Suck and Blow

by John Popper

  Back in high school I also wrote a song called “Honesty and Love” for Sarah, the first alto sax in the Studio Band. That one I submitted to my creative writing class because if you’re going to write a song, it might as well be homework too. But my teacher kept telling me to revise it—she asked me to knock out about half the verses. I remember thinking, How dare you! Which verses? At the time I thought she was so full of herself. She seemed like one of these small-minded people who thought everything she said was brilliant, but I have to admit she was right about one thing: revise, revise, revise. In my mind everything I wrote was gold, but the thing is, if you revise properly, you’re bringing the gold out that’s being worn into the ground by your inability to shut the hell up.

  I wrote “And So It Goes” on a Casiotone with the electric rhythm section and the drum-fill button. I stole the bass line and timed out the fills that Brendan would have to do later. My voice hadn’t even changed yet, but it was about my “wisdom.” We worked that one for a couple of decades, so I guess I owe Casio a royalty.

  There was another one I would pluck out on the piano, this really annoying, poorly executed Bach homage. I used two fingers and the sustain pedal so it sounded all echoey. It had nice songwriter form, but I was ripping off so many pop songs from the seventies, Carpenters kind of songs that were prevalent in the suburbs. I remember it was the first time that girls would talk to me because I was the weird kid. One of them said, “You know, when I heard you play that song, that’s when I realized there was more to you.” She didn’t want to have sex with me or anything, of course, but we became friends.

  So even if Blues Band had some cheesy, formulaically written original songs, at least we had original songs. We had ambition, we had confidence, and soon we had a new bass player and a new name.

  When I went off to the New School in the fall of 1986, the rest of the band was still in Princeton High School. We decided to keep the band going and I’d come back to rehearse and do laundry. One of these times I heard a rumor that we’d fired Felicia and that this major Deadhead Bob Sheehan was now our bassist. I had met him a couple of times—he kept showing up with his bass—and we let him sit in with us at a school homecoming dance.

  The rumor kept circulating, and eventually Felicia said, “You know, I don’t really want to do this anyway.” She stepped aside happily and Bobby was in the band—it was kind of like he talked himself in. He knew we were the best band around for what he wanted to do.

  Now, I can’t confirm or deny that Bob Sheehan started that rumor, and we will indeed never know how it came to be known that Blues Band had fired their bassist and replaced her with the King of the Deadheads Bob Sheehan, but I do find it interesting.

  What happened next was we took a lot more acid, smoked a lot more pot, and sounded better, at least to us. We needed an acid test, and we did one of those in New York City. It had rust-colored-carpeted walls—imagine tripping balls in a room with rust-colored-carpeted walls.

  My friend Steve came to play and trip with us on the saxophone, so picture five absolute maniacs throbbing on one chord over and over again with occasional flurries of individual expression. This must have gone on for five or six hours at top volume, and I suffer to think what people must have thought when they walked by. The rust-colored carpet kept everything in a Van Gogh painting, while we took the Black Cat Jam—that one-chord vamp with lots of pockets in it—and brought it to a new echelon of throb.

  I would recommend to any jamming band that they trip some serious balls once, maybe twice. I think it’s useful a couple of times. Is it useful all that time? That depends on you.

  We were locked in an overcrowded, very furry room, and there was nothing but the music. In that era the band would play two-chord songs—we’d get a groove and beat it to death. But when you’re tripping, it’s amazing how stuff comes out of nowhere and starts to connect to other stuff. If there’s anything I remember from that jam, it was how we would segue into other parts of the jam and into a melody. When you play in a band where you’ve had this sort of acid test, you connect in these ways and can always recall that connection. Something really important happened to us that day. I still have the tape somewhere.

  There were two kinds of musicians coming out of Princeton High School, the kind Mr. B loved and the kind he hated. Brendan and I were in Studio Band, which Mr. B cared about, despite the abuse Brendan got from him. He saw good things for us, and we shared a lot of favoritism in Studio Band. But as far as Mr. B was concerned, Chan and Bobby were potheads, and Mr. B put anyone he didn’t need in a practice booth with their instrument. He didn’t give them any attention, and the way Chan tells it to this day, that was the best thing he could have done for him. I think that’s true because Chan needed to woodshed.

