Suck and Blow

by John Popper

  Their attitude was, “Let’s just let him out of here.” They wouldn’t have done that if I were headed to bank robbery or petty crime, but they knew that I was smart and that there was no way I was going to independently pass a chemistry test. So what were they supposed to do? Make me sit there until I was thirty-five? I remember when I got my diploma there was the largest round of applause, and it was mostly from the teachers. I think I kind of broke them down, and it was, strangely, effortless, primarily because I knew of no other way to get through it.

  What I’m best at is avoiding work, and I worked very hard at it.

  4

  TOO MANY NOTES

  After we moved to Princeton I began spending hours in the basement with the harmonica. I was happy to do that because I never saw it as work as long as no one was telling me what to do.

  It started in Stamford when my friend Tom Brown introduced me to Saturday Night Live, which led to me discovering the Blues Brothers. My first goal was to play like Dan Aykroyd. I remember somebody said that Dan Aykroyd sounded like Paul Butterfield, so I went to get a Paul Butterfield album at the Princeton Record Exchange—it was the double album, Live. Shortly after I took it home, I loved it so much that I attempted to kiss the album, dropped it, and, in the process, broke it. But I had the other disc, so I played “Drifting and Drifting” every morning. I woke up and I learned the solo to the live “Drifting and Drifting,” note for note.

  Paul Butterfield was doing Elmore James and John Lee Hooker tunes, which got me fascinated with those guys. But when I heard Jimi Hendrix do “Voodoo Chile,” both the full one and “Slight Return,” that’s when I knew what I wanted to do for a living. That was when I stopped wanting to be a comedian—because there was a sound Hendrix was getting that I’d never heard before and I had to make that sound happen on the harmonica.

  With my lips I could do anything. My fingers sucked; I could never make my fingers do what I wanted to do on the cello or the piano or the guitar. But my face could always generate the sound I was after. I felt a link to Hendrix in that way because he really seemed to be able to get any sound he wanted. When you hear a Hendrix solo, you feel that he was only limited by his ears.

  I first really listened to Hendrix at my friend Steve’s apartment on 16th Street between 7th and 8th Avenues in Chelsea. I’d known him since first grade, and he had moved from Stamford into this little shit-box apartment with his mom. We’d smoke pot and then play Hendrix and Santana records—about fifteen years later when I inducted Carlos into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame, I described first listening to “Oye Como Va” and seeing God.

  Around the time when I was still playing trumpet in the beginner band, Steve and I started a rock group with Zach Throne, who also lived in the city (and would later become a professional musician). We’d hang out at Zach’s father’s apartment. Zach’s dad was a character actor, Malachi Throne, who was in the unaired Star Trek pilot, which later became part of the episode called “The Menagerie.” That was his big claim to fame, at least in our minds, so we called ourselves Menagerie. We later changed it to Beggerman Thief. It was a saxophone, a guitar, and a harmonica, but all we really did was smoke pot and fantasize about the limousine we’d have someday.

  I’d get on the bus from Princeton, and I remember bringing the trumpet case one time—back when I was still playing in the beginner band—and putting it on the escalator at the Port Authority. It wedged in there, stopping the whole escalator, and the case broke. I then had to carry around the trumpet case tied together with a belt. So that really wasn’t going so well.

  However, I was really progressing on the harmonica. I spent months in my basement with the TV at half volume and me at full volume. I would just go through the rudiments and was applying what I’d hear in band class—that’s a fifth, that’s a third—and was really getting it. Then I was trying to sound like Eddie Van Halen’s “Eruption.” I kept trying to do these intervals faster and faster. I would spend hours at it each day, and it never felt like work; it felt like play, which was interesting to me.

  My sister started to hide the harmonica because I was driving everyone nuts. I learned to do three notes because of the “Eruption” finger tapping, and then I learned a sextuplet phrase. In my head I would say, “The O’Shaughnessy Cage”—that was the phonetic pattern—and once I learned to play that fast, I just changed my position with that same pattern and started moving around and keeping it to triplets or sextuplets as I needed. I developed this technique over the course of a year and a half.

