by John Popper
He has plenty of stories from this time, and my family is working with him on a book about his experiences, so I’ll leave those to him.
He came to America, where Aunt Eva put him up and took care of him. She died in 2014, but she led a remarkable life—hung out with Salvador Dali and fought with Zsa Zsa Gabor, because you can’t have two beautiful Hungarian women in a room together. Lest you think I’m prone to exaggeration, here is her obituary:
A brilliant, witty, international beauty, born in Budapest, Hungary. She was married for 20 years to US Airforce Officer and diplomat Karel Pusta. Later, she enjoyed 20 happy years with Paul Kovi, owner of the famed Four Seasons restaurants. She has lived in Paris, Washington D.C., New York, California and Budapest.
She worked as a Hungarian broadcaster for Radio Free Europe, a prominent event planner for Hilton Hotels, and Fashion Editor at East/West Network, a publisher of Travel Magazines. She was active in the American Hungarian Foundation and in 2007 won the Officer’s Cross Order of Merit of the Republic of Hungary for her diplomatic efforts to improve Hungarian/American relations. Her friendships included luminaries such as Salvador Dali, Pablo Picasso, Oleg Cassini, and David Niven to name a few.
Aunt Eva was a part of this glamorous, jet-set kind of crowd, and among the people she knew was András Simonyi, the Hungarian ambassador. She had him come to a Blues Traveler show in 2005, and he invited me to the ambassador’s house in Washington, where I sampled various delicacies. He also plays guitar, so I brought him on stage with us at the 9:30 Club for a couple of tunes. “Who the hell is he?” the band asked. I told them it was the Hungarian ambassador, but they were skeptical. To this day he’s one of our most oddly accredited sit-ins.
Aunt Eva helped my dad acclimate to his new country, and soon he enrolled at George Washington University. That’s where he met my mom. While they were dating he went off to Fort Lewis in Washington State. He joined the Army to get his citizenship as quickly as possible. He wanted to marry her but didn’t want her to wonder whether he was marrying her for citizenship, so he decided to become a citizen before he proposed. He worked his butt off for that.
He finally became an American citizen, they were married, and he started working toward that American dream. He was a computer systems designer when I came along in 1967. He worked at a bank, U.S. Trust, then an ad agency, J. Walter Thompson, and eventually at Squibb.
His version of the American dream was to have seven kids. He was a Catholic, and that was a very Catholic thing to do. My mom’s a Presbyterian, so I guess she just went along with it. Her father was a Navy admiral, and his father a Navy admiral before him, who, I am told, helped design the Panama Canal.
My mom had seven kids in rapid succession. She basically spent thirteen years of her life having children. She was a baby machine. Then when I was around eight or nine, she went to Fordham Law School in New York City. As soon as she became a lawyer she turned into a different person. She lost weight, the color returned to her cheeks, and she started getting excited about stuff again. It was exactly the right prescription.
It also allowed the three younger ones to be on our own without as much supervision. I remember the four older kids weren’t allowed to say, “Shut up,” but by the time our parents got to us, they were so worn down that we could swear all over the place.
My dad didn’t want Hungarian kids in America; he wanted American kids, so he never taught us to speak Hungarian. I know the words for “May you be butt-fucked by a horse,” but that’s about it, and it does you no good in a cab. (I was in Budapest, and I so wanted to show the driver I could speak Hungarian, but where was that going to get me?)
My brother Tom lives in Hungary—I can’t tell whether that makes him a renegade or a prodigal son—where he’s the editor of a newspaper. He says that the way my dad speaks Hungarian is like ancient Shakespearean Hungarian.
We were in Egypt once, and this guy in a thick Egyptian accent asked my dad where he was from. My dad, in his thick Hungarian accent, said, “I am an American.” And the guy, in his thick Egyptian accent, asked, “No, where are you really from?” And my dad answered in his thick Hungarian accent: “I am an American.” They went back and forth like that for a while.
Once he was an American, that was it.
When I was a kid I’d wake up and he’d be singing, “I’d love to be an Oscar Mayer weiner . . . . . .” horribly out of tune and making up the words but bellowing at the top of his lungs. He loved the sound of that song. I think it was because he’d had to learn English, and in Hungarian the W sound is substituted with a V sound, so singing that for him was liberating. (When my little brother was five they went around the class asking what words began with the letter V, and my brother said, “vindshield viper.”) He told me that he used to fall asleep with his lips in a pucker to help him with words like “you”—speaking Hungarian doesn’t require much puckering.
Every now and then I try to imagine what it was like for him—to leave behind everything you know and go to this whole new place with all of these different rules and learn a completely different language. Then, if you keep driving through the smoke, you’re going to get a life that you wouldn’t otherwise have been able to get.
I think that’s why I’ve always enjoyed the Marx Brothers because I can appreciate their perspective. It’s immigrant humor. It’s anti-authoritarian and subversive, and that’s part of the American story. It was also my attitude in school.
I admired Groucho, but I was Harpo. Harpo was a free spirit. Groucho was more pragmatic; he accepted that we have to talk our way around situations, which is basically an intellectual approach to being Harpo. Whenever I saw Harpo my eyes lit up. I wanted to be that guy. After all, who doesn’t want to pull a swordfish out of his pants?