  Our music program rejected Chan and Bobby, so they did not have the musical rudiments beaten into their heads, while the program loved Brendan and me, so we did have those rudiments beaten into our heads. It was a good combination because Chan and Bob brought a sense of “Do what you want to do because it sounds good,” and Brendan and I brought a sense of “Here’s a section within a structure, and here’s where it has to go.” It was the combination of those two approaches that made it good.

  I would also say that Bob Sheehan was the band’s first promoter. He knew how to get the word out, and that was a major contribution to Blues Traveler. We didn’t even have a name for it. If there’s a thing I regret, it’s not being able to value this skill and acknowledge it at the time because even he didn’t know he was doing it—it’s just the way he was. Suddenly there would be a bunch of people there. It was because he could make friends like diving into water.

  This is a description of Bobby taking a midterm exam: as soon as the teacher walks out the door, he says, “Okay, smart guy, you give all the answers, and you, you’re the lookout.” Then he would get the whole classroom organized so that everyone is going to get a good grade and does it in a way with the smart guy, the lookouts, and the people writing it all down that would make it fun. There was a lot of Huck Finn in him. Bob Sheehan is eternally Huck Finn.

  After we finally put him in the band, Bobby said, “We need a cool name like Blues Entity, because when we play right we become this extra entity.” Ghostbusters was on cable around that time, and there’s a scene in which Gozer announces, “The Traveler has come!” So we became Blues Traveler.

  6

  THE DARK ART OF HARMONIES

  I first met Arnie Lawrence at a Manhattan School of Music summer session after my senior year of high school. He really opened up my head.

  “Just play something,” he told me.

  “What do you want me to play?”

  “Just play anything.”

  No one had ever asked me to do that before. It’s a small thing, but it’s a really important thing to just “play anything.”

  He also had this great exercise with me, a trombonist, and a saxophone player. There’s a joke—a woman’s away, no one’s home except for her parrot, and a plumber, who the woman had called, stops by. He knocks on the door and the parrot says, “Who is it?” And the plumber responds, “It’s the plumber.” The parrot repeats, “Who is it?” And the plumber answers, “It’s the plumber.” Then the parrot asks again, “Who is it?” And the plumber yells, “It’s the plumber!” This happens a few more times, and the plumber eventually gets so upset that he has a heart attack and dies. Then the lady comes home, sees this dead guy on her doorstep and asks, “Who is that?” and the parrot says, “It’s the plumber.”

  Arnie had us play the joke over and over again with everybody taking different turns being the parrot, being the plumber, being the lady, while a pocket evolved behind it. And it became a song. It was a really neat exercise, and we would often do things like that.

  His approach was very ethereal, and Arnie was the first teacher other people took seriously who I could actually relate to. He was starting the New School for Jazz and Contemporary Music the next fall on 13th
Street and 6th Avenue in Greenwich Village. And after the Manhattan School of Music sent me the thirty-two bars of Bach that I would have to learn, it became pretty clear that the New School was my best bet. And after I sat down and played for the dean, I was in.

  When I went to the New School the first year, it felt very unofficial. It was 120 handpicked students in a room with the finest jazz musicians in New York. There were no rules or curriculum, so we’d invariably just play, and that’s where I learned the most.

  The second year had some of that, but they needed a formal curriculum, and suddenly you had new classes where you were going to learn to read music. I wanted no part of it. The way I am with school is the more you offer me that I don’t want, the less I will attend. So I would just show up for the classes that interested me.

  I remember one time I didn’t go to school for about three months because I was so busy with Blues Traveler. Then I came back and they said, “We’re flying you to San Diego tomorrow to represent the New School, not to compete but as an exhibition.” I was the harp wunderkind that everyone was talking about, so I was a selling point for the school.

  But unlike high school, the focus really wasn’t on competition. What I liked about the New School is they didn’t make you feel like a student; they made you feel like you were already gigging, and getting used to that feeling was the best lesson they thought me. You had to figure out stuff on your own.