  This was long before I was learning to play full melodies, but it was a beginning, and that was already more than anyone had figured out how to do on a blues harp. I’d already discovered something truly unique, and I was only seventeen years old. I kept it up, and pretty soon not only would I be as fast as anybody; I would also have my own sound. That should be the goal on any instrument—to make a sound that’s just like you.

  The caliber of blues harmonica in New York during this era was terrible. In Chicago, however, you had Sugar Blue. I saw him when I was in high school and drank five gin and tonics and still walked away sober. He was the first guy I saw go up on those high notes, so I went home and started working on those. The problem with Sugar back then was that he was on drugs, so he was hit or miss. But when he was on, he was an amazing player.

  A couple of years later, when I started playing out in New York, I began to run into these traditionalists who thought the harmonica had to keep the vocabulary established in the 1940s. They thought it should sound the way James Cotton played it because he was the last guy to play with Muddy Waters. For them, that was as far as the harmonica could go, and anything more was blasphemy.

  They would hear me play and then would tell me things that were straight out of the movie Amadeus. They told me I used too many notes. I wanted to ask them which notes I should lose. Or they would say, “You’ve got to learn about tone, son.” Or they’d give me an antiquated saying or colloquialism to shut me down or get me in line behind them. Their initial reaction to me was one of fear.

  So at these jam sessions I would be as nice as I could until we got on stage, where I would then beat the shit out of them. They didn’t know what to do with me. Almost immediately my approach was completely different, and I smacked the cowboy shit out of them. When the song was over I would be completely oblivious—“I don’t even know what happened”—and they would just stare at me like there was a weird light around me. I let them look at me that way because every time I listened to them, they were trying to stop me. I’d run into that before in high school—if there’s any kind of unique approach, the first reaction is to shut you down, and I’ve never encountered that more than in the harmonica-playing community.

  I remember Robert Bonfiglio, who plays classical harmonica with symphony orchestras, called my parents and warned them, “People will try to stop him.” I thought he was nuts, but he actually kind of called it. We met on a gig, a Chuck Wagon commercial my teacher got me when I was a student at the New School. For some reason, he was playing the jaw harp and I was playing the harmonica, even though he could have played the harmonica, and he invited me to the Harmonica Club. They would meet on Wednesday and talk about “harmonica issues” and “harmonica rights,” and I noticed that he would twitch a little whenever he said harmonica. I just knew, Don’t ever go to this place. Whatever you do, never go there. I sensed rituals involving a paddle and hood.

  I also got a feel for the politics of the scene, and I knew that if I was outside of it, they’d have to like me because they couldn’t dismiss me—in fact, they would need me. So I wouldn’t go to the harmonica clinics and talk about harmonica rights. They invited me to speak once and I sent them a stripper instead. I took that one out of the Bill Graham playbook.

  Bill Graham was once called into a meeting by other promoters and because he liked the mafia sense of it, in the middle of the meeting he had a bunch of guys run in wearing suits and hats and carrying violin cases
. They swarmed into the meeting and asked him, “Boss, are you okay?” Bill waved his hand, said, “It’s alright,” and they left. I loved his theatrics, but the best I could do was muster up a stripper. Where Bill wanted to be a mafia don, I elected to be the Joker.

  I wanted to look at my instrument like you would a trombone or an electric guitar. There was no trombone club. Nobody was meeting to discuss electric guitar issues. There shouldn’t be clubs for specific instruments like they’re factions. I don’t want to feel like a persecuted lost tribe of the music world. The harmonica is an instrument, not a religion.

  The other thing I eventually learned was not to turn everything into a duel. I can hurt a lot of people, but I’ve done that, and again, it’s just like treating the harmonica like it’s part of that lost tribe. If you go around always trying to outplay other people, you’ll be a chophound and that’s all you’ll ever be.

