by John Popper
Where I try to draw a line is Alanis Morissette. I can hear her breaking the harmonica when she puts it in her mouth. There’s a track she did, “Hand in My Pocket,” and I can hear the reeds breaking during the harmonica solo. They’re not meant to be blown that hard, and I’m arguably the only person who hears it every time that song is played. It’s like, “For a solo we’re going to smash this violin against the window”—that’s the sound I hear when I hear that song.
I think it was Bob Dylan who lowered the expectation of what a harmonica is supposed to do. Dylan never captured my imagination on the harmonica for a second; he was just somebody breathing in and out—he taught a generation to just breathe in and out on the harmonica. But I think that was a fair price we paid for Dylan’s songwriting contributions, which opened up everybody’s head.
I think he was looking at the harmonica the way Woody Guthrie did, which was that anybody can pick up a harmonica; it was sort of like a mouth zither or an autoharp, and it’s a very vox populi kind of instrument. That’s the way you would play if you bought a harmonica and were singing to your family in your house before there was popular music on the radio. Dylan not only informalized the performance; he made it more intimate. I think we owe that to him.
Dylan did it for the entire world, and one of his points was, “I don’t have to be a meticulous technical musician. I can always be of the people and have a human experience with my music.” In his songwriting you can hear the brilliance, but in the harmonica not so much. But he’s using it to sell that point.
I can use speed to catch everyone’s attention, but what I really learned from all the bebop players is that what’s important is a melodic phrase and that leads to scales. You want to expand your vocabulary, and that means you want some discipline on your instrument that takes you far away from Dylan’s approach to it.
You need to open yourself up to melody. That way you’re actually saying something with all that vocabulary. If you got nothing to offer but chops, you’re just reading the dictionary really fast.
5
BUCKING THE ESTABLISHMENT
While I was still in the JV/Nassau Band at Princeton High School, Mr. Biancosino kept telling us that we should form groups of our own together outside of school. He loved to lecture us. Mr. B was a great guy but kind of nuts.
So in the fall of 1983 I approached the drummer for the Nassau Band and asked him whether he wanted to get together and rehearse. He was a freshman, only thirteen years old, but he was up for it. His name was Brendan Hill, and that was the beginning of Blues Traveler.
We called ourselves The Establishment and played in Brendan’s parents’ basement—you always go where the drum set is. Along with Brendan, we had his brother Sebastian on bass and this guy Levi on guitar. We would play Police and Tears for Fears covers, the Euro-punk-sounding shit that was going around in the eighties, and I kept asking when we could play a song with a harmonica in it. So to appease me, we’d do a twelve-bar blues, and it was terrible. Still, this was the first time I was in an actual band that would actually rehearse, and that part of it was cool.
The Establishment never played anywhere other than the Hills’ basement, although we talked about having gigs. I kept challenging us to try something new, and Brendan agreed, but we took a lot of wrong turns to get there. Mr. B was impressing upon us to be good players, and his bands were very jazz oriented, so at one point I thought it would be great to have Sebastian’s girlfriend sing. We gave that a go and did “Greensleeves,” for God’s sake. Brendan was ready to hang himself. It was terrible.
Then at some point Sebastian and Brendan agreed to try something else. I think they got into the energy of what I was now doing with the varsity/Studio band and liked the harmonica. So that spring we got rid of Levi and began writing our own songs.
I decided we should call ourselves Blues Band. My thinking was that this is going to be what we are—we’re going to play blues.
To some degree I think the name was sparked by the fact that my older sister Emily and I had always talked about forming a band. When we were little kids my younger brother, Ted, got a Bugs Bunny drum kit, so we decided to call ourselves the Bugs Bunny Band. Emily would be the manager, and she promised us ten candy bars a month. We never received our full allotment of candy bars, but then again, we never played a gig. It was in this spirit that my sister and I toyed with the idea of the $1.98 Blues Band. I think that’s what put the name Blues Band in my head. Of course, I may have been influenced by the Blues Brothers there as well.