  Arnie Lawrence was the perfect guy for that. He was a straight bebopper who made his bones playing for the Tonight Show in the sixties—he was first alto in that band with Doc Severinsen. He played with everyone from Count Basie to the Brecker Brothers to the Rolling Stones to James Brown, and he was born to teach.

  In high school Mr. B’s focus was on being fast and loud rather than whatever we might be thinking about. But Arnie would expound on ideas that would stay in your head. He could talk about music the way you imagined Gandalf talked about magic or the way Yoda talked about the Force. He was like Yoda to me. He would challenge you in spiritual ways. I told everyone back home that he was teaching me the dark art of harmonies.

  He had this great line, “The blues is the sound a baby makes when it cries for the first time because after you know you’ll get picked up, then it’s all show business.” And getting that first cry is what the blues is to me. If you can remember why you cry even though you know you’ll be picked up, I think that’s a good exercise for everybody. It’s not about just sitting there and doing primal screams; it’s a much deeper thing than that. Life by its very nature kind of hurts, and that’s not a bad thing—it’s just the experience of living. I think the objective of anybody playing music should be to take that, express it through sound, and share it with others.

  He called our little group the Dummies, and it had me and Eric Schenkman in it. The other bebop guys looked down on us because we didn’t know Giant Steps and the fake book or the real book because we came from a rock-and-roll background. Luckily Arnie recognized rock as a primal endeavor, and there was a time when bebop used to be one too. Part of what made Charlie Parker great was that he was trying to go score smack. He had to play well because he had to hustle in order to get enough to eat and some drugs, which—for a while at least—can really motivate a person. But by the mid-eighties that was something missing in bebop.

  Bebop was being put in a jar like a museum piece. Everybody was trying to play Charlie Parker’s solos note for note and write them down, which I thought was the dumbest thing ever. That’s not what he was trying to do. He couldn’t play King Oliver’s solos note for note—he would vary them. And I think by the time the eighties rolled around, bebop had been so celebrated as this music of the streets that it was no longer the music of the streets. It was kind of this doomed trap because even if you want to show people what’s cool about that music, once you’ve turned it into an effective class, you’ve put it in a jar and deprived it of oxygen so it’s no longer a living thing anymore.

  You don’t want art forms to die; what you want is for art forms to breathe. And usually it’s the ones that aren’t considered fully art forms that get to do the most breathing. And that’s why Arnie called our little group the Dummies and told us to wear the name as a badge of pride. We did so because we knew the jazz students were missing something.

  There’s that old joke: How many jazz students does it take to screw in a light bulb? Three: one to screw it in and two to go, “Ooh, yeah, uh-huh, yeah!” They always had to make the noises at the right time to show they were “getting it.” They were so hell-bent on trying to keep something the way it was, but I happen to think you do a better job of keeping something the way it was by having something new struggle to get out and speak in slang because it’s honest that way. If there’s an adjective that music or any art form has to be, it’s true. If you don’t mean it, it won’t come out of your horn. Charlie Parker said that, and I’ve learned that more by not trying to sound like Charlie Parker than I ever would if I’d tried to sound like Charlie Parker.

  I don’t need to know who was the house band at the Savoy Ballroom in 1936. I’m glad they were there. I’d love to be exposed to the music and to know where it came from, but there’s a point when it does me no good. What I’m looking for is a sound, and the only way to find a sound is to play.

  By the second year the New School had to get a curriculum going or they wouldn’t get accredited, and I was getting busier playing gigs with Blues Traveler, who by then were in town and going to their various colleges, in theory. I was just rehearsing and playing and skipping more and more school. By year three I was skipping almost all of my classes.