3
WHIPLASHED
When the film Whiplash came out in the fall of 2014, I heard from a friend that the character of the perfectionist teacher/band leader, for which J. K. Simmons would go on to win the Academy Award for Best Actor, was based on my high school band teacher Anthony Biancosino. So I went to see the film, and the real giveaway was that the beginner band is called the Nassau Band and the competition band is the Studio Band. Those are unique to Princeton because Nassau Street was the main street in Princeton. Eventually I read an article that said that the writer/director, Damien Chazelle, did indeed attend Princeton High School. Although it was two decades later, Mr. B was still there and, like Miles Teller’s character in the film, Damien was a drummer in the band.
Mr. Biancosino did a lot of good things for people, and I never saw him slap anyone, but he was a serious perfectionist about the drums. Just like in the movie, he would kick someone off the drum kit and put him on this really bad, out-of-tune conga drum. He would put a drummer on, kick a drummer off, put a drummer on, kick a drummer off. When I was there all the drummers went through that, particularly because they were rock drummers and he wanted a big-band drummer. The drummers’ love of Led Zeppelin’s John Bonham was unacceptable to Mr. Biancosino, but if you were a high school drummer in the eighties, you loved John Bonham. At some point he’d get so frustrated that he’d play the drums himself, and he was terrible at it.
He really did love the kids, though, and wanted us to succeed as a top-notch band, which we did, and we had the trophies to prove it. I still have a couple of my own; they’re in my office at home: Best Soloist trophy from 1985 Carteret Jazz Festival and the Verona Jazz Festival Outstanding Soloist Award.
The songbook, though, was an advanced repertoire compared to most other high school bands. Chan Kinchla, my future guitarist, was on the Princeton High School football team and remembers being mortified by this. At halftime the other team would have a marching band parade show, then we’d bring out a little stage and play Glenn Miller. Seeing our big band come out at halftime was not a source of pride or inspiration for the squad.
We played these aggressive competitive-style jazz songs with super-challenging time signatures, crazy-ass
solos, and ridiculous horn parts. They were all written by some asshole at a music college somewhere who saw a business in creating weird things for high school bands who wanted to participate in the competition circuit.
But even though Mr. B certainly could be intense, particularly when it came to the drummers, I escaped all of that. We’d play “Whiplash,” which Hank Levy wrote in 7/4, or “Chain Reaction,” which was in 13/8, and everyone else had to learn these very precise parts. But not me. I was free to make up what I wanted because there weren’t any harmonica parts written. There was no one to tell me if I was doing it wrong; there was no harmonica authority. There was a trumpet authority, there was a trombone authority, there were authorities for all the other instruments, but I had this great autonomy.
I was an attraction, and Mr. B would just point to me for a solo, and that’s all I had to do. I would watch my band leader yell at everybody else while I would just sit there. On the rare occasion when he did yell at me, it would be something vague like, “Could you make it a little more peppy?” or, more commonly, “Don’t be such a smartass.” That’s when I would excel; I would soar when they just left me alone. The key lesson was that there are times when you should fear authority, but you certainly don’t have to listen to it.
I took a clean, unused plunger to make a homemade harmonica amplifier and plugged it into a bass amp. I cut a larger hole into the end of the plunger where the stick normally goes in and wedged a tape recorder microphone into the contraption.
Then Mr. B put a few more rock songs into the repertoire within the confines he deemed acceptable. We did the Ghostbusters theme and “Lapti Nek,” the song they play in Jabba the Hurtt’s palace in Return of the Jedi, which was a funk in E-flat, so I could jam on that. My harmonica was a selling point for letting him do this, and instantly I went from being a weird mutant into being the big man on campus.
When you start out so antisocial, it’s a pretty lonely existence. I’d already made my peace with all of that. So to turn it around within the time I was in high school seemed to me like it was out of a movie. I felt like Molly Ringwald.
That band was the first team I ever belonged to. At first they didn’t know what to make of me—they thought I was an antisocial belligerent—but eventually we became friends. The first girl I ever fell in love with was the alto sax player. I would have a crush on her forever and write tons of songs about her.
But although that whole experience transformed me in many ways, the one thing it didn’t change was my attitude toward schoolwork.
It began all the way back in first grade when we were supposed to practice our writing. We were told to write something like “Today is Thursday” in the morning, and it would take me all day, so already I was pigeonholed. There were the Lippincott kids who would learn how to read stories and the SRA kids who were the morons. It was all about people deciding who you were and where they thought you belonged. They tested me and decided I was disgraphic, a form of dyslexia.
So for many years I would do my best—or my interpretation of my best—and at the end of the year they would advance me to the next grade. By the time I got to middle school, where there was more of a blind emphasis on grades, my parents started to take notice.
