time. When my parents and teachers told me to apply myself, I reasoned that by not doing any homework, I was being true to my nature and, therefore, was applying myself. I kind of felt like Einstein because he would do his work, then rip it up and start from scratch—I just took a modern approach by not doing any work at all. I also found that if I set expectations really low—if I kept getting F’s and then every once in a while get a D, everybody would pat me on the back for it.
But as the dean looked at my transcript and began shaking his head, saying, “I don’t know, John . . . . . . ,” it didn’t seem like a pat was forthcoming.
I had graduated from high school a month earlier and was out of options.
The Manhattan School of Music had seemed like a possibility. I had just finished a two-week summer program there, but then they sent me thirty-two bars of Bach that I would need to learn for an audition. Since I really don’t know how to read music, that was out.
It was at the Manhattan School summer program where I met Arnie Lawrence, who was among the founding faculty of the New School. He was the one who had encouraged me to apply.
The only other plan I had was to make my way to Chicago, harmonica in hand, and find Sugar Blue. I would challenge him to a duel, and if I lost, then in some twisted variation of Ralph Macchio in Crossroads, I would sell my clothes and become his apprentice. If I won, then I would sit on his throne as the King of the Blues.
My family thought this was stupid.
I really had no plan at all.
But as I sat across from the dean, the one thing I did have was my harmonica.
I pulled it out of my pocket and he asked me to play. I threw everything I had into the solo and, as I brought it to a rousing, climatic close, he sighed, “Okay, we’ll let you in.”
The dean had completely proven my philosophy.
If hadn’t had my harmonica in my pocket, I wouldn’t have gotten into the New School. But if I’d gotten good grades and had a harmonica in my pocket, then all of that work would have been completely redundant.
That’s the important thing to remember: if I had gotten A’s in high school, it would have been a waste of all that valuable time.
So kids, if you aspire to a job someday where you’ll tour the world, receive a check for a million dollars, receive the adulation of a million fans, and find yourself in the White House greeting presidents, then stop doing your homework.
2
BLINDING THEM WITH SCIENCE
I always sat way too close to the TV.
This not only impacted my vision—I’ve got the glasses to prove it—but also impacted my vision: I had certain expectations of the world.
After absorbing so many scripted stories from my particular vantage point, I sought to experience one of those dramatic moments when time stopped and E.T. took the bicycle into the sky.
As it turned out, that actually happened to me—when I was a junior in high school (for the first time)—and I’ve felt the repercussions ever since.
My high school in Stamford, Connecticut, was particularly abusive to people who didn’t fit in, and they decided they were going to break me. I hadn’t mastered showering—I was a once-a-week guy—and I’d make weird noises humming to myself because I was usually the only company I kept. It was pretty easy for me to be pegged as a weirdo. I was big and didn’t play football, and if you were big and didn’t play football, that was two strikes against you. They even tied me to the bleachers once.
I remained fairly antisocial for a while after we moved to Princeton, New Jersey, when I was sixteen. That’s where I would eat pencils for money—the key is you bite the eraser off first and swallow it like a pill, and by then everyone is just grossed out. I didn’t really have a normal sense of social interaction with people. I lived in my imagination.
But it was in Princeton where my moment arrived.
I was the third-string trumpet player in the beginner band. I had landed there after I did really well on an untimed SAT in the special ed class where they had placed me after the move from Stamford. I had shitty grades, and they were going to send me to a school for the learning disabled, but then they tested me and discovered that I had college-level reading and comprehension skills.
They decided they
needed to somehow connect me with school. The remedial teacher saw me playing harmonica in the parking lot, so she sent me to the high school band teacher, who explained, “We don’t really have harmonica here. We play big band jazz. Is there any other instrument you’d like to play?” I said, “I dunno—trumpet?” because he had one there and it looked shiny. So he said, “Great,” gave me a trumpet, and kicked me out of his office.
They sent me to the trumpet teacher, who gave me homework—it was a complicated instrument and you have to learn the rudiments—but homework was something I had given up back in eighth grade. Needless to say, I did not flourish at the trumpet.