  I was the only harmonica player at the New School—it was a small class—and one time they brought Toots Thielemans in to teach me. Arnie knew Toots, and a year earlier he got me to call him on the phone. Toots said, “I don’t put too much stock in the blues harp, but keep on puffing.” A bit of a blow-off, but he actually relented the next year and came in to personally teach me. We had this seminar series every Friday, called the Peep Your Hole Card Series, where some musician would come in, and this time they brought the world’s most legendary harmonica player. But I blew it off because we’d had a gig the night before and I slept in—“Ahh, seminar, they always have a seminar. Why do I have to get up at nine in the morning?” And on Monday everyone was like, “Ohh, man . . .” He told me to keep on puffing and then I blew him off, so in my mind we’re kind of even. But, yes, I regret it.

  During my first year, while the rest of my band was still in high school, I lived at the Y on 34th Street. I would come home on weekends and bring some laundry, just jumping on the bus down at the Port Authority, which was right near the Y. We would rehearse on the weekends and then I’d go back to the city, learn about more complicated music, and bring it back to the band.

  My mom gave me forty bucks a week, and somehow I made that work—largely because I had access to the NYU cafeteria through some deal the New School had worked out. I wasn’t big on throwing things away, and eventually there was a sea of trash in my room. I remember stealing an entire pineapple one time and smuggling it under my coat, thinking, “This is the size of a small turkey—I can go home and eat this for weeks.” But I had no refrigeration, so it turned brown and rotted. Then I would get some chicken from Kenny Rogers Roasters, and the bones would sit there and accumulate. I got mice. Eventually the Y management had to come talk to me about the odor.

  They threw me out because of the smell. The day I was leaving I finally put it all into trash bags and tossed it out the window because there were mountains of trash below me. Little did I know there was a guy below there working. I made his day a little stinkier.

  The very first thing I did when I got to New York outside the New School was look for open-mic jam sessions because I figured that’s where I could go and shine. I was like a killer with a smile on my face. I’d be really nice and sweet and innocent, and then I’d get on stage and hurt any other harp player who was there, alon
g with most of the guitar players.

  There was one at Abilene’s on 21st and 2nd—now it’s a KFC—which was an extension of those old-school cutting sessions, although no one actually got cut these days. You’d be cut from the jam but not on your physical person. A woman named Lyvette ran it, and she was a bit down on her luck but had been one of Wilson Pickett’s background singers in the 1960s. She called me Poppy because she said I had a voice like a girl. Sitting in the crowd one night was Joan Osborne, who’d started hanging out there maybe a year or two earlier.

  Joan told me about Nightingale’s and about Jono Manson. I never would have met Jono Manson if it weren’t for Joan. Through her I discovered Jono, the Sweetones, the Worms, and the whole Nightingale’s scene. So Joan was pivotal; she was the right person to bump into.

  Joan was putting a band together with Jerry Dugger, who was Jono’s bass player; Mark Horn, the drummer from the Blue Chieftains; and Johnny Allen, who was playing the guitar. She called the band Ain’t Mozart and invited me to play as well. We would do standards. Occasionally she would put in a song of her own and was a really good songwriter—her hit song “One of Us” was written by one of the Hooters, but I think if she’d put in more of her own songs, she would have been recognized earlier.

  Johnny Allen would hire me to sit in with him at Mondo Cane, and that’s where I met the Mondo Cane crew, and they ended up hiring us a lot.

  The Blues Traveler guys would come in on some weekends. I remember one time they came to see me with Johnny Allen at Mondo Cane and a fight broke out—somebody in the crowd was drunk. They’d call the crowd on Bleecker Street the bridge-and-tunnel crowd because that was how they’d come over from Jersey. They’d go to see music around Bleecker and MacDougal, and the Mondo Cane was in that area.

  So a fight broke out, and Johnny threw his guitar behind him, jumped into the crowd, and started punching this guy. Meanwhile Bobby, who just came in as my guest with Chan and Brendan, seized this moment because he was dying to get on stage. So he jumped on stage and said, “No problem, folks, it’s all just part of the show.” Nobody had invited him, but he was a pig in shit—he was so happy, and I loved him for that. Then I looked back and the drummer, this older guy who had worked with Jimi Hendrix back when Hendrix first came to New York in the mid-sixties—I was in awe of that—just kept drumming away like it was another day at the office. How could I not want to do this for a living after that kind of night?