  Jason Ricci is an awesome harp player. He’s someone who plays very differently from me, and I love that, but people always want to compare the two of us or put him in opposition to me. He’s that other harp player. There’s this harmonica documentary, Pocket Full of Soul, where because of that dueling culture, people want him to talk about me. You can tell he’s sick of it but has to acknowledge me, so it’s a big pain in the butt.

  One time when I was still in high school Blues Traveler was invited to back George Jr., who was playing the Princeton reunion with Pine-top Perkins. He had this harmonica player Bill Dicey with him, and Bill gave me the whole too-many-notes-you-got-to-learn-about-tone speech.

  Cut to a few years later in New York City around 1990. Blues Traveler had become a big deal, and I was a hotshot in New York City. We were in the Nightingale Bar in the East Village, and somebody came in and said, “Bill Dicey is playing next door at the Dan Lynch Blues Bar.” Well, I’m remembering the whole little speech he gave me, so I said, “Oh is he?”

  So I walked next door to sit in with him, and no one could have turned me away. He saw me, and I could detect the worried look come over his face. I asked him whether I could sit in, and he said somewhat meekly, “Okay, okay, the second set.” I’m sure he could see the look on my face, which was, Ho ho ho, let’s have some fun! Because by then my style was quite acceptable. In fact, it could be said that people were freaking out over it and really loved it. And he was trying his best—I could heard his game go up—but in the end he was very ordinary, a standard blues harp player from the 1980s.

  He was doing his thing, and I was sitting there, waiting for my turn to kill him, because at that point I was very good at assassinating people in jam sessions. I was like a professional killer. I approached it like a mafia hit man: “Hello, I will be murdering you tonight.” Then I’d put the gun to your neck, right behind the temple, and pull the trigger. I’d leave the body somewhere convenient, walk away, and get a good night’s sleep. It was that kind of playing.

  But as I was sitting there, I looked around, and the whole crowd was loving what they were hearing. They were rocking out because that was all the music they’d heard, this standard blues kind of show. So I started thinking that once I hurt this guy, I was going to leave, and they would say to themselves, “Well, he’s not really as good as I thought.” I’d done that before. I’d played with people, and the audience was wowed, and then they’d feel the letdown, especially if I wanted them to feel the letdown. So I started thinking about the people in the audience—how they weren’t going to have as much fun and it was really going to deflate the whole show—and I just left.

  I walked back to Nightingale’s, and my band was waiting, asking, “Did you hurt him?” I said no and explained why. Bob Sheehan said, “I’m proud of you.” I remember that as the first time I didn’t act like the harp player who always had to go and protect his turf, like I’m the king-shit harp player here. I’m glad I broke the cycle.

  I’ve been fortunate to play with some amazing harp players over the years—like Lee Oskar, and he’s good, he’s got enough accolades, he’s confident, and all that—but when you get two harp players together, there’s still this impulse to duel.

  I was always looking for Sugar Blue in Chicago, and when I finally met him—we had an interview for Musician magazine—I purposely left my harmonicas someplace else. I didn’t bring them because I didn’t want to be known as that harmonica player who always had to duel.

  I’ll occasionally relapse, though. I’ve known Galactic for twenty years, and I was recently doing a song with them and saw Ben Ellman play harmonica for the first time. So I took him aside and asked, “How come I’ve never heard you play before? You sound so different from me and you’re really good.”

  He told me, “Well, I did play for you once. You were sitting in front of the stage at this little club where we were playing, and I kept inviting you up. You shook me off, but I kept asking. Eventually you agreed, and you proceeded to destroy me on the harmonica, then you handed me the mic and said, ‘Don’t ever do that again.’” After I heard this I thought, Wow, I’m such a badass but also kind of a dick.

  I will bust Ivan Neville for what happened in 2006 at Warren Haynes’s Christmas Jam. Ivan was doing the musical directing, and I was there along with Mickey Raphael from Willie Nelson’s band and Taylor Hicks from American Idol, who is a perfectly nice guy. Ivan saw the three of us and had this devilish idea. He said, “You know, we could do a three-way harmonica jam with you and Mickey and Taylor Hicks.” And as he said the name “Taylor Hicks,” he gave me a look like, You know what to do, John. You know exactly what to do. So I responded, “Yeah, we could,” like, Don’t worry, boss, I’m on it. I got this. I went to Mickey and explained, “Our job, which we will deny, is to hurt this man. We’re going to do a three-way trade-off. Play as hard and as elaborately as you can.”