I was resigned to playing third-chair trumpet and having my trumpet teacher yell at me and wag his finger until this one day in the JV band when we were playing Thomas Dolby’s “She Blinded Me with Science.” It was our first opportunity to really get to solo, and the band teacher went around the room pointing to different people. I did my crappy trumpet solo—I could barely play the damn thing—but also had the three harmonicas in the trumpet case and, luckily, had one in the right key. So I held it up and he said, “Yeah, sure, give it a try.”
It was one of those Excalibur moments. I started playing, and suddenly the whole room stopped. I can remember somebody in the saxophone section saying, “He’s so good.” The next day I was in the first-string band playing harmonica, and I never had to touch a trumpet again. They even brought in the principal to watch me.
It was like the moment in The Natural when Robert Redford gets his hand on a baseball bat. It was a defining moment, and right away almost everyone in school knew my name—“Hey Popper! You’re that harmonica dude!” Basically it’s been that way ever since and I’ve developed a comfort level with people knowing about me and what I do. Over the years I’ve realized that they’ll sometimes claim to know things about me that aren’t even true.
So here’s my version of the story, admittedly told from the perspective of a guy who sat way too close to the TV.
For another indication of what this time of my life was like, I’ll jump ahead a year to a moment when I went with a friend from the jazz band to see Wynton Marsalis in Red Bank, New Jersey. We were hanging outside, having a cigarette, when we realized the dressing room window was open and there was Wynton with his group. I had my harmonica in my pocket—that’s the great thing about a harmonica: you can just have it in your pocket. I whispered, “Should I play?” And my friend said, “No, don’t do it.”
But I couldn’t control myself, so I played a little bit. Then we heard, “Yo, play that blues, man.” It was Wynton. So I just went off—by then I had a standard going-off thing that I would do at high school assemblies. I went off and then heard “Holy shit!”—and that was my hero Wynton Marsalis saying that.
He invited us into the dressing room and signed my harmonica case. I was on cloud nine and still have that harmonica case.
That’s something I can’t stress enough: before I played the harmonica, I had no social skills. Actually I’m not sure I have social skills now, but at least the harmonica acts as a substitute. It’s amazing how people don’t give a damn about you if you lack social skills.
I wasn’t the one who got it the worst in my high school, though. There was this whole cast of people who no one saw, at least not in Princeton. I was scary—“Don’t mess with him—he’s weird and doesn’t comb his hair.” I think I had this desire to fit in but no way to do it. So the contrast with suddenly being known by everybody was all the more striking.
It was during my middle school days when I first became a performer. I’ve always called those years my Vietnam experience because that’s when I was really picked on—hunted for meat, I used to say.
I attended the Harvey School in Katonah, New York. It was a boarding school, but I would a drive half hour each day from Stamford, Connecticut. We had to wear a tie and jacket and call teachers “Sir.” When a student did something wrong, he would get demerits, and when he had enough, he would have to run laps. In the winter when it was too cold to run, we had to write “How sharper than a serpent’s tooth it is to have a thankless child” ten times. So we’d tape ten pens together and write them that way. Demerit pens, we called them. (The quote is from King Lear. I looked it up. I don’t think I knew that at the time.)
They had a mandatory sports program, and I did not want to get naked in the locker room. So I would hide in the woods with the other mutants, like the three-foot-tall kid with the giant head and the kid with the really thick glasses. I was the fat guy. We were like the kids in Lord of the Flies, so I guess I was Piggy. We hid in the woods and tried making wine with some berries we found. It was horrible.
The head of the athletics department was a full-blooded Hungarian, Mr. Gobel. He called me a half-breed because my dad was Hungarian—he was raised there before he escaped the country in 1951—and my mom’s a WASP who can trace her roots back to the First Families of Virginia, back to Thomas Jefferson and Patrick Henry. Mr. Gobel decided he was going to make a man out of me, but I was no good at soccer and didn’t want to wrestle, so I cried. The guy under him, who was the JV wrestling coach, took pity on me and made me the wrestling manager. This meant I had a little clipboard and didn’t have to change my clothes in front of the other kids.