The problem with Blues Band was that the Blues Brothers had Matt “Guitar” Murphy and Steve “The Colonel” Cropper. We didn’t. We replaced Levi with the only guitarist we could find, and he was horrible. David had been in the Nassau Band, but eventually he came to Studio Band because Princeton was literally out of guitarists. At the beginning of one song he had to do a simple trill, and he just couldn’t do it. He’d mess it up in the middle, and it would almost be adorable if it weren’t so annoying. He was there when we needed a guitarist—there was a real dry spell—but like Mr. B, I was really hard on him. Eventually we replaced him with someone we’ll call Mr. Y, who wasn’t very good either. There was just an amazing shortage of guitarists at the time.
In early 1985, the winter of my second junior year, we expanded to a five piece with a new vocalist. Chris Gross was the guy I knew in English class, and we hit it off pretty much right away. We were sixteen or seventeen, and all we did was talk about songwriting.
I can still remember this song he wrote about working at Thomas Sweet, the ice cream place on Nassau Street.
Scooping at Thomas Sweet
don’t ya know I’m pretty neat
Scooping at Thomas sweet
where the work is hard and the pay is beat
I work all night to the broad daylight
Let’s scoop, scoop, scoop on
We’d go off into the Herrontown Woods in Princeton and smoke pot and write songs, and he was really my songwriting counterpart. The lyrics I was writing—and I still have this problem—took too long to get there. But Chris could really get to the hook really quickly and really cleverly. Sometimes he would get a little wordy and I would be a little more to the point, but that was the counterbalance we had.
I think it was inevitable that he would play with my band, so we asked him.
The problem was that we were way too rigid for him. We had band uniforms—we decided on blue jeans, a white shirt, and a thin black tie. It was, again, a little homage to the Blues Brothers. I was also borrowing from Studio Band, where we had uniforms.
Chris hated the uniforms. He would wear his tie around his head while he sang the Thomas Sweet song with us and a couple of other songs he wrote. Another problem was that in the middle of the set he would jump off stage with that characteristic Chris Barron leap and start dancing with a girl he liked. Also, he wouldn’t show up to band meetings, and we were so rigid about rules and stuff that everyone agreed I had to fire him.
A few years ago I said to him, “Man, we were so uptight back then,” and he responded, “You know, I’ve been waiting for decades for you to say that.” Even with all that happened in the Spin Doctors, he wanted me to acknowledge that we were too uptight when he joined Blues Band. And yes, we were. It was true.
After Brendan’s brother graduated from high school in 1985, my friend Felicia, who played violin in the orchestra, became our bass player. She was the little sister of our friend Ben and was well on her way to Yale, but she agreed to do us a favor, thinking it would be kind of fun. She gave it hell, and we all liked her, but she really was not a good bass player. She took a bass solo in our demo that . . . well . . . let me just say that every bass solo Felicia played was a testimony to her friendship and loyalty to us.
Both Felicia and Brendan agreed we needed to get rid of Mr. Y. Whenever he would start to solo, he would drool uncontrollably, and I can’t stress this enough—uncontrollably, because there was no method to his dro
oling. The drool would come of its own volition and wouldn’t stop until well after he was done. It was an odd nervous tic, and I’ve never seen anything like it before or since. He would start going, and Felicia couldn’t stop laughing. Brendan had seen this guy Chan Kinchla playing in the practice booth at school and said we had to get him. So Brendan asked him, and when Chan showed up, he was pretty sloppy. But he was also the first guitarist we had who actually could make a phrase, a confident loud phrase, and when he’d do his spiel he’d keep going. That became the final lineup for Blues Band—Brendan, Chan, Felicia, and myself.