  Poor Taylor did not know what hit him. Mickey would take a solo, then I would take one, pushing each other as hard as we could. Then Taylor would come on and honk as hard as he could, and one of these things was not like the other. It was a Taylor Hicks torture session. He was trapped and could not get out of it.

  In October of 1995 I learned that James Cotton wanted to sit in with Blues Traveler. Back when I was a senior in high school, James Cotton played a set of his own at the Princeton Reunion. I snuck in to watch him do his harmonica thing, and after he was done I sat down next to him. I already knew I played weird. I’d never heard anybody who played like me. So I asked, “Mr. Cotton, can you let me know what you think of this?” I played as hard as I could, my Eddie Van Halen-est, and he looked at me and asked, “You got any pot?” I said, “No.” So he told me, “Then I don’t want to talk to you.”

  That would have been a great story except three months earlier a friend of mine in high school, Chris Gross, who would later become known as Chris Barron when he was in the Spin Doctors, had gone to a James Cotton show. Chris told me that the same thing happened. He tried to speak with James Cotton, who then asked him if he had any pot. Chris said no, and James Cotton said, “Then I don’t want to talk to you.” So it turned out James Cotton had given me his stock thing.

  Then in 1995 Blues Traveler was in Memphis, and James Cotton wanted to come out and play with us. He had been in Muddy Waters’s band from the mid-fifties through the late sixties. He plays a style he helped cultivate, but in my opinion it’s really Little Walter’s style. Little Walter was definitely an innovator. He was the first one to put the microphone to the harmonica, and when he left the band, James Cotton was forced to play an imprint of Little Walter. So James Cotton had some shoes to fill, and he maintained the expectations of the harp in an electric blues setting that had been there since the forties.

  But one thing I knew in 1995 is that I could house James Cotton. I remember what happened in Princeton, and I said to myself, “He may be nearly seventy, but I’m going to hurt this old man.” And the fun part was he went up there and was as James Cotton-y as James Cotton could be. The crowd loved it, and I didn’t want to hurt him. We had a great ti
me together. And that’s the thing: you have to be honest. That’s what works and that’s exactly what he did. I had waited years for the chance to hurt James Cotton, but I couldn’t hurt him with all my power because he was James Cotton.

  One of the players I love playing with is Charlie Musselwhite. I’ve always had harmonica players trying to outdo me somehow or show me their chops because I have this overpowering way of playing that they think requires a response. And Charlie Musselwhite was the first guy who still just played like himself. He had plenty of chops that were so tasty that I wouldn’t attempt to do them, and we would play together. It was so easy and really fun.

  But when it comes to less technically proficient players, what I’ve come to accept over the years is that if somebody picks up a harmonica and they’re playing what I happen think is lousy but the audience doesn’t seem to mind, then I shouldn’t let it bother me.

  I recently saw my first Bruce Springsteen concert, and he’s a terrible harmonica player. But am I really going to go, “No, no, sorry, everyone—that’s no good.” He’s rocking the house with that crappy harmonica. I think it’s really an eye-of-the-beholder situation. Are people enjoying it? That to me is what determines what’s good and bad. There is a technical aspect that I could become anal about and fixated on. I do think you have to look at it like a technician, but what I think is important about a musician like Neil Young, for instance, is that the harmonica he’s playing serves a purpose.

  The guys in my band do a great impression of me trying to enjoy Neil Young’s harmonica playing. I’m making this expression as if to say, Oooh, you almost got it. But the fact is he’s doing something that’s effective.

  I know what I can make a harmonica do, but if that’s your only objective, you’re not going to connect with people. Then again, if you’re a total slob on the harmonica, you won’t be able to do anything people notice. You really have to balance that out, which requires awareness.