That was when my dad bought me my first shotgun. It was a single-shot Iver Johnson, and my dad told me we had made a sacred oath, and in exchange I would get good grades. He wanted to buy me the shotgun, and I really wanted the shotgun, but I was certain I was flunking and didn’t know how to tell him—I thought this was news best told by a report card. So he purchased it on the promise that I would get good grades. What I was thinking the whole time was, He’s going to find out my grades suck and I’m not going get the shotgun. But he bought it and unveiled it—“Here’s your shotgun because you got good grades!” Then he took a look at my report card and gave the shotgun to my little brother. Eventually I got my first shotgun, but it took years.
History repeated itself in the spring of 1983 when we moved to Princeton. We moved on my sixteenth birthday, and although the driving age in Connecticut was sixteen, it was seventeen in New Jersey. My parents felt terrible about this, so I used this guilt to get myself a moped—it was legal for me to ride it by myself even though I couldn’t drive a car for another year. I had wanted a mini-bike since I was a kid, so I thought, This is crazy—I get a moped. New Jersey’s wonderful!
But it was all on the condition that my grades improve. So I thought, Oh no, here we go again. I brought home my report card, and suddenly my little brother got to ride the moped. He was too young to ride it on the road but was allowed to ride it in the yard, and of course, he crashed it the first day. He didn’t really hurt it, but when I finally had my chance in the fall, the little basket was already bent.
The new school year always came with optimism, at least for my parents, but nothing much changed for me. I had, by now, made my own sacred vow not to do any homework.
What I found was that I did okay, especially in English and history, when I listened to everybody talk the next day. I would take in the class discussion, and when that ran dry I would be interesting or distracting. The teacher might ask, “Does anybody know the theme behind the Godfather?” and I would sing it, and that would crack the class up. I’d be the funny guy, and it would also take the teacher out of his lesson, slowing everybody down and catching me up. Then if I really didn’t know what else to say, I would challenge everyone else, and as long as I could interject something interesting, the teacher would get caught up in it as well. So we’d still have a nice conversation and we’d all learn something; it just might not be something from the lesson plan.
My only problem was that in science and math class this approach didn’t work at all. I can still remember one of the questions in chemistry: “What is the definition of work?” There was some sort of equation involving energy times something, but I wrote, “Work is the accomplishment of doing something.” I thought that was a perfectly acceptable answer, but the teacher didn’t agree.
I would be so behind that I didn’t even want to be in front. My parents would get me a tutor, so I’d make friends with the tutor and then the tutor would do my work for me. If I were behind in English, I’d work on it with my mom and give dictation, which was great.
I also learned another neat trick about education, which is if you keep getting F’s, they eventually become meaningless. The teachers would say, “He’s not being taught right” or “He’s not properly motivated.” Then they’d give me some sort of catch-up make-up test, and I’d get my mom to do it when I was young or my smart tutor when I was in high school, and that worked just like a dream.
Another riff on that same idea is if you get a detention then skip that detention. They’ll give you another detention and then you skip that one. Eventually you get so many detentions that you can’t be there to do all these detentions and then you’re free.
Going to school with two working parents and a working moped gave me another kind of freedom as well. In the morning I would go to band practice, and then around second period I would disappear on my moped. I would cruise by the supermarket, grab some canned ravioli and some Pop-Tarts, go home, and watch my videotape of Letter-man from the night before. It was a great way to spend my time. Little did I know I was doing career research.
During my junior year, we were only allowed to have eighteen absences, and I had fifty-five. If you just keep skipping, eventually they have to work something out with you. You don’t go straight to being flunked out unless they genuinely don’t care about you. That’s the thing: they cared about me enough not to kick me out of school, but they still didn’t know what to do with me.
There had been a contract I signed with the help of my guidance counselor that was supposedly with the superintendent. I promised I would work really hard so I would pass. But my guidance counselor had a baby, and her replacement hadn’t quite understood that this contract was supposed to be taken seriously. The new guidance counselor thought
I had committed to trying harder, but what I had actually agreed to was that if I had any more absences, I would be expelled from school. This gave me carte blanche for some time to skip classes, apologize, get detentions, and then skip those detentions. It worked for quite a while.
But finally there was a meeting with all of my teachers, my mom, and the principal. What was I to do when I was finally confronted by all of these people I had been lying to, who had now gathered in the same room? My first instinct was to identify the factions. Half of them wanted to punish me and half wanted to punish the system. Well, how was I supposed to feel when I was getting these mixed messages? I started them on arguing with each other. The only person who got what I was doing was my history teacher. He was looking over at me, shaking his head, laughing, and the next day he said to me, “I saw you in that meeting. You’re going to do just fine in this world.”
Eventually it all caught up with me—sort of. They gave me the choice to work really, really hard and graduate with my original class or, as I heard it, I could relax and repeat junior year. This wasn’t much of a choice for me. My parents were against it, but I said, “Wait, did you say I could relax?”—again, missing the point. It’s all about figuring out what motivates a kid, because if you’re going to be motivated for a kid, all you’re going to be doing is striking a stubborn mule. You’ll hurt your hand and nothing will happen except that you’ll ensure that the homework will remain undone.
Eventually they decided to let me graduate. I got so good at one weird little thing that the school let me out with less than the required credits. You needed a hundred credits to graduate, and my bass player Bobby did it with ninety-eight. That’s pretty good, but I did it with ninety-four. That became a badge of honor.