School was from eight in the morning until five at night, and practice was from three to five in the afternoon. I had to sit there and help the coach out. At the end of each practice I had to walk out onto the mats and tell a joke. If they didn’t think the joke was funny, they got to kick my ass until I got off the mat. So what I learned to do was to tell a joke and run. That’s how I began learning the rudimentary aspects of captivating a crowd. I looked at an audience as an angry mob of people bent on trying to kill me—I think that was an actual vaudeville tradition. If you walk up to a tiger and look at it in the eye, it’ll do what you want, but if you blink, it’ll eat you. There really is that element when you’re on stage—you start out performing for self-preservation, and then you get better at it and eventually you want to share yourself. I think most people who perform want to share themselves, but it’s also probably a defense mechanism on some level.
I wanted to be comedian. In Stamford I met Tom Brown, who was into Saturday Night Live. He got me into SNL—I think comedy was an important refuge for a lot of fat or antisocial kids. I had finally found something I could imagine doing with my life: performing.
After middle school I attended Stamford Catholic High School, where we participated in the Green and Gold Show. It was some sort of talent show, and Tom and I did sound effects. We were horrible, but I became addicted to that moment when the lights came up. It was the first time I was ever on stage, and that was when I decided I really wanted to be a comedian.
But all of that changed because of Saturday Night Live. After I saw the Blues Brothers I suddenly wanted to play the harmonica like Dan Aykroyd’s Elwood Blues.
I always had some connection to music. I can remember learning that I had perfect pitch when I was a kid singing in church. My sister’s violin teacher told my parents to encourage my musical development, so they gave me a cello, in part because my great grand uncle David Popper was a world-famous cellist (I found out later in life that I’m also related to the philosopher Karl Popper). But I had a shitty bowing hand and it’s hard; you’ve got to practice—it doesn’t give you gratification right away. So I looked good with it but I never practiced and never learned to read the notes. Eventually I abandoned the violin. The next step was piano lessons at age eight, but again I didn’t read music, although it was certainly a better experience than the cello. Then my parents had me take up the tuba—that’s a classic: give the fat kid a tuba. It was a baritone horn, so they took a little bit of pity on me, but the same thing happened. I never learned to read music and didn’t practice.
When I was eleven I took guitar lessons. It started out promising—I had learned one of Vivaldi’s fugues by ear. I could play it with my thumb and two fingers—
my index and middle fingers on my left hand and my thumb on my right hand. That was encouraging, and I fooled the guitar teacher for weeks when I played “Love Me Tender.” I was pretending to read the music but was really playing it by ear. Then one day I played the rhythm slightly differently, and he realized I had fooled him and kicked me out, telling my parents, “I can’t do anything with this guy.” Now that, to me, was the biggest mistake—if you have a kid who’s fooling you, that means he’s gifted, so work with him. But this, along with my academic career, just reinforced my authority issues. I can’t stand anybody telling me what to do.
I received a harmonica for my fourteenth birthday but I didn’t really play it for nearly two years. The day I got it I could play “Oh! Susanna” and “High Noon (Do Not Forsake Me).” But I put it away until I saw the Blues Brothers, when I realized, Oh, that’s what you can do with a harmonica!
Then, just as I started getting going with the harp, we moved to Princeton, New Jersey. (By the way, either harmonica or harp is fine by me. I often call it a harp because it’s less syllables; Mississippi saxophone also works, but that’s long. Some people say mouth organ, but that sounds a bit NSFW.) Moving to Princeton was like being in a Spielberg movie: it was a pristine, beautiful bubble amid the rank highways of Central Jersey, where the sports teams were terrible but the studio band would win award and after award in every jazz competition from there to the Berklee College of Music. The musicians were the hot shits, and the lead trumpet in the jazz band was kind of like the quarterback. It was in Princeton where I would meet the other guys in Blues Traveler.
We moved because my father had taken a job as the vice president of the pharmaceutical company Squibb (which became Bristol-Myers Squibb in 1989). He moved there to pursue his American dream with his wife and seven children.
My father grew up in Hungary, and while he was teenager the Nazis and Russians were fighting over Budapest. There was rape and murder and all manner of bloodshed. Families lost everything. As my dad and his sister, my aunt Eva, were fond of saying, “You don’t want to remember these things. You went through them and they happened and you try your best to forget them.” As I got older and he told me a few stories, I realized there are American problems and there are old-world problems, and the two are very different.