When we replaced Mr. Y with Chan, having found a real guitar player so we could become the band that we now are, Mr. Y became so despondent that he decided to kill himself. He ate an entire box of Clorox bleach powder, figuring he would die after beating Chan in a guitar duel at the Spring Fling that we were playing at our high school. So he came up to us in his cool Stevie Ray Vaughan hat and said, “Mind if I sit in?” We were late setting up our gear so we said, “No, we’re really busy.” So because he couldn’t sit in, he had to go throw up the Clorox he ate, so we inadvertently saved his life. We ignored him into a suicidal state and then we ignored him back to life.
We played a few actual gigs as Blues Band. Some of them were in school or at parties, but our first professional gig was at John and Peter’s in New Hope, Pennsylvania. We got $200 and six people showed up. Those six people were our parents. It wasn’t even our friends—it was our parents. My parents couldn’t make it because they were working, but the other six parents were there. I have a tape of the show, and you can hear them all laughing. They were the only ones in the room as we played.
Chan was the first person in the band I couldn’t physically intimidate, and there were plenty of alpha-male moments when he would just be contradictory, but he could play. It became so much more fun with him—he was a real student of Jimmy Page. He came in, and at first he had no control, but because we all had way too much control, that was the perfect balance.
As soon as he started ripping I immediately began thinking, How am I going to control this guy? because I was such a control freak. The good news is that when it came to the music, he was starved for information—all he wanted to do was play better. He never wanted to slack when it came to playing music. He did like drinking beer, though, and he kept bringing it to rehearsal and eventually got us all in trouble with Brendan’s mom.
All of our parents were really helpful, although Brendan’s parents bore the brunt of having the band there because that’s just how it is for the drummer’s parents. Brendan was born in London of Irish parents, and his mom and dad had all these tea cups and china sets because they really took their tea time seriously. Everything would rattle when we were playing because we were under their kitchen. The basement was also surrounded by pipes covered in asbestos, and I kept smacking my head into them. I still wonder whether I can get some workman’s comp out of that.
I should also mention that my parents would let everyone in our house drink because none of us did it very much. So our liquor closet was always open, and when Brendan and Chan discovered this, it became a feeding frenzy. I remember one time Chan took a fifth of Jack Daniel’s and drank it. My dad eventually noticed it was missing and came to me to ask what happened. I told him I didn’t know, and he insisted that Chan get him another bottle of Jack Daniel’s. This was how my dad thought, even though Chan was seventeen.
But then I came downstairs one day and found our cleaning lady’s brother passed out on the floor in our basement next to many bottles of booze. I thought he was dead. As a result, because now my father couldn’t prove that Chan had been responsible for the missing Jack Daniel’s, he had to go out and buy Chan a bottle. To this day this is one of Chan’s favorite moments of vindication: when my fifty-something-year-old dad had to buy him some whiskey . . . even though Chan had pilfered it in the first place. I remember another night Chan showed up at my house completely drunk. He kept saying, “Let’s call our album Felicia’s Hairy Butthole,” because he was drunk and wanted to be disruptive. He was with Brendan, and I told them to meet me at the bowling alley because my mom was in the other room. But I had no intention of meeting them. As it turned out they hitched a ride to the bowling alley and were stuck out on Route 1. So they called me late at night, and I was so mad at them when I picked them up to take them home, I said, “I don’t want to hear one word out of either of you motherfuckers,” and Chan goes, “John . . .” To this day he claims he was going to apologize, but I slammed on the breaks, did a total high school skid out, and I yelled, “That’s it! Get out of my car!” Brendan said, “But I didn’t do anything!” And he didn’t. He had just followed Chan because he wanted to go bowling, but I left them there on the highway and went home.
There was also an incident when Chan was thwacking the back of my head while I was driving. So I pulled over the car and said, “I am not leaving unless you get out of the car or promise you will not hit me if I’m driving.” Then after a long bit of arguing, we were philosophizing and he said, “John, I promise I won’t hit you unless you’re driving,” and I said “Okay.” So I drove away and then he started taunting me, “Ha ha, I said unless.” So I pulled over again and went to look for a road sign to get him out of my car with (the thought process was still forming, but I likely would have used the sign to scoop or poke him out of the car, much like getting a grizzly to rear up on its hindquarters in order to spear a vital area and perhaps land a decisive blow. The key with a larger, stronger opponent is never to swing wide; they will always catch the implement and likely hit you with it). Eventually he apologized, but when it came to the music, he was always serious.
There was this moment early on when Chan, Brendan, and I got really stoned and played in the basement for what seemed like twenty minutes, but in actuality three hours had gone by and we taped it all on Brendan’s sister’s Fisher Price tape recorder. That was the first time we got high and really let loose.
Then we went across the street where we could smoke cigarettes because we had to hide all of this from Brendan’s mom. And while we were listening to it, this black cat walked up to us and hung out with us. So we called it the Black Cat Jam, and that’s where our mascot of the black cat came from. A lot of our early songs came out of that jam too—“Sweet Talking Hippie,” “But Anyway,” and “Mulling It Over.” I wrote a poem about it called “Black Cat Blues,” and we recorded a version of it later with a really slow pocket because we’d already plumbed the grooves we had from the original jam by that point.
Around this time we began sneaking into Princeton University to play frat parties and eating clubs. One time this college kid came up to me and said, “I know what you’re thinking—rich white kid exploiting your music.” I didn’t want to tell him that my dad was VP at Squibb and I lived up the street and that I think I’m Caucasian as well. So instead I said, “I hear you man,” because that’s what he wanted—you just learn what role to play.
But I would never suggest I was anything but a white kid from the suburbs. One thing I’ve always felt is essential is to keep it true. I wasn’t going try to talk about the blues in some stereotypical way, like I was James Cotton in some juke joint in the 1950s. I will never know what that experience was like. I can’t fathom what James Cotton went through, all anyone can know is their own experience.
I think that’s also why I came to value songwriting, which became important. If I just went for chops I think I would have gone the way of Joe Satriani where people know my quantity and think, Okay he does that, and it would pretty much be my only function. This way I can be more than a harmonica meme.
They say that Paul Butterfield, who was one of the best ever in my estimation, died on a bar stool trying to convince someone he was Paul Butterfield. That is the fate of a harmonica player—no matter how good you are, you’re a harmonica player. The way around that is to write songs, and because I’m a songwriter, I don’t ever have to just be a harmonica pla
yer. But being a songwriter allows me to put that harmonica in weird places, and that allows me to surprise and to think in terms of melodies.
During my senior year the space shuttle Challenger crashed. I wrote a song about it for my English class called “Ain’t That Life.” Picture a seventeen-year-old telling you about life. All of my songs went about ten verses too long, and this one had a very sappy bridge:
A newborn kitten freezes
While two young lovers part
And maybe right here some sucker
Could be taking this song to heart
It was a bit juvenile, but they had me come in and sing it for the PTA. I could smell that they didn’t know how to talk to the kids about the space shuttle disaster. I was really good at honing in on stuff like that. People were traumatized, and the teachers really wanted to connect with students. I loved it when teachers wanted to connect with students—they were easy prey. I didn’t have to do any homework senior year; I just got an A for writing a song about the space shuttle blowing up.
Later, at the New School, I had to take one English class, and again I didn’t do any work, then I busted out this space shuttle song around Christmas and passed. I remember thinking it was good because everyone I sang it for thought it was so deep and moving. But then I tried it out in New York to some girl in her twenties, and she laughed in the middle of it. I remember thinking all of the demoralizing things a young man would feel at that point, but at heart I was like, Yeah, she’s right. I knew it was lame. To be fair, it was a high school assignment gone awry that I had milked for two years, but it had finally hit the ceiling in that moment. I was humiliated but also thought, This is why I came to New York. It’s time to put away the stupid bullshit you can get away with and do something real.
